Tuvelan

Documentation

Understand how Tuvelan calculates college ROI, or integrate our analysis engine into your own application via the REST API.

Quickstart

Enter your target schools and major and get ROI rankings in under 5 minutes.

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NPV / IRR Model

How we calculate net present value and internal rate of return for the education investment over a 20-year horizon.

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Monte Carlo Simulation

10,000 earnings scenarios using College Scorecard distributions calibrated to school, major, and geography.

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Price-to-Earnings Premium

Third Way PEP methodology -- years to recoup net cost via median earnings above the high-school baseline.

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Economic Mobility Score

Chetty mobility rate -- probability of moving from the bottom to top income quintile by institution.

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Loan Repayment Modeling

Standard, Extended, IDR, and PSLF plan comparison with forgiveness timelines and monthly payment projections.

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API Endpoints

POST/v1/calculate
GET/v1/institutions/search
GET/v1/majors
POST/v1/signup
POST/v1/login
GET/v1/account
POST/v1/checkout

Authentication

All API requests require an API key passed via the X-API-Key header.

curl https://tuvelan-api.smarttechinvest.com/v1/institutions/search?q=MIT \
  -H "X-API-Key: tuv_your_api_key_here"

NPV / IRR Model

For each school+major combination, we compute the education investment NPV as:

NPV = Sum of discounted (projected_earnings - counterfactual_HS_earnings - annual_loan_payment) over 20 years - net_cost_of_education

Projected earnings use Mincer wage curves calibrated with College Scorecard median earnings at 1, 4, and 10 years post-graduation. The counterfactual is median earnings for high-school graduates by state from Census ACS. IRR is the discount rate where NPV equals zero.

Net cost of education uses IPEDS net price by income bracket, accounting for Pell grants, institutional aid, state grants, and merit scholarships.

Monte Carlo Simulation

Rather than a single point estimate, Tuvelan runs 10,000 simulated earnings scenarios for each school+major combination. Each scenario draws from College Scorecard earnings distributions (25th, 50th, 75th percentile) with BLS employment probability adjustments.

The simulation produces a complete outcome distribution, giving you:

  • Expected (mean) NPV -- the average across all scenarios
  • Median NPV -- the 50th percentile, less sensitive to outliers
  • 10th percentile NPV -- your worst-case planning number
  • Full histogram -- see the entire distribution of possible outcomes

This lets you compare schools based on both expected return and downside risk.

Price-to-Earnings Premium (PEP)

The PEP score, based on the Third Way methodology, answers a simple question: how many years will it take to recoup the net cost of your degree via higher earnings compared to a high school graduate?

PEP = net_cost / (median_alumni_earnings - median_hs_earnings). A PEP of 2.0 means it takes 2 years of post-graduation earnings to recoup the investment. Schools with PEP scores above 10 may indicate a poor financial return.

Economic Mobility Score

Using Chetty et al. (2017) Mobility Report Cards data, we compute the probability that a student from the bottom income quintile will reach the top income quintile after attending a given institution.

This identifies schools that actually move students up the economic ladder, not just the ones with prestigious brands. Some lesser-known public universities have higher mobility rates than Ivy League schools.

Loan Repayment Modeling

For each school, we model loan repayment under multiple plans: Standard 10-year, Extended 25-year, and Income-Driven Repayment (SAVE/REPAYE/IBR/PAYE). We compute monthly payments, total interest paid, and forgiveness eligibility.

PSLF eligibility is modeled at 120 qualifying payments. IDR forgiveness is modeled at 20 or 25 years depending on the plan. The tax implications of forgiven balances are included in the total cost calculation.