And, let's say you're earning $100k right out of college, you have to account for what you would have earned and been earning after 4 or 5 in the workforce. That might easily be $60k or more for those particular people.

So, there would be something like $200k of foregone earnings compared to something like $50k of student debt + interest. When you're earning an extra $40k it takes most of the next decade to break even.

That’s true. The degrees often get you started, but beyond that, most of the success is based on your work in the field (hopefully)

WeAreAllSatoshi

charts_and_numbers

Which College Degrees Have the Best Return on Investment?

jakoyoh629

These are returns to those degrees, though. That means you have to attempt to account for how much your engineering peers would have earned otherwise. Since they are fairly smart people that probably would have been a decent amount.

It would be a methodological mistake to attribute all future earnings to the degree.