With students and parents shelling out tens of thousand (or more) for college these days, more and more people are questioning whether such an enormous investment is actually a wise financial move.
In many cases, especially when students are taking on exorbitant loans or entering a low-paying field after graduation, the answer is “no.” But there are some schools out that offer a serious financial upside to students who can swing the cost of attendance.
SLIDESHOW: 10 Biggest-Bang-for-Buck Colleges
The career site Payscale has crunched the numbers on more than 1,200 schools to show just how greatly the value of a degree varies from one university to another. The site calculated the future earnings of graduates over the next 20 years as they compare with the median pay for a high school graduate, taking out the cost of tuition.
Thanks to the high salaries their graduates command, engineering schools dominated the top of the list. Seven of the top 10 schools are engineering schools where the average 20-year net ROI is $677,500. By comparison, liberal arts, religious, art, and music and design schools all have an average 20-year net ROI of less than $250,000.
Alumni who majored in engineering, computer science and math, or business fields (or those who landed in those career fields after graduation) were most likely to have a net ROI of more than $1 million.
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