Gunner Mack Jr. posted:Why not just go to Payscale.com for best ROI colleges. I will just note NEWMAC has 3 of top 22 and 4 of top 32 schools. The US academies clearly the best deals too.
https://www.payscale.com/college-roi
Fun data to play with, but there are some HUGE caveats. The service academies definitively will show a high ROI, since they are free. For the right kid, they are great choices. Otherwise the list tends to be skewed to engineering and tech-oriented schools. Why? Because almost all their grads can earn relatively high salaries because of their chosen fields. The valid comparison is between students in the same major and career, not across the entire population. Take, for example, the University of Chicago. It doesn’t have an engineering school (so a bad choice for an aspiring engineer), but does have (for example) a fantastic program in ancient near-Eastern languages and archeology. Grads in those fields never earn high salaries, but if you want to get a degree in Sumerian, you really can’t do better. Sumerian majors will, however, tend to pull the school’s average salaries down... a lot.
My point is that schools with strong performing arts programs, or that graduate a lot of future professors, etc. will tend to have lower earnings than, say, Colorado School of Mines (great school, btw, if you want to go into a relevant field). Kids from UChicago who go on to be Philosophy professors don’t earn big bucks (although the Philosophy majors who go on to law school certainly can). Chicago’s Econ majors, however, probably do as well as Econ majors at any other school.