Is Your College Degree REALLY Worth It?
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yes, it’s that time of year. It’s that time of year. I’m seeing the photos up on Facebook and a lot of proud parents out there. College degrees, college degrees being passed out here, there and everywhere. Well, the folks over at Reason, they put together some interesting numbers. This is something that I’ve talked about on our program for some time. Understanding that a college degree is a major
expense, and I was not expense. It’s the wrong way of putting it. You don’t want it to be an expense. You want it to be an investment. And like all investments, you want to return on that investment. Well, let’s take a look at some of the numbers. OK, three quarters, three quarters, 75 % of all bachelor’s degrees have a positive return on investment.
75 % not bad, but again 25 % not so much. So there’s some study was done. Study was done. They examined data from 50 ,000 degree and certificate programs at thousands of American colleges and universities. And they basically what they looked at was how much kids were earning right after graduation is also.
how much they were making 10 years later. 31 % of students are right now enrolled in a program with a negative return on investment. The earnings, benefits are not gonna compensate the cost of pursuing this degree. Again, 77 % of bachelor’s degrees in doctoral.
and professional degrees have positive return on investment. 57%, this is, it’s amazing to me because this is a big moneymaker for colleges and universities. 57 % of masters and associates degree programs have a positive return on investment, just 57%. For bachelor’s degrees, the fine arts, education,
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and biology programs had the lowest return on investment, while engineering, computer science, and nursing degrees gave students the highest long -term rewards. But what’s also interesting as well, what they looked at is where you go to school, where you were enrolled mattered when it came to return on investment. And they gave the example of getting an English degree from the University of Virginia.
and it had a five hundred eighty one thousand nine hundred twenty five dollar positive return on investment. The contrast to that with Virginia Commonwealth University, which is another public university where that had a thirty thousand dollar negative return on investment. What does this mean? Again, it does matter whether you want to believe it or not. It does matter where you go to school and what degree you’re going to get.
from that school, there’s only so many, and you get an English degree, okay, what are you going to do with that English degree? If you’re getting it from a top tier school like a Virginia, you’re more apt to maybe get that job because there’s only so many jobs out there in that department, in that area, where are they gonna hire from? We talked about this with a lot of our listeners here, there are feeder programs for certain fields. It is what it is, there’s certain universities out there that have the tie -ins.
whether it be Wall Street, law firms, whatever it may be. And you need to know that going in. You need to understand that. And that definitely will help as far as an investment is concerned. I’m all for higher education people, I am, but we know how expensive things are. You know, when they talked about, you know, a negative return on investment on education. I mean, I used to laugh about this when I was in college.
They had a building at Syracuse University. It was a school of education. I’m like, why in the world are you going to spend this type of tuition to become a school teacher? There’s nothing wrong with becoming a school teacher, but you go do that and you get that degree at a state school for crying out loud. You don’t do it at a private university unless mom and dad are footing the bill and they don’t care. All of these things need to be taken into consideration. One of the biggest problems we have right now with
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what society is filtering through to everything else is all of this student debt out there. All this student debt that got put on steroids as soon as Obama took the damn thing over, but he became president under the whole Obama care, making homes affordable nonsense. And we’re at a point in time where again, you got high inflation, you got student loans you gotta pay back, it makes it difficult to get ahead. Again, your college degree,
Don’t look at it as an expense, it’s an investment. It’s an investment. And what do you want on your investment? A return. Wax Dog on wallstreet .com.
