2026-10-14T05:34:13Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/32988698 2026-09-24T20:11:41Z category_25960 category_26143 item_type_3 month_year_09_2026

College ROI Dataset — lifetime return on investment of U.S. colleges and majors LE TEEN (24395294) Economics of education Higher education college ROI higher education tuition student debt IPEDS net present value Mirror of the canonical dataset: <a href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21351603">https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21351603</a> (concept DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21351602).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.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.Five tables (~29,700 FREOPP program-level ROI records aggregated; 3,392 colleges):<ul><li>roi-by-major-category.csv (19 rows) — cohort-weighted lifetime ROI per major category: mean/median, p25/p75 spread, % of graduates who never break even, median breakeven age, completion-adjusted and dropout ROI</li><li>best-value-colleges-by-state.csv (607 rows) — top institutions per U.S. state by 30-year NPV for a resident student</li><li>out-of-state-penalty.csv (455 rows) — the 30-year NPV cost of attending each public flagship/university as a non-resident vs resident</li><li>ai-exposure-by-major.csv (18 rows) — LE TEEN-derived AI applicability score per major category (occupation-weighted; exposure, not displacement)</li><li>institutions.csv (3,392 rows) — IPEDS 2023-24 join table: UnitID, name, location, control, level, tuition (in/out-of-state), room & board, median earnings where published</li></ul>Sources & method (full write-up: https://le-teen.com/methodology): FREOPP higher-ed ROI (2021 publication, ~30,000 bachelor's programs; earnings from College Scorecard cohorts 2015–17, 2022 dollars, 3% real discount rate; CC BY 4.0); NCES IPEDS 2023-24 Final (institution identity, tuition & fees, room & board; U.S. public domain); BEA Regional Price Parities 2023 (cost-of-living adjustment in NPV calculations; U.S. public domain); Microsoft Research "Working with AI" (2025), Anthropic Economic Index (2025-09-15), Census ACS 2022 PUMS + NCES/Census crosswalks (AI-exposure score per major).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 exposure, not displacement.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.Canonical repository: https://github.com/thomasthinks/college-roi-data · Interactive tables: https://le-teen.com/rankingsFull mirror set: Zenodo (hub, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21351602) · GitHub · Hugging Face · Kaggle · OSF · figshare · OpenML. Also a free keyless JSON API at <a href="https://le-teen.com/api">le-teen.com/api</a> (640 endpoints) and an MCP server for LLM tooling (<code>college-roi-mcp</code> on npm).Changes in v2 (2026-08-13) — data correction. In <code>roi-by-major-category.csv</code>, the column <code>pct_never_breakeven</code> was carrying the share of graduates whose 30-year lifetime ROI is below zero, rather than the share FREOPP flags with its 999 “never breaks even” sentinel. Five of nineteen rows are corrected: Agriculture and Natural Resources 15.8→15.5, Communications and Journalism 16.5→16.4, Mathematics and Statistics 3.2→2.9, Computer and Information Sciences 2.5→2.3, Economics 2.1→1.9. The remaining fourteen are identical under either definition. A new column <code>pct_negative_lifetime_roi</code> now carries the below-zero share, so both figures are available and no existing column was renamed or removed. The two are not interchangeable: never-breaks-even is a strict subset of below-zero-ROI, and the graduates in the gap do break even, in their late fifties, past the 30-year window. No other table is affected.Changes in v4 (2026-09-24) — four columns added to <code>out-of-state-penalty.csv</code>, no value changed. The file still holds all 455 public universities, and its first eight columns are byte-identical to v3 on every row. Ten of the 455 are graduate/professional or health-science campuses that do not admit first-time freshmen; LE TEEN leaves them out of the named rankings it publishes, and until now nothing in this file said so, which put University of Maryland, Baltimore at #7 in the out-of-state ranking with no label. Four columns are appended: <code>unitid</code> (the IPEDS join key to <code>institutions.csv</code>), <code>admits_freshmen</code>, <code>excluded_from_named_rankings_reason</code> (empty or <code>no-freshman-admission</code>) and <code>rank_freshman_admitting</code>, the 1..445 rank le-teen.com publishes. <code>rank</code> still runs 1..455 over every row of this file. The exclusion is editorial, not a data correction: the ten rows stay, with their values unchanged. This matches Zenodo version 1.1.0. No other table is affected. 2026-09-24T20:11:41Z Dataset Dataset 10.6084/m9.figshare.32988698.v4 https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/College_ROI_Dataset_lifetime_return_on_investment_of_U_S_colleges_and_majors/32988698 CC BY 4.0