The cost of attending a 4-yr. private university can easily top $150,000, making education one of the most expensive purchases we make. Unfortunately, the sorts of informed opinions and objective comparisons that are widely available for other large consumer purchases, like automobiles, are lacking in education. Instead we must make due with ad hoc indexes like that published annually by U.S. News and World Report. A recent alternative to this index using preference rankings was proposed. In this essay I discuss the challenges facing this index, and other survey instruments, caused by nonignorable missing data. My conclusion is not optimistic.
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Howard Wainer (2005) studied this question.