Kind of a neat article discussing the return-on-investment of college degrees. The data comes from this ranking of colleges by ROI (some appear twice because of separate calculations for in-state and out-of-state tuition). My almae matres performed reasonably well, I'm glad to see.
In general, ROI increases with selectivity, but it varies so widely within selectivity categories that you cannot use selectivity as a proxy for value.
It seems reasonable to reject outright an institution whose ROI is less than the cost of borrowing the money to finance the degree (about 7% right now). There's a list of 17 failures at the first link.
bearing blog 