2014 Payscale Ranking of College Education Return on Investment

  image by flickr user 401(K)2012, cc licenseConsider higher education an investment in your student's future? Then Payscale.com has a must-read ranking list just for you. 
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image by flickr user 401k2012

image by flickr user 401(K)2012, cc license

Consider higher education an investment in your student’s future? Then Payscale.com has a must-read ranking list just for you.

This week, Payscale.com released its annual College Education Return on Investment Rankings. This ranking shows how much one would expect to get in return for the money it costs to get an undergraduate degree from a particular college.

This year’s top perfomers:

  • Harvey Mudd College [$1.1 million 20 Year Net Return on Investment]
  • MIT [$973,800 20 Year Net Return on Investment]
  • Caltech [$968,500 20 Year Net Return on Investment]
  • Stanford University [$950,800 20 Year Net Return on Investment]
  • Stevens Institute of Technology [$838,500 20 Year Net Return on Investment]

The biggest change from last year to this is looking at 20 year net return instead of 30 year. They justified this by the general flattening of pay for workers around age 40.

There were two other notable additions to this year’s report. First is the best return on investments by major. Such a release of data can help to adjust the generally engineering-heavy return on investment in these rankings, as we noted last year. A few examples: Stanford tops the list for economics majors, UC-Berkeley is #1 for business majors, UNC-Chapel Hill leads the way for life sciences majors, while George Mason University ranks highest for humanities and English majors.