美国最能帮学生赚钱的10所大学

For decades, the best-known college rankings have tried to encompass everything from alumni giving and "academic reputation" to dorm amenities. But a few years ago, SmartMoney stripped all that away in favor of a simpler benchmark. With help from PayScale, a Seattle-based compensation-data company that maintains salary profiles of 29 million workers, we collected median pay figures for two pools of each school's alums: recent grads (who've been out of school for an average of two years) and midcareer types (an average of 15 years out). For each class, we divided the median alumnus salary by tuition and fees, averaged the results and, finally, converted that result to a percentage figure. The outcome: a measure of return on (tuition) investment that we've dubbed the Payback Score. For example, a hypothetical grad who spent $100,000 to attend college and now earns $150,000 a year would score 150. The higher the score, obviously, the better.

Among recent grads, public alumni earn annual salaries equal to 52 percent of their four years of tuition and fees; private-school kids bring in just 32 percent on average. For out-of-state students, full-fare tuition at the schools in our survey is 35 percent lower than at private colleges, but in many cases, the career options are just as strong.