Paying for College: Is Your Education a Good Investment?

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College, according to the traditional wisdom, is a great investment and going into serious debt to get a good education will always pay off. But then again the traditional wisdom also said the same about home-ownership and claimed that house prices rise perpetually. We all know how wrong that turned out to be. Is it possible that sometimes a college education �C like a McMansion - is a bad investment? And how can you decide when signing those student loan papers really is a good idea?

PayScale’s Dr. Salary blog may have found a solution to this quandary — a recently released report put together in conjunction with Bloomberg and BusinessWeek that lays out the ROI on 554 bachelor’s degree granting colleges and universities.

All together, the PayScale College ROI Report ranked 852 possibilities, evaluating public universities for both in-state and out of state tuition costs. The report shows that the return varies tremendously across schools. Netting a million dollar payday is far from a sure thing.

The PayScale College ROI Report should open people eyes’ to when paying for a 4-year college degree is?making an?investment in higher future earnings, vs. when paying is simply buying a great experience (a consumable). Depending on the school, paying for tuition can be?more like buying a ticket to a great play than buying a share of stock. Worth doing, but not to be confused with an investment.

The report crunches the numbers and comes up with this list of top colleges for investment purposes:

MIT California Institute of Technology Harvard Harvey Mudd College Dartmouth Stanford Princeton Yale University of Notre Dame University of Pennsylvania

Sounds like an interesting resource for those thinking about heading to college, but of course the non-monetary benefits of higher education have to be factored in as well.

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