College ROI Data: 30-year net present value of U.S. colleges and majors

Clean, citable tables on the lifetime financial return of U.S. colleges and majors: 30-year net present value by school and state, cohort-weighted ROI by major category, the out-of-state cost premium, and an AI-exposure score per major. 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, FREOPP 2021) — and in several popular major categories the majority of graduates never break even. Derived by LE TEEN from FREOPP (2021, CC BY 4.0), NCES IPEDS (2023-24 Final, public domain), BEA Regional Price Parities (2023, public domain), Microsoft Research "Working with AI" (2025, CC BY 4.0), the Anthropic Economic Index (2025-09-15, CC BY), and Census ACS 2022 PUMS (public domain). Full methodology: le-teen.com/methodology. Canonical repository: github.com/thomasthinks/college-roi-data. Ships as tidy CSVs plus a Frictionless datapackage.json with typed schemas. CC BY 4.0. Also queryable as a free, keyless JSON API (le-teen.com/api, 640 endpoints) and via an MCP server for LLM tooling (college-roi-mcp on npm). Mirrored across Zenodo (hub), GitHub, Hugging Face, Kaggle, OSF, figshare, and OpenML. Changes in 1.0.1 (2026-08-13) — data correction. In roi-by-major-category.csv, the column pct_never_breakeven was carrying the share of graduates whose 30-year lifetime ROI is below zero, rather than the share FREOPP flags with its 999 “never breaks even” sentinel. Five of nineteen rows are corrected: Agriculture and Natural Resources 15.8→15.5, Communications and Journalism 16.5→16.4, Mathematics and Statistics 3.2→2.9, Computer and Information Sciences 2.5→2.3, Economics 2.1→1.9. The remaining fourteen are identical under either definition. A new column pct_negative_lifetime_roi now carries the below-zero share, so both figures are available and no existing column was renamed or removed. The two are not interchangeable: never-breaks-even is a strict subset of below-zero-ROI, and the graduates in the gap do break even, in their late fifties, past the 30-year window. Field descriptions in datapackage.json now state each denominator. No other table is affected.