Is your college degree worth it? This tool from DEED can tell you
Have you ever wondered if your college degree was worth the money? The Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development is trying to answer that question.
A new tool shows the median salary compared with the cost of living for dozens of college majors and degree types using data from people seven years out from graduation. It was created by Carson Gorecki and Luke Greiner.
Users can type in their debt load, select their certificate level and choose their major for an estimated net income. They can also get a realistic picture of what to expect financially in the future, which is why Gorecki and Greiner speak to high school and college students often.
“It answers so many of the questions that we typically get, and so many of the questions and misconceptions that people have about higher education,” Greiner told MPR News. “It’s really just designed in a way to help folks understand what their return is on the investment of higher education.”
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Greiner says students — and even counselors and teachers — don’t have a solid grasp on the range of outcomes from college, and that getting a degree at a fancy school doesn’t guarantee high earnings. The major or focus is more important.
The data aren’t self-reported, so there’s no survey bias. Instead, Greiner says they scraped wage data from unemployment insurance systems and tax data, offering a high degree of accuracy. Median debt data is from the Office of Higher Education.
The point isn’t to dissuade students from picking certain majors or an associate versus a bachelor’s degree, but to set their expectations.
“A lot of folks, they might ask, you know, what's the best degree to get?” Greiner said. “That formula is really dependent upon not only your earning potential, but also your input cost, your investment… you don't have to wonder ‘is this going to be a burden if I get this degree? Am I going to be able to pay it back? How much should I finance? How should I finance it?’”
This data, Greiner says, can allow students to better pursue their passion — whether that be dance, psychology, biomedical engineering or welding — or to relegate those interests to a hobby.
“Maybe I have a lot of passions, or if that's truly what I want to do, and I see what my typical earnings are probably going to be, now I can actually start to make a plan in order to do this,” Greiner said as an example. “Make it happen and live a reasonable life afterward.”