The Value of A College Degree is $1 Million
There is a difference in pay with a college degree after all.
Market Watch reports.
A college degree is worth $1 million
Maybe all that student debt is worth it, after all.
College graduates earn $1 million more than high school graduates over their lifetime, and the income gap between the highest-paid college majors and the lowest-paid is more than $3 million dollars. This is all according to a study released Thursday by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. The study analyzed wages for 137 college majors to discover the economic benefit of earning an advanced degree by undergraduate major.
“Not all bachelor’s degrees are created equal,” the report concluded. Among the 15 groups of college majors studied, architecture and engineering majors are paid the most and education majors are paid the least. Graduates with degrees in top-paying college majors earn $3.4 million more than those with the lowest-paying majors over a lifetime. Not surprisingly, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and health and business majors are the highest paid, leading to average annual wages of $37,000 or more at the entry level and an average of $65,000.
Comments
These values should be scaled back a bit.
First off, the value is not 1 million if you are talking net after subtracting average student debt for each major. That’s a big no-no in the reporting of these findings.
Secondly, you have to scale down the actual value of 1 million dollars earned over a lifetime versus 1 million dollars today.
Thirdly, since you need to include loan debt you have to scale up the debt (subtraction from net value) based on average interest payment over the average life of the loans. If you want to be extra fancy and account for those who pay off their debt early, you have to scale for the value of the dollars used to pay the debt now in relation to the almost assuredly lesser value of the dollars earned later over the course of the career.
I still think its a nice chunk of net profit, especially for the right majors.