This is a damned good chart. Click on the link, you get a bigger picture, plus you can search for the dot that represents a given college. http://priceonomics.com/is-college-worth-it/ P.S. The yellow dot on the bottom left is College of the Ozarks.
I know mine isn't going to pay off. I am fine with it. Sure having a lot of disposable income would be nice, but it wasn't really ever in the cards.
I wonder how different this chart would be from one that mapped the family incomes of the students as they started at these schools.
Compared to which axis of the graph? Obviously there'd be a big link between school cost and family income. But for the payoff of college, the relationship might be less clear. Note that colleges like UMass-Lowell and South Dakota School of Mines seem to do very well in long term wage premium. And Sarah Lawrence and Reed are down near towards the bottom in that category - roughly comparable to places like Arkansas State and Austin Peay.
Oh, definitely. It might very well be less clear, but I'd be surprised if birth family income was not at least a decent predictor of the ultimate income of the progeny. It's just a guess, of course. But if true, it might provide a basis for questioning the relationship between school and earning, since the primary driver for both might be class.