What’s my college degree worth?
It might be a good idea to think through this question before going into debt to get that sheepskin.
Well, now Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has a relaunched website to help people decide what are the likely financial gains of a particular major or college before going into debt.
The Wall Street Journal explains:
The website is CollegeScorecard.ed.gov, and it’s been around for a while. But until recently students could only look up the earnings and debt for colleges and universities as a whole. Given the large difference between what an English major and an electrical engineer can expect to make, this has been a crude and often unhelpful measure.
The good news is that the site now offers a much fuller picture that gives students more ways to compare. A student choosing her field of study at, say, Iowa State might want to know that while a civil engineering major can look forward to earning $60,700 in the first year after graduation, the salary drops to $30,600 for history.
Or compare the median monthly earnings and monthly loan payments for, say, computer science at Duke ($8,300/$82), at Rutgers ($5,858/$221) and at Florida State ($4,233/$231). They can do the same for the debt students compile before they graduate.
I hate it that we are losing sight of the value of a liberal education. We often treat college as only a route to a job.
Still, future earnings always have been (and should be) a part of the college decision.
Too bad grads who find themselves burdened on the brink of adult life by life-altering debt didn’t have a resource like this.