SilviaAscarelli

Senior news editor

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Harvey Mudd College, a school of about 800 students, once again tops a list of colleges and universities giving the best return on tuition for the second year running.

The list, compiled by Payscale.com. not surprisingly is heavy on schools that focus on science, technology, engineering and math, as Harvey Mudd does. The school, located east of Los Angeles, has topped the list for four years.

Payscale ranks schools by the 20-year return on investment, which it defines as the 20-year median pay for a bachelor’s degree from that institution compared with the 24-year median pay for a high school graduate, less the cost of attending that institution. Its criteria excludes those who have obtained advanced degrees or are not working in the U.S. Only full-time workers are included; the self-employed are not.

Harvey Mudd. which says its nine degree programs all include a healthy dose of humanities, ranks first, both with and without financial aid. Nearly 80% of its students receive some financial aid to cover tuition alone that costs $46,315. (Add in room and board, and cost tops $64,000 a year.)

The median payoff after all those expenses, according to Payscale, is $985,300 for those who got no financial aid and more than $1.1 million for those who did.

“Our alumni also know how to write, communicate with broad audiences, work across disciplines and work collaboratively rather than competitively,” Thyra Briggs, Harvey Mudd’s vice president for admission and financial aid, said via email. “We hear repeatedly from employers and graduate schools that our alumni are often ‘translators’ in their offices and graduate programs.”

Payscale’s top 10 is dominated by private schools like Harvey Mudd; the first state school on the list is Colorado School of Mines. a state engineering university. Princeton is the only Ivy League school to crack the top 10 without financial aid (including financial aid, both it and Brown do.) Harvard University ranks No. 34 without aid, and 14th with aid.

The ranking covers 1,223 institutions and can be sorted by a number of criteria, including majors and states. Excluding financial aid, just over 40 have a negative ROI, excluding financial aid. The list shrinks to under 20 when financial aid is included.

At the bottom are Shaw University, an historically black university located in Raleigh, N.C. when financial aid is excluded, and the State University of New York at Potsdam, near the Canadian border, for out-of-state students, including financial aid. It also has a negative return for in-state students after financial aid, according to Payscale.

SUNY Potsdam called the data “extremely flawed, incomplete and possibly inaccurate,” with only 70 students self-reporting data.

“With less than two-tenths of one percent of SUNY Potsdam’s 40,000 graduates reporting, the Payscale return on investment ranking does not accurately reflect the success of our alumni,” said Rick Miller, vice president for enrollment management and institutional effectiveness.

Many graduates are self-employed in the arts or go on to graduate school, neither of which would count in the Payscale methodology, he noted.

Shaw University didn’t respond to a request for comment.