What ROI actually means for a degree (and what it does not)

ROI is a comparison, not a verdict

Every number on this site answers one question: over the first five years after graduating, how much more does someone from this program earn than a typical high-school graduate in the same state, and what did it cost to get there?

That is it. We are not scoring prestige, teaching quality, campus happiness or how much you will like your classmates. Those matter. They are just not what earnings data can measure.

The three numbers that matter most

**Five-year cumulative premium.** Add up years one through five of earnings for graduates of a program. Subtract what a high-school graduate in that state would have earned over the same five years. What is left is the premium — the part of the earnings that plausibly traces back to the degree.

**Four-year cost.** Published cost per year, multiplied by four. Most students pay less than this after aid, so treat it as a ceiling rather than a bill.

**Premium per dollar of cost.** The premium divided by the cost. A 2.0x means that in five years, the earnings gap has returned twice what the four years cost. Under 1.0x means five years was not enough to clear the cost — which is not automatically a bad program, but it is a slower road.

Where this stops being useful

Earnings data comes from students who took federal aid. Wealthier students who paid cash are missing, which can pull a program's numbers in either direction. Small programs are noisy: twelve graduates in a good hiring year will look excellent and mean very little. And five years is early — teaching, social work and the pre-health tracks all bend upward later than finance does.

Use the numbers to narrow a list from forty schools to eight. Then go visit, talk to graduates, and ask what people two years out are actually doing.