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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If you filter the CEW’s database for 4-year schools/not-for-profit/public schools and remove the specialized (maritime/technology/health) schools, here is the ranking of the top 10:

1.	UC Berkeley $1,383,000
2.	University of Michigan – Ann Arbor $1,364,000
3.	University of Maryland – College Park $1,330,000
4.	Virginia Tech - $1,313,000
5.	UCLA - $1,300,000
6.	University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign $1,299,000
7.	Binghamton University $1,298,000
8.	University of Virginia – Main Campus $1,291,000
9.	University of Connecticut – Stamford $1,288,800
10.	University of Connecticut – Waterbury $1,283,000

Looks like you pick an in-state school and go with it. [/quote]

I'd argue that what you see in that list is largely schools with higher percentages of their alumni settling in areas with the highest cost of living:  San Francisco/Silicon Valley, New York, DC, Los Angeles, Chicago.  If you adjust for cost of living, I wonder what it would actually look like.  [/quote]

Why does Virginia Tech have higher ROI than UVA?[/quote]

Mix of majors. VT’s undergraduate engineering enrollment is twice the share of UVA’s: 30% vs. 15%.

These NPVs are highly misleading if you don’t understand how they’re calculated. They are impacted by mix of majors (technical and professional majors pay more), dominant location of alumni (big cities offer higher salaries), and average cost to attend (elite privates are boosted by lots of financial aid, which drives down average cost but may not reflect your cost). [/quote]

Engineering graduates make about over 1.5X as much on average as the average non-engineering major.  If you look at VT, it has 27% engineering majors (and 73% other), UVA has 13% engineering and 87% other.  William & Mary has 0% engineering, 100% other.  Based on this, all things being equal, you would expect VT grads to have 7% higher income than UVA, and 14% higher than William & Mary.  The ROI/NPV numbers from the report shows VT at 2% higher than UVA and 7% higher than W&M, so this suggests to me that VT has no advantage over either UVA and W&M (and may be slightly lower in earnings per major).   Similarly, UVA would appear to have no advantage in earnings over W&M for non-engineering majors.

So I would say 1) make sure your kid doesn't discount engineering out of hand if they are interested in earning potential 2) be careful when comparing NPV of different schools due to differences in majors (and cost of living of where graduates settle).

The last thing that I noticed in the NPV analysis is that the public schools tend to be very similar in ROI (other than ones like Georgia Tech that has a huge percentage of engineering graduates and very high NPV).  But the same isn't true for top privates.  A number of those more selective private schools have significantly higher NPV than the public schools with which they might be compared. Duke for instance has an NPV of $1.754M while UVA is $1.291M and UNC is $1.185M.  Duke has about 15% engineering vs 13% at UVA and only 1% at UNC, so majors would not appear to explain the 36% difference vs. UVA in NPV and the 48% difference vs. UNC.  [b]If you can get admitted to these schools and get a reasonable financial aid package[/b], it would appear you should not rule them out vs. state flagship schools even if the state school is less expensive.  [/quote]

This is the key. The NPV assumes that you paid the "average" cost for these schools, which is oftentimes at or lower than the cost of a state school. But, if you paid full price, you probably paid 4X the NPV average. Unfortunately, CEW doesn't provide a tool that allows one to input the actual cost of their education and create a personal NPV. If they did, the NPV for many top-tier privates would be much lower for full-pay families than published.[/quote]

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