Graduating high school seniors only have a few hours left to make one of the largest financial decisions of their lives: where to get their bachelor's degree.
College graduates have steadily been making more and more money than their counterparts without bachelor's degrees. At the same time, college has gotten more expensive and drowned many in student debt. To get the best bang for your buck, students need to consider how much they'll earn in the future from investing thousands of dollars in tuition, room, and board over the next four years. That makes May 1, when most students have to decide which institution they will attend, a financial rite of passage.
Knowing the return on that degree can make this decision a little easier. Thankfully, Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce built a database ranking 4,500 colleges on their return on investment using the average net price and earnings from the US Department of Education's College Scorecard. We ranked the top 31 colleges according to how much that investment will be worth in 40 years in today's dollars.
Here are the top 31 colleges with the best return on investment.