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https://github.com/thomasthinks/college-roi-data

College ROI, decoded — 30-year NPV of U.S. colleges and majors. FREOPP + IPEDS + BEA derived, CC BY 4.0, maintained by le-teen.com
https://github.com/thomasthinks/college-roi-data

college-roi csv dataset economics education higher-education ipeds net-present-value open-data student-debt

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College ROI, decoded — 30-year NPV of U.S. colleges and majors. FREOPP + IPEDS + BEA derived, CC BY 4.0, maintained by le-teen.com

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# College ROI Data — what U.S. colleges and majors actually pay back



[![DOI](https://img.shields.io/badge/DOI-10.5281%2Fzenodo.21351603-1682D4?style=flat-square)](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21351603)

[![License: CC BY 4.0](https://img.shields.io/badge/License-CC%20BY%204.0-b31b1b?style=flat-square)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

[![Website](https://img.shields.io/badge/site-le--teen.com-111?style=flat-square)](https://le-teen.com)

[![Methodology](https://img.shields.io/badge/methodology-public-111?style=flat-square)](https://le-teen.com/methodology)



Clean, citable tables on the **lifetime financial return of U.S. colleges and majors** —

30-year net present value by school and state, ROI by major category, the out-of-state

premium, and how exposed each major's career paths are to today's AI. Maintained by

**[LE TEEN](https://le-teen.com)**, a college-ROI data project. Every number traces to a

public source; nothing is scraped, modeled behind closed doors, or vibes.



The headline the data mints: **picking a major swings mean lifetime ROI by ~$1.24M**

(Engineering **+$1,132,553** vs Philosophy & Religious Studies **−$111,915**, cohort-weighted

mean lifetime ROI, FREOPP 2021) — and in several popular major categories the **majority of

graduates never break even**. Weeks get spent on campus tours; the number that decides the

next 30 years gets minutes. These tables exist so it can get cited instead.



> **CC BY 4.0** — quote a figure, build on it, cite the source. Free for journalism,

> research, and answer engines.



## What's inside



| File | Rows | What it is |

|---|---:|---|

| `roi-by-major-category.csv` | 19 | Cohort-weighted lifetime ROI per major category: mean/median, p25/p75 spread, % of graduates who never break even, median breakeven age, completion-adjusted + dropout ROI |

| `best-value-colleges-by-state.csv` | 607 | Top institutions per U.S. state by 30-year NPV for a resident student |

| `out-of-state-penalty.csv` | 455 | The 30-year NPV cost of attending each public flagship/university as a non-resident vs resident, with both tuition rows |

| `ai-exposure-by-major.csv` | 18 | LE TEEN-derived AI applicability score per major category (occupation-weighted; **exposure, not displacement**) |

| `institutions.csv` | 3,392 | IPEDS 2023-24 join table: UnitID, name, location, control, level, tuition (in/out-of-state), room & board, median earnings where published |



## Quickstart



```python

import pandas as pd

majors = pd.read_csv("roi-by-major-category.csv")

majors.nlargest(5, "mean_lifetime_roi_usd")[["major_category", "mean_lifetime_roi_usd", "pct_never_breakeven"]]

```



Interactive versions of every table live at

[le-teen.com/rankings](https://le-teen.com/rankings) and the per-major pages at

[le-teen.com/majors](https://le-teen.com/majors); the calculator that joins them is

[le-teen.com/worth-it](https://le-teen.com/worth-it).



## Sources & method



Full write-up: **[le-teen.com/methodology](https://le-teen.com/methodology)**.



| Source | Used for | License |

|---|---|---|

| [FREOPP](https://freopp.org/projects/higher-education/) higher-ed ROI (2021 publication, ~30,000 bachelor's programs; earnings from College Scorecard cohorts 2015–17, 2022 dollars, 3% real discount rate) | Program-level lifetime ROI, aggregated by LE TEEN to major categories and institutions | CC BY 4.0 |

| [NCES IPEDS](https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/) 2023-24 Final | Institution identity, tuition & fees, room & board | U.S. public domain |

| [BEA Regional Price Parities](https://www.bea.gov/data/prices-inflation/regional-price-parities-state-and-metro-area) (2023) | Cost-of-living adjustment in NPV calculations | U.S. public domain |

| Microsoft Research ["Working with AI"](https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07935) (2025), [Anthropic Economic Index](https://huggingface.co/datasets/Anthropic/EconomicIndex) (2025-09-15), Census ACS 2022 PUMS + NCES/Census crosswalks | AI-exposure score per major | CC BY 4.0 / CC BY / public domain |



**Modification notice (CC BY 4.0 §3):** the per-major ROI aggregates, per-institution

30-year NPV figures, out-of-state deltas, and AI-exposure scores are **LE TEEN-derived**

from the sources above (cohort weighting, CIP→SOC crosswalks, NPV joins) — they are not

original FREOPP, Microsoft, Anthropic, or federal figures. The AI metric measures how much

of a field's work current AI is *observed reaching for* — Microsoft Research explicitly

disclaims a job-loss reading, and so do we.



**Vintage disclosure:** ROI earnings derive from FREOPP's 2021 publication (the newest with

a public download); costs are IPEDS 2023-24 Final; deflators BEA 2023. Earnings outcomes

are intrinsically lagged — cohorts must be 5–8 years post-graduation to observe. Where a

figure matters, say the vintage.



## Mirrors



The canonical, versioned record is **Zenodo — DOI [10.5281/zenodo.21351603](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21351603)** (the concept DOI [10.5281/zenodo.21351602](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21351602) always resolves to the latest version). The same tables are mirrored for discovery and convenience:



| Surface | Link |

|---|---|

| GitHub (this repo) |  |

| Hugging Face |  |

| Kaggle |  |

| figshare |  |

| OpenML |  ·  |

| OSF |  |



Cite the Zenodo DOI (see [Cite](#cite)). A Harvard Dataverse record is pending curator review and will be added here when it publishes.



## Programmatic access



Don't want CSVs? The same numbers are queryable live:



- **JSON API** — free, keyless, CORS-open static JSON at [le-teen.com/api](https://le-teen.com/api): all majors/subfields, the 500 positive-NPV-envelope colleges, and the standing rankings, with an [OpenAPI 3.1 spec](https://le-teen.com/api/v1/openapi.json). Root: `https://le-teen.com/api/v1/index.json`.

- **MCP server** — the data as native tools for AI agents (Model Context Protocol, stdio): `npx -y college-roi-mcp` ([npm](https://www.npmjs.com/package/college-roi-mcp) · [source](https://github.com/thomasthinks/college-roi-mcp), MIT). On the [official MCP registry](https://registry.modelcontextprotocol.io/v0/servers?search=college-roi) as `com.le-teen/college-roi-mcp` and on [Smithery](https://smithery.ai/servers/tj-r4v3/college-roi-mcp).



Note the scope difference: this dataset covers all 3,392 institutions; the API/MCP college endpoints expose the 500 that clear LE TEEN's positive-NPV editorial envelope (absence there is a coverage statement, not a verdict).



## Cite



> LE TEEN (2026). *College ROI Data: 30-year net present value of U.S. colleges and majors.*

> Derived from FREOPP (2021), NCES IPEDS (2023-24), BEA RPP (2023). https://le-teen.com/methodology



A `CITATION.cff` ships in this repository; DOI: [10.5281/zenodo.21351603](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21351603) (concept DOI for all versions: [10.5281/zenodo.21351602](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21351602)).



## Refresh cadence



Tracks the LE TEEN site data: IPEDS/BEA annually, FREOPP when a new public download

exists, AI-exposure inputs ~60 days. Each refresh is a tagged release.



*Maintained by [LE TEEN](https://le-teen.com) · press: press@le-teen.com*