"Return on Investment" in College Education
The Measured and the Unmeasurable
(The iconic baby carriage rolling down the Odessa Steps in Battleship Potemkin)
The Season of College Decisions
We’re nearing the time of year when high school seniors who have applied to college find out where they’ve been accepted. Among the children of the middle and upper classes (whether defined by wealth or education) it is a time of high anxiety. Indeed, many parents of potential students, and some of the potential students themselves, have been thinking about their choice of college for years. When they search for expert guidance, an increasingly common refrain is to look at “return on investment” – ROI for short.
The concept comes from the world of business, where it means the expected monetary return on a given monetary investment over some specified period of time. In business, the concept makes sense – as long as one keeps in mind that ROI is at best a prediction, more likely a hope, given the inherent uncertainty of any major expenditure in a rapidly changing technological world.
As applied to higher education, ROI is supposed to evaluate the cost of a college education (tuition and living expenses) against the expected gains in earnings of a graduate of a particular college, and in more sophisticated terms, of a particular major in that college.
There are elaborate calculations involved in determining the cost of a bachelor’s degree education at any given college. That’s because the sticker price of tuition is rarely what families pay. It depends on family income, on how badly the college wants to attract a particular student, and on the resources available to the college to subsidize tuition from its endowment. Nevertheless, there are websites or advisors who will do that calculation for you. There are also websites that list – more or less reliably-- the earnings of graduates in particular majors over a given period of years after graduation.[i]
Books such as Jeffrey Selingo’s Dream School: Finding the College That’s Right for You (2025) devote a great deal of attention to a college’s “earnings to net price ratio.”
Now, as the cost of college education has risen relative to other expenses, it is natural and desirable for prospective students and their parents to pay attention to such matters, as they consider where to enroll and the opportunity costs involved. College presidents and administrators have understandably become more concerned with assuring the parents of potential students that their investment is worthwhile.
But what are parents and their college-age children investing in, and what sort of “return” should they be considering? I’ll have more to say about the unmeasurable benefits of the right sort of undergraduate education in future postings. But for now, an illustrative trip down memory lane.
A Course That Paid Unexpected Dividends
Here is my experience of one of the college courses that provided me with the greatest “returns.” It was a course in the history of film, which I took as an undergraduate when I was a visiting junior at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. (Most of the courses I took were taught in Hebrew, but this one was taught in English, I think by a visiting professor whose name I cannot recall.) The readings included Kevin Brownlow’s history of the silent film industry, The Parades Gone By…. The course included lectures on the history of the film industry, but much of it involved watching the films themselves. Films such as Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), and Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939). In each case, we learned about the history of the film’s production and release, and the techniques involved in particularly important scenes. I took away from the course an interest in and appreciation of film as an art form, as well as a sense of the development of the movies as an industry. I came to see film not just as popular entertainment, but as an object of fascination -- and as something that could be studied.
When I was growing up in a small city in southern Ontario in the 1960s and early 1970s, it was simply impossible to see any of these films: the only “classic” film one could see on television was “The Wizard of Oz” – and that only once a year. Thus, I arrived at college with no real appreciation of film beyond “the movies” playing at the local cinema. The opportunity to see more historical, artistic, and sophisticated films came only with college. Greater opportunities opened up when I attended graduate school in New York City, where in the late 1970s one could see Hitchcock films, for example, at specialized theaters like the Thalia. The coming of cable television, DVDs, and then streaming channels such as the Criterion Channel opened up ever greater opportunities to see a wide range of historical, foreign and “art” films. Not only that, but with the coming of DVDs and Blu-ray discs, one could watch films with ever greater visual clarity, along with expert commentaries and interviews with the directors and actors.
When my children were in the household and my professional demands were heavy, I had limited time to watch such films. Now that I’m officially retired from my professorial duties, I have more discretionary time. And few things give me more pleasure than to sit back, watch a great (or even not so great but distinctive) film by say Bergman, Carol Reed, Fellini, Kurosawa, or Scorsese, and if, as so often, it piques my interest, to investigate it further. In short, five decades after taking that film course, it continues to provide me with “returns” in terms of life’s pleasures.
The effect did not stop with me. Some of my children picked up on my interest in film, improved upon it in terms of their own knowledge, and now take great pleasure in watching great films with their children. So the film course I took has actually paid dividends across generations.
The Same Pattern in Art and Music
I could write a similar account of the ways in which an art history course that I took as an undergraduate (at Brandeis University) opened my eyes to the history of art, gave me a sense of the historical context of particular works of art and what to look for in a painting or a sculpture. That too has continued to pay dividends, in terms of the pleasure I get from being able to appreciate more fully the works I see in art museums. (Parenthetically, one of the greatest books that I regularly taught in a graduate course on approaches to the study of history was Leo Steinberg’s The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion [1983], a work of remarkable erudition that combines the history of theology with the history of art.)
Or the way in which an introductory college course on “what to listen for in music” taught me basic but powerful concepts – such as themes and variations in classical music and in jazz – ideas that continue to shape my appreciation of both genres.
Did It Increase My Income?
Did the college courses I’ve mentioned about film, art, and music affect my monetary income? Not in the least. But they’ve enriched my life for almost half a century.
Of course, it is possible to learn about each of these subjects after college, and outside of any academic framework. Indeed, there are now a profusion of ways to learn about them – and about almost anything else. But whether one actually makes use of these opportunities depends in great part on motivation. And college is potentially a prime period in which to stimulate such interest and provide such motivation.
What the Metrics Miss
No such non-pecuniary utilities are included in the standard metrics of “return on investment.”
But they are no less real for being unmeasurable in monetary terms.
And turning for a moment to monetary returns on college education – the truth is that with the coming of Artificial Intelligence and its tendency to erode the market value of technical skills and other forms of professional knowledge, the monetary returns to college education in technical subjects are ever less predictable. The investment is knowable, the returns ever less so. So, if you’re a prospective college student or the parents of a prospective student thinking about a college education, keep the non-monetary, unmeasured and unmeasurable potential returns of “useless” courses in mind.
[i] https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/roi2025/