A new ROI metric and dashboards
August 11, 2025
The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) has launched a new return-on-investment (ROI) metric and dashboards to help students, policymakers and institutional leaders explore trends in student outcomes among the commission’s institutional members, which are primarily California community colleges.
The Student Achievement Dashboards pull from three data sources: institutionally reported annual data, federally reported IPEDS data and a new ROI metric developed in partnership with the College Futures Foundation. The metric uses a Price-to-Earnings Premium (PEP) model to assess how long it takes students to recoup their educational investment by examining the relationship between net costs and earnings premiums, according to ACCJC.
ACCJC provides this example, using American River College, one of California’s largest community colleges: Learners pay $4,628 in out-of-pocket costs each year, or $9,256 total to earn an associate degree in two years. Former students earn $40,162 per year — $7,686 more than the typical California high school graduate — after attending. Using these additional earnings of $7,686 annually, graduates can recoup their $9,256 in net costs in 1.2 years.
