When selecting colleges, it is important to consider cost, student debt expectations, and return on investment. This data provides information on nearly 2,000 higher education institutions. Many surprising results:
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All this shows that as a society we value engineers & those in other STEM fields way more than we value social scientists, teachers and those in the arts & humanities and pay them accordingly. Hence the strong showing of those schools that are big in STEM fields. It also does not take into account that many of us do not pay full price for college, especially at selective meets needs schools. My daughter’s intended college suggests that there is a negative return on investment, but if you take into account what she’ll pay with her financial aid the return on investment is still not what it would be at MIT or something like that, but not negative either. Given that, like many others, she’d be miserable studying / working in a field like engineering, it’d be nice if society valued some of the other fields as well. But fortunately she’s learned that you can grow up, love what you do and have a really nice life without making a ton of money and she is ok with that.
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Pay is market driven. High demand of highly skilled results in higher pay.
My popcorn is almost ready.
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Really? So public school teacher salaries are market-driven? Nothing to do with the fact that we’ve tied public school budgets to property taxes so that the rich can afford to pay their teachers well and those that own buildings in poorer areas (often rentals owned by those who don’t live there) don’t care to pay their share of property taxes to pay teachers in those areas well? I could go on, but I won’t bother - I won’t change the minds of those on here who think they are middle-class when they make double, triple & more the median household income for the US and think that anyone who wants to be in the arts or social services or anything aside from engineering or medicine deserve to be paid poorly.
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I generally scroll right past PayScale posts, because the data is all self reported. It is interesting however that you can select by major, at least broadly.
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It’s probably a subject for another thread, but there’s no doubt that the way we fund our public schools is bizarre and inequitable. We chide schools for underperforming and laud those that excel, without acknowledging the funding gaps that separate them.
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I wonder if this exercise accounted for jobs that offer overtime, rather than a straight salary.
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I agree with the first two and strongly disagree with the third. Any freshman level Econ class will tell you that consumers make decisions based upon utility maximization not ROI. ROI is a business decision (Theory of the Firm).
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If money is the only thing one cares about, I suppose this is true.
My family gets their dopamine surges from other things that give us happiness and contentment in life. Personally, I think that’s a good thing because those chasing money seem to never have enough. There’s always someone making more.
Different strokes for different folks. YMMV
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Just for kicks, I selected engineering to see how the list shakes up:
Lamar University (I am familiar with) with 34% graduation rate is a better value than MIT according to this site.
This list is not likely worth the electrons it inconvenienced.
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Yeah, it shows up some weird rankings for other fields as well.
Am I really better off with a high ROI, but calculated on a low annual salary, vs. a stellar income, even if it had cost me twice the percent in tuition?
Follow that logic and dropping out to work at Pizza Hut would yield an ROI approaching infinity.
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Major is probably more influential than college name in many cases.
https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/ shows pay levels in the first two years from IRS data by college, major, and degree level, but only for students who received federal financial aid. That may be more fine grained than Payscale’s survey, but some majors at some colleges may have insufficient data to be shown.
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You are right about major being more important. Additionally, a lot of this data is self-reported. A bunch of kids just don’t report. Therefore drawing conclusions from this is not reliable. If you really care enough, you need to talk to kids from those schools and majors.
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That’s why I think it’s a move in the right direction. The narrative has been that School X will get you a specific ROI, but it’s really about the majors represented at School X. It is very possible for a student to pick a low ROI major at a high ROI school. This is a start in helping to figure that out. 
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There are a lot of problems with ROI lists, but one of the most fundamental issues is assuming that name of college attended is the primary determination of future income. Major and planned field of work influences income, as do individual student characteristics. For example, Lamar and MIT were compared above. These 2 colleges do not have equivalent students. If a kid accepted to MIT chooses to attend Lamar, he does not suddenly become the average Lamar kid with a B HS GPA and 1000 SAT, who has good chance of failing to graduate and often comes from a lower income family (majority of Lamar students have Pell grants). Similarly if you put a not high achieving Lamar kid with weak HS preparation at MIT, it doesn’t mean that he/she has as good a chance of graduating and receiving as high a salary as the average MIT student.
ROI also depends on cost. Assuming that everyone pays the same costs is also obviously problematic . So you end with a ROI calculation based on a fundamentally flawed numerator divided by a inaccurate denominator. This particular list also uses a small sample of self reported information from variable years, without controlling for cost of living differences in different areas of country. The end result is a meaningless output.
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There’s no such thing as ROI with colleges. Salaries are highly skewed towards east/west coast schools with atrociously high cost areas. College is only as good as the major you choose. If you choose engineering, most any ABET accredited school will do. If you choose “Communist Philosophy,” you’ll probably get laughed out of the job market.
In other words, ignore this and please choose a marketable major that earns practical job skills.
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Another source for ROI data:
I understand that no dataset is perfect and ROI should not be the sole decision point for making college selections. However, given how many graduates are complaining about excessive student loan burdens, it behooves everyone not super wealthy to investigate what they can expect from the schools/degrees they are choosing. That’s all.
What about a postion in the public sector that allows for Public Service Loan Forgiveness, pays well hourly, and includes the potential for very lucrative “forced” overtime pay? That could evolve into a very beneficial ROI for a graduate.
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It should not be too surprising that if you sort that list by NPV or NPV rank, the ones at the top are mostly specialty schools focused on health professions or CS and engineering.
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