@ucbalumnus . . .
Per your quote:
I neglected to include major which would be the best thing to base a sample size, thanks.
I believe they supposedly included them in the Forbes outcomes. But I understand Payscale’s point: To which program does one attribute success for someone who goes to Southwest Missouri State and then after four years of employment attends Harvard Business School?
Not only has her income stream not been steady, it’s interrupted (HBS: one cannot serve two masters); it’s finite, and convoluted, and this is just one person. No two people have the same debt load, no two people have the same income streams. So how can one assemble all these disparate elements into one figure? How is ROI calculable?