Look up almost any college in a published ROI ranking and you will find a comforting number. Positive. Often six figures. Sometimes seven. Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW) publishes rankings like this for thousands of institutions, and other researchers produce their own versions. A parent scrolling one of these tables sees a college showing $500,000 and reasonably concludes the school generates an extra half million dollars.

That reading is correct as far as it goes. The problem is where it stops. The table almost never tells you the one thing an investor would demand to know before trusting any return: compared to what?

I ran the test on my model of 1,679 bachelor’s-granting colleges, built from the government’s own College Scorecard data. Each school keeps the starting salary and wage growth my model already gives it. I changed only the accounting, to match the league tables’ basic construction: forty years of earnings, minus four years of cost, and nothing else. No comparison path, no taxes, no time value. The published versions vary at the edges, and the CEW is even more conservative, holding earnings flat after year ten. But none of the popular tables restores all three of the missing pieces, and the three together are the story. On that accounting, every single institution comes out positive. All 1,679 of them, at full sticker price and at the typical price after aid.[1] One hundred percent.

A metric that returns the same verdict for every school cannot be measuring whether any of them beats the alternative. And yet that positive sign is exactly what a reader takes away from the table.

Here is what the construction asks: are forty years of earnings bigger than four years of tuition? The answer is yes for every college, because forty years of almost any working life is bigger than four years of almost any bill. The question the table answers is real, and the researchers who build these tables are answering it honestly. It is simply not the question a family standing at the decision is asking. The family wants to know whether this path beats the path their child already has, the one that costs nothing to choose: go to work.

To see how much that missing comparison matters, follow one school through the arithmetic. Take a private university charging about $50,000 a year at full cost, whose median graduate earns about $58,000 four years after graduation. In the CEW’s 2025 table, this school shows a forty-year ROI of about $1.7 million, which places it comfortably in the top third of their rankings.[2] On my league-style accounting, with wage growth included, it shows roughly $3.1 million.[3] The constructions differ, but they share the property that matters: a number that size does not look like a warning. It looks like a rounding error away from a guarantee.

Now add what the table left out, one step at a time.

First, the comparison. Put both paths on one full working lifetime, ages eighteen to sixty-five. That alignment hands the college side about $370,000 more of late-career earnings than the table’s forty-year window counted, so the window is doing no work against the school. Then subtract the path the student already had: a high school graduate who goes to work at eighteen earns about $2.8 million over those same years, before taxes.[3] The school’s headline number collapses to about $676,000. The go-to-work path earns roughly eighty cents of every dollar the college path nets over a lifetime, and the student owned that path before anyone mailed an acceptance letter.

Second, taxes. The earnings advantage a degree produces is the top slice of income, and the top slice is where the tax rates live. Run both paths through federal income and payroll taxes and about $259,000 of the remaining premium goes to the government before the graduate touches it. The advantage is down to roughly $418,000.

Third, time. Every dollar of cost and all four years of forgone earnings happen at ages eighteen to twenty-two, at full weight. The premium arrives mostly in the graduate’s forties and fifties, and a dollar thirty years away is worth about a dime today. Discount both paths the way you would discount any forty-year investment and the advantage does not shrink. It flips. The school that showed seven figures in the ranking leaves its median graduate about $149,000 behind the high school path at its full price, and about $67,000 behind at its net price, the same kind of price the CEW uses.[3] My book walks this same collapse for the median American college in Chapter 3, and takes the published studies apart one by one in its appendices. The point here is narrower: the ranking and the verdict point in opposite directions.

Positive seven figures in the table. Negative against the alternative at full price and at the typical price after aid.

This is not one unlucky example, and it is not a cherry-picked one. The school sits at the exact median of the 1,330 institutions that flip, and the CEW’s own table, remember, places it in their top third. Across my model’s 1,679 institutions, 1,330 of them, seventy-nine percent, are behind the high school path at full sticker price once the comparison, the taxes, and the time value are counted. At the typical price families pay after aid, 967 institutions, fifty-eight percent, still are.[1] Every one of those schools shows a positive number in a league-table construction, and the median league-table figure among them is about three million dollars.[3] A reader cannot tell the winning colleges from the losing ones by the table’s verdict, because that verdict is positive for all of them.

You do not have to take my model’s word for the direction of this. In 2025 the CEW updated their rankings, and the update makes it possible to run the comparison inside their own numbers, with no discounting anywhere. Their method implies a high school baseline of about $1.6 million over the same forty-year window. Set their rows against a high school path priced by their own method and about two-thirds of ranked institutions fall at or below it. The median institution in their table, at roughly $1.4 million, falls short.[4] Before a single dollar of time value enters, and with every number theirs, the baseline changes the story. And if you suspect my 7.8 percent discount rate is carrying the arithmetic above, run it gentler. At 3 percent, the example school climbs back above water, but 525 institutions, nearly a third, stay behind the high school path at full price, and 235 stay behind even at zero cost.[5] The rate moves the count. It does not repeal the comparison. My book defends the rate itself in its closing chapters.

I want to be precise about who this criticizes, because the answer is almost no one. The researchers who build these tables document their methods and answer the question they pose. Some discount, some adjust for cost, and the CEW has improved their methodology across versions. What none of the popular tables do is subtract the alternative path, net out taxes, and price the wait, all three, and then say plainly what the number means against the choice a family faces. The harm is not in the research. The harm is in the reading: a wall of positive numbers that looks like a menu of good investments, when most of the menu, read against the default path, is not.

So here is the habit, and it takes one question. Whenever anyone shows you a return, on a college, a program, anything, ask: compared to what? If the answer is “compared to spending four years of tuition and nothing else,” you have learned that college beats paying tuition for nothing, which was never in doubt and is not the bar. The bar is the life your child would build anyway. My model runs that comparison, after costs, taxes, forgone years, and time value, for nearly every college and major in the country, free, at collegeroi.org. The full method, and every assumption behind it, is documented line by line in my book.

A positive return is not the same thing as being better off. The difference between those two ideas is worth exactly as much as the comparison the rankings leave out. For the median American college, at the price families actually pay, it is worth the whole verdict.

Reference Sources

1. Author’s model, built on U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard data (March 2026 release), 1,679 bachelor’s-granting institutions. League-style accounting applied to the model’s own earnings engine: 40 years of pre-tax graduate earnings (starting salary back-solved from median earnings four years post-graduation, 2 percent annual wage growth) minus four years of cost, with no baseline comparison, no taxes, and no discounting. For reference, the CEW’s own 2025 method uses Scorecard earnings 6 to 10 years after enrollment, holds real earnings flat after year 10, subtracts five years of average net price, and applies no discounting, no taxes, and no baseline comparison (CEW ROI FAQ, 2025). Model comparison: net present value versus the high school path after costs, federal income and payroll taxes, forgone earnings, and a 7.8 percent discount rate. Registered values: 1,679 of 1,679 league-positive at both cost bases. 1,330 (79.2 percent) and 967 (57.6 percent) behind the high school path at full sticker and median net cost respectively. Run any school at https://collegeroi.org.
2. Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, ROI rankings explorer (2025 edition), institution-level table, most recent cohort year (2021–22): 40-year ROI $1,740,000 in 2023 dollars for the example institution (10/15/20/30-year values $124,000 / $394,000 / $663,000 / $1,201,000. earlier cohorts range to $1,874,000). Rows exported from the public explorer, accessed July 5, 2026. The CEW basis: Scorecard earnings 6 to 10 years after enrollment for federal-aid recipients, held flat after year 10, minus five years of average net price, undiscounted, untaxed, no baseline comparison.
3. Author’s model, median institution among the 1,330 that flip sign at full sticker: league construction $3,082,135. minus the high school counterfactual ($2,755,586 pre-tax over the same ages-18-to-65 window) leaves $676,350. after taxes on both paths $417,735. discounted at 7.8 percent, −$148,922 versus the high school path. Medians across all 1,330 flipped institutions: $3,082,135 → $676,549 → $426,470 → −$120,639. At the example institution’s net price ($27,715, the CEW’s kind of cost basis), the model’s result is −$66,994 versus the high school path. at zero cost, +$32,739. Window note: the league figure runs the tables’ 40-year convention. the waterfall’s later steps run both paths on the model’s full 18-to-65 window, which adds about $367,000 of late-career earnings to the college side before the subtraction. The alignment favors college, so the collapse is not an artifact of window choice.
4. Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, 2025 ranking update, zero-discount basis. The CEW’s own methodology implies a 40-year high school baseline of approximately $1.6 million (40 years at roughly $40,000 a year, the high school earnings figure the CEW’s own materials use, applied with their flat-after-year-10 convention). 1,494 of 4,476 ranked institutions (33 percent) sit above it, two-thirds at or below. the median institution’s 40-year value is approximately $1,405,000. Detailed reconstruction and sourcing in the author’s book, Appendix B.
5. Author’s model, 3 percent discount sensitivity (run July 5, 2026, registered in the model’s ground-truth file): institutions behind the high school path at a 3 percent rate: 525 of 1,679 (31.3 percent) at full sticker, 359 (21.4 percent) at median net price, and 235 (14.0 percent) at zero cost. The example institution is above the baseline at 3 percent (about +$31,000 at full sticker).