Are you looking at ‘return-on-investment’ data to help create your college list?

College Search & Lists
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Regarding CSU Stanislaus, summary of 25th to 75th percentile earnings stats at 2 years out in most recent available year is below. In this example, nursing majors have more than double than early career earnings compared to the average, assuming they are employed. Note that the vast majority of Stanislaus grads are not employed soon after graduating. Stats below only include those who are employed.

I expect the primary conclusion is that nursing majors in CA often have high earnings soon after college, not that Stanislaus has a high ROI or Stanislaus has an earnings premium. It’s true one could also conclude that high early career earnings in nursing does to require attending a “desirable location”, although one does not need a ROI table to draw that conclusion. I’m also not sure Stanislaus would be considered “undesirable” for nursing salary, given that it is located under 2 hours from SF bay area – the region of CA with highest median salary for nursing.

– Stanislaus Nursing Major – $103k to $148k
– All CSU Campuses: Nursing Major – $97k to $152k

– Stanislaus Non-nursing Majors – $34k to $66k
– All CSU Campuses: Non-nursing Majors – $38k to $74k

Rather than an earnings premium for Stanislaus or a low cost for Stanislaus compared to other Cal States, I expect in addition to major distribution, a key reason why Stanislaus does especially well on ROI is because they have a larger portion of low income students than most other campuses. This leads to a larger portion of students claiming substantial FA… reducing the reported overall average net cost, but not reducing net cost for a particular student when controlling for that particular student’s income. For example, College Navigator reports the following. Sticker price is the same at Stanislaus and SDSU, but the average price is nearly triple at SDSU due to the different portion of students receiving substantial FA and different portion living on/off campus.

– Stanislaus – 61% Pell, Sticker = $36k (on campus), Average Net Price = $7k
– SDSU – 24% Pell, Sticker = $36k (on campus), Average Net Price = $20k

These types of wide variations in earnings and cost from one student to the next make ROIs that don’t consider individual student differences have little meaning.

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31

Without necessarily endorsing this entirely, it seems like it would actually be at least more useful to have a tool where you could input an intended major and your actual cost of attendance for various colleges, and then it would output some sort of individualized ROI comparison.

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33

Well sure, and I don’t disagree with that. I have one child, a current rising college senior, at an institute of technology (WPI) and the construction management major child is a rising freshman at a large state public school (Clemson). Given our unique circumstances (which, I get are specific to us) we couldn’t do the type of comparison you are suggesting. the Clemson kid wanted a program - construction management (or building construction or construction science - NOT engineering) - that typically has nearly 100% employment at the time of graduation. Which is a solid ROI for us. But it’s a major typically only offered at larger state schools - he specifically looked at Clemson, Virginia Tech, and Tennessee. If we looked at general “employed at graduation” or “salary” post graduation for those three large schools, the numbers would look lower than they do for my kid at the institute of technology school (WPI). But in reality, I’m guessing his specific major has the same type of success.

If you want to focus on narrow degrees, then you should focus on narrow degrees across all the schools - if a WPI has majority engineering degrees, compare them to the engineering outcomes at the large state schools. If a SLAC has only humanities degrees, compare them to only humanities programs across other schools. The fact of the matter is that major does impact ROI, and if some schools are tailored to major, then of course their employability and salary will be different.

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Getting to 1 ROI number is pretty meaningless given the wide range in the input factors. A more useful analysis would be separate tables summarizing outcomes by major and avg net cost based on some income bands, with a link to the NPC calculator for each school. The outcomes most relevant are: graduation rate, % employed within a year (and avg starting salary of those employed), % attending professional or grad school within a year. Salary data after the first year is going to be driven much, much more by the efforts/luck of the employee, not which school they graduated from.

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It’s an improvement, but there are still other key factors to control for. If you created a tool that just controlled for major, for many majors (not all), it would find the more selective the college, the higher the median salary. This often has more to do with differences in average student ability/motivation, rather than the college name, which makes it important to control for something correlated with student ability/motivation. For example, how do earnings compare for 1400-1500 SAT students who attended college A vs college B? How do earnings compare for comparably selective colleges B, C, D? If you could some how successfully control for ability/motivation, then I expect you’d see a notable correlation with location. Colleges that have a large portion of students working a VHCOL area like Silicon Valley or NYC tend to have higher average earnings. As such, it becomes important to consider differences in cost of living when evaluating ROI.

This often makes ROI rankings more a measure of what is not controlled for than a measure of premium earnings for a particular college name. If you aren’t controlling for major/career, then it may largely be a measure of which colleges have the highest % tech/pharmacy/nursing/… majors. If you aren’t controlling for student ability/motivation, then it may largely be a measure of which colleges have the highest portion of students with high ability/motivation. If you aren’t controlling for differences in individual student costs, then it may largely be a measure of which colleges…

I think more useful would be to present the available stats in a format other than a ranked “ROI” table. For example, it would be useful to compare employment stats for a particular major at different colleges. Ideally these employment stats should include rate of successful finding employment or grad school – not just salary of persons who are employed full time. A student can manually consider differences in context of selectivity, location, and similar when evaluating the stats. Most colleges we discuss on this forum publish these types of stats, with control by major.

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38

We look at ROI directionally, but not literally. Focus of school, Choice of major, Career orientation.

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So did I the parent look at ROI, sure per school. But did we consider it. No. We did look at major specific ROI. Just to get a ball park. I looked at tons of different reporting and learned most don’t matter. Kids went to schools to learn.

One thing an college counselor friend told us was the Big Ten ROI rivaled the Ivys 10 year’s out. It didn’t really matter to us but a fun pseudo fact.

? As you can probably see for those of us that are more educated in the process these reports become meaningless. To those just learning I would assume they have some meaning or bragging rights. We all know people that went to no name schools that would blow those reports out of the water also.

Again, major specific roi to each school which schools usually have, to me has more meaning but just as a guideline

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Some kids transfer. Many many kids change majors. Many careers aren’t even on anyone’s radar screen right now.

That’s why ROI can be misleading.

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41

Payscale offers this.

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“Some of the institutions in the top 15 have fewer than 100 data points, and all self-reported,” he said. “It’s hard to know if it is at all representative of the college.” He said PayScale should be “much more honest” and transparent about the “severe limitations of the data.”

GIGO.

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43

And the source you prefer is . . . ?

BTW, who are you quoting?

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Did I (the parent) look at ROI? Yes-I looked at a lot of numbers. Did it make any difference in our decisions? No. The data is so major-dependent, not very accurate, there’s so many other factors other than name of school that affect it, and the schools where the name itself means something to the world at large really weren’t in play for us financially anyway.

What did matter?
Availability and strength of preferred major-not a ton of reason to consider generic ROI figures for the music education major-we can calculate that ourselves. And the kid who wanted a major offered at only 20 schools? We looked hard at course catalogs and graduation requirements.
Affordability-graduating without debt was huge and we couldn’t afford our EFC so we looked hard at merit scholarships.
Diversity-we thought attending a more diverse school would be valuable (and it was).
Location
Size
Affordability-I’m mentioning it twice. We worked very hard to make a list of schools that fit our kids, that we could afford, and that would set them up to graduate on time and achieve their goals. That was the ROI we were looking for.

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45

Just to get this out of the way, I’m not aware of a SLAC, or even any LAC, that only offers humanities degrees. “Liberal Arts” includes the social and hard sciences. Humanities are something else.

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46

Some schools (not necessarily LACs) do have a strong skew toward certain types of majors. For example, you can major in English, history, or philosophy at Caltech, but relatively few students actually do those majors. There may be some schools skewed the other way.

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Skewing and ‘only offers’ are very different things. And Cal Tech represents an extreme end of the skewing spectrum.

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Yeah, trying to calculate a predicted “R” is subject to so many personal value judgments, trying to predict highly uncertain developments at both the personal and macroeconomic levels, and various other fundamental issues that I think at best you can just try to figure out what seem like good colleges for an individual kid in light of their current interests and preferences, while providing reasonably for possible changes of direction.

The good news is I think in most cases, good colleges in this sense are not really very scarce, at least not in the US, for most kids who do not have some very specific needs. Instead, paying for them is often the much more tricky bit.

But fortunately, the “I”, defined as your actual cost of attendance, is a hard, ascertainable value. And so you can figure out what would be a comfortably affordable budget for your family, then make sure you have affordable options which would also be good in the above sense.

So I am really skeptical you need to try to quantity the “R” part just so that you can divide it by the “I” part. Instead, you just need to make sure “I” is not any bigger than makes sense for your family.

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49

My two cents is it is worth watching out for majors that are listed as offered but extremely few kids actually do at a college.

I tend to think interacting with at least a decent number of fellow majors (understanding that what counts as decent depends on the major and overall size of the college) is an important part of the educational process. I also think that at least where switching majors is easy, kids tend to “vote with their feet” by switching into majors where the professors are doing a good job and other things are going well for students in those majors, and out of majors where it is more the opposite.

In other words, in a very broad sense, if there are a decent number of kids in a major (relatively speaking) at a college, that is not bad evidence it probably is a relatively strong “R” major (again in a very broad sense of R) at that college.

But you can’t necessarily tell any of that by whatever label is put on the whole college, or subdivisions like School of X, or from college websites, and so on.

Fortunately, though, NCES collects this data, and you can get a snapshot of graduating students in different majors from the NCES College Navigator. If you like, you can also dig back into prior years–potentially useful if you are talking about a naturally small major where a given year might not be representative.

Again, to me this is a reasonable “R” sort of consideration when picking a college–do a decent number of kids actually do this major that interests me at that college? Although I would not try to quantify it, nor use it to justify paying more than is comfortably affordable.

And you might think that last thing should not be tempting, but in a way it is what people are often doing when they justify spending more than is comfortably affordable for a “good for X” college (good for premed, good for prelaw, good for CS, and so on). A lot of times that is a sort of self-reinforcing effect where a lot of kids go to that college for that reason, so then a lot of kids end up doing that thing, and so that persuades more kids it is good for that, so then more kids do that thing . . . . And indeed this might show up in some career results stats.

And for the reasons above, I don’t think it is entirely wrong to use that sort of logic on the R side. Like that probably would not be happening if in fact that college was not doing a reasonably good job supporting kids with those goals, at least in relative terms.

But when you start justifying uncomfortably high costs because of this sort of reputation, I think you are almost always straying beyond the plausible value-added benefits, versus just the attributes those kids (and their families and such) brought to the table themselves.

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As a sidenote, since you mentioned that specific major as high ROI, what is the Construction Management major exactly - what does it entail, what academic strengths does it require/benefit from having, does it have other names, what jobs does it lead to?

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It can also be a problem if the number of students in the major is so small that the department is reluctant to increase instructional capacity, resulting in bare minimum course offerings with limited breadth and depth in the subject at upper levels.

However, it can also be a problem if the major is extremely popular and interest bumps into the department’s capacity limitations. This can result in such things as competitive secondary admission for the major (which can lead to an overly competitive environment) and completely full classes (you should get the courses you need for the major, but not necessarily additional electives in the subject). Even if you are in some other major, you may not be able to take out-of-major electives in the subject that is enrolled to capacity, since the completely full classes may be reserved for those in the major.

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Note that the last question, as applied to any major, can be asked in the form of, “what jobs does this major give advantage in being hired for compared to applicants with other college majors, or those without a bachelor’s degree?”. A related question would be, “are there jobs where this major has a disadvantage in being hired for compared to applicants with other college majors?”.

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