<p>"It's a gas."</p>
<p>How much has money or the potential for it factored into your choice of a college major?</p>
<p>For me it was a pretty big factor, because I'm the practical type and feel the need for a good ROI on my education.</p>
<p>So what is your major?</p>
<p>So how did you factor ROI?</p>
<p>Accounting is my major (CPA is my goal)... </p>
<p>ROI was figured under hypothetical situations, with a basic figure. Basically using websites like bls.gov, and imanet.org...I gathered some basic salary statistics for different accounting careers, multiplied the salary figure by the amount of time I am spending in school to come up with the ending value, divided it by my final cost of school, and subtracted by one. </p>
<p>Ex: if my realistic potential salary is $70,000, I multipy it by 5 years (for a MAcc)--not adjusted for inflation, because the salary numbers are given in today's money--and divide it by my total costs of school, then subtract one, and get my time in school ROI. Over my entire lifetime, the ROI is potentially MUCH greater, but a lot more vague to figure out.</p>
<p>Let me get this straight.........5 years of education yields 30 years of income. I don't exactly see your process.</p>
<p>nope, essentially what I said is that to figure the ROI on time (opportunity cost) and money spent I compared equal time amounts. To do this, I figured what my realistic potential annual salary would be in a typical accounting career (whether its not for 25 years down the road, or 3 years after graduating--i figure it doesn't matter, because most likely the salary is achieved in a big part by my educational training), and multiplied it by the same amount of time spent getting the education that opened the doors to this potential salary. This is my comparative ending value. Since I can't figure in future unknowns about health, economy, technology, I didn't. The number in my previous post was hypothetical for an example/illustration.</p>
<p>Average salaries for different fields could easily change positively or negatively over 4 years due to supply and demand.</p>
<p>^^^ How this affects CPAs is a tough determination, because the CPA designation provides its possessor much career mobility.</p>