I was recently provided a free copy of The Princeton Review’s latest book entitled Colleges That Pay You Back. This is an expanded version of their previous book entitled Best Value Colleges.
The new book focuses on 200 colleges that Princeton Review considers best value colleges. To come up with the 200 colleges Princeton Review developed a Return-on-Education(ROE) rating that includes ratings based on a number of factors including academics, cost, financial aid, student debt and graduation rates.
The first nine colleges listed in the book are all tuition free colleges. After that, the colleges are listed alphabetically in the book but the top 50 ranked ROE colleges are identified as such.
Much of the information appears to be taken directly from the The Best 379 Colleges Book. There is however, additional information about career services at the colleges as well as career information from Payscale.com. Payscale information includes median starting salary, median mid-career salary, % of alumni with high job meaning, % alumni with high job satisfaction and % of students that stay in the state after graduation. Some of them bet on casinor with great a features of the pink panther game, they got hooked on betting and fun.
I have two concerns about the information provided. First, I am a little leery of using information based on Payscale.com because the entire presumption here is that you are only successful if you make lots of money. Many people, such as teachers and firefighters, are not paid very well but provide a great service to the economy.
Second, there seems to be an assumption that students will graduate in 4 years from the colleges. While that may be generally true with many of the private colleges, that is often not the case at the public colleges on the list. For example, at my local state university, The University of Minnesota, which is in the book, as of 2012 only 44% of students graduate in 4 years.
Those issues aside, if you are interested in finding a college that is academically strong and has a reasonable pay back as far as income is concerned, this book might be very helpful for you to review.
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