IS AN IVY LEAGUE DEGREE WORTH IT?

Capitalizing on the tense economic climate, SmartMoney unveiled its "Best Colleges for Making Money" ranking (slideshow here) yesterday, compiling tuition costs and salaries to find the schools that offer the largest payback, and trying to convince us to transfer to the University of Georgia.
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The magazine's ranking calculated the "average payback" ratio of colleges across America by comparing the median salary of graduates to the cost of a degree, effectively seeing how the investment in higher education paid off.

Princeton University came in first out of the Ivy League schools with an "average payback" of 132%. According to the ranking, the median salary of a Princeton graduate is $66,500 after three years and $131,000 after 15 years. The cost of a Princeton degree for the Class of 2005 was $111,840 without financial aid. Fifteen years ago, the Class of 1993 paid $64,150 for their degree, also not including financial aid.

Rounding out the top five Ivy League investments were Dartmouth, in second with an "average payback" of 131%, followed by Yale, Harvard and University of Pennsylvania.

SmartMoney's ranking names University of Georgia the school with the highest "average payback", at 338%.

However, when calculating "returns", SmartMoney's ranking focuses on the ratio of earning power to tuition, not on the actual salary. Though Dartmouth alumni earned the highest median salary fifteen years after graduation, $134,000, Dartmouth did not make the Top 20. The median salary fifteen years after graduation at top-ranked UGA is $86,000.

Unlike other publications, SmartMoney assesses only the return on the investment, as it were, and not the schools' resources or quality of education. The ranking also did not factor in the financial aid provided by many private institutions when calculating the cost of a degree. Only two private schools, Washington and Lee University and Princeton, were included in the Top 20.

For now, we'll be staying put at Princeton, defiantly facing the inevitable declining median salary of our graduates once alumni start trickling out of Wall Street. We like the castles. But what we noticed in this ranking wasn't just who was above whom, but the skyrocketing cost of higher education, which has been on our mind since Tamar Lewin's recent New York Times article was published.

Today, the average cost of attendance for only one year at Princeton is around $49,190, according to the University's website. Tuition for this year, 2008-2009, is $34, 290. That's more than half the cost of four years of a Princeton education from 1989-1993.


Sources:
www.smartmoney.com
www.princeton.edu
www.onlineathens.com

-AW