How the numbers are computed.

The question the calculator answers

/worth-it computes a 30-year projected net value for a specific school and home state: the degree path’s cash flows against the alternative path of skipping college, working at the high-school-graduate median wage, and investing the difference. Both paths are compounded forward to the same terminal year under the same real-rate convention, and the headline is the gap between them, in real (constant-purchasing-power) dollars.

Degree-path costs: out-of-pocket cost of attendance (tuition + room & board, net of the borrowed share), foregone wages during enrollment, and loan payments on a standard amortization. Degree-path benefit: the school’s median-earnings premium over the high-school baseline, adjusted for the cost of living where the graduate will work, accrued over a 30-year career. Alt path: those same dollars (wages plus the money not spent on college), compounded at the long-run equity return.

Data sources

• FREOPP Higher Education ROI (2021) — per-program lifetime-ROI estimates and institution earnings for ~30,000 U.S. bachelor’s programs, published by the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (freopp.org, CC-BY-4.0). We use the ages-29–31 cohort-weighted mean as the institution-earnings proxy of record. 1,661 of 3,392 institutions carry real FREOPP earnings; the remainder fall back to the BLS national bachelor’s median ($74K) and are excluded from all named rankings.
• IPEDS 2023–24 (Final) — the U.S. Department of Education’s universe of postsecondary institutions: identity, published tuition & fees (resident and non-resident), room & board (nces.ed.gov/ipeds, U.S. government work).
• BEA Regional Price Parities (2023) — cost-of-living deflators by state, used to adjust post-graduation earnings for where the graduate will live and work (bea.gov, U.S. government work).

Public data only; no institutional scraping. We are an analysis layer over these sources — when you cite a number, the underlying figure is theirs and we name them inline.

Default assumptions (all user-editable in the calculator)

• Program length: 4 years (bachelor’s default).
• Career horizon: 30 years post-graduation.
• Borrowed share of cost: 60% — IPEDS-grounded median for borrowing students.
• Loan rate: 6.5% APR — the 2026 federal undergraduate Direct Loan rate; 10-year Standard Repayment.
• Alt-path return / discount convention: 7% — the long-run S&P 500 real-return convention common in consumer finance (FREOPP itself uses 3%; a lower rate makes college look better, so our default is the harder test).
• High-school baseline wage: $34,000 — BLS 2023 full-time median for HS-diploma-only workers at career entry.

How each ranking is built

• Worst-ROI majors — ranks FREOPP’s 19 major categories by FREOPP’s own published lifetime-ROI figure, cohort-weighted by graduate count. Their number, reported verbatim; names no institution.
• The out-of-state tax — runs the calculator twice per public four-year school: once at resident tuition, once at non-resident, with earnings and cost-of-living held identical. The gap is purely the residency pricing line. Only schools that stay NPV-positive both ways are listed.
• Best value by state — each state’s own four-year schools at resident pricing, ranked by 30-year projected net value. NPV-positive schools only.

Editorial gates (what keeps the rankings honest)

• No school is ever named with a negative number. Negative results exist in the calculator (your school, your inputs, your screen) — but our published rankings only name schools in positive or neutral cost-comparison context.
• Thin-coverage exclusion: institutions whose FREOPP earnings roll up from fewer than 3 reported programs are excluded from named rankings — one outlier program shouldn’t crown a school.
• No estimated earnings in rankings: schools without real FREOPP coverage are excluded rather than estimated with the national-median fallback.
• Hand-verified exclusions: schools confirmed closed since the IPEDS 2023–24 vintage are removed by hand.

Known limitations (published on purpose)

• Sticker cost, not net price. We do not apply a financial-aid adjustment — a single aid factor cannot honestly represent the public/private/for-profit × in-state/out × Pell/no-Pell distribution. A school generous with aid will look worse here than your actual offer; run your real numbers.
• Gross-of-tax on both paths, so taxes approximately cancel; no real wage growth applied to either stream.
• No completion-risk weighting. The model assumes you finish. Roughly 40% of starters don’t finish in 6 years (federal six-year completion data, IPEDS), and non-completion is the worst financial outcome — costs without the premium.
• Category means hide spread. A major category’s mean ROI is not your program’s ROI; a specific program at a specific school can land far from its category.
• Earnings vintage: FREOPP 2021 (cohorts 2017–19). Field-level relative differences are stable; absolute levels drift with inflation.

Use the data

Every ranking is downloadable and free to cite with attribution (ranking tables: free to share with attribution; underlying data carries its upstream license — FREOPP CC-BY-4.0, IPEDS/BEA U.S. government works).

• worst-roi-majors.csv — 19 major categories, mean lifetime ROI, % of graduates below zero
• out-of-state-tax.csv — every qualifying public four-year (455 schools), resident/non-resident NPV + the penalty
• best-value-by-state.csv — all 51 states’ top-15 lists at resident pricing

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