College ROI Calculator

The premium is the gross difference in career earnings between the degree path and the no-degree path, compounded over your working years. A 3.5% vs 2.0% growth gap applied to a $30,000 starting salary gap turns into a multi-million-dollar difference over 38 years: even before subtracting costs. The headline Net ROI already nets out tuition, opportunity cost, and loan interest, so use that number, not the premium alone, to judge whether the path is worth it.

3–4% is defensible for most fields over a 30-year horizon: that combines roughly 2% inflation with 1–2% real wage growth from promotions and tenure. CS / engineering and finance often run 4–5% early-career; education and most non-profit work runs closer to 2–3%. The default of 3.5% with-degree vs 2.0% no-degree is conservative-to-typical; the gap is what drives the model, not the absolute rates.

Break-even is the year when the with-degree path's cumulative cashflow (out-of-pocket school costs during study, then loan payments) overtakes the no-degree path's cumulative earnings. If your with-degree salary is barely above the no-degree salary, or loans are large, the lines may never cross within a working lifetime. That is the model telling you the math doesn't work at these inputs. The practical fix is usually to lower tuition, reduce loans, or revisit whether the salary projection is realistic for your major and market.

It's the salary you could realistically earn today in your area without a 4-year degree: entry-level admin, retail management, skilled service, sales, hospitality, or trade-adjacent work. National median for high-school-only workers runs about $40,000 (BLS, 2023). Use the local rate you'd actually take if you didn't go to school. This is the most important counterfactual input: if you set it too low, every degree looks brilliant.

A lot, deliberately. It does not model: taxes (premiums are pre-tax dollars), employer benefits (health, 401(k) match, RSUs), investment of saved money (a low-cost path leaves you with capital that can compound), graduate-school detours after the first degree, unemployment spells, major-specific completion rates, geographic moves, non-financial returns (network, signaling, personal growth), or price inflation in tuition during your study years. Treat the headline as a defensible order-of-magnitude estimate, not a guarantee.

The comparison shows what each path typically costs using benchmark defaults: not what you'd pay if you took your active path's tuition and applied it to community college. If we let your tuition slider drive all four bars, switching to a $50k tuition would also make trade school look like a $50k path, which isn't a meaningful comparison. The salary, no-degree salary, and career-length sliders DO flow through to all four paths because those are about you, not the institution.

Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook entry-level medians for representative roles in each field, rounded to a defensible round number. They're starting points, not destinations: adjust based on your specific role, the employer (FAANG vs regional firm), and the metro you'll work in. NYC, SF, Seattle, and Boston run 20–40% above the national median for most fields; rural and lower-cost metros run below.