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SmartMoney: Occidental Is A Top Value
Occidental College is one of the country’s top liberal arts colleges as measured by the return on an investment in higher education, according to SmartMoney’s new January issue.
Occidental is ranked No. 7 in the magazine’s college “payback” rankings, which focuses on the relationship between tuition costs and graduates’ earning power.
With a median alumni salary of $51,900 three years after graduation and $105,000 after 15 years, Occidental had an average “payback” of 114 percent, according to SmartMoney. That return on investment is almost identical to Amherst, Bucknell and Holy Cross, and higher than such Ivy League schools as Columbia and Brown.
The new rankings are based on salary data compiled by Seattle-based Payscale.com, which claims to own the world’s largest online database of employee salary data. In a separate report released in July, Payscale.com also ranked Occidental No. 7 among liberal arts colleges for the earnings potential of its graduates.
Occidental is regularly identified as one of the country’s leading liberal arts colleges. Earlier this year, it was named a “Best Value” school by U.S. News & World Report and Kiplinger's Personal Finance for its combination of academic quality and affordability. New this year is a U.S. News survey of high school counselors, in which Occidental was ranked among the nation's top 25 liberal arts colleges.
Occidental also was recognized by The Yale Daily News' Insider's Guide to the Colleges as one of a handful of colleges and universities with the “strongest undergraduate focus” -- an Editor's Choice Top 10 group that includes Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Swarthmore, Amherst, and Williams.