STATISTICS · UPDATED 2026-06-16
College cost & ROI statistics
Every number on this page is computed from public data — FREOPP program-level earnings, IPEDS costs, BEA price parities — and free to republish under CC BY 4.0 with attribution to LE TEEN, le-teen.com. Each stat links to the page where it lives with its full context and methodology.
The return on a degree
- 457 of 1,656 U.S. four-year colleges in the covered set produce a negative 30-year net present value even at in-state prices, under default assumptions — just over one in four. — LE TEEN, from FREOPP per-program earnings + IPEDS costs (derivation published)
- $1.21M is the median 30-year NPV, at resident pricing, among the 500 largest-coverage four-years that clear a positive-NPV bar. — LE TEEN college pages
- $10.06M is the single highest 30-year NPV in the state best-value rankings (California Institute of Technology). — LE TEEN best-value ranking
What college costs
- $101,216 is the median total cost of attendance (four years, all-in, resident pricing) among the 500 covered four-years. — IPEDS 2023 via LE TEEN
- $1.42M is the largest out-of-state penalty among U.S. public four-years — the 30-year NPV a non-resident gives up versus a resident at the same school (University of Michigan-Ann Arbor). — LE TEEN out-of-state penalty ranking
- $376,191 is the median out-of-state penalty across the 445 public four-years where both residency legs stay NPV-positive. — LE TEEN out-of-state penalty ranking
The major matters more than the school
- +$1,125,922 is the median lifetime ROI of the best-paying major category (Engineering); the worst (Visual Arts and Music) sits at −$92,704 — the major-choice spread dwarfs most school-choice spreads. — FREOPP 2021 per-program data via LE TEEN
- 2 of 19 major categories have a negative median lifetime ROI — half the story college pricing never mentions. — LE TEEN worst-ROI majors ranking
- 67.9% of Visual Arts and Music graduates are projected to never break even on the degree — the highest never-break-even share of any category. — FREOPP via LE TEEN
- +$1,458,418 median lifetime ROI for Construction Management, the best of 115 CIP subfields; the lowest (Dance) is −$362,573. — FREOPP via LE TEEN
Cite these numbers
Cite as LE TEEN (2026), College ROI Data — le-teen.com, upstream sources
FREOPP / IPEDS / BEA. For a stable reference use the dataset DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21351602. The same figures are
queryable via the free JSON API and the
college-roi-mcp MCP server; full tables at
/data and the methodology
lists the limitations we know about.