Top-20 Ranking Showcases Investment Return

Tuesday, April 18, 2017
ROI

Career Advantages: Alumni have earned a median salary of $67,500 within the first five years of their careers, according to PayScale.com’s 2016-17 Salary Survey. It’s likely that most of those jobs came from one of the three career fairs hosted each school year by the Office of Career Services, resulting in three-fourths of students being placed in jobs before their graduation day.

Rose-Hulman is among the top 20 U.S. colleges and universities in the nation in return on investment (ROI), and leads all Indiana institutions, according to salary information collected by the national PayScale Inc. data collection company. The statistics are based on an examination of data from millions of graduates across all industries.

A 20-year net ROI of $738,000 put Rose-Hulman 20th among 1,833 colleges in PayScale.com’s 2017 College Return on Investment Report. That return puts the institute higher than Harvard University (26th, $700,000), Carnegie Mellon University (29th, $678,000), Dartmouth College (37th, $650,000), Duke University (43rd, $633,000), University of Notre Dame (80th, $546,000) and Purdue University (83rd, $544,000).

Earlier, PayScale.com’s 2016-17 Salary Survey ranked Rose-Hulman 10th for alumni having a median salary of $67,500 within the first five years of their careers. Rose-Hulman’s Class of 2016 had an average accepted salary of $68,929, with a high offer of $124,800, according to the Office of Career Services’ 2015-16 Placement Report.

As for the Class of 2017, Director of Career Services and Employer Relations Kevin Hewerdine reports that 77 percent of this year’s graduating seniors have already accepted post-graduate employment, expect to attend graduate school or will be commissioned as military officers after completing Army and Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps programs. He says that more than 600 companies conducted on-campus interviews or attended one or more of the three career fairs organized during the 2016-17 school year.