http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/14/upsho ... -data.html
Colleges give prospective students very little information about how much money they can expect to earn in the job market. In part that’s because colleges may not want people to know, and in part it’s because such information is difficult and expensive to gather.
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On Saturday, the federal government solved that problem by releasing a huge set of new data detailing the earnings of people who attended nearly every college and university in America. Although it abandonded efforts to rate the quality of colleges, the federal government matched data from the federal student financial aid system to federal tax returns. The Department of Education was thus able to calculate how much money people who enrolled in individual colleges in 2001 and 2002 were earning 10 years later.
On the surface, the trends aren’t surprising — students who enroll in wealthy, elite colleges earn more than those who do not. But the deeper that you delve into the data, the more clear it becomes how perilous the higher education market can be for students making expensive, important choices that don’t always pay off.
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The Department of Education calculated the percentage of students at each college who earned more than $25,000 per year, which is about what high school graduates earn. At hundreds of colleges, less than half of students met this threshold 10 years after enrolling. The list includes a raft of barber academies, cosmetology schools and for-profit colleges that often leave students with few job prospects and mountains of debt.
But some more well-known institutions weren’t far behind. At Bennington College in Vermont, over 48 percent of former students were earning less than $25,000 per year. A quarter were earning less than $10,600 per year. At Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, the median annual earnings were only $35,700. Results at the University of New Mexico were almost exactly the same.
Look at the data yourself: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov
The absolute worst school in the list is some place called Southwest University of Visual Arts-Albuquerque, a for-profit school whose students go on to on average earn less than high school grads, for the price of $47k a year on average. I notice that all of the bottom schools have names with words like "arts", "design", "music", and the like in their names and the top ones are nearly all nursing, medical, or science & technology schools. Shocking!
The best intersection of cost and average income is the United States Merchant Marine Academy, followed by the Ivies (really cheap!), a couple more naval or maritime colleges (interesting), and some tech schools.