By economist Richard Vedder. I have several other posts on this topic from over the years and links to them are below as well as the salary data from an article on college majors. Excerpts:
"According to a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Kevin Carey, 46% of the students graduating from Eastern New Mexico State University make less than $25,000 annually (less than the earnings of a typical full-time Wal-Mart employee with a high school education) after college. Almost simultaneously, an article in the Wall Street Journal told of recent graduates who earned degrees online at the expensive University of Southern California sometimes amassing six-digit debts loads and working in similar low-paying jobs. Many enter college thinking graduation will provide a comfortable middle class life, but that is often simply not true. Going to college has significant financial risks, like with most financial investments—beginning with the reality that close to 40% of matriculants fail to graduate in six years."
"most choosing colleges don’t have a good idea about what they want to study, and fail to understand that the choice of major is usually much more important in predicting future vocational success than the choice of college."
"“28% of bachelor’s degrees... do not have a net positive return.” If one calculates a broader social rate of return taking account of college scholarship subsidies, the total rises to about 37%. It probably is roughly true that college pays well financially for about one-third of graduates, is a bad investment for one-third, and is marginally beneficial to the remaining one-third."
"college is a consumption good as well as a human capital investment, and a person can greatly enjoy the four-to-five-year collegiate gap period between adolescence and life even though the result financially is not satisfactory"
"I think all of this contributes importantly to the most striking trend of the modern era in higher education: the pronounced flight to quality where colleges perceived to be “excellent” are flourishing while those with a less distinguished reputation are suffering."
"the subject studied in college is particularly crucial. Employers perceive college as high-level vocational education —upscale trade school."
"“a majority of programs in art, music, philosophy and psychology leave their average students financially worse off.” A petroleum engineering major at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin is likely to have a better return on her/his investment (average earnings at age 25 of $89,692) than a comparable major in English literature or art at Columbia University."
"an awful lot of college kids meet their lifetime soulmate in school, and love, a decidedly difficult quality to measure quantitatively, is important in assessing the overall quality of life. Even the financial dimension of life is impacted by collegiate hookups: perhaps one spouse becomes a poet and earns little but loves her work —but she or he has a partner making megabucks serving as Whiplash Willie plaintiff attorney. For this couple, college is decidedly a profitable financial investment even if the data for one of them suggests otherwise."
Here are some earlier posts on related topics:
Does It Pay To Go To College? (2009)
Maybe That College Degree Is Not As Valuable As You Thought (2010)
As college costs rise, sticker shock eased by student aid (2010)
Is It Getting Too Expensive To Go College? (2011)
Is College Still A Good Investment? (2012)
What College Majors Pay The Highest? (2013)
Who Is Most Likely To Default On Their Student Loans? (2016)
The Diminishing Returns of a College Degree: In the mid-1970s, far less than 1% of taxi drivers were graduates. By 2010 more than 15% were (2017)
The Diminishing Returns of a College Degree (2017)
Student-Debt Forgiveness Is a Wonderful Boon, Until the IRS Comes Calling: Education analysts, student advocates warn of impending crisis from one-time tax bills individuals may not be prepared to pay off (2018)
Is the U.S. student loan system broken? (2019)
Many college dropouts are worse off economically than if they hadn’t started college (2019)
More employers offer workers help paying off student loans (2019)
College Still Pays Off, but Not for Everyone (2019)
Studying Economics Increases Wages a Lot (2020)
See also from Feb. 2020 this article 33 of the Highest-Paying Majors You Can Choose in College.
Here is the salary data from that article
The 15 Highest-Paying Majors Overall
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