[rm999]

Education doesn't guarantee a higher salary - instead it opens up opportunities and raises each person's potential ceiling. This makes using averages and ROIs very difficult.

I could have gone to med school (historically a very high ROI degree) but I'm terrible at memorization/studying and probably wouldn't have thrived i.e. wouldn't have reached anywhere near its ceiling. Obviously, it would have been a poor degree for me.

Or, I could have gotten an MBA (another very high ROI degree), but my salary probably wouldn't have immediately been higher than what I have as a software engineer/data scientist. But an MBA would enable me to enter an executive track that is mostly closed off to me now. Is it worth it? Honestly I don't know - its an extremely complicated calculation.

Instead of ROI, I think it's worth thinking about how much each degree will cost you (both time and money), what it will enable you to do, whether you are capable of doing that, whether you want to do that, and what the payoff will be. If I were a counselor, I would go through this exercise with my students.

[wooyi]

ROI is loosely all that. Outcomes (salaries, happiness, growth..etc) have many different metrics. I'm agreeing with what you're saying even though they may not be "ROI" to you.

Counselors do go through a lot of the non-salary career choice exercises (if you had a million dollars what would you do scenarios) but rarely go over the "money" talk.

[jerf]

"Instead of ROI, I think it's worth thinking about how much each degree will cost you (both time and money), what it will enable you to do, whether you are capable of doing that, whether you want to do that, and what the payoff will be."

Um, are you quite clear on what "ROI" is? You just described it there, while making it sound like you disagree. As with any future-looking thing, it's all probabilities in the end. There aren't any guarantees in life.

[rm999]

> As with any future-looking thing, it's all probabilities in the end.

Actually, this was the exact opposite of my point and my own personal experience. On average, a medical degree would have paid out more than the option I went with, but I ignored this simple ROI calculation. Instead, I did a deeper analysis, mixed with some intuition about myself, and went with what was at the time a fairly low ROI option (masters in AI/CS - at a time when the average MS in CS was paying 5k more than a bachelors). I did this because I knew it would open certain doors for me, not for any monetary gain. I'm confident it's served me better than the "just go to med school" advice I was repeatedly given when I was 20 - advice that was strongly backed by every monetary statistic you could find.

So, maybe that's still an ROI estimate, but it's a complex one that explicitly rejects averages. It's not what people typically mean when they refer to "ROI".

[jerf]

"So, maybe that's still an ROI estimate, but it's a complex one that explicitly rejects averages. It's not what people typically mean when they refer to "ROI"."

I still say you've got a seriously impoverished view of "ROI". You pretty much never just get to look it up on a table, you certainly never get a guarantee, and you are absolutely supposed to consider everything in a ROI calculation... if you value personal satisfaction than be sure to factor that in.

One of the baseline facts of modern economics is the highly variable nature of individual preferences. Microeconomics 101 is literally an exploration of this fact, and all economics cease to function if you assume all agents in the system have the same preferences. The idea that it's all about money is a slanderous strawman, not how it actually works. And so with ROI... if you are not considering your personal happiness with a ROI investment in your degree, that's your fault for failing to do a proper ROI investment, not basic economic's fault for not taking your personal preferences into account.

If this sounds wrong to you, I'd suggest digging in and learning some microecon 101, because it sounds like you've got a strawman understanding right now. If you're a programmer it's easy enough to pick up by just reading about it.

[rm999]

I'm referring fairly specifically of the context of the parent comment. These are the parts that I was replying to:

>can you pay off a 6 figure debt to pursue a comparative literature degree?

>If you pick a program that has high salary/demand, you will have better ROI. Even if you spend lots of money on it, you will be able to pay it back. That is ROI. (Not just cost by itself)

>Here is a list of top ranking salary schools. They are almost all dominated by Ivies, tech/engineering (and interestingly, Military) schools.

I disagree with the approach of the first two quoted parts, and what the third comment is alluding to.

> One of the baseline facts of modern economics is the highly variable nature of individual preferences. Microeconomics 101 is literally an exploration of this fact

Erm, I studied econ in college (concentrating in micro econ and game theory), this certainly is not what micro econ 101 is about. One of the key assumptions of classic micro economics is simplifying people into homogenous representative agents (usually, perfectly rational agents who seek to maximize gains and minimize costs). The field of properly modeling individual preferences in micro economics is a relatively recent development. Economics 101 is where the simplistic definition of ROI arises, e.g. http://econwiki.wikidot.com/roi. And yes, a lot (probably most) people still mean this when they refer to ROI.