So basically, the methodology is that they do a very complex analysis of the student body to predict what their average earnings would be if they went to "colle

So basically, the methodology is that they do a very complex analysis of the student body to predict what their average earnings would be if they went to "college in general" and then compare that with what the graduates actually make. There's one thing that jumps out at me when I see the actual rankings: At least three of the eight schools that received a perfect 100 score -- W&L, Babson, and Bentley -- have a very, very high number of students who go to work for lucrative family businesses immediately upon graduation. In the case of W&L (which provides a great liberal arts education mind you) it's mostly southern good ol' boy/girl types. At Babson / Bentley (which provide great undergrad business educations), a huge chunk of the student body are the scions of the economic elite in developing countries, who are getting schooled up so they can be ready to be put in charge of something at a young age. My hunch is that the Economist's "expected earnings" methodology wasn't granular enough to take these idiosyncratic attributes into account, and that its r-squared of .85 might not be a rigorous number.