The ROI analysis helps understand whether subsidized college enables social mobility. Subsidized college is politically convenient because you can sell it to c

The ROI analysis helps understand whether subsidized college enables social mobility. Subsidized college is politically convenient because you can sell it to corporate interests as reducing the cost of skilled labor, to labor as a way to move up social strata, and to lower-level elites as a way to facilitate booting incompetent or uncouth people out of their stratum (you can sum up the latter two clauses as "meritocracy"). If people weren't forced to accept subsidized college as a substitute for wealth redistribution (IMO this is largely the case) you might not see so much obsession with ROI.