The central problem with most college-ranking lists is that they measure inputs rather than outputs: Schools that make certain types of investments in their students (such as low professor-to-student ratios) score better than those that don’t. But we get very little sense of how much students actually have learned after four (or more) years of costly tuition payments.

That may begin to change, thanks to Boeing. CHE reports:

There’s about to be a new entrant in the college-ranking business: the Boeing Company.
The Chicago-based aerospace giant has spent the past year matching internal data from employee evaluations with information about the colleges its engineers attended. It has used that analysis to create a ranking system, which it plans to unveil in the coming month, that will show which colleges have produced the workers it considers most valuable.
With a 160,000-person work force that includes 35,000 engineers worldwide, Boeing may make a mark where the government and others have not — raising the possibility that employers could become a major force for college accountability.
“We want to have more than just subjective information” for evaluating the colleges that Boeing visits to recruit and hire, said Richard D. Stephens, the company’s senior vice president for human resources and administration. “We want to have some concrete facts and data.”

Prediction: The deans and professors at top schools are going to hate this new form of accountability, and those at lower-ranked ones are going to cross their fingers and hope they do better than expected.