Is Your Degree Worth It?

One thing that you should consider when going to college if the degree that you’re going for is going to pay off in the end. If you’ve been around business-minded individuals, you may have heard of the acronym ROI thrown around. This acronym stands for Return On Investment. When a business owner makes a decision on where to move forward with their company, they must first calculate the costs of that business decision and decide on whether or not making an investment on that decision is worth the risk. What they must do is look at the figures and see how much they will likely make in return. The same should be done in deciding on whether your degree is worth the money that you’ll be putting into it.

On Bankrate.com, they posted up a short list of degrees showing the ROI students would get from these degrees. This includes the number of years required for the degree, average costs, median pay for the job the degree applies to, annual repayment of loans, and the number of years needed to pay off the investment in your education. Unfortunately, it’s not a very extensive list, but it at least gives you an idea of what to expect if you ever plan on going into one of these career fields. Another thing too is that they leave out the most important factor: what’s the job demand like? Civil Engineering has a high Return on Investment, but also a high unemployment rate as well, so just because a degree has a high ROI doesn’t necessarily mean that it also has good job security either.

What I really want to get at here is that depending on what you’re majoring it, your degree may or may not be worth going to college over. From here, you must decide what would be worth it. Do you need to go to a university, or can you go for a community college instead? Should you live on campus or would it be more worth it to commute instead? Do you need to get a 4-year degree now, or can you just settle for a 2-year degree for the time being? Would you even consider taking your entire degree online? These are all questions you should be asking yourself before investing into college.