Is college worth it? Cost plus missed wages vs the salary premium
| Credential | Median NPV, 40 yrs (CEW) | Median Lifetime Earnings (College Payoff 2021) |
|---|---|---|
| Certificate | $88,000 | — |
| Associate degree | $141,000 | $2.0M |
| Bachelor's degree | $306,000 | $2.8M |
| Master's degree | — | $3.2M |
| Doctorate | — | $4.0M |
| Professional degree | — | ~$4.7M |
| High school diploma only | $0 (baseline) | $1.6M |
CEW's NPV figures (from "A First Try at ROI," 2019) discount future earnings at 10% and cover tuition, fees, and living costs net of grants. FREOPP's stricter cut, which nets out taxes, loan interest, and completion risk, puts the median bachelor's at $160,000 — and finds more than a quarter of the nearly 30,000 programs analyzed have negative ROI.
| Field | Typical Starting Salary* | The data says |
|---|---|---|
| Computer engineering | $82,565 | NACE Winter 2025, highest-paid single majors (with software engineering at $82,536) |
| Computer science | $81,535 | NACE Class of 2026 average projection for bachelor's grads |
| Architecture & engineering (career) | — | $3.8M median lifetime earnings vs $2.8M bachelor's average (CEW College Payoff) |
| Top-ROI majors | — | Engineering, computer science, nursing, economics (FREOPP) |
| Weakest-ROI majors | — | Fine arts, anthropology, and some education/psychology programs cluster underwater (FREOPP) |
*The salary presets in the calculator are editable planning bands; the engineering and CS anchors are the published NACE figures shown here. Swap in a real offer or a salary-grid number from the occupation you're actually aiming for.
Most "is college worth it" takes compare a graduate's salary to a high-school grad's salary and stop. That's not an investment return — it skips what you paid and what you gave up. A real return has to survive both.
Investment = (net cost per year × years) + (comparison wage × years). The second half is opportunity cost: money you didn't earn while sitting in class. Return = annual premium (your salary minus the comparison wage), grown at your premium-growth rate over the working years, summed for the lifetime gain and discounted at your chosen rate for NPV. Break-even is the first year cumulative premium covers the investment. NPV is the honest way to see it: a dollar at age 60 isn't a dollar at age 22.
Pick a field to prefill a starting salary, then replace it with a real number once you have one — a job posting, a bureau wage table, or a school's reported outcomes. Set net cost to what you'll actually pay after grants (the college cost calculator builds that number). The comparison wage should be what you'd plausibly earn without the degree, not a national average: $45,000 is a common planning default, but a skilled-trade apprentice track justifies a much higher one, which shrinks the premium honestly.
In-state public, $20,000 a year net cost, four years: $80,000 paid. Opportunity cost at a $45,000 comparison wage: $180,000. Total investment $260,000. Business grad at $60,000 — a $15,000 premium growing 2% a year. Over 40 working years the premium stream sums to $906,030, for a lifetime net gain of $646,030, or about $224,666 as present value at a 3% discount rate. Cumulative premium passes the $260,000 investment in year 16 of work — roughly age 40 for a 22-year-old graduate. Every raise above that 2% track pulls the date earlier.
Now the spread. The same model with an $82,000 engineering salary and $45,000 a year private net cost ($360,000 invested) returns a lifetime gain of $1,874,873 and breaks even in year 9. An out-of-state humanities path — $55,000 a year net, $48,000 starting salary against a $45,000 comparison wage — never recovers the $400,000 investment: the 40-year gain is −$253,341. That's the FREOPP quarter, in miniature.
For the median student, yes. Georgetown CEW's ROI analysis puts the median net present value of a bachelor's degree at $306,000 over 40 years, using a 10% discount rate, and median lifetime earnings of $2.8 million versus $1.6 million for a high school grad. But the median hides a wide spread: FREOPP analyzed nearly 30,000 bachelor's programs and found a median ROI of $160,000, with more than a quarter of programs coming out negative. Which side you land on depends mostly on major, net price, and finishing the degree.
Two credible answers: Georgetown CEW's $306,000 median NPV (40 years, 10% discount, includes tuition, fees, and living costs net of grants but not taxes or loan interest), and FREOPP's $160,000 median, which nets out taxes, loan interest, and the odds of not graduating. Both agree the payoff is real for most students and awful for some programs: engineering, computer science, nursing, and economics sit at the top; many fine arts and some liberal arts programs land underwater.
ROI = career earnings premium minus the full investment. The investment has two parts you can't skip: what you pay (net cost after grants) and what you give up (four years of high-school-level wages while enrolled). The return is the annual gap between your expected salary and the high-school comparison wage, grown over a career and, for present value, discounted back. Divide the gain by the investment for a percentage, or count years until cumulative premium covers the investment for a break-even date.
FREOPP's program-level data puts engineering, computer science, nursing, and economics at the top and clusters the weakest returns in fine arts, anthropology, and some education and psychology programs. Georgetown's lifetime-earnings data agrees on the spread: bachelor's holders in architecture and engineering earn a median of $3.8 million over a career against the $2.8 million bachelor's median. Starting salaries anchor the same story: NACE's Winter 2025 survey pegs computer engineering at about $82,500 to start.
Counting tuition and the wages you give up while enrolled, a typical in-state path (about $20,000 a year net cost, $15,000 salary premium) breaks even around year 16 of working, roughly age 40 under a 22-to-26 start. Cheaper paths and higher-paying majors pull that in dramatically: the same model with an $82,000 engineering salary breaks even about 9 years in. Expensive paths with weak salary premiums can take well past retirement or never get there at all.