Play · education economics

College & Career ROI Explorer

Updated 2026-07-30 · Sources: 5 · Concept: education ROI, student debt, crossover year

One eighteen-year-old enrols; the other starts work. Four years later the first has a degree, a starting salary, and a loan balance; the second has four years of paychecks and no debt. This tool runs both lines for twenty years and marks the year (if there is one) that the degree path passes the working path. Then it shows you how little it takes to move that year, because the honest finding is not a winner. It is that the answer belongs to your numbers.

Predict first

A four-year public degree at $11,950 a year with half of it borrowed, leading to a $68,680 starting salary, against a one-year training programme at $4,150 leading to $51,688, starting three years sooner. In which year does the degree path pull ahead in total money kept?

Pick an estimate, or skip to your own numbers.

Path A: cost per year ($) Path A, years in school: 4 Path A: starting salary ($/yr) Path A, share of cost borrowed: Student-loan rate (%/yr) Path B: training cost per year ($) Path B, years of training: 1 Path B: starting salary ($/yr) Raises, both paths: 3%/yr

This is arithmetic, not destiny. Watch what just happened when you moved a salary slider: the crossover year jumped by five years, or vanished. That instability is the finding. A degree is not an investment product with a published yield; it is a field, a school, a debt load, a labour market, and a person, and this model knows only the last two numbers you typed. Nothing here says which path is more faithful. Scripture never ranks the lecture hall above the workshop; the carpenter's son taught in both. Work is service before it is income (see work, diligence, and vocation), and the question underneath this chart is not "which pays more?" but "what am I for?"

Method: both lines are cumulative money kept: earnings so far, minus what you paid out of pocket for schooling, minus loan payments, minus any loan still outstanding. Rent and groceries are deliberately left out because both paths pay them: subtracting the same living cost from both lines moves them down together and leaves the crossover year exactly where it was. Loans accrue interest from disbursement (the unsubsidised case) and are then amortised over ten years on the standard schedule, M = P·r(1+r)ⁿ/((1+r)ⁿ−1). Defaults and where they come from, as of 30 July 2026: cost per year $11,950: average published tuition and fees, public four-year in-state, 2025-26 (College Board, Trends in College Pricing, which also puts public two-year in-district at $4,150 and private nonprofit four-year at $45,000); Path B training cost $4,150/yr is that same public two-year in-district figure. Path A starting salary $68,680: the average projected starting salary at the bachelor's level for the Class of 2025 from the NACE salary survey, as reported by Bankrate; by major it ranged from about $60,353 (communications) to $78,731 (engineering) (BestColleges). Treat it as generous: NACE surveys employers who choose to respond (158 organisations in that round), so it leans toward large firms that recruit on campus. Path B starting salary $51,688: $994 a week, the median for full-time workers 25 and over who are high-school graduates with no college, second quarter 2026 (BLS, Usual Weekly Earnings, released 21 July 2026; bachelor's degree and higher was $1,768 a week, or $91,936 a year). That is deliberately the plain high-school median, not a skilled-trade wage, because it is the number BLS actually publishes. The Department of Labor advertises an average starting salary of $86,000 after completing a registered apprenticeship (apprenticeship.gov), though its own footnote sources that to one state's reporting system, so treat it as indicative. Type it into Path B and watch the crossover disappear. Student-loan rate 6.52%: the fixed rate on Direct Subsidized and Unsubsidized loans for undergraduates first disbursed between 1 July 2026 and 30 June 2027 (Federal Student Aid). What this model leaves out, in both directions: grant aid (College Board estimates average net tuition and fees for first-time full-time in-state students at about $2,300 for 2025-26, so a 50% borrowed share is pessimistic for many families), taxes, income while enrolled, the risk of not finishing, unemployment rates (which fall as attainment rises), employer benefits, the physical wear of some trades, and every non-financial reason either path might be the right one. A teaching model, not a forecast, and not advice.

Prepare thy work without, and make it fit for thyself in the field; and afterwards build thine house.

Proverbs 24:27

KJV. The proverb is about sequence, not thrift: get the field (the thing that will feed you) established first, and let the house follow. Applied here, it is a question about order. Whichever path you take, does it put a working trade under you before it puts debt on you?

This tool needs JavaScript. Here is the worked example it computes from the default inputs (Path A: four years at $11,950, half borrowed at 6.52% accruing from disbursement, then a $68,680 starting salary; Path B: one year of training at $4,150, then $51,688; both with 3%/yr raises, both lines counting cumulative money kept):

End of year	Path A: degree	Path B: trade
4	−$51,958	$155,612
5	$14,953	$212,093
10	$383,950	$520,954
15	$817,474	$879,008
20	$1,322,209	$1,294,091

Loans at graduation: $28,058, repaid at $318.88 a month for ten years, $38,266 in all, of which $10,207 is interest. Crossover at these numbers: year 19. Now change one input. Path A starting at $60,000 instead: no crossover inside twenty years. Path B starting at $60,000 instead: no crossover either. Path A at $85,000: crossover in year 11. The loan barely moves it: borrowing nothing at all still crosses in year 18, which tells you the debt is not the decisive variable here. The salaries are. That is the lesson.