Does where you go impact earnings?

New York Times reports.

College Rankings Fail to Measure the Influence of the Institution

Students, parents and educators increasingly obsessed with college rankings have a new tool: the Obama administration’s College Scorecard. The new database focuses on a college’s graduation rate, graduates’ median earnings 10 years after graduation and the percentage of students paying back their college loans.

While Scorecard adds potentially valuable information to the dizzying array that is already available, it suffers from many of the same flaws that afflict nearly every other college ranking system: There is no way to know what, if any, impact a particular college has on its graduates’ earnings, or life for that matter.

“It’s a classic example of confusing causation and correlation,” said Frank Bruni, the author of “Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be,” a book about the college admissions process, and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. “Anyone who has taken statistics should know better, but when it comes to colleges, that’s what people do. They throw common sense out the window.”