GAME OF LOANS
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Americans are accruing more student loan debt than ever before. According to the Pew Research Center, Americans "owed about $1.5 trillion in student loans at the end of March 2019, more than two times what they owed a decade earlier."

With college graduates continuing to owe thousands of dollars in student loans for years after attending school, it's becoming more and more important for prospective students to know how to get the best bang for their buck out of their college education in relation to the job market. Redditor -Newfangled- crunched the numbers and created an interactive chart of the colleges with the best return on investment using data from PayScale.com's 2018 College ROI Report on the Best Value Colleges โ€” specifically median earnings minus the cost for college over the following 20 years. See the full interactive infographic here.

 

Graduates from public colleges make largely the same earnings as many private colleges for significantly lower costs. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many private colleges have negative returns.

The absolute best bang for you buck comes from the military academies โ€” for the grand old price of 0 dollars (and, it's worth noting, several years of your life in service), the Coast Guard, Naval, Air Force and Military academies all offer high ROIs, with the Military Academy one of only three institutions to break the $1 million ROI mark (along with the SUNY Maritime College and MIT). 

On the other end of the spectrum, you might want to avoid Mississippi Valley State University (-$174,800 20-year ROI) and the Maine College of Art (-$163,600)

Click here to see the full interactive chart and here for a full ranking. 

[Tableau via Reddit]

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