Colleges with the Best Return on Investment

Almost certainly the first question that’ll pop into your head after you find out exactly how much you’ll be paying for your child’s college education has to be…

“Just what am I getting for all this?”

Well in most cases the most obvious answer is… an education, room and board and hopefully preparation for a successful life after it’s all said and done.

But there’s another way of measuring just what exactly you’re paying for when it comes to college tuition and whether or not it’s worth it.

Experts are now reporting on what colleges and universities’ “return on investment” actually is.  That’s to say, it’s now being calculated what the average student tends to earn after graduating from a specific school.

Payscale.com conducts the annual college ROI study and recently reported their latest results.   How do they arrive there?  Well Payscale takes the total cost of a student’s college career (tuition, books, room and board etc) and adds it up.  They do NOT,  however, assume a student will graduate in 4 years.

You see, it’s taking longer for students to get their college diploma these days.  Some take 4 years, some take 5, some take 6.  In fact, in 2009 USA Today reported that only 53% of college students receive their degree in 6 years.

So Payscale calculates the average college career time of each student at each school and arrives at the cost of their “total” tuition that way.

After that, the site pulled data from 1.4 million pay reports from college graduates of the last 20 years and measured what they earned over what they paid for their schooling.

Take a look at the top 10 schools:

As you probably could have guessed, there are two big trends here… technology and Ivy League education.

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Engineers, software developers and IT professionals in general have only become more and more in demand over the years.  Therefore the (hefty) cost of their education at schools like Cal Tech and M.I.T. often times turns out to be well worth it considering what they’re making after college.

The cache of an Ivy League education and the connections it brings along with it also helps to offset the expensive cost of attending college at one of these institutions.

A Harvard or Princeton degree opens doors to higher paying jobs than many other schools.  Is it fair?  Probably not, but it’s a reality.  The prestige factor still holds a lot of weight when it comes to hiring practices at places like high priced law firms or banks.

So what can you learn from this?  Well it pays to have a broad view when it comes to measuring whether or not a school’s price tag is worth it.

Don’t just base your decision on what your child is receiving during his or her specific career there… but what the school’s degree can bring to them AFTER they’ve left as well.

After all, isn’t that what you’re sending them to college for in the first place?

You can check out Payscale.com’s complete list of colleges that are worth your investment right here.  It’s a great piece of research.

To your successful college search,

Scott Weingold
Publisher, CollegeMadeSimple.com

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