For some students, particularly those in certain tech, economics and healthcare fields, the answer is an unequivocal “yes.” Like engineering majors — 95% of which can expect to make more than $80,000 by mid-career, according to FREOPP. But 28% of college degree programs actually leave alumni “financially worse off than if they had never gone to college at all,” meaning graduates don’t earn enough to recoup the money they spent earning the degree, according to the report.
The worst offenders? Only 1% of psychology graduates will earn more than $80,000 a year by the time they’re 35, the reports says, and the odds aren’t much better for those in education and the arts.
The cost of a college education has long undermined the value of a degree. In the last decade alone, in-state tuition and fees at public four-year institutions grew by 16% in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to the College Board. With the average student loan debt hovering around $30,000 per borrower, deciding where to study and what to major in can be risky business.
Institution matters a great deal: Princeton University’s economics program gives students a better ROI than the University of Pennsylvania’s. But major plays an outsized role even at some of the most competitive schools in the country. UPenn’s finance major is one of the most lucrative programs in the U.S., FREOPP says, with most graduates raking in over $288,000 by the age of 35. Film majors from the same school, on the other hand, make just over $45,000 by that age.
What a student chooses to major in, the researchers conclude, “is perhaps the most important financial decision he or she will ever make.”
could afford her rent and $800 monthly daycare bill. She applied for financial aid. She searched for an affordable laptop.
Despite her efforts, things didn’t go as planned once classes started.
“I bought the cheapest laptop I could find at the time, and certain programs that I needed were not accessible for me on that laptop, so I ended up not passing the course,” Rose says.
Burnt out and not wanting to waste money by signing up for the next semester only to potentially have the same thing happen again, Rose put her studies on hold. Her experience is all-too-common for the student parents on college campuses across the country.
About 4.8 million undergraduate students in the U.S. are parents, according to a 2021 report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR). But in the past decade, their numbers have declined at a rate faster than the overall student population as they face more acute financial burdens.
With extreme demands on their time, plus too few affordable child care options, student parents drop out at rates far higher than their non-parent counterparts. Only 18% of student parents actually earn an associate’s or bachelor’s degree within six years, a problem that not only affects their own long-term economic stability, but that of their kids, too.
“Student parents [make up] almost a quarter of students on campuses, but for far too long, they’ve not been recognized as such,” says Julie Peller, the founding executive director of Higher Learning Advocates, a bi-partisan organization that advocates for the needs of college students.
For Rose, it wasn’t just technical difficulties that discouraged her. Rose’s 4-year-old daughter was born with amniotic band syndrome, a birth defect that requires both physical and occupational therapy on a weekly basis. Despite her initial excitement about earning a degree, the shuttling back and forth between work, school, day care and medical appointments became too much.
“I decided, ‘Maybe just focus on trying to make sure you keep your job because that’s paying your rent, that’s paying your daughter’s day care,'” she says.