All non-profit, 4-year US colleges and universities were included. Red dots are public schools, blue dots are private schools, size of each dot corresponds to undergraduate population. Both trend lines are LSRLs. Data is from 2023.
Source: [https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data](https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data) from US Dept. of Education College Scorecard, most recent institution data(2023). Tools: numpy, matplotlib, and scipy.
geeklimit on
Would love to see one with college name labels, especially to see who the outliers are!
Although I wonder how this works when, for example, in a college with a good nursing program has a small percentage of graduates who skew their median, while churning out a lot of non-nurses who are all unemployed.
Error_404_403 on
My read: only the most expensive private universities provide enough of the income boost to justify the cost of education in them. Meaning, in majority of the cases, public universities are a better option.
caucasian88 on
It’s only “worth” it in the sense that these degrees are required for jobs as a way of gatekeeping younger people from jobs. There are only a handful of industries that require higher education or professional certifications from a college education.
I just learned that the UK has professional apprenticeships. We desperately need that in the US.
Karrottz on
There are 100% some uncontrolled variables here which makes this data a lot less useful. For example, people who enrol in private colleges probably have generational wealth anyways, meaning they are more likely to have a higher income anyways. Reading this graph and not considering factors like that might lead to people making some incorrect conclusions.
Bad_Commit_46_pres on
damn i wonder where i would be on this list. i went to a public school in 2023. less than 10k tuition.
and my salary is also off the chart, almost double the highest BLUE dot even though i should be a red dot.
feels good to be an outlier
Jets237 on
So the answer is.
maybe… or at least sometimes
magmcbride on
I would say any undergraduate program with good vocational training located in a region where that industry is active, *might* be worth considering. I got a CS & Math degree and graduated in 2010 – it has opened many economic doors for me in life. It also only cost around $30,000 USD in 2010 dollars. ($44k today)
It probably took 8 years to pass the break even point economically, but now I’m miles ahead of where I’d likely be without the piece of paper. In summary, short term nah long term hell yea.
Feldii on
It would be nice to see the base line—income at 32 without a college degree. I think that’s about $42k. Also, a tricky issue here is scholarships. Many people, especially at private universities, don’t actually pay full tuition.
Tommyblockhead20 on
Whats the private university that seems better than public ones, is it Brigham Young?
What-Do-I-Know on
Just eyeballing it, the trend line characterizing public universities seems way off. Given the dots presented, looks like the trend line should be much more vertical.
The implication of this is that spending more on public education doesn’t get you much in way of a return. Would be interesting to look at this broken down my major or occupation.
underlander on
oh wow, sure is . . . the default chart settings from matplotlib
elfonzi37 on
Gotta get the poor kids that go to top schools to take that lockheed martin job offer somehow.
Current_Lack_535 on
Both of these trend lines look like terrible fits
stron2am on
Tuition is not a great independent variable because every university use pricing models that do not map cleanly onto tuition “sticker prics.” . For instance, fancy schools might advertise a very high tuition rate to *signal* their elite status to prospective students, but they also give out lots and lots of financial aid to basically every student, so the median price that students *actually* pay for 4 years of college is substantially lower.
I believe Duke does this, if not others. NPR’s *Planet Money* ran a story on it a few years back.
Atomic_ad on
Does your career path goals require degree? Then yes, its worth it. I think if you are going into STEM its a great idea.
If you are going for something like philosophy, it is not worth it unless you have a career path in mind. In 2025 you can study philosophy relatively easily for free.
figgypudding531 on
The title isn’t really what this graph is capturing. It’s not a question of income with a college degree vs. without, it’s “Is going to a college with high tuition vs. low tuition worth the extra cost?” And I guess the answer is yes, for private at least.
nondescriptun on
Interesting, but OP’s headline is misleading. This chart speaks more as to whether spending more on college is worth it than whether college itself is worth it. It provides no real data on that question.
lokicramer on
For many carrer paths its not worth it anymore.
For things like the medical field, engineering, law, it still is pretty necessary.
Aside from select and shrinking career paths, earnings between careers that require degrees, and those that dont have began to match, and in some cases, the non degree careers pay more.
This is especially exacerbated when you consider the debt to earning ratio.
An entry level plumber, depending on location, can earn between 30, and 60 dollars an hour, and would have no student loans.
Trade jobs, while looked down upon from the 80s to 2010’s are proving to be the safest career choices.
Many of them are recession proof, and will likely be among the very last to be under threat from any sort of automation.
Electricians, plumbers, HVAC, ect.
marigolds6 on
This trend line might be related to location rather than college quality, with both salaries and tuition being driven up by high cost of living states, particularly when that is concentrated in VHCOL cities.
spottie_ottie on
Start rich stay rich, that’s the message.
geek66 on
Tuition may only be a fraction of cost to attend… and then ROI may be a better function to compare against.
But a huge problem are what I call “boutique” majors and degrees that get hyped up for HS students making $100k commitments that really do not have commercial value.
Internal-Pianist-314 on
I hate shit like this that leaves out a huge factor. Even the lowest paying white collar jobs tend to have a better quality of life then the middle level blue collar jobs. So even if someone is only making 60k a year it is better to do that answer phones then digging holes. Hour wise and life expectancy wise
maringue on
This interestingly exposes the *real* thing people are paying for: to be initiated into “the network”.
That’s why private college students cluster into two very different groups: one that gets the benefit from “the network” because their parents are members, and the students who don’t and end up with the same salaries as public school students.
teakwoodtile on
What is a “private college”? Don’t think we have those here in Canada unless it’s a for-profit a la DeVry??
pvisc on
Aaah US. Happy to be graduated with less than 300€ in tuition. Not per year. In total. Bachelor + master.
With a salary which is on par with the average of public US universities.
I think it’s just not worth it to be destroyed by the US high education racket.
Fickle-Ad7259 on
This is a great plot. I wonder what the relationship would look like if you extracted the top 20 (maybe even 50) private schools that seem to be skewing the data based on some comments. You could make some really interesting correlations then. “You pay 150% more for tuition for a 110% increase in expected pay which likely won’t pay for itself in 10 years”
Real-Psychology-4261 on
TLDR: **Public Schools are a MUCH better VALUE than private schools.**
dsp_guy on
No issues with the graph itself, looks great. What throws off the interpretation is that while not all degrees have the same earning potential, they generally all cost the same at any given institution.
Who is to say that the average student at a public university isn’t leaning towards STEM, Medical, Finance while many at private universities don’t happen to lean a little more towards education and performing arts?
In some ways, it is ambiguous. However, many who apply to a university have already declared a major or at least a general field. Maybe they couldn’t get in for a particular degree at a public school, so they had to pay a premium to go to a private school for the same degree.
Mr-Blah on
I think a distribution curve might serve to illustrate better the point here: Top college *can* lead to higher wages but the distribution of results is much much wider than for public colleges.
If I was to bet, I’d go for a public college. Yes, the max outcome is lower, but the grouping is much more interesting making it more of a “sure shot” to gain an advantage on the job market.
substituted_pinions on
Would be easier to digest with typical degree _cost_ (sub-aggregated by major) which would include as other commenters rightly suggest discounts. Also this comparison doesn’t tell us if college is worth it, just that private college is probably not.
ohanse on
Seems like private ain’t worth it unless you are going to an elite private university.
Clear-Might-253 on
Can someone explain the results here to my dumb self?
StumpyTheGiant on
This is an ugly chart. It is supposed to be beautiful.
Soulfighter56 on
Gotta find out which ones are those at the top. Also, seeing this data matched against tuition would be useful for determining value.
DCTiger5 on
Great chart. Could you include for-profit schools on here too?
dasquared on
I’m curious why the data stops at 5k undergrads – many good private unis have fewer, especially STEM small private schools.
TieFighterRobin on
There’s a lot that makes this pointless and uninterpretable.
First off. The lack of plotting a non college data point means the titles just sounds like AI/human slop.
Secondly, as others have mentioned the tuition in no way reflects the cost of attendance for private or for public. Scholarships. Fees. Housing. All that good important a stuff.
I do give points for the clean presentation though. It’s a nice use of the tools. The underlying data is just useless at face value.
naileyes on
also i’ll say i’m doing pretty well now, but was in grad school exactly 10 years after graduation, so my income would have been on the very very bottom of this scale
Darklyth on
Oh god no. If they lowered the price by at least half, then sure it would be worth it. But you can learn anything you would in college from just a week or two of research on your own. They take a semester- a year to teach you something you could easily learn in just a month.
zAbso on
I think you should make this more granular. There’s a difference between someone getting a degree in Art History and someone getting a degree in Electrical Engineering.
What would be more interesting is if you made a series of charts that were based on degree/field. In that you can have tuition, income in 10 years, scholarships awarded compared to taking out debt, and possibly even add in whether or not they’re working the field they got a degree in.
Just doing income in 10 years over tuition leaves out a lot of contextual information.
ThinkBlue87 on
1. Please use commas!
2. It is hard to make any conclusions from this. It appears that the average salaries are higher for private, but it is not intuitive whether that extra “investment” pays out
3. You’re title says “Is college still worth it?” But only include data for people that went to college. Wouldn’t you want to include non-college salaries?
Gowniakis_Dad on
As others are pointing out there are many contributing factors not represented here but just from the graph it shows investing an extra 60k earns you roughly 20k extra pa. So it pays for itself after just 3 years.
TheGumping on
Would also like to see trade schools in here to do a good comparison.
vt2022cam on
I’d love to see the data on which colleges and where they appear.
collint1995 on
Do first 1.5-2 years at community college… saved me a lot of money. Those early years are pretty irrelevant anyways.
Sol-Gyopo on
I like the graph, but there is one thing that is missing which is a baseline comparison group, namely those that didn’t go to college. Even the average line for those that didn’t go can help with the interpretation.
ZamboniJ on
It’s worth it depending on your major.
groovinup on
Short answer, hell no. Not for most.
That doesn’t mean most high school graduates should not at least consider it, and know what they are saying no to. If an affordable state college degree, is available in a field that has evergreen demand, then sure.
But those evergreen fields are continuously shrinking. Not even a CS degree is a guarantee anymore.
The best guarantee, if I was a 18 year-old graduating high school, I would go straight into trade school, learn how to be a plumber, electrician, HVAC tech, appliance tech … something that cannot be eliminated or encroached upon by AI.
Those fields and skills can also lead to a small business ownership in the future for those who have that ambition. And they’re portable anywhere in the country.
49 Comments
Source: [https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data](https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data) from US Dept. of Education College Scorecard, most recent institution data(2023). Tools: numpy, matplotlib, and scipy.
Would love to see one with college name labels, especially to see who the outliers are!
Although I wonder how this works when, for example, in a college with a good nursing program has a small percentage of graduates who skew their median, while churning out a lot of non-nurses who are all unemployed.
My read: only the most expensive private universities provide enough of the income boost to justify the cost of education in them. Meaning, in majority of the cases, public universities are a better option.
It’s only “worth” it in the sense that these degrees are required for jobs as a way of gatekeeping younger people from jobs. There are only a handful of industries that require higher education or professional certifications from a college education.
I just learned that the UK has professional apprenticeships. We desperately need that in the US.
There are 100% some uncontrolled variables here which makes this data a lot less useful. For example, people who enrol in private colleges probably have generational wealth anyways, meaning they are more likely to have a higher income anyways. Reading this graph and not considering factors like that might lead to people making some incorrect conclusions.
damn i wonder where i would be on this list. i went to a public school in 2023. less than 10k tuition.
and my salary is also off the chart, almost double the highest BLUE dot even though i should be a red dot.
feels good to be an outlier
So the answer is.
maybe… or at least sometimes
I would say any undergraduate program with good vocational training located in a region where that industry is active, *might* be worth considering. I got a CS & Math degree and graduated in 2010 – it has opened many economic doors for me in life. It also only cost around $30,000 USD in 2010 dollars. ($44k today)
It probably took 8 years to pass the break even point economically, but now I’m miles ahead of where I’d likely be without the piece of paper. In summary, short term nah long term hell yea.
It would be nice to see the base line—income at 32 without a college degree. I think that’s about $42k. Also, a tricky issue here is scholarships. Many people, especially at private universities, don’t actually pay full tuition.
Whats the private university that seems better than public ones, is it Brigham Young?
Just eyeballing it, the trend line characterizing public universities seems way off. Given the dots presented, looks like the trend line should be much more vertical.
The implication of this is that spending more on public education doesn’t get you much in way of a return. Would be interesting to look at this broken down my major or occupation.
oh wow, sure is . . . the default chart settings from matplotlib
Gotta get the poor kids that go to top schools to take that lockheed martin job offer somehow.
Both of these trend lines look like terrible fits
Tuition is not a great independent variable because every university use pricing models that do not map cleanly onto tuition “sticker prics.” . For instance, fancy schools might advertise a very high tuition rate to *signal* their elite status to prospective students, but they also give out lots and lots of financial aid to basically every student, so the median price that students *actually* pay for 4 years of college is substantially lower.
I believe Duke does this, if not others. NPR’s *Planet Money* ran a story on it a few years back.
Does your career path goals require degree? Then yes, its worth it. I think if you are going into STEM its a great idea.
If you are going for something like philosophy, it is not worth it unless you have a career path in mind. In 2025 you can study philosophy relatively easily for free.
The title isn’t really what this graph is capturing. It’s not a question of income with a college degree vs. without, it’s “Is going to a college with high tuition vs. low tuition worth the extra cost?” And I guess the answer is yes, for private at least.
Interesting, but OP’s headline is misleading. This chart speaks more as to whether spending more on college is worth it than whether college itself is worth it. It provides no real data on that question.
For many carrer paths its not worth it anymore.
For things like the medical field, engineering, law, it still is pretty necessary.
Aside from select and shrinking career paths, earnings between careers that require degrees, and those that dont have began to match, and in some cases, the non degree careers pay more.
This is especially exacerbated when you consider the debt to earning ratio.
An entry level plumber, depending on location, can earn between 30, and 60 dollars an hour, and would have no student loans.
Trade jobs, while looked down upon from the 80s to 2010’s are proving to be the safest career choices.
Many of them are recession proof, and will likely be among the very last to be under threat from any sort of automation.
Electricians, plumbers, HVAC, ect.
This trend line might be related to location rather than college quality, with both salaries and tuition being driven up by high cost of living states, particularly when that is concentrated in VHCOL cities.
Start rich stay rich, that’s the message.
Tuition may only be a fraction of cost to attend… and then ROI may be a better function to compare against.
But a huge problem are what I call “boutique” majors and degrees that get hyped up for HS students making $100k commitments that really do not have commercial value.
I hate shit like this that leaves out a huge factor. Even the lowest paying white collar jobs tend to have a better quality of life then the middle level blue collar jobs. So even if someone is only making 60k a year it is better to do that answer phones then digging holes. Hour wise and life expectancy wise
This interestingly exposes the *real* thing people are paying for: to be initiated into “the network”.
That’s why private college students cluster into two very different groups: one that gets the benefit from “the network” because their parents are members, and the students who don’t and end up with the same salaries as public school students.
What is a “private college”? Don’t think we have those here in Canada unless it’s a for-profit a la DeVry??
Aaah US. Happy to be graduated with less than 300€ in tuition. Not per year. In total. Bachelor + master.
With a salary which is on par with the average of public US universities.
I think it’s just not worth it to be destroyed by the US high education racket.
This is a great plot. I wonder what the relationship would look like if you extracted the top 20 (maybe even 50) private schools that seem to be skewing the data based on some comments. You could make some really interesting correlations then. “You pay 150% more for tuition for a 110% increase in expected pay which likely won’t pay for itself in 10 years”
TLDR: **Public Schools are a MUCH better VALUE than private schools.**
No issues with the graph itself, looks great. What throws off the interpretation is that while not all degrees have the same earning potential, they generally all cost the same at any given institution.
Who is to say that the average student at a public university isn’t leaning towards STEM, Medical, Finance while many at private universities don’t happen to lean a little more towards education and performing arts?
In some ways, it is ambiguous. However, many who apply to a university have already declared a major or at least a general field. Maybe they couldn’t get in for a particular degree at a public school, so they had to pay a premium to go to a private school for the same degree.
I think a distribution curve might serve to illustrate better the point here: Top college *can* lead to higher wages but the distribution of results is much much wider than for public colleges.
If I was to bet, I’d go for a public college. Yes, the max outcome is lower, but the grouping is much more interesting making it more of a “sure shot” to gain an advantage on the job market.
Would be easier to digest with typical degree _cost_ (sub-aggregated by major) which would include as other commenters rightly suggest discounts. Also this comparison doesn’t tell us if college is worth it, just that private college is probably not.
Seems like private ain’t worth it unless you are going to an elite private university.
Can someone explain the results here to my dumb self?
This is an ugly chart. It is supposed to be beautiful.
Gotta find out which ones are those at the top. Also, seeing this data matched against tuition would be useful for determining value.
Great chart. Could you include for-profit schools on here too?
I’m curious why the data stops at 5k undergrads – many good private unis have fewer, especially STEM small private schools.
There’s a lot that makes this pointless and uninterpretable.
First off. The lack of plotting a non college data point means the titles just sounds like AI/human slop.
Secondly, as others have mentioned the tuition in no way reflects the cost of attendance for private or for public. Scholarships. Fees. Housing. All that good important a stuff.
I do give points for the clean presentation though. It’s a nice use of the tools. The underlying data is just useless at face value.
also i’ll say i’m doing pretty well now, but was in grad school exactly 10 years after graduation, so my income would have been on the very very bottom of this scale
Oh god no. If they lowered the price by at least half, then sure it would be worth it. But you can learn anything you would in college from just a week or two of research on your own. They take a semester- a year to teach you something you could easily learn in just a month.
I think you should make this more granular. There’s a difference between someone getting a degree in Art History and someone getting a degree in Electrical Engineering.
What would be more interesting is if you made a series of charts that were based on degree/field. In that you can have tuition, income in 10 years, scholarships awarded compared to taking out debt, and possibly even add in whether or not they’re working the field they got a degree in.
Just doing income in 10 years over tuition leaves out a lot of contextual information.
1. Please use commas!
2. It is hard to make any conclusions from this. It appears that the average salaries are higher for private, but it is not intuitive whether that extra “investment” pays out
3. You’re title says “Is college still worth it?” But only include data for people that went to college. Wouldn’t you want to include non-college salaries?
As others are pointing out there are many contributing factors not represented here but just from the graph it shows investing an extra 60k earns you roughly 20k extra pa. So it pays for itself after just 3 years.
Would also like to see trade schools in here to do a good comparison.
I’d love to see the data on which colleges and where they appear.
Do first 1.5-2 years at community college… saved me a lot of money. Those early years are pretty irrelevant anyways.
I like the graph, but there is one thing that is missing which is a baseline comparison group, namely those that didn’t go to college. Even the average line for those that didn’t go can help with the interpretation.
It’s worth it depending on your major.
Short answer, hell no. Not for most.
That doesn’t mean most high school graduates should not at least consider it, and know what they are saying no to. If an affordable state college degree, is available in a field that has evergreen demand, then sure.
But those evergreen fields are continuously shrinking. Not even a CS degree is a guarantee anymore.
The best guarantee, if I was a 18 year-old graduating high school, I would go straight into trade school, learn how to be a plumber, electrician, HVAC tech, appliance tech … something that cannot be eliminated or encroached upon by AI.
Those fields and skills can also lead to a small business ownership in the future for those who have that ambition. And they’re portable anywhere in the country.