r/gatech • u/paulfromatlanta Phys - 1987 • 1d ago

Survey/Study/Poll The 10 public colleges with the best ROI in the U.S. -- when it comes to the best return on investment, the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta earns top marks for the third year in a row

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/23/public-colleges-with-the-best-roi-in-the-us.html
119 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

20

u/MrJetSetLife Alum - MGT 2004 1d ago

I believe it.

18

u/Square_Alps1349 1d ago

Strange how the rankings aren’t done 100% based on total income.

Also in state tuition works strangely in other states. For example in California, many UCs nominally charge < 10k in tuition but would add double that amount in various “fees”

16

u/Ancient_Astronaut547 1d ago

It’s best to not take these rankings too seriously

7

u/OnceOnThisIsland 1d ago

Spending 100k on a degree to earn 80k/year doesn’t mean better ROI than spending 20k to earn 79k/year. Straight income isn’t everything. 

3

u/Square_Alps1349 1d ago

But not everyone spends the same amount for college, and it would be misleading to generalize tuition that way.

I pay and know many that pay the full 50k/year here, and there are plenty of out of state students paying damn near 0. And then in state tuition is its own thing. It would be misleading to generalize ROI on a single tuition payment figure too.

And frankly it’s much harder for a school to increase the median graduate income than it is for a school to lower tuition to game the rankings, so income still makes a lot more sense in my mind.

4

u/Impossible_Ground907 1d ago

They need to normalize the incomes to the area that graduates get jobs…. For example, I would wage to bet many of the UC Berkeley graduates end up working in the Bay Area, which has one of the highest cost of livings in the US. That gives them a huge artificial boost. Considering some of the crazy rents that I’ve heard out of the Bay Area, UC Berkeley’s income figures aren’t very impressive.

4

u/Funny_Analysis_1764 CS - 2028 1d ago

It’s not really an artificial boost though? Georgia Tech grads have the freedom to move to the most economically vibrant areas of the country, and to be honest the Bay Area in particular is so much stronger economically in no small part due to Berkeley and Stanford.

3

u/Relevant_Sentence973 1d ago

That metric would be misleading on its own. Not all undergraduate majors lead to the same salary ranges, and not all institutions offer the same number of undergraduate majors. GT only offers half the number of majors that the University of Virginia does, for example.