The Main Thesis

College is freaking expensive. The original premise of CollegeValue was to evaluate what you get for your money.

When I was thinking about how to answer question, I started looking for data. A college degree has become a required credential for most jobs, and so the primary reason people go to college is to get that good job. I figured there must be a way to track earnings. This is usually done at either the college level or at the level of majors. But both of those are obvious. We know that Yale grads, on average, will earn more than those from Southeastern State College. And we know that, on average, Computer Science majors will earn more than English majors. What’s been harder to find is data that combines these two, so that we can compare Computer Science at Southeastern College and Northwestern State U.

Surprisingly, the only thing I’ve found that has this is federal aid data. And I’ve never seen it laid out before. So here it is:

The average Carnegie Mellon Comp Sci. grad will earn 160k+ in salary! No surprise, there’s loads of Computer Science and engineering. Not bad for your early 20s. About half of the college/major combos that show up here are computer related.

Nursing and Allied Health Diagnostic, Intervention, and Treatment Professions majors showcase strongly too, making up 30+ of the top 100 entries. It looks common today to get a nursing salary over $100k.

There’s other major sprinkled in too. For example, Homeland Security has strong upside, but only at certain colleges. Union Institute & College is by far the strongest, which is extra interesting since I can’t find mention of the degree on their website! But there’s a long tail of lower earnings in this field too, unlike some of the engineering majors.

What really got me going was how we can factor debt load into this equation. After all, the change to make $100k a year after college sounds great, but it might not sound quite as good if you’re coming out with even more than that in debt!

And so we can make a simple calculation to get a sense of how much the debt load impacts earnings by subtracting the debt load that graduates end up carrying. Using this metric, the University of Washington Computer Science program rises to the top. In-state tuition combined with having Microsoft, Amazon, and others right in your backyard makes this a great path for those looking to maximize the economic impact of college.

By this metric, nursing has an even greater impact. Especially in California and New York and especially from public universities where the debt you incur is so much lower.

One thing I did NOT expect is to see University of Phoenix and Strayer on here. I thought both were somewhat predatory based on their for-profit status. But it turns out that they can be valuable if you’re studying the right things. And no surprise here, the right things are computers and nursing.