University graduates’ degrees have a lower return on investments than those of graduates from Washington & Lee University, Virginia Tech and the College of William & Mary, according to a recently released study by Affordable Colleges Online.
The University’s ROI is $924,000; the top three Virginia schools all topped $1 million. Washington & Lee has the highest reported return, coming in at $1,053,000.
The organization analyzed data from 173 colleges across the state and calculated return on investment as the total of “incremental lifetime earnings as a result of earning a college degree minus the cost of the education.”
The incremental lifetime earnings are the 30-years accumulated difference in earnings of the average worker with only a high school diploma. The cost of education is calculated by using the average time required to graduate.
This study comes at a time when the skyrocketing costs of a college education raises the question of whether degrees are worth their sticker prices.
Matt Davis, the managing director of the Affordable Colleges website, said in an email that the survey indicates there is still a high payoff for those who obtain a college education, but which college they attend can significantly impact the overall economic benefit.
“With jobs becoming harder and harder to come by, the importance of an education is at an all-time high,” Davis said. “Students want to find schools that will reward them for both their monetary and temporal investments.”
There are a variety of reasons for differences, Davis said. “Some schools have higher ROIs because they have invested their own resources in developing programs which produce highly-specialized and often highly-paid graduates,” he said.
This study compiled data from both government and non-government sources, including PayScale.com’s 2013 College Earnings Report, the Integrated Post-Secondary Education Data System, the National Center for Education Statistics and the Carnegie Foundation.
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