How Long Until College Pays Off?

Time to ROI

The years of extra earnings it takes to cover what students paid. Two years of net price, divided by how much more students earn each year than a high school graduate who never went to college. Golden Returns compares against the California median; Rooted Returns compares against the median for the college's own county.

Students

Everyone who enrolled at the college with federal aid, whether they finished, transferred, or left after a few classes. Their earnings are measured ten years after they enrolled, counting only those who are working and not still in school. Source: College Scorecard.

California High School Graduate Earnings

a year. The median earnings of Californians aged 25 to 34 with a high school diploma or equivalent, no college, who worked in the past five years. From Census American Community Survey responses for 2019 through 2023, with each year's answers converted to 2023 dollars by the Census. Every college is measured against this one number.

County High School Graduate Earnings

The same figure, calculated from the responses of the college's own county, in 2023 dollars. Three counties are too small for the Census data to report, so the statewide number stands in for them. Rooted Returns converts this figure, and the students' earnings, to 2024 dollars so that they sit in the same year as the costs (see Methodology, "Dollar years").

Earnings Gain

What the college's students earn, minus what a high school graduate earns. This is the return the report counts. The report calls it the earnings premium.

Net Price

One year's full published cost of attendance, including the college's own living-cost budget, minus grant aid. It is averaged over full-time, first-time students with federal aid. The report counts two years of net price for every public college.

Published Living Budget

The room-and-board figure a college publishes, as part of its cost of attendance, for a student living off campus and not with family. Most California community colleges adopt the California Student Aid Commission's statewide standard budget as-is, which is why the same figure appears at colleges hundreds of miles apart. The budget is meant to cover rent, utilities and food for the academic year. This page spreads it over nine months to compare it with a month's rent.

Median Rent

The Census Bureau's median gross rent for the college's city: half of renting households pay more, half pay less. Gross rent is rent plus utilities. It covers every rental in the city, of every size, so it describes the local market, not student housing specifically. From American Community Survey responses for 2020 through 2024, in 2024 dollars.

Rooted Returns

Datura Labs’ version of the Golden Returns calculation. Same formula, two inputs made local: students are measured against high school graduates in the college’s own county rather than statewide, and the college’s published room-and-board budget is replaced with nine months of the city’s median gross rent plus the USDA moderate-cost food plan for one adult, scaled to the county. Tuition, books, other expenses and grant aid stay as published. Earnings and the county figure are restated in 2024 dollars, the year of the rent and the budgets. It prices a student renting alone. Students living with family or roommates pay less.

Grant Aid

Money students receive that they do not pay back: federal Pell Grants, California's Cal Grants and the California College Promise Grant fee waiver, and grants or scholarships from the college itself or other sources. Loans and work-study are not grant aid.

How College Scorecard gets its number. Each college reports to the U.S. Department of Education, for its first-time, full-time students who received federal aid, the average cost of attendance (tuition and fees, books and supplies, and the living-cost budget for each student's own housing situation) and the average grant aid those students received. The Scorecard subtracts one from the other and publishes the result as "net price." It does not publish the grant aid figure on its own.

How this page gets its number. The grant aid shown here is the college's published off-campus cost of attendance minus the report's net price: the amount of aid that makes the published budget arrive at that net price. It is a derived figure. Because the Scorecard's average uses each student's actual housing budget, and some aided students live with family on a lower budget, the true average aid is likely a little lower than shown. The Rooted Returns study holds this figure fixed and changes only the room-and-board line, so the comparison between the two studies does not depend on it.

No Economic ROI

Shown as a striped bar. Ten years after enrolling, students at these colleges earn no more than a high school graduate who never went to college. With no earnings gain, the cost is never recouped.

Immediate ROI

At a few colleges, grant aid covers the full cost budget, or all but a few dollars of it, so the average aided student pays nothing or next to nothing. The cost is earned back within days; the report scores it as 0.00 years, and this page calls it immediate.

Local Entry Wage

The 25th-percentile annual wage for an occupation in the college's labor-market area: roughly what someone starting out in that job earns locally. Where a program trains for several occupations, only those open without a bachelor's degree count, weighted by how many people hold each job locally. If every matched occupation needs a bachelor's, the page says so instead of comparing.

In-Service Program

A career program where most students already work in the field and are taking classes for the job they hold, such as fire technology, police academy or apprenticeship courses. Their earnings after leaving reflect that existing job, so this page does not present them as a result of the program. The flag is set when earnings after leaving run more than 5% above the local entry wage.

Pell Grants

Federal grants for lower-income students. A college's Pell share is the portion of its students who receive one. A low share can mean low need, or low financial aid form completion.

Certificate-Predominant

A federal label for colleges that award more certificates than degrees. The report's workbook applies it to some public colleges, but still prices them at two years like every other public college.

What year each number describes. Published budgets (tuition, books, room and board, other expenses): academic year 2024-25. Net price: the report's figure, which matches the federal net price for students from families earning under $75,000 in 2022-23. Earnings ten years after enrollment: students who enrolled in 2009-10 and 2010-11, measured in 2020 and 2021, stated in 2022 dollars. High school graduate earnings: 2019 to 2023 pooled, in 2023 dollars. City and county rent: 2020 to 2024 pooled, in 2024 dollars. Food: January 2025. Household income: 2019 to 2023, in 2023 dollars. Jobs: 2022. Program-level earnings: 2024 dollars. Strong Workforce earnings: students who left in 2021-22 through 2023-24, measured the year after leaving, as reported. Local wages: first quarter of 2026. Job openings: 2023 to 2033 projections. Rooted Returns restates earnings and the high school graduate figures in 2024 dollars; see Methodology.

Golden Returns — College Futures Foundation, with research by the HEA Group, August 2025. The ranking, its formula, and the published payback figures for all 327 California institutions. Its net price is not the Scorecard's average net price: it corresponds, to within a few hundred dollars, to the federal net price for full-time, first-year, aided students from families earning under $75,000, for 2022-23. The report does not state the definition; this page's reading comes from matching the figures.

College Scorecard — U.S. Department of Education, June 2026 release. Published cost-of-attendance budgets (tuition and fees, books, room and board, other expenses; 2024-25), median earnings ten years after enrollment (2022 dollars; not refreshed since 2024), Pell share (2023-24), part-time and adult shares (fall 2024 and fall 2023), completion and transfer rates (fall 2021 entrants), and program-level earnings for certificate and associate programs (2024 dollars).

American Community Survey — U.S. Census Bureau. Three uses, two vintages: 2019–2023 public-use microdata for the high school graduate earnings figures (statewide, reproducing the report's $32,476, and by county; 2023 dollars); 2019–2023 table B19013 for median household income by city and county; and 2020–2024 table B25064, released January 2026, for median gross rent, which is rent plus utilities, by city and county (2024 dollars).

USDA Food Plans — U.S. Department of Agriculture, Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, Cost of Food Reports. The Moderate-Cost plan for one adult aged 19 to 50, January 2025 (the middle of academic year 2024-25), averaging the male and female figures and adding the USDA's 20 percent for a one-person household. The plan assumes all meals are prepared at home. Scaled to each county with the food-price ratio from The Self-Sufficiency Standard for California 2026 (Center for Women's Welfare, University of Washington), which varies the USDA plan by county using Feeding America grocery-price data.

The Self-Sufficiency Standard for California — Center for Women's Welfare, University of Washington, published with the Insight Center for Community Economic Development. The 2026 edition supplies the single-adult living wage shown on the Program Alignment tab and the county food-price ratio used for Rooted Returns. The 2021 edition is the bar the state's Strong Workforce dashboard applies for its living-wage share, using the county where each college's district office sits.

Consumer Price Index — U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI-U all items, annual averages for 2022, 2023 and 2024. Used only to restate earnings and the high school graduate figures in 2024 dollars for the Rooted Returns column.

Student Expense Budgets — California Student Aid Commission. The statewide standard living-cost budgets, built from the Commission's Student Expenses and Resources Survey (SEARS), that most California community colleges adopt as their published room-and-board and other-expense figures. Not an input to this page; cited because it is where the colleges' published budgets come from.

LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES), 2022 — U.S. Census Bureau. Jobs within 25 miles of each campus and the share paying over $40,000, used in the expected-versus-actual comparison. Excludes uniformed military.

Census geography files — 2020 PUMA-to-county relationship file, and the 2023 gazetteer of California places and tracts, used to map microdata to counties, campuses to nearby jobs, and college cities to Census places.

Strong Workforce Program metrics — California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office, DataVista (with WestEd), exported by college and program. Median annual earnings after leaving college, the share reaching the county living wage, and the share reporting a job closely related to their field, from state unemployment-insurance wage records matched to students. The earnings are for every student who earned nine or more career-education units and then left without transferring: completers, non-completers, and working people taking classes for a job they already hold. That last group matters. In public-safety, utility and apprenticeship programs most students are already firefighters, officers or tradespeople, so the earnings reflect the job they came in with, not what the credential produced. Where a program's earnings run above what its occupations pay a starter locally, this page flags the program as in-service and does not present the earnings as a program result. Three school years are pooled; cells under ten students are suppressed at the source.

Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, 2026 first quarter — California Employment Development Department, Labor Market Information Division. Employment and annual wages by occupation for each metropolitan area and rural region, including the 25th percentile used here as the local entry wage and the median as the mid-career figure. Colleges are matched to the area that contains their county.

Long-Term Occupational Employment Projections, 2023–2033 — California Employment Development Department. Annual job openings, ten-year growth, and the typical education needed to enter each occupation, by area. Registered nursing is counted as reachable with an associate degree, since California licenses those graduates, even though the federal label calls it a bachelor's-level job.

Program-to-occupation crosswalks — the Chancellor's Office TOP-to-CIP crosswalk (June 2020) and the National Center for Education Statistics CIP-to-SOC crosswalk (2020 CIP, 2018 SOC). Used to link each college program to the occupations it trains for. Postsecondary-teaching occupations and "all other" catch-all occupations are dropped. Transfer programs such as Liberal Arts have no occupation match by design and are shown as transfer pathways rather than job matches.

All sources are public. Every number in this page is reproducible from them with the build scripts in the project; nothing is estimated from private data.

Program Alignment (both studies). Each career program is linked to the occupations it trains for through two public crosswalks, and those occupations are priced in the college's own labor-market area: the 25th-percentile wage as the entry wage, the median as the mid-career figure, and the state's ten-year projections for openings. What students actually earned the year after leaving comes from state wage records, pooled over the latest three years and weighted by student counts. A program whose students earn more than 5% above the entry wage is flagged as in-service, because that pattern means most of them were already working in the field. Transfer degrees are shown separately; they have no job match.

Expected versus actual. I compared each college against the ranked community colleges on seven measured circumstances and asked what earnings gain a typical college in that situation would post. The comparison uses community colleges only. Under Rooted Returns both the expected and the actual gain are measured against the county line, so the gap between them is the same under either study. Job counts come from Census workplace data, which leaves out active-duty military, so colleges near bases look more job-poor than they are.

What the metric hides. It divides today's prices by the earnings of students who enrolled a decade ago. It counts university transfers as non-finishers. It measures working adults against the very wages they help set. And the high school graduate figures are for people aged 25 to 34, while community college students enter at about 24 on average and are measured ten years later, so most are older than the people they are compared with, which tends to flatter the earnings gain. None of that is a reason to ignore it. Colleges will be judged by this number either way, so it is better to understand it first.

Three colleges are not ranked. Clovis, Madera, and Calbright are too new to have ten-year earnings data. They appear in the list without a number, and will be updated when the data exists.

Sources. Golden Returns (College Futures Foundation with the HEA Group, August 2025). College Scorecard (June 2026). Census American Community Survey 2019 to 2023 microdata and 2020 to 2024 rents. USDA food plans. Census LODES 2022 workplace data.