Payscale.com recently listed colleges and universities in order by the annual return on investment, averaged over 20 years of employment after students received degrees from several schools throughout the country.
If you would like to know how much you can expect to make from an average degree from these institutions, divided by how much that school will cost you for four years, considering 20 years of employment after your graduation, check out the website. A few schools are listed here:
- 61. Univ of Illinois, Urbana, $113,200 grows to $541,600 (9.3% ROI)
- 80. Univ of Maryland, College Park, $95,630 → $501,300 (9.8% ROI)
- 127. Univ of Maryland, Baltimore County, $102,500 → $442,700 (8.9% ROI)
- 326. Northern Illinois Univ, DeKalb, $115,300 → $307,100 (6.9% ROI)
- 358. College of Notre Dame of Md., $168,700 → $295,300 (5.4% ROI)
- 427. Towson Univ, $97,230 → $273,600 (7.1% ROI)
- 434. Illinois State Univ, Normal, $105,300 → $270,200 (6.7% ROI)
In the above data, we used in-state tuition, and not all schools available on the payscale.com website are reprinted here. When sorted by the total income graduates can expect to receive over the first 20 years after graduating, the top three were Harvey Mudd College, Caltech, and MIT.
The issues with reports like this
Of course, not everything kids get out of college is financial in nature. As our photo illustrates, you can pour molten gold into a college education, and you’ll get some gold out. However, you’ll also get a living, growing plant, which is often proportional in size to the amount of solid gold you get.
The data are also compromised by the fact that not everybody who graduates from college makes the maximum amount possible. Some take jobs that don’t pay as well because of circumstances in their lives that don’t allow them to take the top salary-earning offer. This bias, which reflects life choices more than any quality of the universities, probably has a bigger effect on the data from some schools than from others.
It has also been observed that different majors, especially at huge universities like Illinois or Maryland, command substantially different salaries over a 20-year term. The payscale.com site lets you sort by majors, but combining that information with the colleges’ averages is not easy.
But, if you accept these biases and care only about how much money you’re going to make after graduating from college—warning: mileage will vary—this is certainly a good place to start. Choosing a college isn’t quite this simple, but the list also features schools whose graduates earn a net negative income during the 20 years following graduation. Some people might want to stay away from these schools.
One such school is the Maryland Institute College of Art. According to payscale.com, students will invest $205,200 for a four-year degree from MICA and they will find themselves in a net deficit situation 20 years after graduation. Their average debt is estimated to be $90,900, which represents a net annual ROI of -2.7 percent.
So, unless you have some other plan for money, don’t make an investment in MICA, because if it’s going to be just you and your degree from MICA, this analysis predicts you’ll starve. Life circumstances will, I hope, work in your favor, but just don’t believe everything you read. Overcome.
