@BKSquared . . . The concept of return on investment is a noble one if it were calculable. It really isn’t though – too convoluted to derive both upstairs and downstairs in addition to deriving an income stream. The attempts at ROI have been extremely poor from what I’ve seen.
At least USN – if this is whom you’re critiquing – added the metric of educating the poor, which hints at this, because their spots could have been taken by those who have incredible stats and set successful futures.
In addition, both UCSD and UCLA were lauded in the NYT study as having the highest number of poor students jumping two quintiles of income from whence they came.
Let me add that if ROI is always so great, then what would prevent some colleges from taking hypothetically full-tuition payers, which would => infinite return?