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Aug. 5, 2013 – Allegheny College has been ranked among the top 30 colleges in Pennsylvania with the best lifetime return on investment by AffordableCollegesOnline.org (AC Online). Graduates from these schools earn more on average than graduates from other Pennsylvania schools, according to the AC Online report.

Also making the top 30 are Haverford, Swarthmore and Dickinson Colleges as well as universities including Carnegie Mellon, Temple, Bucknell and the University of Pennsylvania.

“These are important lists for prospective students to consider,” said AC Online founder Dan Schuessler. “We’ve sifted through comprehensive data sources to find colleges and universities in Pennsylvania that offer a high quality education with consistent, long-term payoffs in the workplace.”

In compiling their rankings, AC Online used data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education; the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, the primary federal source for data on colleges, universities and technical and vocational postsecondary schools in the U.S.; the Carnegie Classification, a framework widely used in the study of higher education, both as a way to represent and control for institutional differences, and also in the design of research studies to ensure adequate representation of sampled institutions, students or faculty; and Payscale.com, a salary data collection organization.