ROI by major and college

[sanantone]

These types of studies are great to reference but one thing I noticed before is they sometimes aren't as accurate with online degrees that someone does while working full time in their industry. Since they incorporate opportunity cost, if they assume someone stopped working for a few years, it can have a huge impact on the degree's ROI, but an inexpensive (sometimes employer covered!) degree pursued while still earning a salary (and years of experience) is generally better than some of these studies would indicate.

They used demographics to do counterfactuals - how much the person likely would have made if they didn't go to college. Some groups are probably more likely to go into the trades or take an alternative route to become an IT professional, so they would have started down a career path sooner. For most, going to college is better than the counterfactual before you factor in completion rates and completion time.