Forbes says that they are using Third Way’s ROI, which is summarized at Third Way . However, Caltech isn’t listed in the link above because Caltech doesn’t have sufficient earnings information for their limited number of federal FA recipients.
The Third Way ROI calculation as described above seems inaccurate. ROI is largely dependent on student qualities – choice of major/career field and quality of student, yet the ROI calculation does not control for either of these factors. More importantly, it assumes students pay the same cost.
Edit – Numbers seem to have changed in map. Different colleges are available and missing from map (Williams is gone, Amherst has been added). Perhaps database was updated. Now costs seem closer to what I’d expect for the full student body average. Some new results are below
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Stanford – Stanford costs $14k/year. Stanford grads earn $57k more than HSG. Ratio = $56k/$69k = 0.8 years to of work to recoup investment
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Reed – Reed costs $28k/year. Reed grads earn $18k more than HSG. Ratio = $109k/$18k = 5.9 years of work to recoup investment.
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Caltech – No information
Perhaps when there was no earnings information available, Forbes assigned a default value that is typical for colleges of its type. That would explain why Caltech and several selective smaller colleges had large decreases this year.