How Much More Can You Earn With a Higher Education Degree, Depending on Your Specialty
Applying to graduate school is time consuming and expensive, so the decision is not easy. How much more you can earn will depend on both your bachelor’s degree and the degree you want to pursue. This calculator shows how your lifetime earnings will increase (or even decrease) depending on your choice.
The calculator is on Quartz, and the data comes from online lender SoFi, which analyzed data from 200,000 of its users who tried to refinance their student loans over the past year.
Select the field with the bachelor’s degree, and on the right side of the chart, you will see how much your average lifetime earnings increase depending on the bachelor’s degree.
Most of them meet your expectations. If you have a liberal arts degree, earning an MA will increase your lifetime income by 8.4% – a difference of $ 223,660 over your lifetime – compared to a 175.7% increase if you went to the dental school, that is, 7,101,330 US dollars. … Of course, dental school takes longer and is more expensive. SoFi’s calculations also take into account the loss of income while in school and the cost of student loans.
The good news is that in all but four combinations, a college degree leads to higher average lifetime earnings. Exceptions as reported by Quartz:
Glaring exception: people who have completed a bachelor’s degree in engineering, business, finance, or economics, and then completed a graduate degree in fine arts, humanities, or social sciences. For example, SoFi found that a person with a Bachelor of Engineering degree had a 17% drop in average lifetime earnings after earning a Master of Fine Arts degree.
Sorry MFA alumni, but MBA students have good news: no matter what your undergraduate level, an MBA increases your average lifetime earnings from 34% to 89%.
If the data provided here doesn’t help you make a decision, you can calculate whether a graduate school is worthwhile for your particular situation and use the annual wage rule of thumb to decide whether getting a student loan for that degree will pay off.
Should you go to graduate school? Yes. May be. Definitely not | Quartz