4 Charts That Show What College Is Worth

Ed Surge

Nadia Tamez-Robledo

May 5, 2022

College Scorecard and its mountainous trove of data are ripe for providing insights about the value of a degree—if you can wade through it. We decided to dig into the data to see how colleges and programs stack up when it comes to earnings for recent grads and their pay-off later in graduates’ careers. And you can see how your favorite college or major stacks up as well with these four interactive charts.

Note that the colleges included in our analysis were identified as “main campuses” by College Scorecard, a resource provided by the U.S. Department of Education that went through some changes earlier this year. Earnings and student debt are based on the medians in each category, to curb the impact of outliers. Earnings are based on salaries of former students who received federal aid, and debt refers to federal loan debt.

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