Quantifying The Value Of A College Degree (By Major)

Folks have told me on HN several times they wanted to hear about some number crunching/SEO work/etc that I did regarding the worth of particular college degrees. I just got the OK from my client to share results, so here you go.

Search tool: http://www.onlinedegrees.org/calculator/ Summary article: http://www.onlinedegrees.org/calculator/salary/engineering-d...

Short version: get an engineering degree.

The client has generously permitted me to talk about the business case for this project in broad strokes, and I think it is potentially very interesting for the average HNer startup. The general gist is that the government has terabytes of very interesting data and very limited resources for publicizing it. The NYT knows this and they totally kill it by turning CSV files of population statistics into compelling, actionable presentations that tell a story. You can do this, too.

With a little creativity, 1 GB of Bureau of Labor Statistics data becomes several hundred pages of rather interesting content for the client's niche. Google doesn't particularly love raw data in terms of rankings, though, so the graphs got beefed up a bit with content written by TextBroker writers, stock photos, and the like.

The business goal is that eventually most of these pages will rank for, e.g., [computer science degree average salary], and that some portion of searchers will request an application packet through the website. The CPA for that is between $10 and $100 (I'm not familiar with exactly how it is set).

This project took a few thousand dollars of outsourced work plus the equivalent of about three weeks of full time work from myself. The client and I anticipate that it will be very successful for them.

You can do something fairly similar for your startup -- I've never seen one that can't combine engineering expertise plus writing to generate fairly compelling content at scale, and the SEO gains for it are considerable. I recommend trying it.

I think we're going to see the next generation of kids taking a much closer look at what they will be studying and the cost/benefits of those studies.

College tuition has gone up so much and people are in so much debt now that 2nd generation college students will likely have better advice from their parents.

All I ever got my whole life was, "go to school." Luckily I majored in engineering, but I know too many people with half a mortgage in student loans making $12/hour now.

We are also very lucky here that we don't take out student loans, and make repayments (we get HECS[1], and the repayments are automatic, like tax, once you cross a certain income threshold), so I'm guessing there wouldn't be a large enough number of people interested to make Australian centric data profitable.

[1] http://www.goingtouni.gov.au/Main/Quickfind/PayingForYourStu...

HECS has been a pretty good compromise between private and public education. The major flaw is that course place supply is centrally dictated by Canberra and the ALP removed the main pressure valve (full-fee places).

Next generation nothing, barring a major and sudden economic turnaround I expect this to happen next year, by which I mean, this next fall school year. Somewhere in March I expect a few little nervous merpings to trickle out about how college applications seem to be a bit down this year but we're talking ourselves into believing they'll pick back up by the start of the school year, and somewhere in June or July for this to break as a major national news story/obsession after it doesn't pick back up. The obsession will center on how this is yet more proof of the inevitable decline and dumbening of the US and how important it is for high school graduates to apply anyhow. And it will all be wrong, because a return to some cold, hard cost/benefit and affordability analysis is not merely what we need, but in fact will be utterly unavoidable, and this will simply be another consequence of that broad (but quiet) trend.

I think I'm going out on a limb a bit here, but it's plausible. I feel much less like I'm going out on a limb to say that if the economy is still sputtering along in 2012 that this is almost certain to happen. (To avoid this we must not merely tread water but see noticeable improvements in our economic outlook.) I'm also curious as to how the bubble pop in higher ed will manifest, because none of the historical precedents for bubbles like this have the college admission cycle to contend with, and most of them involved resellable goods, even if the value did tank. The housing market can collapse overnight because anybody can sell a house any time, college can't be sold and can only be entered at certain times. Still, fireworks will occur somewhere and sometime, for better and for worse.