Return on Your College Degree Investment: A Look at Selected Upstate NY Schools

PayScale.com recently took a look at how a degree from specific colleges and universities stack up to one another. As they say, "Attending college is an investment of time and money. Make a decision that will pay off in the long term."  PayScale has ranked almost 1,500 U.S. colleges and universities, including private, public and for-profit schools, to determine the potential financial return of attending each school given the cost of tuition and the payoff in median lifetime earnings associated with each school.

When deciding which college or university to attend, a major factor to consider is if the lifetime earnings you will experience after earning your college degree will make the cost of earning that degree worth it. Otherwise known as Return on Investment (ROI), this performance measure is increasingly being used as a way for top schools to tout their worth. The schools they reviewed were ranked highest-to-lowest on their average 30 year net return on investment for in-state students. The top 10 schools in the country included:

Below are how some local and upstate New York schools fared in the rankings. The 30 Year Net ROI is a measure of how much a graduate of this school will make over 30 years of working, minus what they would have made with as a high school graduate and the cost of attending this particular college (tuition, room, board, fees etc). It is basically their net earnings after 30 years as a graduate of this college.

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