Make Sure Your College Tuition Pays You Back 
 
 Look Beyond College Costs, Check Your Return on Investment 
 
 Paying for college is more of a luxury than ever. Where can you get the most payback on your tuition dollars? PayScale reviewed nearly 700 colleges and universities to calculate your tuition return on investment (ROI) - what you get back for what you spend. 
 
 Highest College ROI 
 
 California Institute of Technology (Caltech) $1,713,000 Lowest College ROI 
 
 Shaw University $15,480 
 
 - 100K ||||| With the ever-rising cost of a college degree and the dearth of jobs for graduates, many have begun questioning the worth of higher education. Compensation data site PayScale has taken some uncertainty out of the equation by completing an in-depth tabulation of more than 850 colleges' ROI, or return on investment, scores. ROI takes the price of a school's degree and compares it to how much that school's graduates earn on average, producing perhaps the truest measure of a school's value. Using 1.4 million reports, they calculated which colleges give the most bang for their buck. 
 
 We've highlighted the 13 schools with the top ROI scores below. See Payscale's complete list here, including a breakdown of the public and private schools with the highest ROIs. 
 
 And over at BusinessWeek, there's a state-by-state breakdown of PayScale's data, with a slideshow featuring the best-value school in each state. 
 
 Is this list surprising to you? Has your college degree given you a worthy ROI? Let us know in the comments section.
– Which colleges pay off? PayScale crunched the numbers to compute the best returns on investment—by comparing the cost of a degree against what its students earn upon graduation—and Huffington Post rounds up the best of the bunch: Massachusetts Institute of Technology: annual ROI: 12.6%; 30-year ROI: $1.69 million California Institute of Technology: 12.6%; $1.64 million Harvard: 12.5%; $1.63 million Harvey Mudd College: 12.5%; $1.63 million Dartmouth: 12.4%; $1.59 million Stanford: 12.3%; $1.57 million Princeton: 12.3%; $1.52 million Yale: 11.9%; $1.39 million Notre Dame: 12.2%; $1.38 million University of Pennsylvania: 11.8%; $1.36 million See the Huffington Post slideshow here and PayScale's complete rankings here.