Sometimes, they do.
A new analysis of over 240,000 student-loan-refinancing applications filed through bank alternative SoFi between January 2014 and September 2015 shows that there are schools where students' earnings quickly outpace their debt.
Specific to MBA programs, the lender examined data from over 50,000 students, including only those where at least 20 students had applied for refinancing through their site.
The resulting analysis highlighted a refinancing applicant's average salary a few years out of school, and the average student-loan balance remaining. You can see the leaders ranked by different criteria on SoFi's website.
"I think people can make their own conclusions from the data," SoFi cofounder Dan Macklin tells Business Insider. "We think transparency is the main objective. For prospective students going in, schools show them how much it's going to cost, but I think they do a less good job as an industry showing how much they're likely to earn."
This data, he suggests, provides a little more transparency into the financial implications of graduate school. He also points out that the top 10 schools where graduates are outearning their debt by a wide margin aren't necessarily "the big name schools everyone knows and loves, with the exception of Stanford."
Below, find the 20 MBA programs where students just a few years out of school are, on average, earning more than twice their remaining student debt.