The One Question Every Future College Student Should Ask
Each year, high school students and their families agonize over where to attend college. The better question for a student to ask is, “What should I major in and where?” The rising costs of attending a four-year university and the growing questions about the value it provides mean that students and families need to be more discerning than ever about this life-changing decision.
Some universities have hundreds of college programs, and many have a track record of propelling students to great heights. Still, many others leave the typical student saddled with mountains of debt and few career prospects.
For example, at my alma mater, the University of Delaware, a degree in Management Information Systems and Services will leave the average student $1.5 million better off in terms of lifetime earnings than if they did not complete the degree. On the other hand, the school’s fine arts, wildlife management, and international relations programs leave students more than $100,000 worse off. So does a degree in neuroscience. You can see all this information in a new tool that allows families to access college program ROI data instantly—data that paints a rather grim picture.
Today, one in three college programs leaves students worse off. This calls into question everything we have been told for generations about the necessity of pursuing higher education. According to the excellent work of Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute and former senior fellow at The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, most bachelor’s degrees (77 percent) pay off, but that’s only true for 57 percent of associate degrees and an equal share of master’s degrees.
Many of the programs to seek out or avoid are commonsense. Programs in the arts or those with the word “studies” in the name, especially at the graduate level, do poorly, while many computer science programs do quite well. But others are surprising. For example, high-quality liberal arts programs do very well (but lower-quality ones do not).
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