Is your degree worth it?

Money left each month = take-home pay − cost of living − student loan payment.

Salary: the median early-career salary (ages 22–27, full-time, bachelor's degree only) for the major, from the New York Fed (2024 data).

Take-home pay: salary minus 2026 federal income tax for a single filer (standard deduction $16,100, actual brackets), Social Security (6.2%) and Medicare (1.45%). State income tax isn't included unless you enter a rate, because it varies a lot by state.

Cost of living: $3,117 a month, what one-person households spend on essentials in the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey (2024): Food $470, Housing (rent, utilities, phone) $1,588, Transportation $579, Healthcare $336, Clothing $93, Personal care $52. Picking a state scales it by that state's price level (BEA Regional Price Parities, 2024). It's an average, not a bare-minimum budget.

Student loans: each major starts at the typical federal student debt of its graduates who borrowed, from the Education Department's College Scorecard: the median for every bachelor's program at every public and nonprofit college, averaged across schools weighted by how many graduates borrowed ($25,170 across all majors). It counts federal loans from every school the graduate attended, but not private loans, Parent PLUS loans or interest that built up during school. For-profit colleges are left out because a few large online programs would swamp some majors. Tuition is mostly set by the school, not the major, so where you go matters more than what you study here. Majors with fewer than 500 borrowers in the data use the all-majors figure. Repaid at 6.52% (Federal Direct Loans for undergraduates first disbursed July 1, 2026 to June 30, 2027) over 10 years. Plenty of grads don't borrow at all, and many borrow more or less, so change it to yours.

Jobs that need a degree = (100% − unemployment) × (100% − underemployment), using the New York Fed's rates for recent grads (ages 22–27) in the same year. It's the share of recent grads in the labor force working a job that typically requires a bachelor's degree. It is not the share working in their field, and people not looking for work aren't counted.

The verdict: Worth it if at least $500 is left each month and at least 50% of recent grads work jobs that need a degree. It depends if one of those fails, Not worth it if both do. These are our screening rules, not laws of economics, and they only cover money, not whether a degree is worth it to you in every other way.