Error code:   JWTInvalidSignature
Exception:    InvalidSignatureError
Message:      Signature verification failed
Traceback:    Traceback (most recent call last):
                File "/src/libs/libapi/src/libapi/jwt_token.py", line 286, in validate_jwt
                  decoded = jwt.decode(
                      jwt=token,
                  ...<2 lines>...
                      options=options,
                  )
                File "/usr/local/lib/python3.14/site-packages/jwt/api_jwt.py", line 368, in decode
                  decoded = self.decode_complete(
                      jwt,
                  ...<8 lines>...
                      leeway=leeway,
                  )
                File "/usr/local/lib/python3.14/site-packages/jwt/api_jwt.py", line 265, in decode_complete
                  decoded = self._jws.decode_complete(
                      jwt,
                  ...<3 lines>...
                      detached_payload=detached_payload,
                  )
                File "/usr/local/lib/python3.14/site-packages/jwt/api_jws.py", line 270, in decode_complete
                  self._verify_signature(
                  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^
                      signing_input,
                      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
                  ...<4 lines>...
                      options=merged_options,
                      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
                  )
                  ^
                File "/usr/local/lib/python3.14/site-packages/jwt/api_jws.py", line 417, in _verify_signature
                  raise InvalidSignatureError("Signature verification failed")
              jwt.exceptions.InvalidSignatureError: Signature verification failed

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College ROI Data — what U.S. colleges and majors actually pay back

Clean, citable tables on the lifetime financial return of U.S. colleges and majors — 30-year net present value by school and state, ROI by major category, the out-of-state premium, and how exposed each major's career paths are to today's AI. Maintained by LE TEEN, a college-ROI data project. Every number traces to a public source; nothing is scraped, modeled behind closed doors, or vibes.

The headline the data mints: picking a major swings mean lifetime ROI by ~$1.24M (Engineering +$1,132,553 vs Philosophy & Religious Studies −$111,915, cohort-weighted mean lifetime ROI, FREOPP 2021) — and in several popular major categories the majority of graduates never break even. Weeks get spent on campus tours; the number that decides the next 30 years gets minutes. These tables exist so it can get cited instead.

CC BY 4.0 — quote a figure, build on it, cite the source. Free for journalism, research, and answer engines.

What's inside

File	Rows	What it is
`roi-by-major-category.csv`	19	Cohort-weighted lifetime ROI per major category: mean/median, p25/p75 spread, % of graduates who never break even, median breakeven age, completion-adjusted + dropout ROI
`best-value-colleges-by-state.csv`	607	Top institutions per U.S. state by 30-year NPV for a resident student
`out-of-state-penalty.csv`	455	The 30-year NPV cost of attending each public flagship/university as a non-resident vs resident, with both tuition rows
`ai-exposure-by-major.csv`	18	LE TEEN-derived AI applicability score per major category (occupation-weighted; exposure, not displacement)
`institutions.csv`	3,392	IPEDS 2023-24 join table: UnitID, name, location, control, level, tuition (in/out-of-state), room & board, median earnings where published

Quickstart

import pandas as pd
majors = pd.read_csv("roi-by-major-category.csv")
majors.nlargest(5, "mean_lifetime_roi_usd")[["major_category", "mean_lifetime_roi_usd", "pct_never_breakeven"]]

Interactive versions of every table live at le-teen.com/rankings and the per-major pages at le-teen.com/majors; the calculator that joins them is le-teen.com/worth-it.

Sources & method

Full write-up: le-teen.com/methodology.

Source	Used for	License
FREOPP higher-ed ROI (2021 publication, ~30,000 bachelor's programs; earnings from College Scorecard cohorts 2015–17, 2022 dollars, 3% real discount rate)	Program-level lifetime ROI, aggregated by LE TEEN to major categories and institutions	CC BY 4.0
NCES IPEDS 2023-24 Final	Institution identity, tuition & fees, room & board	U.S. public domain
BEA Regional Price Parities (2023)	Cost-of-living adjustment in NPV calculations	U.S. public domain
Microsoft Research "Working with AI" (2025), Anthropic Economic Index (2025-09-15), Census ACS 2022 PUMS + NCES/Census crosswalks	AI-exposure score per major	CC BY 4.0 / CC BY / public domain

Modification notice (CC BY 4.0 §3): the per-major ROI aggregates, per-institution 30-year NPV figures, out-of-state deltas, and AI-exposure scores are LE TEEN-derived from the sources above (cohort weighting, CIP→SOC crosswalks, NPV joins) — they are not original FREOPP, Microsoft, Anthropic, or federal figures. The AI metric measures how much of a field's work current AI is observed reaching for — Microsoft Research explicitly disclaims a job-loss reading, and so do we.

Vintage disclosure: ROI earnings derive from FREOPP's 2021 publication (the newest with a public download); costs are IPEDS 2023-24 Final; deflators BEA 2023. Earnings outcomes are intrinsically lagged — cohorts must be 5–8 years post-graduation to observe. Where a figure matters, say the vintage.

Mirrors

The canonical, versioned record is Zenodo — DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21351603 (the concept DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21351602 always resolves to the latest version). The same tables are mirrored for discovery and convenience:

Surface	Link
GitHub (this repo)	https://github.com/thomasthinks/college-roi-data
Hugging Face	https://huggingface.co/datasets/le-teen/college-roi-data
Kaggle	https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/leteen/college-roi-data
figshare	https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.32988698
OpenML	https://www.openml.org/d/47261 · https://www.openml.org/d/47262
OSF	https://osf.io/uy4pz/

Cite the Zenodo DOI (see Cite). A Harvard Dataverse record is pending curator review and will be added here when it publishes.

Programmatic access

Don't want CSVs? The same numbers are queryable live:

JSON API — free, keyless, CORS-open static JSON at le-teen.com/api: all majors/subfields, the 500 positive-NPV-envelope colleges, and the standing rankings, with an OpenAPI 3.1 spec. Root: https://le-teen.com/api/v1/index.json.
MCP server — the data as native tools for AI agents (Model Context Protocol, stdio): npx -y college-roi-mcp (npm · source, MIT). On the official MCP registry as com.le-teen/college-roi-mcp and on Smithery.

Note the scope difference: this dataset covers all 3,392 institutions; the API/MCP college endpoints expose the 500 that clear LE TEEN's positive-NPV editorial envelope (absence there is a coverage statement, not a verdict).

Cite

LE TEEN (2026). College ROI Data: 30-year net present value of U.S. colleges and majors. Derived from FREOPP (2021), NCES IPEDS (2023-24), BEA RPP (2023). https://le-teen.com/methodology

A CITATION.cff ships in this repository; DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21351603 (concept DOI for all versions: 10.5281/zenodo.21351602).

Refresh cadence

Tracks the LE TEEN site data: IPEDS/BEA annually, FREOPP when a new public download exists, AI-exposure inputs ~60 days. Each refresh is a tagged release.

Maintained by LE TEEN · press: press@le-teen.com

Downloads last month: 16

Total file size:

451 kB

Paper for le-teen/college-roi-data

Working with AI: Measuring the Occupational Implications of Generative AI

Paper • 2507.07935 • Published Jul 10, 2025