FREOPP 2021 earnings · IPEDS 2023 cost · BEA 2023 cost-of-living · Utah four-year schools, resident pricing · real-earnings-coverage only · every school shown is NPV-positive.

1 Neumont College of Computer Science · Salt Lake City · private +$4.87M
2 Western Governors University · Salt Lake City · private +$4.14M
3 Weber State University · Ogden · public +$2.31M
4 Utah Valley University · Orem · public +$2.22M
5 Brigham Young University · Provo · private +$2.12M
6 University of Utah · Salt Lake City · public +$1.79M
7 Utah State University · Logan · public +$1.32M
8 Utah Tech University · Saint George · public +$1.17M
9 Southern Utah University · Cedar City · public +$834K
10 Westminster University · Salt Lake City · private +$604K

How this is computed (and what it isn’t)

For each school we run the /worth-it calculator with the home state set to Utah — resident tuition, plus foregone wages, capitalized loan interest, and BEA cost-of-living on the skip-college path. The ranking is the 30-year projected net value of going vs. skipping and investing the difference. It ranks schools, not majors — and the major you pick swings that payoff by over a million dollars on its own.

What it isn’t: a list of “good schools.” It’s a list of good trades at resident pricing. Schools without real FREOPP earnings coverage are excluded rather than estimated; institutions whose earnings roll up from fewer than 3 reported programs are excluded as too thin to rank; schools verified closed since the IPEDS 2023-24 vintage are excluded by hand. Only NPV-positive schools are listed — the point is where the value is, not naming losers.