Growing up in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, kids were always taught they had to go to college to make something of themselves and have a better life than what their parents had. Sure, everyone knew that a decent income could be made in the trades after earning your stripes as an apprentice, eventually becoming a journeyman and then maybe starting your own business, but generally these jobs were frowned upon or considered to be for those not “smart enough” to go to college. Why would anyone choose hard labor, often out in the elements, if they could have a nice cushy desk job in a climate controlled office, often making more money? Well, that was the thought process at least.

Despite these teachings and general acceptance by most of society that college was “the way”, by the time my high school graduation rolled around in 1988, I wasn’t even remotely considering this path. Although I knew I was a smart kid after having mostly A’s on my grade school report cards, I grew sick of the nerdy kid label and decided to slack off in high school, barely skimmed by as an average student, and focused on dreams of becoming a rock star. I was content with a plan of working minimal skill jobs to get by until I could “made it big”. Frankly though, I had no real plan for either success in the music industry or earning a decent income in the meantime. I floundered in this lifestyle for 5 years while bouncing in and out of a few bands and partying with friends all hours of the night.

This (non-)plan continued until my manager at Wawa (a popular convenience store and gas station for those not familiar with the east coast USA chain) approached me in the Spring of 1993 with an offer to start their manager trainee program. It was time to face reality. Did I really want to start a career of running a store and waiting on customers (that unfortunately include entitled Karens and other raging a-holes), working a mix of day, night, weekend, and holiday shifts? The path I had been meandering down clearly wasn’t working… I had just been booted out of a band and I was frankly tired of making barely above minimum wage. The day of reckoning had come. I gave my manager a polite no, thank you, and decided it was time to buck up and go to college.

But At What Cost?

Fast-forward to the Spring of 1997, and I graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering. I paid for this with help from a few sources. Some was my own money that I earned while continuing to work at Wawa part-time during my first two years at community college, financial support for living expenses from my live-in girlfriend / future wife’s full-time job, some scholarship money, and about $25,000 in student loans, which included money for tuition, books, and rent during my last two years of college. The result of my investment was that I took on $25k in debt and instead of earning about $20k per year at Wawa as a manager trainee, my first engineering job paid $36k. So my net increase in salary of $16k covered my total loan of $25k in less than 2 years; that is what you call a good return on investment! Good returns like these were why a college degree was considered the holy grail of how to get ahead in life. The problem is that this isn’t typical anymore.

Before retiring in 2021, I was discussing the cost of college with a colleague. My kids were just getting to high school age and considering what they might want to do when they grow up, and his kids had recently graduated college. His son was in the process of refinancing student loans to lower monthly payments. The financed part of his son’s education was over $200,000! I don’t recall the exact degree, but it had something to do with history. After refinancing, his payments were still over $1,800 per month… for a 4-year history degree! I hope I’m not the only one that sees a major issue with this. Can anyone name one job from a 4 year history degree that will earn you enough money to justify that cost? They may be out there, but his son who had been out of college for nearly a year hadn’t found any yet. Of course I kept my mouth shut at the time because hindsight was obvious to both of us. Sadly, this wasn’t the only similar story I heard from friends and colleagues about young adults leaving college, buried in debt, with few career prospects available to repay loans in the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Seems that quite a few people, despite knowing the risings costs, failed to consider a basic business tenant when it comes to spending money.

Know Your Return on Investment

Unpopular opinion: some degree programs and colleges simply aren’t worth the money. In the past, this possibility was rarely considered. People have to go to college to make something of themselves, right? They looked at colleges, applied to the ones they liked the most, enrolled at their choice from the acceptances, and signed up for whatever loans were needed. The only consideration people usually gave to college costs were IF they could get accepted and get the loans needed to swing it, rarely wondering if they’d make enough money to justify the financed costs. A college degree always earned you more, so if you could go to college, you did. Again, those days are LONG GONE. In previous generations, if you were one of the rare cases that struggled to get a job that used your degree, you could work your way up through any service, retail, or sales position, become a manager, and earn enough to eventually pay back your loans after a refinance. Today? Good luck making enough with one of those “regular” jobs paying back $200,000 in loans while trying to pay rent and buy food.

How can we fix this broken system? Well, for one, we obviously need to stop assuming college is always the best option for anybody to become a productive member of society. A college degree does not (and has not for a long time) mean that you automatically make more than those without a degree, nor does it mean you will make enough to pay back the costs of earning that degree. It works sometimes, but with skyrocketing costs for some institutions and the huge number of degree options that have few high-paying careers, often it does not. Those skyrocketing costs are a product of a business being able to charge more and more because consumers and lenders keep signing off on any loan, no matter the costs. Yes, there are some rich people that can and will pay whatever college costs are to make sure their kids have the opportunity, but for regular people, the model is severely broken.

So this is a good time to revisit the phrase, return on investment (ROI). In short, an ROI is how many years it would take to recuperate your initial investment. For example, when I graduated college, the average annual salary for a high school graduate was around $22k. By comparison, the average salary of a 4-year college graduate at that time was $32,000 (National Association of Colleges and Employers, https://www.naceweb.org/). Assuming these generalizations were accurate, if a 4-year degree at that time cost $50,000 and I had the choice to either earn $22,000 out of high school with just a diploma OR pay for a bachelor’s degree and make $32,000, a difference of $10,000; I would see a 5-year ROI since I made $10,000 more per year and the initial cost was $50,000. One problem of this theory is, it’s a lot more specific and complicated than that. A 4-year engineering degree and a 4-year psychology degree cost the same amount of money to earn, but the job prospects and average salaries are a lot different. The same calculation should be considered for any education you’re paying for with the intent of providing career and income opportunities, be it college, technical school, apprenticeship, or any training.

The obvious advice: start teaching kids about ROI when they’re looking at the cost of education and the associated careers and job prospects. Only when you critically evaluate cost, associated career salaries and prospects, and the calculated ROI, can you make a smart financial decision rather than hope to get lucky. If two different colleges have the same accreditation, why should someone pay College #1 $10,000 per semester over College #2’s tuition of $5,000 for the same degree? Why do Sallie Mae and other lenders sign off on these loans without an ROI evaluation? Might it be that they care about money and keeping you in debt more than your long-term financial success? If I ever suggested in private industry that my company should sign off on debt that we had no realistic means of paying back in 5 or 10 years, I’d lose all credibility at the least or possibly be fired. Why should someone go in debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars if only a small percentage of those in their chosen field make more than the average high school graduate without secondary education?

When I started my first two years at community college, I hadn’t ever heard of ROI or know how to calculate it. I knew it was going to cost less than $2000 per year for college, so I signed up, anticipating a mechanical engineering degree would eventually get me more money than I would need to pay back those loans. Only when I started applying to state colleges and university did I realize the disparity between tuition at different institutions. I was told by my advisor at community college to look for an ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) accredited college if I wanted to earn a Bachelor’s degree in engineering. I applied to four colleges with this accreditation, was accepted to three of them, and went to the least expensive. The tuition was only about $2000 per year (barely more than my community college) compared to the most expensive college I applied to, which was about $20,000 per year! Without calculating ROI, I knew which education I was more comfortable paying back!

A Confession

When I set out to write about the high costs of tuition, I had a preconceived notion that all costs were ridiculous and that there were rarely situations that college was worth the cost anymore. I figured my conclusion was going to be don’t go to college, but rather look at technical schools and trades, because this is where the real ROI is, plus you don’t have to sacrifice four years of income earning potential. But, the more investigation I did, the more I realized there are still reasonable options. Obviously, costs had gone up a lot since I went to college in the mid-1990s, but it wasn’t all doom and gloom. The community college I attended isn’t less than $2000 per year anymore, more like $4500, but you can still wrap up your first two years of college for about $9k. Similarly, my alma mater no longer checks in at $2k per year, and is now about $6400, but again, a four year degree totaling $22k plus room, board, and books isn’t all that terrible if you earn a degree that substantially boosts your income potential like a STEM career. For a bit more than double my costs in the mid-1990s, engineers now start at about double what I did out of college; seems fair. Room, board, and books can add quite a bit to these costs, but between living with family or taking on roommates if you have no family close-by, there are some serious cost-cutting options. Ramen or PB&J for dinner, anyone?

The problem is that students too often aren’t considering costs, how much more money their chosen degree can earn them, or what the prospects are in that field.

“But you can’t put a price on education” (implying that education is worth any cost)! Well, yes and no. I appreciate that knowledge and information are invaluable, but to get that piece of paper that reads “Bachelor of…”, it will cost you whatever your college or technical school of your choice charges for credit hours and supplies needed; so you can put a price on education. I guess you could say there’s a cost to an institution acknowledging an education? But why would you pay 6 figures for a degree that will get you no better of a salary than any high school graduate could muster selling real estate or cars?

If you have a thirst for knowledge and want to study something purely for the sake of human curiosity but the piece of paper that proves you know what you’re talking about won’t earn you a return, might I direct you to the internet or library for some free learning? This way, you can pursue your hobbies and interests in your personal time while keeping your money in your pocket.

Yes, the same place that brings you 24/7 political decisiveness, non-stop videos of cute animals being derps, and all the time-wasting social medias you can consume (along with all other sorts of unsavory topics I won’t delve into), also brings you all the knowledge of any topic you care to research. My kids, who have home-schooled their whole lives, have learned from sources like Khan Academy (https://www.khanacademy.org/) and YouTube (www.youtube.com) to Prodigy (www.prodigygame.com) and Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com). Yes, you have to siphon through some bullshit when it comes to YouTube, but there is a lot of good there. Feeling a bit old-school? The local library still offers a ton of free books to borrow, covering about any educational topic.

So, What are My Options?

A return on investment means keeping costs low and potential for income high. A college degree is an investment in your career, so treat it like one. If you can get a high quality, reasonable cost, accredited education with a high starting salary in an in-demand field with only a few years or less ROI, Yahtzee! If that doesn’t describe your prospects, time to lower the costs and/or find a field with a higher demand and salary. Community college is a great way to shave costs between lower tuition plus potentially cutting out room and board costs (thanks Mom and Dad)! Once you transfer to a university and earn your Bachelor’s degree, that 4-year college’s name will be on the degree that you list on your resume and carries just as much clout as someone that attended that school for all four years.

To cut costs even more, how does free sound? One thing that shocked me while I was digging into costs for college was learning that there are actually free accredited colleges out there! Keep in mind you’ll still need to figure the costs of books and room and board, but there are options.

• https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/slideshows/tuition-free-colleges?onepage
• https://www.collegeconsensus.com/rankings/best-tuition-free-colleges/

I was also surprised to learn that some states offer free community college (https://students.collegefactual.com/blog/us-states-with-free-college).

And for a handy guide of degrees offering higher than usual ROI:

• https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/best-roi-degrees
• https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/college-majors-with-the-best-return-on-investment

Outside of a college education, we’re missing out on a couple of other options to prepare for careers that can offer a great ROI. Technical and trade schools may have a bad rap, but if you do your research, many are highly regarded and can earn you a high paying job without going in debt for what amounts to a typical mortgage. In some instances, you may not even need a trade school and can luck into an apprenticeship. Rather than paying for an education to learn a trade like welding, carpentry, or plumbing, you can actually learn and get hands on experience while also getting paid! You may not earn a whole lot more than typical entry level, but earning $15 or $20 an hour to learn rather than paying many times that is better, right? Salaries in the trades keep increasing at a faster rate too because there are fewer people in those fields.

Slap a Bow On It

So the answer to the question, “Is College Worth the Cost Anymore?”, I offer a definite: it depends. The important thing to recognize is that a college education can be the first step to a rewarding career, a hell-hole of debt that will bankrupt you and prevent you from ever getting ahead, or more likely, somewhere in between. Before going to a college because you really like the brochure and enjoyed a specific high school class in your chosen major, know the job prospects, know the approximate salary, and make sure you’ll get your money back out of the education costs. Most colleges provide estimated costs for everything from tuition, fees, books, meals, and other related living costs, so use those to figure your total costs, and find an online loan payback calculator to estimate your after-college payments if you pay back over 5 years or 10 years. Consider options to save money like a community college to get started, living with friends or relatives, and eating lots of ramen and cereal for a few years. Finally, if it doesn’t make sense to pay for college, don’t. Learn it online for free. Find a career that you enjoy and won’t bankrupt you with no prospects of a career in that field. And, don’t forget the trades! For some, there is nothing more rewarding than building something with your hands, and thanks to so many people preferring the college route, those jobs are in high demand and paying more than ever.