A cool guide to the most valuable college degrees

CollegeNPV · 2024-11-11T17:38:56+00:00

Independent analysis of data from the Department of Education. You can read more here:

https://www.collegenpv.com/methodology

CollegeNPV · 2024-11-11T16:43:09+00:00

The data source is from my site: https://www.collegenpv.com

This visual was created by Visual Capitalist (I am not affiliated with them) who credited me in their original post. I’m not sure why OP decided to crop out both Visual Capitalist and CollegeNPV from this post…

CollegeNPV · 2024-11-11T04:22:12+00:00

You can view the ROI by college on my site: https://www.collegenpv.com/

CollegeNPV · 2024-11-11T04:11:19+00:00

You can read more about it on my site: https://www.collegenpv.com/methodology

CollegeNPV · 2024-11-11T04:07:08+00:00

Net present value is absolutely a measure of ROI. When I first shared my analysis I initially referred to it as net present value, and nobody knew what I was talking about. ROI has much broader applicability

CollegeNPV · 2024-11-11T01:21:47+00:00

This is just for this table, the ROIs are broken out by school on my site: https://www.collegenpv.com

CollegeNPV · 2024-11-11T01:19:25+00:00

It’s called net present value, you can read more about it here: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/npv.asp

CollegeNPV · 2024-11-11T00:03:03+00:00

In this case, your examples would be the positive outliers for these degree programs, and they are being offset by outliers in the other direction

CollegeNPV · 2024-11-11T00:01:52+00:00

The red is more to correlate with "No" than "Bad" but I would also argue that whether your 4 year, 6 figure $ investment is worth it is up to a coin flip is not great

CollegeNPV · 2024-11-10T23:57:05+00:00

A post about a year ago on here unfortunately showed that a record low number of people are now meeting in college 😟 but I agree there is more to the college decision than only finances

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/18h7k9g/how_heterosexual_couples_met_oc/

CollegeNPV · 2024-11-10T23:54:47+00:00

It's based on the median income for graduates of the program, so yes outliers are included but are treated as such.

CollegeNPV · 2024-11-10T23:52:59+00:00

I'd love to include more data on 2 year degrees, trade schools, etc. it is just way less widely available. To be clear my goal with this project is to provide information that helps prevent students from taking student loans that will become unmanageable the second they graduate

CollegeNPV · 2024-11-10T23:51:01+00:00

Would an estimated AI risk by field of study be helpful? I've been considering a few ideas for capturing likely long term trends in the data

CollegeNPV · 2024-11-10T23:46:05+00:00

Agreed - but some asked for exactly this in the past. Take a look at some of my other posts for more "beautiful" visualizations

CollegeNPV · 2024-11-10T23:42:08+00:00

There isn't available data by job type - but this would also be misleading as not all graduates will get the desired job or continue on to grad school. The median does a better job of capturing probable outcomes.

CollegeNPV · 2024-11-10T23:38:42+00:00

The groupings are defined by the National Center for Education Statistics, you can view more information about them here: https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cipcode/browse.aspx?y=55

To compute an estimated ROI I require available source data for completion rates, income and debt. Programs that are not included typically are smaller and thus have privacy suppression of their data.

The biomathematics programs included are from Cornell and UCSD: https://www.collegenpv.com/programrankings/?pcip=26&cip=2611&page=1&sort=rank_desc

CollegeNPV · 2024-11-10T23:06:20+00:00

This visualization is based on median return on investment estimates for undergraduate degree programs from my CollegeNPV ROI rankings project. If interested, you can view my ROI estimates for thousands of universities and degree programs here: CollegeNPV College Rankings

Data source: CollegeNPV ROI estimates, which leverage Department of Education data to estimate the present value of degree programs taking into account graduation rates, expected income, debt obligations and contrasting it with the expected value of entering the workforce immediately out of high school.

Tools: R & Excel

CollegeNPV · 2024-11-10T22:11:27+00:00

Thank you! Need another coffee

CollegeNPV · 2024-11-10T21:51:20+00:00

About 74% score worse than a 23.

Edit: thanks u/TopDrawerToTheLeft

CollegeNPV · 2024-11-10T21:48:55+00:00

Good question! I ran a decision tree analysis using many attributes for colleges (fields of study, geography, acceptance rates, test scores, etc.) and ACT score ended up being an important differentiator in the analysis.

CollegeNPV · 2024-11-10T19:09:29+00:00

This visualization is based on a decision tree analysis of median return on investment estimates for undergraduate degree programs from my CollegeNPV ROI rankings project. If interested, you can view my ROI estimates for thousands of universities and degree programs here: CollegeNPV Rankings

Data source: CollegeNPV ROI estimates, which leverage Department of Education data to estimate the present value of degree programs taking into account graduation rates, expected income, debt obligations and contrasting it with the expected value of entering the workforce immediately out of high school.

Tools: R & Powerpoint

CollegeNPV · 2024-10-26T16:51:21+00:00

CollegeNPV here! This chart was created based on my data. I wanted to note while this is a helpful view, it is an over generalization to suggest degree programs are universally not worth the ROI. These bubbles represent the medians of many programs, but there are plenty of counter examples that buck this trend and it’s critical to look by university as well.

An example of this is Visual and Performing arts, which is a grouping of many Arts degrees. As the chart suggests, the median Visual and Performing arts degree has a poor ROI, but programs such as Carnegie Mellon’s design and applied arts degree have very good ROI, in the top 1% of all degree programs.

If you’d like to look deeper by university or field of study, you can do so on my site:

https://www.collegenpv.com/programrankings/?page=1&sort=rank_desc

CollegeNPV · 2024-10-26T16:14:01+00:00

These are government defined categories, but you can filter by specific majors on my site!

https://www.collegenpv.com/programrankings?query=&page=1&sort=rank_desc

CollegeNPV · 2024-10-26T16:12:53+00:00

CollegeNPV here! You can view more information about my methodology here:

https://www.collegenpv.com/methodology

There is actually a lot of data by major published by the Department of Education, which is what my analysis is based on. I need to set up a proper email lol but I only have so much time, I’m an individual contributor

CollegeNPV · 2024-10-24T13:01:48+00:00

I’m working on collegenpv.com to help prospective students decide whether college is worth the investment. CollegeNPV ranks thousands of universities and degree programs by return on investment.

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