Journal / Essay

The Math of the Degree

The first piece in this journal put the average student loan balance at $39,547. This is about whether the thing that debt bought was actually worth it — and the honest answer is that it depends enormously on two words on a diploma.

And Then You're Dead · August 2026 · 6 min read

"Is college worth it" is the wrong question, because it assumes one answer covers every degree. The right question is which degree, and the data on that is a lot less comfortable than the general encouragement to "just go to college" usually lets on.

Some Degrees Pay for Themselves Many Times Over

At the top of the list, the math is not close. A degree in management information systems or statistics returns, on average, nearly eighteen dollars in lifetime earnings for every dollar it cost.

Computer and information sciences and electrical engineering round out the top of the list, all comfortably above 1,400% lifetime return. For these degrees, the debt from the first piece in this journal is, on the numbers, a genuinely good trade.

Some Don't Pay for Themselves at All

At the bottom of the same list, the math runs the other direction entirely.

The lowest-ROI bachelor's degree — psychology — has a lifetime return of negative 122.78%. On average, it leaves graduates $54,188 worse off than if they'd never gone and just held a high school diploma.

That's not underperformance. That's the degree, on average, actively subtracting from lifetime earnings once the cost of getting it is counted — the same $39,547 of average debt from the first piece, financing an outcome that a high school diploma alone would have beaten.

The Underemployment Problem

Even for degrees that aren't negative-ROI, a large and growing share of graduates end up in jobs that never required a degree in the first place.

Business management (65%), communications (60%), and psychology (54%) all land far above the average. Nursing (11%), computer engineering (18%), and accounting (21%) sit at the other end — degrees where the credential and the job market are still tightly linked.

And Then You're Dead

You take on the debt from the first piece in this journal on a promise that's true for some majors and false for others, and the promise doesn't come with the odds attached. Some people leave with a credential that pays for itself eighteen times over. Some leave $54,000 behind where they started, holding a diploma for a job the market never actually asked for. Both of them signed the same loan paperwork. That's the plan. That's the math.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

Read the first piece · or see every essay