<p>I am looking for schools with high ROI's preferably in California</p>
<p>You could be a lot more helpful by being more specific about kinds of schools, your intended major, size, and what YOU mean by return on investment.</p>
<p>A Business or Business/Econ major,Large/Medium and Return on investment how much the average person makes when they graduate </p>
<p>The top ones are Caltech, Stanford, Berkeley, some specialist engineering schools and Hurvery Mudd. </p>
<p>The usual ROI listings tend to be headed by schools which are engineering/CS heavy. But that implies that ROI tends to be more heavily major-dependent than school-dependent.</p>
<p>And ROI will depend on your actual cost to attend. Full pay at Stanford will have dramatically lower ROI than State U at in-state tuition or full ride at Podunk College.</p>
<p>payscale.com attempts to rank colleges by ROI:
<a href=“College Education Value Rankings - PayScale 2013 College ROI Report”>http://www.payscale.com/college-education-value-2013</a></p>
<p>The payscale methodology is heavily criticized on College Confidential, so take these reports with a grain of salt. Note that most of the top 20 are characterized as “engineering” schools.</p>
<p>In my opinion, a list like this does not tell a prospective business/economics major very much. The trouble is, there does not seem to be anything better out there. I agree that ROI seems to be more heavily major-dependent than school-dependent (although a few extremely selective/prestigious schools do seem to open doors to a few very lucrative fields like investment banking). </p>
<p>One thing the payscale list does suggest to me is that the up-front cost may have relatively little impact on the long-term ROI. Both cheap schools and expensive schools are interspersed throughout the first few hundred. Very expensive schools seem to be more heavily concentrated near the top. Not that the “2012 cost” field indicates what the average student actually pays.</p>