Communicating Return on College Investment to High School Students and Families

Under a $1 million ED Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant, Vantage Point developed a user-contextualized, return-on-investment (ROI) modeling tool called Return on College (ROC) that students and families can freely use to make meaning of the lifetime costs and opportunity tradeoffs associated with different degree programs offered by post-secondary institutions. Two versions of ROC, sharing the same core backend data and ROI models, are being fully developed. ROC for High School Advisors enables students to explore and compare colleges based on desired geographic location and occupational goals, guiding students and families as they make informed decisions about colleges, programs of study, and debt using a personalized career exploration and college discovery application that makes loan repayment, disposable income, graduation risk, and ROI the focal points of these decisions. It is being piloted at 35 public high schools with the Pennsylvania College Advising Corps (PCAC). ROC for Colleges enables prospective students to have greater transparency about relevant careers, salaries, price, and debt expected of each degree offered by the school. The research-backed ROI calculations are based on econometric functions that discount earning cash-flows under current and future state career and education assumptions and subtract college net price cost information using data from EMSI, Census Bureau, and the departments of Education and Labor.