Today I ran across a graphic from The Economist in March 2015 that shows the return on investment (ROI) to different college majors by level of selectivity of the college the student attended. The charts show that while college pays, it does not pay the same for everyone. More specifically, it does not pay the same for every major. Engineering and math majors have high ROIs, followed by business and economics majors. Humanities and arts majors have lower ROIs on average.
If you’re underwhelmed by the realization, you should be. After all, it’s really common sense and something I’ve written about before here. But it’s a fact that seems incomprehensible to so many (for starters, count the number of votes Bernie Sanders has received). This is im
portant because college education is subsidized not by degree, but by the expense of the school the student chooses. An arts major at Stanford is paying the same tuition as the engineering major–and likely borrowing just as much money–but their returns on investment for those educations are vastly different. Put another way, the value of those degrees are very different, even if the price of the degrees is the same.
Interestingly, though, the ROI by degree does not change much based on the selectivity of the school (typically a measure of quality). Looking at each of the degree types, there is very little obvious correlation between selectivity and ROI (taking into account financial aid; i.e., based on net-cost not listed tuition). While students from more selective schools may earn higher starting salaries, the higher cost of their education means they are getting no better return on their financial investment than students of similar majors at much less selective schools.
This suggests that the market for college graduates is actually working pretty darn well when you take into account students’ degrees (i.e., the value of the human capital they develop in college).
It also suggests we should reconsider federal policy for student loans. If we insist on continuing to subsidize higher education (and all the ills that creates), at least we could do it more intelligently by tying loan amounts to degree programs rather than tuition levels.