<p>Ouch.</p>
<p>Average</a> Cost for College - Compare College Costs & ROI</p>
<p>It ranks based on raw ROI–that’s a silly number because the college tuition rates vary. I paid less to get the ROI. Since UW’s tuition is so low, the %ROI is 12.3% according to your data. </p>
<p>That’s higher than Yale, UPenn, Columbia, and Brown to name a few. Not surprisingly, many publics fared well when comparing %ROI–including William and Mary and UVA you’ll be happy to note.</p>
<p>To be honest, comparing either raw ROI or %ROI isn’t fair across publics and privates. Privates are just so much more expensive that it skews the data. Typically only top students or the wealthy go to privates. On average, this naturally selects them to have stronger connections/networks/job opportunities, so they earn more raw ROI. But their colleges are so much more expensive that they can’t compete with %ROI.</p>
<p>Also, this isn’t an original thread. I don’t know much about payscale, but posters in the real thread argue that it isn’t a good source of information.</p>
<p>Even their basic sources of data–non-scientific surveys of people that use the site–which I never had heard of unti they starting sending out press releases–indicates that their own “analysis” suggests many (half) of the submissions they get are phony. There is no way to tell how many are accurate or who even bothers with the site.</p>
<p>“All data submitted to PayScale undergoes various validity tests to determine if the information is accurate and eligible to be used as employee profiles. Due to the comprehensive analysis and screening of the data, approximately 50% of the data profiles submitted to the system are not used in PayScale reports. Thousands of new profiles are added to the database every day, so from a statistical perspective it is unlikely that a single profile will have a meaningful effect on the aggregated data reported.”</p>
<p>UW and UVa both publish very good career placement reports if that’s what you are interested in.</p>