New Student Loan Program Estimates a Graduate’s Earnings
Graduates for the past couple of years have been stiffed on entry-level earnings. A bachelor’s degree used to be the guaranteed ticket to a well-paying job, but now it has transformed into a much-needed resume perk, and the master’s degree has taken the spotlight of “I grant thy student a job” status.
While it’s easy to inaccurately deduce this means the end of the fame of the college degree, it’s turned into quite the opposite. This is not deterring people from attending college; on the contrary, college is more necessary than ever to get out of the unemployment cesspool. The government is encouraging the American populace to go back to school, and to get some form of postsecondary education, because it’s that extra oomph that helps individuals survive in today’s competitive workforce.
Undergraduates leaving school are realizing, however, that fuzziness between the payscale of vocational training (or an associate degree) versus their traditional 4-year degree, and the immense variability between a Bachelor of Science in Accounting and a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies, is astounding. Certain degrees just don’t pay out compared to others.
This is why, to combat this dispersity in earnings between one degree holder and the next, the new student loan program “Human Capitol Score” has been released (albeit in a beta stage.) By punching in your SAT scores, your college major, and the university you plan to attend, you can find out your guesstimated earnings upon graduating college. This will help student loan providers determine how much debt you will be able to carry once you finish your education.
It sounds good and well, but Wallet Pop argues that students and families should be wary; after all, what if the star MIT graduate decides to pursue a career in the circus? The Human Capitol Score calculator undermines individual choice and potential in exchange for an averaging based on grades and school names, and grades and testing are borked enough as it is.
While the clown example might be a bit extreme, studies have shown that students, more often than not, take up occupations that have no relationship to their major. Research claims about 55% of students end up somewhere entirely different from where their degree choice started. Of these students, 62% found jobs that took them because they held a bachelor’s degree–even if it wasn’t a BS in Business from Harvard University.
This should not deter students that select specific majors for specific fields, like human resources, either; if your college education backs up your job choice, all the better. For a student loan program limit financial aid purely based on a student’s major and school choice, however, is a far stretch from reality.
