<p>"With help from PayScale, a Seattle-based compensation-data company that maintains 35 million salary profiles, we collected median pay figures for two pools of each schools alums: recent grads (out of school for an average of three years) and midcareer types (an average of 15 years out). For each group, we divided the median alumnus or alumna salary by tuition and fees (assuming they paid full price at then-current rates), averaged the results and, finally, converted that result to a percentage figure. The outcome: a measure of return on investment that weve dubbed the Payback Score. For example, a hypothetical alum who spent $100,000 to attend college and now earns $150,000 a year would have a personal score of 150. Just as with the SATs, the higher the score, the better." ...</p>
<p>Of course, the Payscale numbers are available stratified by either school or major, not both school and major, which would be most interesting.</p>
<p>Also, the value proposition depends considerably on one’s actual net price after scholarships and non-loan financial aid, as well as in-state versus out-of-state price for state universities.</p>
<p>This is worthless. Almost no one pays retail at private schools, making this comparison very biased toward public schools. I also agree with ucbalumnus, any school heavy with science majors is going to come out ahead becuase science people make more. </p>
<p>What WOULD be useful is some ROI in the offer letter. What if my acceptance to college X included the cost, agerage starting salary for my career goal, then payback calculation. At least I would be comparing apples to apples.</p>
<p>I’m a bit perplexed as to why the administrator on the site posts this, when the limitations of Payscale have been enumerated a zillion times on these boards already.</p>
<p>Not all science people make more. Biology majors tend to have low pay at the bachelor’s degree level, about comparable to English majors in career surveys. Biology is by far the most popular science major.</p>
<p>Agree that this list is full of holes. For the publics, are they looking at instate tuition or OOS? It bases everything on full pay, and while many do pay full pay, many others do not, for public or private schools. And, duh that a state tech school is going to do well in this ratio of cost/salary. That said, for my N of 1, having turned down the oppty to attend tech (that was an N of 2), we paid about the same for younger s to attend a private than we would have had he attended tech, and his starting salary was higher than the median reported for Tech students in this article. Not that this is saying much, or means anything.</p>