The price of college tuition has skyrocketed over the last twenty-five years. Many depressed graduates are financially imprisoned as they struggle to meet loan payments and wonder how adult education was ever a means to an end if the debt itself is never-ending. And no one ever told them about this...
SmartMoney decided to, "spotlight the relationship between tuition costs and graduates' earning power." Is it worth the extraordinary bill if the paycheck at the end of the four-year rainbow can barely put a dent in your debt? If you pick the right school:
Working with consultant PayScale.com, which recently published a groundbreaking survey on alumni salaries, we first looked at what graduates from 50 of the most expensive four-year colleges earn in their early and midcareers. Then we factored in their up-front tuition and fees. The result? A unique "payback" ratio for each school.
The results are very interesting. It seems the University of Georgia (ranked number one in the survey) delivers a "payback" that triples the earning power Harvard grants when you factor in tuition. The Ivies, according to this study, don't even compare to the state universities of Delaware and Rhode Island.
Remember, we're strictly speaking about earning potential based on a new kind of college survey. No one's talking about learning anything here. And obviously this can't appropriately apply to all areas of study (sorry poetry majors). But it does raise some interesting questions about the net worth of an American education.
See the article and the survey.
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