The University of Maryland scored in the top 20 of a national ranking of colleges.
Money magazine’s list looked at 27 different data points, from graduation rate to student debt, to compile the ranking. But this list added another feature: how well students fared in the workplace after attending.
Using data from LinkedIn on skills listed by alumni combined with research on the market value of those skills, Money determined how well students are doing. It also scored how many students moved from low-income backgrounds to upper-middle class jobs.
Based on that data, Money ranked the University of Maryland No. 20 on a list of 711 schools, just ahead of Columbia University. The college was also notably cheaper than most of the others in the top 20.
These college rankings have become a cottage industry in recent years, spurred by the success of the U.S. News ranking (which placed the University of Maryland at 60th), the Wall Street Journal (96th) and Washington Monthly (56th).
Given the different ways each ranking measures colleges, any individual score doesn’t mean a whole lot. But doing really well, especially if you’re not Harvard, Yale or Princeton, can mean students who would have never thought about coming take a closer look.
That’s good news for the University of Maryland—and good news for Route 1, which benefits from having a bustling campus in its midst.
