If you are signing college tuition checks now, you probably don’t want to hear that your money is not going to be well spent. But here goes.
A Web site called PayScale, which collects data on compensation, has ranked colleges by the return on the investment in their tuition: What a student pays to attend versus what he or she will get back in lifetime earnings. And some colleges that have attracted graduates of Verona High School have not fared well in the rankings. Savannah College of Art & Design, which drew several members of the Class of 2011, ranked dead last on the PayScale list, number 1248 with a negative ROI of -12.3%.
Montclair State University, where four years of in-state tuition will set you back $108,300, has an ROI of 7.5%. William Paterson University (four-year cost $111,800) has an ROI of 6.6%.
Others fared better. Rutgers University has an ROI of 9.6% , NJIT”s is 9.7%, and Penn State got an 8.8%. The top-ranked school on the list is Harvey Mudd College, an engineering school in southern California, which has an 11.2% ROI.
There is, predictably, a lot of hand-wringing and gnashing of online teeth over the list, particularly from SCAD grads. You can see the full ranking here.
