<p>Some people investigated the value of college education as a kind of investment and calculated the return on investment on different schools. We found that the data are interesting, so we create an interactive table out of the data to make them easier to compare. For now, it only contains some of highly-ranked schools, but if you want to have more data in the table, let us know through the comment box at the page. We will try to import more data on the table.</p>
<p>Hope this helps some of people who make the important decision.</p>
<p><a href="https://engineering.purdue.edu/HIVELab/projects/SimulSort/University_ROI/%5B/url%5D">https://engineering.purdue.edu/HIVELab/projects/SimulSort/University_ROI/</a></p>
<p>But what about major selection?</p>
<p>A biology major from a top school might not have as good job and career prospects as a math major with minors in computer science and economics from a middle ranked school.</p>
<p>Yes, each major should have different job prospects, so major matters. However, the collected data do not have major-specific information. I think that the data can help students choose between different schools in a same major.</p>
<p>The data can be skewed by the distribution of majors by students at different schools.</p>
<p>For example, suppose two schools’ graduates have the same post-graduation income levels when comparing major by major. But if one school has mostly engineering majors, while the other school has mostly biology and humanities majors, entire school comparisons of post-graduation income levels could show one of them much “better” than the other.</p>
<p>Good point, @ucbalumnus. Your point could be also true given the methodology description of this study in the following page:</p>
<p>[What’s</a> Your College Degree Worth? - Businessweek](<a href=“Bloomberg - Are you a robot?”>Bloomberg - Are you a robot?)</p>
<p>It says, “The study used pay reports from only full-time U.S. employees with bachelors degrees and no advanced degrees, and pay reports averaged about 1,000 for each of the 554 schools in the study.” If the selection of 1,000 students was randomly done, the different ratio in different majors would bias the results. </p>
<p>Again, I think that the data show the general trend, not exact future/estimation of an individual person or an individual school.</p>
<p>@yijisoo
I don’t understand how the website works. I can just click the name of a category and then it changes the reverses the order for that specific category, but nothing else.</p>
<p>@ivybound1, yes, it is not like a regular table. The table is already sorted, so what you have to do is simply hover a mouse cursor on a school that you are interested in. Then, the numbers for the school will be highlighted in yellow. If you look at the highlighted values, you not only see the numbers of the school, but also see where each number stands compared to numbers of other schools. I hope that this explanation makes sense for you. For example, if you click University of Virginia (In State), you can see that its total cost is lowest among schools in the table and its Annualized net ROI is highest.</p>
<p>Looks like the columns are out of alignment.
For example, at the top, Yale, WUSTL, Vanderbilt & Chicago are all labeled “Public”.</p>
<p>Are bigger numbers supposed to be better in the Ranking column (e.g. “66” for Yale, at the top)? Or is this another column out of whack?</p>
<p>@tk21769. Thanks for pointing out. Yeah, this is not a conventional table, so rank “66” is not about Yale. If you select “66,” you can see that “Purdue University” is highlighted. The “66” is for Purdue University. If you want to see the Yale’s ranking, click “Yale.” Yale’s ranking is “3.” I understand that this table is somewhat confusing at first, but you may find that this also can show some interesting trends.</p>
<p>@yijisoo
Oh I see. Very cool.</p>
<p>@ivybound1, Glad to hear that you get it.</p>