Is Your Degree Worth It?

🔎 What do you want to be?

Type a major, career, or goal — we'll match it to real ROI math:

💬 Ask Worth — the AI analysis with the real math

Calculators give you numbers. Worth shows you the full math in plain English: five quick questions, then the complete cost-and-earnings picture for every route — opportunity cost, payback years, worst case, every number sourced from College Scorecard and BLS. First report free.

Worth never judges you — it compares routes and shows the math. It never predicts admission odds, and every tough number comes with the alternative routes on the table.

New investigation

72 colleges charge $45,000 a year. In 37 of them, the median graduate earns less than a high school graduate.

We ran the federal numbers on all 6,273 US institutions. The most expensive half of that tier is not buying earnings — it is buying a receipt. Full list, sorted worst ratio first, every figure reproducible in four minutes.

Previous investigation

In California, the most expensive college costs $99,682 a year. The cheapest pays students $2,296. Their graduates are 28% apart.

Across 500 California institutions, the rank correlation between net price and ten-year earnings is 0.004. Price stopped being a signal. Full method, honest objections, and every school above $55,000 nationwide.

Latest investigation

Colleges that graduate 55% of students report higher earnings than colleges that graduate 80%. The completion rate is a type label, not a quality score.

Across 4,895 institutions, median earnings peak in the 50-60% completion band at $42,198, then fall 11.7% by the 80%+ band, where 57% of colleges are for-profit. Plus the 13 schools where graduates earn $70,000+ and fewer than half of students finish.

All investigations (3) →

📚 Is X Worth It? — Deep Dives

The real math on specific degrees: opportunity cost, payback years, worst-case scenario. Every number sourced from official data.

• Is a Psychology Degree Worth It? — +19% growth, counselor-exit math
• Is a Criminal Justice Degree Worth It? — the exit that doesn't need the degree
• Is a Communications Degree Worth It? — $77,720 median, split by AI
• Is an Engineering Degree Worth It? — $99,510 median, +11% growth
• Is a Finance Degree Worth It? — analyst math at a $99,010 median
• Is a Biology Degree Worth It? — the $51,440 technician exit
• Is a Computer Science Degree Worth It? — 2.5-year payback, steepest salary curve
• Is an Accounting Degree Worth It? — the CPA 150-credit fine print
• Is an Education Degree Worth It? — the pension and PSLF math
• Is Nursing School Worth It? — ADN pays back 10x faster than BSN
• Is an MBA Worth It? — the median premium is just $23,644/yr
• Is a Master's in Computer Science Worth It? — fastest grad payback: 3.6 years
• Is Law School Worth It? — the median is a statistical fiction
• Is Medical School Worth It? — $550K all-in, 7-year runway
• Is Nurse Practitioner School Worth It? — +46% growth, employer-funded path
• Is a Psychology Doctorate Worth It? — self-paid PsyD: 28.8-year payback
• Is a Data Science Degree Worth It? — +36% growth, grad-school bottleneck
• Is a Cybersecurity Degree Worth It? — $120,360 median, certificates rival the degree
• Is an Architecture Degree Worth It? — $93,310 median, the 5-year licensure runway
• Is a Graphic Design Degree Worth It? — the degree that barely clears the baseline
• Is a Paralegal Degree Worth It? — the career where 2 years is the standard entry
• Is PA School Worth It? — the best-value clinical route: 5.4-year payback
• Is Veterinary School Worth It? — $490,544 all-in, the second-largest bill in the series
• Is Pharmacy School Worth It? — the biggest raise in the series, on a shrinking retail side
• Is Physical Therapy School Worth It? — automation-proof demand, 14.4-year clock
• Is Occupational Therapy School Worth It? — real demand, thin raise, COTA bridge math
• Is Speech-Language Pathology School Worth It? — the longest payback in healthcare
• Is a School Counseling Degree Worth It? — the only degree that never pays back on salary alone
• Is a Master's in Math or Statistics Worth It? — +30% growth, second-highest in our dataset

Why WorthDegree?

Other tools calculate numbers and stop. We go one step further: what the numbers mean for your family's situation.

• Opportunity cost — the wages you give up while studying (≈$120K over 4 years). No brochure prints this.
• Three routes compared — 4-year vs community college transfer vs certificate/apprenticeship. Same license, different math.
• Worst-case scenario — what the bottom 30% actually look like. Decisions that hedge self-overestimation.
• Every number sourced — click any figure to verify its origin. We use College Scorecard, BLS, and College Board data — the same sources the government uses.

🤝 The Honest-Data Pledge

We built this on three promises you can verify:

• We never sell your data. Your state, budget, and school choices stay private — no data broker, no marketing list, no lead-selling to colleges. Ever.
• No ads, no affiliate kickbacks. We take no money from any school. When a degree's math is bad, we say so plainly — because there's no one paying us to say otherwise.
• Every number is verifiable. Salaries, costs, and outcomes come from official sources (College Scorecard, BLS, College Board, field-of-study data) — click any figure to check its origin, and estimates are always labeled as estimates.