Colleges ranking highly after 10 years aren’t necessarily the same ones at the top after 40 years, report says. The middle tier is a perhaps surprising mix of public, nonprofit and for-profit institutions.
What kind of a return on investment can a student expect to get on his or her college education?
The answer depends on any number of factors. Cost of attendance, choice of college and type of degree attained are just a few of the major ones.
A new report released today by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce examines several of those factors and how they affect returns on students’ investment. The report uses data made available on the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard — net price and median earnings — in order to calculate the net present value of degrees and credentials from different colleges over short and long time frames. It ranks more than 4,500 public, private nonprofit and private for-profit colleges awarding bachelor’s degrees, associate degrees and certificates. It ranks the institutions as a whole but not their individual programs, although its authors hope to be able to analyze program-level return on investment in the near future.
Generally, community colleges and a large number of certificate programs posted the highest return on investment in the short term, defined as a 10-year period. Colleges that award mostly bachelor’s degrees did much better over the long run, a 40-year time frame.