
Ranking of Colleges by ROI - johnny313
https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/CollegeROI/
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iguy
I haven't read this in detail, but according to commentary here [1] it sounds
like they don't actually have 40-year returns, they have 10-year data and
extrapolate.

Which is a massively different thing, and as you would expect would favor
things closer to trade school (immediately useful) rather than the sort of
careers people going to top schools are likely to aim for (many of which have
high pay much later).

[1]
[https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/11/th...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/11/the-
future-of-higher-education.html#comments)

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mullingitover
Pretty impressive that eight of the ten the top 10-year NPV schools are two
year degrees.

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gowld
That's because they are single-major schools (nursing).

The lowest NPV schools are art/music schools.

4 year schools have many majors, so nursing and art departments cancel out and
you get the average returns.

These ranking are silly, they don't attempt to separate confounding factors.
They also make the unhelpful observation that a $92 school has the best ROI,
ignoring that ROI is a useless measure more investments you only make once in
your life and do not have constant R or I.

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nfrankel
> bachelor’s degrees from private colleges, on average, have higher ROI than
> degrees from public colleges 40 years after enrollment

That's a f... up conclusion if there's one. Let's look at it another way: in
those private colleges, you'll likely find more students whose parents are
rich than in public colleges. Guess what? After 40 years, there's a higher
chance they will find themselves higher in the food chain than students from
poorer families.

The only conclusion is the renewal of the capital gap generation after
generation.

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didgeoridoo
Chetty et al [0] came to the opposite conclusion: “...children from low and
high income families have similar earnings outcomes conditional on the college
they attend.”

[0] [http://www.equality-of-
opportunity.org/papers/coll_mrc_paper...](http://www.equality-of-
opportunity.org/papers/coll_mrc_paper.pdf)

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DataWorker
Read your own link: “We document four results. First, access to colleges
varies greatly by parent income. For example, children whose parents are in
the top 1% of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend an
Ivy League college than those whose parents are in the bottom income quintile.
Second, children from low- and high-income families have similar earnings
outcomes conditional on the college they attend, indicating that low-income
students are not mismatched at selective colleges. Third, rates of upward
mobility – the fraction of students who come from families in the bottom
income quintile and reach the top quintile – differ substantially across
colleges because low-income access varies significantly across colleges with
similar earnings outcomes.”

They attend very different schools and have very different results.

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gizmo686
Isn't that what parent said?

Once you control for college attended, outcomes do not depend sugnificantly on
parent incomes; therefore parental income is not a confounding factor in
looking at the ROI of collages.

Children of wealthy parents still tend to do better, but that is because they
get to purchase a superior product.

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8bitsrule
I'm pretty sure that 95% of my college ROI can't be measured. The people,
ideas, techniques, perceptions, and multiple forms of expertise and culture
shared with me - the opening of horizons - have been invaluable to me as an
individual ... and hopefully to some people I shared with.

College can be much more than quantifiable job training. All of us know this,
and we owe this kind of reckoning no more respect than it deserves. This
experience needs to be open to all who wish it, regardless.

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jmpman
Would be interesting to see these charts based upon the actual degree. A CS
degree will likely have a better ROI than basket weaving. Society shouldn’t be
creating more basket weavers, and the first step is to have solid data.

