Is $70,000 per year for an undergraduate degree worth it?

Note that the savings rates varied over time (page 61 of the linked paper).

For the bottom 90%, the savings rate varied from around 11% in 1982-1983 to as low as -8% (almost certainly increasing debt) in 2006 (it was negative from 1998-2008). It was close to 0% in 2009-2011 (2011 is the latest year shown). Over longer terms, the bottom 90% had about a 5% savings rate from the 1940s to 1980s, while the top 10% excluding the top 1% had about 30-35% savings rates from the 1940s to 1970s, but then dropped. The top 1% historically had high (though variable across decades) savings rates except in the 1930s when it was negative (perhaps due to negative income from loss-making capital investments).

“The career world makes no distinction between schools with their bachelors requirements.”

Not true enough in all cases that you can generalize like that.

“I doubt that paying $70K per year for undergrad would ever be a proper financial decision.”

In terms of purely ROI if you could go to a good school for cheap, it would be tough to justify except for some somewhat rare exceptions, yes.

“The career world makes no distinction between schools with their bachelors requirements”

This is false. You can graduate from college A as a math major and cover 60% of the content that you’d cover at college B. And if you think that employers who hire math majors straight out of undergrad don’t know this, then I have a bridge to sell you. You can graduate from college C as a history major, without ever having used primary sources, developed an original idea and defended it with contemporaneous evidence, and the most difficult thing you’ve had to produce is a 15 page paper
 or graduate from college D as a history major with a thesis or original research requirement which uses primary sources (some of which have never been cited or published before) which is 80 pages long including detailed footnotes, annotations, and interviews AND required translating documents from the original into English.

Do you think employers don’t know the difference? Of course they do. I’ve recruited on campuses where a B average gets you into the Honor Society for various majors, and campuses where only the top 10% of students get any Honors designation. I’ve interviewed kids majoring in International Business who haven’t taken any second language (are they planning to spend their careers in London and Sydney?) and kids where the MINIMUM requirement for any international degree is full on fluency.

You are delusional if you think employers don’t know the difference.

This question has many valid answers, depending upon the finances of whoever is paying the bills. Set aside financial aid or scholarships, $70,000.00 a year would not be worth it for most people. For those who have the income, there are far worse things to spend that kind of money on, so it’s definitely worth it. And, for the record, there are employers who do care about where you went to school. Some of it is pure snobbery, some of it is based on past experience with graduates from particular institutions being either prepared or unprepared to work there.

What @blossom said.

Employers know the difference, and grad schools definitely know the difference between the quality of education, the academic expectations, and what and how much students are likely to produce at different institutions. There are, of course, individual exceptions. Can a motivated student produce a brilliant masters-level thesis at Podunk U.? Absolutely! Can an underachieving student manage to graduate from a top tier university without ever having written more than a 5 to 7 page paper in any given class? Absolutely!

OP’s question involves too many variables. “Is $70,000 per year for an undergraduate degree worth it?” can only be answered after in the context of two additional criteria: 1) “worth it for whom?” (e.g. for the top 1% or for the rest of the 99%ers? How many other educations will need to be funded and how will it affect retirement or other plans?); and 2) “in what subject/field?” (e.g., What is the field of interest? Will the student be entering the workforce immediately or will he/she continue studying at the graduate level? If so, where?)

Part of the problem with considering ROI is that eduction is seen as a means to an end – never an end in and of itself. In a perfect world, the purpose of an education should be to become an informed, educated person, capable of clear thought and able to understand and evaluate complex ideas.

I don’t agree that forcing students to write novel length manuscripts is the marker of a great school. In the business world I work in, almost all communication to upper management has to be no more than 4 pages. A longer document might be 10-20 pages. College students need to learn to write well, but part of writing well is learning to be concise.

The goal of writing a thesis (or senior project of some kind) is not the number of pages- but the process of developing a hypothesis, identifying sources and facts which either support the theory or dispute it, adding ancillary information which either makes the argument clear and coherent or not.

I wasn’t suggesting that the number of pages was a marker of intellectual achievement. But the rigor involved in an original research paper/project is really not the same as a summary of secondary source material. Especially in the age of Google and Wikipedia- there isn’t much intellectual stretching if your college education consists of cutting and pasting in lieu of having to create and then defend an original idea.

And back to the posters point that employers don’t know the difference- they sure do. Corporations would stop hiring from about 20 colleges which are perennial favorites and core schools to their recruiting strategies-- because they don’t offer a BA in “business”. These companies don’t care about getting a degree in “business”- they care about hiring people who can think, analyze, calculate, write, defend an idea, do research, question, etc.

That’s not being “snobby”- that’s being pragmatic.

A more relevant senior thesis/project would require all that, but cap the paper length to a maximum of 20 pages or the length of a typical journal article in the field.

@roethlisburger Why a journal article length? How about the length of a nonfiction bestseller?

Honestly the point is the depth of research and thought and presenting that clearly and completely.

It’s OK to learn to research and write an 80 page thesis and also be able to write a persuasive memo or email, this is not either-or. Even better to determine what length is appropriate for the task at hand rather than be told.

Again- not about the pages. Again- about original work, research, primary sources, unpublished or new material.

There are colleges which do not expect that type of rigor from undergraduates in some fields. And companies know the difference between rigor and a survey of Wikipedia entries.

@roethlisburger – An individual research paper for a single class (for which a 20 page cap is reasonable) is very different than a senior thesis that pulls together four years of undergraduate learning (for which a 100 page cap might be more appropriate, but frankly the maximum number of pages should be the minimum required to put forth and defend a thesis and provide the necessary background). @blossom is referring to the latter.

It may also depend on the subject – an honors senior thesis or research paper in the humanities or social sciences is probably going to be longer than a report of the results of a series of lab experiments in a biology or chemistry laboratory. For the record, the last journal article my husband wrote in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal in the social sciences was over 80 pages. YMMV.

^^ Thesis cap in Amherst math dept, for instance, is 50 pages and fewer are encouraged. It’s a year-long effort.

https://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/departments/mathematics-statistics/major/honors/thesisreg

There’s also a comprehensive exam to pass.

@OHMomof2 - Exactly. Using Amherst as the example, for the English Dept, an honors thesis"
might be fifty to seventy five pages of critical writing, usually organized into chapters. Or it might comprise a collection of essays or poems or stories" whereas in Political Science, “Target page length of thesis: 75 pages.” Economics has cut back, asking students to “
 focus on a narrow research question, and unlike a traditional thesis will not need to include an extensive review of the literature. As such, the project will conclude with a paper 50 pages in length rather than the 100+ page thesis of years past.”

Is private college worth $70K+ per year? For about the 10 or 15 colleges with huge “signal value”? Yes, definitely. For the rest? No.

@LoveTheBard

Here’s another example. A PhD might reflect years of work and original research. The dissertation itself might be 200 pages, but that gets read by practically no one outside the committee. The important way those results get disseminated is through conferences or journal articles(which in engineering are typically 10-20 pages). You’re not going to convince me anyone who is an an effective communicator needs 50+ pages to cover the work in an undergrad thesis.

This subject is fascinating to read the responses. Everyone wants to “argue” why their view is “right” when there is no right answer. I’m assuming every family is making the best decision for their child. The best decision for my kid was applying and being accepted at Northwestern. This is his top school that he thinks will provide the best college experience for him. My wife and I had made the decision before having kids (two total) that we would save enough for our kids to go to the best fit college for them. Meaning we are paying full fare. As a National Merit Finalist, he will get at least $2,500 up to $8,000 total. Other than that, Northwestern offers no other merit opportunities. The opportunity “cost” will be $250k. That’s the difference between what we will pay for Northwestern over what we would pay if he applied to Alabama as a National Merit Finalist. Knowing my son, he would be miserable at a very large university. Being in Illinois, he didn’t want to visit Illinois or Michigan. In other words, yes $250k for him to have what he believes will provide the very best college experience is worth it.

Yay for engineering where I guess it’s good enough to skip the dissertation and just write the journal article.

Now can we acknowledge that there are hundreds of other possible fields of study that may differ?

@bluebayou We had similar experience. Our older son was accepted to two UCs, UOP, Cal Poly and ASU. ASU won due to competitve cost (lower than either UC) and ease of graduating in 4 years. Both UCs and Cal Poly were almost a given for 5 years to graduate.

Off point, but the 4-year graduation rate at UC is plenty high. It ain’t that difficult for kids who want to get out ‘on time’, particularly with the generous use of AP/IB credits. Heck, that is true even for Engineering majors, assuming that they don’t have to repeat coursework.

Cal Poly offers plenty of internships, so kids make take a semester off to work in their chosen major.

OTOH, there are a bunch of low income kids at UC/Cal State that HAVE to work part-time and help out at home so they take a minimum load and require 5 years.

Graduation rates are mostly student-related; stronger students => higher graduation rates. For a given individual student, the chance of graduating in four years probably varies little across different affordable colleges in the same major in most cases (co-ops and such are more common at some colleges, so that can alter the calendar year graduation rate, but not so much if one counts by semesters/quarters).

UCR and UCM have roughly comparable four, five, and six year graduation rates as ASU; the other UCs have higher graduation rates.