Want to make money after you graduate from college? Forget Harvard. Go to Maine Maritime Academy instead. If that doesn’t work, think about the United States Merchant Marine Academy.
A new study from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce shows that in terms of return on investment 40 years after graduation, Maine Maritime Academy is number six in the top ten among 4,500 colleges studied, Harvard is number eight, and the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy is number ten.
For some perspective here, Harvard was founded in 1636 and has an endowment of $40.9 billion. Maine Maritime Academy, a public, four-year, coed school in Castine, Maine, was founded in 1941 and has an endowment of $18.1 million.
The study was conducted by Anthony Carnevale, a Georgetown University professor and director of the center. To help students and parents plan ahead, he tried to answer the question of whether college is worth it, and to put a dollar number on the return on investment for 10, 15, 20, 30 and 40 years after graduation. He took into account the cost of attending each school and graduates’ earnings, obtained from federal data bases.
The net value of a Maine Maritime Academy education 40 years out was $2,043,000; for Harvard, $1,967,000; for U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, $1,949,000.
Maine Maritime, of course, has a limited range of programs, compared with Harvard, and they’re focused on high-paying fields, such as engineering and science. Still, the Maine Maritime score is remarkable.
“If you know you want to go to sea and be an engineer, go to Maine Maritime Academy,” Carnevale told the Bangor Daily News. “You will take literature. You will learn a foreign language. It is a bona fide four-year institution. But you’re going to end up going out to sea, and you’ll make a lot of money.”
The Maine Maritime Academy’s website says the college is career focused, and that job placement is more than 90 percent within 90 days after graduation.
In case you’re wondering, the top ten colleges 40 years after graduation are:
1.Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Science
2.St. Louis College of Pharmacy
3.Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences
4.MIT
5.Stanford
6.Maine Maritime Academy
7.Babson
8.Harvard
9.Georgetown
10.U.S. Merchant Marine Academy.
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