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Discover realistic colleges that are a sound investment in your future. We help you find the best colleges for your personalized needs based on their track record of increasing the earnings of their graduates, flexibility of degrees fields of study, distance from home, your strength of application (do you have strong enough grades and profile to get into each school?), and your level of family income.

Salary Boost (net) methodology

Relative to high school graduates who go straight into the workforce, the Salary Boost factors in the higher expected working-age (22-65) salary expectations and earnings growth rate, while deducting for 4 years of lost income and 10 years of typical student loan payoffs given the cost to attend this specific university. This stream is then discounted at a rate of 5% over time to get the NPV (net present value), and finally divided by the working years to get to your expected net income boost from attending this university.

Your Total Score methodology

Schools are scored on a combination of fixed inputs (student-faculty ratio, student quality) and calculated values using user-specified input weights (Net Salary Boost, Flexibility). First, all schools are scored on their student-faculty ratios and peer quality (proxied via acceptance rate). Next, user-specified family income levels provides the necessary input to calculate a personalized investment analysis of the relative Net Present Value of attending this specific school at your net cost (given your family income) over a user's working life. Changing slider positions weights the relative score of Education Goals changes the scored importance of the number of fields of study available at a given institution, higher numbers of fields translating to more flexibility (e.g. keep options option). Finally, distance from home, application strength, and in-state only controls filter out inapplicable options but do not directly impact the scoring.

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Data source: collegescorecard.ed.gov