The data used on this site is publicly available via the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard. For our rankings, we've filtered public and private (for-profit and nonprofit) schools with at least 1,000 students that predominantly award bachelor or graduate degrees.
The values for the following metrics are presented exactly as the latest available data points in the public database:
The break-even metric is an estimation of the time it will take for the graduate's salary to add up to the total cost of attending the school, assuming it takes them 4 years to graduate and they start working immediately.
The break-even calculation doesn't consider other common costs you'll have post-graduation (e.g. living expenses or loan interest payments), so it should be considered an extremely optimistic scenario — it will likely take considerably longer for people to turn a profit on the cost of college.