Virginia Public Institutions Deliver on Value

As a higher education advocacy professional, each fall leaves me waxing nostalgic for college application season. Early in my senior year of high school, my mom picked me up from school and drove us to Starbucks to make a game plan. With a Pumpkin Spice Frappuccino in hand, we talked through the colleges and universities we visited over the last year, items I had left to collect for my applications, the FAFSA, and our budget for application fees. 

My mom, a career higher education administrator who got her start in admissions, knew exactly what needed to happen between September and May to get me to college in the fall. As many prospective students navigate the admissions process with little to no support, I’m lucky that my mom could walk through it in her sleep. 

Sitting in that coffee shop, espresso grinders whirring and light rock playing in the background, we didn’t have much information about what the actual cost of my education would be. We had the sticker price available on college websites, the US News & World Report rankings (which prioritize prestige), and guesses about what I might earn after graduation if I stuck with the major I had decided on (spoiler: I didn’t). To top it off, I was only applying to one Virginia public school—the rest were small, out-of-state private liberal arts colleges. We had no way to gauge the impact of the debt I was taking on against potential earnings. 

Today, return on investment and college value are hot topics in higher ed policy, and boy, would I have made some different decisions if I had access to tools like my team’s Price-to-Earnings Premium (PEP). The Price-to-Earnings Premium does exactly what I needed: it measures the average net price students pay to attend an institution against their typical income 10 years after enrolling, telling us how much time it takes an average student to recoup their costs. 

In my home state of Virginia, college typically pays off in just under nine years. But it varies by school—at one college, it takes as little as two years to see a return on tuition, while students at another will never see a return in their lifetime. But there’s good news: 83% of institutions in Virginia allow the average student to recoup their costs within 10 years, including all our public colleges. 

For low-income students, 65% of Virginia colleges and universities do the same, with seven schools paying for themselves in less than two years, and two schools (Washington and Lee University and William & Mary) doing so in less than six months. 

In the spring of my senior year, a month before I needed to share my decision with the schools to which I had been admitted, I realized that I would essentially be taking out a mortgage for a small home to attend one of the out-of-state colleges I had dreamed about.

Instead, I chose to enroll in my local community college and would eventually transfer to George Mason University, which helps many students recoup their investment in just over a year according to Third Way’s PEP. Six years later, I’m still paying off my student loans, but as it turns out, my decision to attend college in Virginia is and will continue to pay dividends.