Baruch College, CUNY
New York, NY · Selective $70,000 median earnings, 10y out
- Net price / yr
- $9,000
- Median debt
- $14,000
- Grad rate
- 72%
kvlak limn
What This College
U.S. Department of Education · College Scorecard Form CS·1 · July 4, 2026
Statement of Estimated Cost & Return
What This College
Actually Costs You
A college's sticker price is a work of fiction, and its brochure never prints the number that matters: what a typical student actually pays after aid, how much debt they carry off the stage, and whether the paycheck a decade later ever clears it. The federal College Scorecard tracks all three. This is a reading of where the arithmetic works, where it doesn't, and the quiet schools that beat their reputations.
Illustrative v1 snapshot Institutions and every pattern shown are real and documented; the exact dollar figures are a rounded curated approximation pending the live CSV drop-in. See Methodology.
The Value Map
Debt Carried vs. Earnings Ten Years OutEvery school is a point: how much federal debt the median borrower leaves with, read left to right, against what the typical student earns about ten years after they first enrolled, read bottom to top. Up and to the left is the sweet spot - a big paycheck for little borrowed. The oxblood line is what a typical high-school graduate earns; a four-year degree that lands below it did not, on the median, buy its way past skipping college. Every school here clears that line. Many programs elsewhere in the system do not - that story is further down.
Illustrative figures
Every school, in numbers
| Institution | Debt | Earn 10y | Net price | Grad |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology | $14,000 | $124,000 | $25,000 | 96% |
| Harvey Mudd College | $22,000 | $118,000 | $42,000 | 92% |
| Stanford University | $12,000 | $112,000 | $22,000 | 95% |
| California Institute of Technology | $16,000 | $112,000 | $25,000 | 93% |
| University of Pennsylvania | $18,000 | $103,000 | $27,000 | 96% |
| Georgetown University | $22,000 | $102,000 | $30,000 | 94% |
| Princeton University | $10,000 | $95,000 | $16,000 | 97% |
| Georgia Institute of Technology | $23,000 | $93,000 | $18,000 | 91% |
| University of California, Berkeley | $16,000 | $88,000 | $18,000 | 93% |
| University of Michigan, Ann Arbor | $21,000 | $82,000 | $20,000 | 93% |
| New York University | $24,000 | $78,000 | $38,000 | 87% |
| California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo | $18,000 | $78,000 | $18,000 | 83% |
| University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | $20,000 | $76,000 | $19,000 | 85% |
| University of Texas at Austin | $20,000 | $74,000 | $17,000 | 88% |
| Baruch College, CUNY | $14,000 | $70,000 | $9,000 | 72% |
| University of Florida | $17,000 | $68,000 | $12,000 | 90% |
| Stony Brook University, SUNY | $18,000 | $65,000 | $15,000 | 75% |
| Pennsylvania State University, University Park | $33,000 | $62,000 | $26,000 | 86% |
| Ohio State University, Columbus | $24,000 | $58,000 | $19,000 | 88% |
| California State University, Los Angeles | $13,000 | $58,000 | $8,000 | 55% |
| Arizona State University, Tempe | $22,000 | $56,000 | $14,000 | 66% |
The Real Price Isn't the Sticker
II. Net Price by Family IncomeColleges advertise a sticker price and then quietly charge most families something else. The bar runs from what a low-income family actually pays (income under $30,000, the filled dot) to what a high-income family pays (over $110,000, the open ring); the faint stub reaches out to the published sticker - the number almost nobody pays. At the wealthiest schools the sticker is nearly all fiction: a low-income student pays less at Princeton than at many state schools. At others, the floor barely moves. Illustrative figures
Princeton University Princeton, NJ
$3,000 → $46,000 sticker $79,000
Baruch College, CUNY New York, NY
$4,000 → $16,000 sticker $26,000
Stanford University Stanford, CA
$5,000 → $45,000 sticker $82,000
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA
$9,000 → $42,000 sticker $79,000
Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA
$9,000 → $24,000 sticker $30,000
Ohio State University, Columbus Columbus, OH
$11,000 → $26,000 sticker $30,000
New York University New York, NY
$28,000 → $58,000 sticker $84,000
low-income net · high-income net · published sticker
Where Debt Outruns Earnings
III. The Programs the Math FailsEvery four-year school on the Value Map clears the high-school-earnings line. Plenty of programs elsewhere in the system do not: their typical student, ten years on, earns less than someone who never enrolled - and still carries the loans. The failure is not spread evenly. It concentrates by sector. Rather than pillory named schools on approximate numbers, this is the shape of the problem: the share of each sector's programs whose typical graduate earns below the $32,000 baseline. Illustrative shares
Private for-profit 30%
Certificate mills and career-college chains. Heavily over-represented among programs whose typical student earns less than a high-school graduate.
Private nonprofit 10%
Wide spread: elite research universities at one end, small tuition-dependent colleges at the other.
Public 6%
State universities and community colleges. Low tuition keeps the downside shallow even when earnings are modest.
bar length = share of the sector's programs below the baseline · axis 0 to 40%
The lesson for a family isn't "avoid a whole sector" - it's that the Scorecard lets you check the specific program before you sign. A for-profit nursing program can be a fine bet; the chain selling a general certificate next door may not be. Look up the exact school and field on collegescorecard.ed.gov and read its earnings line before the debt is real.
Methodology
V. What's Real, What's IllustrativeThis is a hand-curated v1 snapshot of 21 institutions, not a live extract. The institutions are real, and the direction of every pattern shown is real and well documented - which kinds of schools sit where, why sticker price and net price diverge, why for-profit certificate programs cluster below the earnings line. The specific dollar figures are rounded, illustrative approximations of published College Scorecard patterns: close to the real cells, but not pulled from the file. Treat them as the shape of the truth, not the decimal. Every figure is meant to be replaced.
Source, and how the real data drops in
The underlying dataset is the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard, published as a bulk institution- and program-level CSV (~7,000 institutions, hundreds of fields each, refreshed roughly annually). This site is built so the real file drops straight in: src/lib/source.ts already maps the Scorecard column names (MD_EARN_WNE_P10, GRAD_DEBT_MDN, NPT4*, COSTT4_A) onto the fields these charts read. Download the institution CSV, drop it at data/raw/, run npm run data, and every number here becomes the government's - components unchanged.
What "earnings" actually measures (read this one)
The Scorecard's headline earnings figure is easy to misread. It is the median earnings of students who received federal financial aid (Title IV grants or loans), measured about ten years after they first enrolled - not ten years after they graduated. Crucially, it includes students who never finished. So it is closer to "what the typical aided student who walked in the door is earning a decade later" than "what a graduate earns." That makes it a fairer measure of a school's real bet - dropouts and their debt are part of the story - but it is not a starting-salary-for-grads number, and it says nothing about the student who paid cash and took no aid.
The high-school-grad baseline
The oxblood line is set at $32,000, standing in for the median earnings of a 25-to-34-year-old whose highest credential is a high-school diploma. The real figure moves with the year and the source (roughly the $30,000-$40,000 range); the round number here is deliberately illustrative. The Scorecard itself frames outcomes against exactly this comparison - a degree that leaves the median student earning below it did not, on the median, out-earn skipping college.
Net price, sticker, and debt
Sticker is the published annual cost of attendance. Net price is what remains after grant and scholarship aid - the average a family actually pays - and the by-income figures split that by the family income bands the Scorecard reports (under $30,000 through $110,000-plus). Median debt is the median federal loan balance at graduation; it excludes private loans, excludes what parents borrow through PLUS, and only counts students who took federal loans. Real debt burdens can therefore run higher than the figure shown.
The value metrics are editorial
"Premium over baseline," the "premium ÷ debt" multiple, and "return per dollar of net price" are constructions of this site, not official Scorecard fields. They are honest arithmetic on the underlying numbers, chosen to answer a family's real question - does the paycheck justify the price - but a different reasonable analyst would weight cost, debt, and completion differently. The sector shares in Where Debt Outruns Earnings are directional and illustrative: for-profit programs really are heavily over-represented among sub-baseline outcomes, but the exact percentages here are round stand-ins for the program-level counts in the field-of-study file.
What you're not seeing
Selection, mostly. A school's earnings reflect who chose to enroll as much as what the school did with them - a highly selective university starts with students who would have done well anywhere. The institution-level view also hides enormous variation by major: engineering and nursing outcomes sit far above the campus median, and the Scorecard's field-of-study file is where a real decision should end up. Graduate earnings, students without federal aid, and anyone still outside the workforce ten years on are all outside the frame.
Snapshot generated 2026-07-04. Source attribution: U.S. Department of Education, College Scorecard (collegescorecard.ed.gov/data). Figures on this page are an illustrative curated approximation pending the live CSV; see above.