<p>College:</a> Big Investment, Paltry Return - BusinessWeek</p>
<p>According to the interactive table, all 852 colleges provided a positive financial return on investment. When you add the many nonfinancial benefits of college, I would reach the conclusion that college is a great financial value, which is virtually the opposite conclusion as that reached by the author from the same data.</p>
<p>One thing about the methodology is that it excluded anybody with an advanced degree. I can understand that they would need to do that to isolate the impact of the undergraduate degree, but that certainly skews the sample. In my field, which happens to offer good salaries, everybody has an advance degree. It’s required by most firms. The college that provides that advanced degree is more important than the undergraduate institution. If you know you expect to get an advance degree, that would argue toward picking the college with the lowest total cost to graduate rather than highest ROI for just the undergraduate degree alone. A timeless debate here on cc.</p>
<p>More important than the “return on investment” is what you want to do with the degree(s).
What is the career goal?
As the old saying goes: Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.</p>
<p>“One thing about the methodology is that it excluded anybody with an advanced degree. I can understand that they would need to do that to isolate the impact of the undergraduate degree, but that certainly skews the sample.”</p>
<p>Yes…to a large extent, this biases the sample towards the least capable graduates. At top schools, a huge number of undergrads go on to med, law, or business school. The group that does not includes those with other interests, but also everyone with a GPA too low to get into the grad school they would want. So in all likelihood, at least for the CC-type schools, the average return is much higher than the chart suggests.</p>
<p>Patriot League schools performed well-Colgate,Lehigh, Holy Cross. In addition these schools have very good alumni networks.</p>
<p>Students generally don’t pay for their education, their parents do, and parents generally don’t receive any income from their child’s degree.</p>
<p>The average student debt after graduation is something like $25k, so that, combined with whatever contribution students themselves make to tuition (like summer jobs) is the investment number they should be looking at.</p>
<p>Anything that uses Payscale to make conclusions is based on garbage. It is not a survey anymore than the vote this or that on your TV news is a real survey.</p>
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<p>Absolutely.</p>
<p>There have been several headline-grabbing posts based on Payscale data and threads usually come down to the (lack of) quality of the data.</p>
<p>I’m having a tough time understanding their methodology. It sounds like they’ve looked at graduate’s pay for the past 30 years, and then they’ve subtracted off the cost to get a degree, factoring in time to degree. Shouldn’t they be using the costs and time to degree from 30 years ago? </p>
<p>They say that there were an average of 1000 pay reports per school. The stats are then based on an average of 33 pay reports per school per year. That’s a pretty small number.</p>
<p>Looking at ROI as a percentage, in-state publics show up as best return on investment.</p>
<p>Its much cheaper for a media outlet to use payscale than to actually conduct a scientifically valid survey.</p>
<p>If all research universities used such an approach, the cost of research would be cheaper, and perhaps tuition could be less ;)</p>
<p>but, yeah, paying full freight at a private u with a less than 20% graduation rate would seem to be a losing proposition. Or out of state tuitions at bottom tier, commuter school, directional publics. But did we really need business week to tell us that?</p>
<p>I always find it a bit ironic that these “Do You Really Need College” articles are invariably written by journalism school grads (in this case George Washington University) about studies conducted by university professors or private consultancy groups that would never even consider hiring someone with “only” a high school diploma.</p>
<p>Does everyone need to go to college in order to make a decent living? No.
Are some majors and schools better at preparing you for a future career? Yes.
Does a college degree give you more employment options? Hopefully.</p>
<p>I think I’ll send BusinessWeek a bill.</p>
<p>If the ROI was calculated (even using Payscale’s questionable methods) for different degrees at the same large public university, the outcomes would be vastly different. Articles like this serve as a wake up call for the naive, willing to mortgage their future to attend an undergraduate program that is too expensive for them. In the current economy it is inevitable that the media will now attack the conventional belief that nothing is too much to pay for a degree from school XYZ - it keeps people reading.</p>
<p>Worth reading the article before commenting on the financial value of a college degree (I erased my initial comment). They actually discuss other issues nicely, considering the briefness of the article. Refreshing for a business publication to actually look beyond the mere money aspect and to mention factors yielding the results (such as gender and majors found at schools that influence rankings). Good read for those concerned with thinking only of the financial return, their audience needs awareness of more factors determining ratings.</p>
<p>I grow increasingly tired of these articles written by people who I am quite sure will send their own children to the best colleges they can get into.</p>
<p>This article is incredibly misleading. They want to make the argument that certain schools have a better ROI than others, when really, the argument that they show is that certain degrees have a better ROI than others. Schools that graduate more students with higher paying degrees will then show a better ROI. As they point out:</p>
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<p>^Amen, Hunter!</p>
<p>Another thing that bothers me has to do with the place that several small liberal arts colleges have in the rankings. Amherst, Williams, Bowdoin and Middlebury have wildly different places in the rankings, with Amherst at 14, Bowdoin at 22, Williams at 39 and Middlebury at 100. I would have suspected that these schools would cluster together, since they seem to me to offer a similar kind of education and college experience.</p>
<p>Does this mean that (1) the quality of education at Amherst is that much better than Middlebury, such that these students are better qualified for top paying jobs? or (2) The typical graduate from Amherst chooses a field/career that results in a higher paying job than the typical graduate from Middlebury or (3) it just so happened that more highly paid graduates of Amherst responded than Middlebury?</p>
<p>If a young person has something he would prefer to do such as join the military, find other training, I think it’s just fine that s/he do so. No hurry to rush into college. I think that is often the reason for kids who have a terrible time of it at college. They are going to college without wanting to continue with academics.</p>
<p>We have gone through this situtaion personally, as my kids were not academically interested. They made that clear in high school. However, their peers were all heading to college, we had always talked college, they went to college prep school, so the momentum was to go to college. So they decided to give it a try. Had they come up with alternative ideas, a gap year, something, we would have considered it, probably gone that direction.</p>
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<p>I don’t think survey from sites like payscale is anyway less credible as a lots of leading fortune 500 companies use these surveys as guidelines to employee pays.</p>
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<p>If you take out the obvious MIT/Caltech/HarveyMudd from the survey then how you explain the rest of the data which clearly shows a degree of HSYP or Dartmouth in any discipline provide better ROI? Majority of graduate from these five are in Liberal Arts than engineering.</p>