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“Wait a minute, isn’t Lawrence a private college?” asks the astute reader with a scrunched-up facial expression signaling confusion and/or discomfort on behalf of the headline writer.

Yes, Lawrence is a private college, which is why we will move very quickly from a provocative headline to nine reasons the nine reasons in the headline require closer scrutiny. (The repetition in the previous sentence is intentional.) The good news is that someone already did it for us. Therefore, in true Lawrence University fashion, we will invoke our honor code and cite our source: the National Association of Independent Colleges & Universities, an organization that, as the name indicates, represents private (nonprofit) colleges. NAICU recently published Nine Myths About Private Nonprofit Higher Education, which addresses each with nine evidence-backed truths overturning some widely shared, and often uncritically accepted “facts”, including this one:

• Private college students typically graduate with $100,000 in debt. News and opinion pieces often reach for the stars when they want a detail to support the point that private college is expensive. But here’s the truth: 3.1% of private college graduates leave with more than $100,000 in loans. (Hardly typical.) In fact, 11.5% have debt exceeding $50,000. The average debt load—and we’ll admit it’s not by any means small or insignificant—is just under $30,000, which, by the way isn’t much more than the average debt load of a public school graduate, as you’ll see in the article.

There are eight other gems in NAICU’s well-researched and well-supported article. We encourage you to consider them as you consider Lawrence University along with other private colleges.

What are your graduates doing within six months of graduation?

At our college fair tables and in our interview sessions, we hear this question often and—as the economy continues to sputter—with increasing frequency from parents and students considering investing in a Lawrence education. While six months after graduation seems to be the common metric—often employed by parents who, despite loving their children, aren’t that excited about having them back in the house right after college—we encourage families to take the long view.

Sure, we can talk about “learning how to think critically” and being a “creative problem-solver” and “independent thinker,” but these are tough to measure. Because they’re hard to measure, they can often leave families frustrated. We don’t blame them.

One metric to consider is mid-career salaries, defined as salaries earned by alumni 10 to 15 years after graduation. One resource that tracks this metric is Payscale.com. In a report they published this year, we were delighted (and not all together surprised) to see Lawrence graduates enjoying a healthy midcareer salary that puts them among the nation’s “top liberal arts college” graduates at just under $90,000 per year. Check out the list to see where our graduates rank among other liberal arts colleges’ graduates.

While we know an investment in a Lawrence education yields a lifetime of intangible results, it’s comforting to know that it can also yield this pretty significant tangible one, too.