Years to pay off net price, or the amount of time it would take a graduate to pay off the cost of attending.

TAMU comes in at 28 with 1 year 10 months. Not bad at all, honestly. Princeton is honestly a shocker to me at 4 months. Must be business and banking floating that. MIT not surprising at all. Since we are playing the sips again, t.u. listed at 41.

I really dig this “Years to Pay Off Net Price” metric that goes into the WSJ 2025 Best Colleges in the US (published today)

The metric is a good approximation of “bang for the buck”.

Princeton at 4 months? Respect.

Virginia Tech coming in at #19 with 1 year 7 months. pic.twitter.com/9oB7oOL8ZK

— Adam Rossi (@rossiadam) September 5, 2024

fify for the pertinent part

Princeton says it costs $86,700 a year to attend, so $346,800 for four years.

If you can earn that back in 4 months, we're talking a brand new college grad making $1,040,400 a year?

That's "list price"

I'd assume the "Net Price" plays a big role in that. If your family income is $100k or less, Princeton is virtually free to attend.

edit: That has to be it. Stanford has a similar program and has a similarly outlandishly short payoff time.

These statistics are manipulated.

I don't agree with those data. When writing a student loans vs fancy facilities (I.e., raising prices to attract more student by building really expensive dorms and coffee shops) journal article, we used a ton of prior published research on payback periods. Those studies were controlled for major, but the shortest payback was something like 5 years- and that was from being an engineer from Missouri-Rolla (formerly Missouri S&T)

Princeton is legit school, know some graduates from there.
They are smart and make bank.

4 months is a little shocking though.

CanyonAg77 said:

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Princeton says it costs $86,700 a year to attend, so $346,800 for four years.

If you can earn that back in 4 months, we're talking a brand new college grad making $1,040,400 a year?

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There are probably some high earners at each school, that skew the percentage.
Especially at "smaller" schools like Princeton.

ATM is very impressive given that most folks don't receive any scholarships

I'm extremely doubtful that WSJ journalists know how (or are willing to take the very large amount of time this would require) to properly clean these datasets to get meaningful, accurate results. Do they contract that work out to qualified statistician and data scientist groups? If not, this has absolutely zero credibility.

CanyonAg77 said:

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Princeton says it costs $86,700 a year to attend, so $346,800 for four years.

If you can earn that back in 4 months, we're talking a brand new college grad making $1,040,400 a year?

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Princeton has a very strong alumni base in both The Sinaloa Cartel and The Jalisco New Generation Cartel. So it is definitely doable.

Shooting from the hip the math has to be some form of simple calculation of: Average starting salary/4 year cost to attend

Both sides of this metric are heavily manipulated. So yeah if your whole school is an engineering department and the average starting salary is 80k and its 20k a year to attend, one year 'payback' is a doable metric.

Could probably break it out by colleges for most universities and come away with some good metrics for ranking. It'll tell you things you already know though. Like attending a well ranked, low cost engineering program is the best ROI for the largest percentage of students.

The Ivys distort this metric the most though. Guys on wall street who went to elites are of the few career paths where new hires are allowed to have traditional liberal majors like philosophy, great books, economics, etc and track into great career placement.

Rick Burns said:

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These statistics are manipulated made up

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