As high school seniors ponder the route they want to take for college, a fresh cache of data sheds light on which higher education institutions and programs are paying off for students — and which ones are yielding smaller pay days.
EdSurge crunched the newest batch of data from the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard to see how colleges stack up when it comes to earnings, student debt and graduation rates. The figures are based on information from students who received federal aid, whether grants or loans, at public colleges and universities.
The results are four charts that show what college is worth in terms of cash.
Weighing Earnings Against Debt
As student borrowers scramble to make sense of the court battle over Biden-era repayment policies, it’s no wonder that some high schoolers are wary of the prospect of taking on debt to pay for their education.
Taking a bird’s-eye view of the salaries that students are landing six years after first enrolling in their college of choice, at least half of top 10 institutions for earnings are maritime academies or have strong maritime programs.
We’ve written in the past about naval architecture, the niche but profitable college major where graduates can find themselves at the helm of huge engineering projects early in their careers, experts say. Starting salaries can range from $75,000 to $85,00 for those who go the military route, or $75,000 to $100,000 for graduates who enter an industry like oil and gas.
As the median student debt of each college increases, so do the median earnings — aside from a handful that were upside down on their earnings-to-debt ratios. Grambling State University in Louisiana had the highest median student loan debt at $36,500; its students earned a median salary of about $25,600 six years after enrolling.
Bethany Hubert is a financial aid specialist at Going Merry by Earnest, a website that helps students find scholarships, where she has spent her career helping families and school counselors understand how students can fund their education.
Hubert says she has heard students express concern about the prospect of debt, but it’s not necessarily deterring them from their college plans.
“While Gen Z students especially are going to find taking on student loans to be intimidating and the cost of college to be really expensive — and they have questions about, ‘Is it even worth it?’ — they also feel a great deal of pressure from their parents and from their schools to go on to college,” Hubert explains. “Oftentimes, they feel like that's the only pathway forward for them. Even if they say, ‘OK, well, I want to go to college myself,’ they then feel pressure to take on a degree from a certain caliber of college.”
Parents are typically taking charge of the process, she says, and may be willing to take out education loans for their children.
Where Hubert does see reluctance if it means debt is among low-income and first-generation college students, who have less support when it comes to planning and funding their higher education.
“I think it comes down to the fact that in the past students could visualize the return on their investment with their education, with their degree,” she says, “but now Gen Z is coming to this place where they're thinking college might be a gamble for their financial future, not an investment. It’s kind of a multifaceted issue here, where college and career readiness really pushes college, but it doesn't always explain how to pay for college. That's something that I think a lot of schools could look at addressing.”
Data backs up what Hubert has experienced in talking to students and their parents.
In a survey of about 1,000 high school students’ attitudes about higher education, the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Third Way found that their perception of college’s potential return on investment heavily depended on students’ family income and socioeconomic status. Among students who were the most worried about the cost of higher education, 57 percent believed that a four-year degree is “worth the investment and usually pays off” compared to 88 percent of higher-income students who said the same.
“For the next generation of college students, it’s not a question of whether cost matters in their postsecondary planning but how much it matters: a combined 89% of students said cost was ‘very important’ or ‘somewhat important’ in deciding whether to attend a four-year program,” according to the organization’s analysis. “Almost one-third of students polled (29%) either are not considering a four-year degree at all or want to pursue a four-year degree but view the cost as such a barrier that they don’t consider it an option.”
Return on Investment
For students who want to earn as high a starting salary as possible after graduation, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the four-year degree programs delivering the biggest paychecks are in the sciences.
Graduates with the highest median salaries one year after graduation are those who studied computer science at the University of California-Berkeley, where students had a median salary of nearly $150,000 with a median of $13,750 in student loan debt.
Other fields among the college programs with the 100 highest earning salaries for recent graduates included nursing, pharmaceutical science, engineering, construction management and business administration. Students from these programs earned a median of roughly $90,000 or more.
The 100 college programs with the lowest starting salaries for graduates included majors like drama, fine arts, dietetics and anthropology.
Drama school graduates from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University are earning the highest median starting salaries at about $36,600, while the top median fine arts earnings were around $44,500.
