Another Return-On-Investment Boost

If one thing has become clear in the last decade, it is that not all college degrees are created equal. Rather than simply attending any college and getting any degree, young people should seriously consider the risks and rewards of their college path before starting. In an effort to get more data into the hands of young students, parents, and lawmakers, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges Senior College and University Commission (WSCUC) has expanded its online dashboard to include details about the financial outcomes of degree attainment at institutions accredited by the organization. The hope is that this move will help students get clear insight about the potential return on investment at schools they are considering attending (and to which they may thereby give considerable amounts of tuition money).

Potential students have an important new tool at their disposal when making decisions about postsecondary study. The Key Indicators Dashboard (KID) on the WSCUC website includes information on student debt, earnings and other measures that allow potential customers to gauge institutional performance all the way down to the program level. The most interesting facet of the KID may be the new Price-to-Earnings Premium metric (PEP), which tracks how long it takes graduates from various programs and institutions to recover their tuition costs. According to coverage at Inside Higher Ed, “WSCUC officials said the PEP metric will help universities, students and lawmakers better understand how specific programs compare within institutions and to national benchmarks.”

Efforts of the kind described here can only help students and parents more fully understand the decisions they are making. Take, for example, Azusa Pacific University, accredited by WSCUC since 1963. According to the new PEP metric, nursing graduates recoup their tuition costs in less than a year, while history majors require more than eight years to do so. Whereas international business majors require 1.9 years to achieve the mark in question, majors in fine and studio arts require 4.2. Though individual students will obviously have divergent experiences, these data reveal what the median graduate can expect. Thus, potential students have an important new tool at their disposal when making decisions about postsecondary study.

A similar initiative exists on the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity’s (FREOPP) website. FREOPP’s dashboard includes many more schools but does not have the same level of detail as WSCUC’s. For instance, it includes earnings only after one year and 10 years and doesn’t include tuition data, specifically. Nevertheless, both sites are excellent tools and will facilitate a turn toward financial realism among college shoppers.

The new WSCUC dashboard component is timely. President Trump recently signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which has some provisions that tie federal student loans to students’ earnings and hold colleges accountable. If colleges do not provide a good service to students in the form of a great education, they will not be able to attract more students (or federal money) to continue their programs.

Efforts of the kind described here can only help students and parents more fully understand the decisions they are making with their time, effort, and money. This should be celebrated. It is good to see that the old narrative that all college is worthwhile is giving way to a much more reasoned take: College is worth it only if the particular course of study one chooses improves one’s knowledge and employability.

Grace Hall is a communications assistant at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. She works and lives in Georgia.