Your Degree Is Worth Less Than The Debt You Took To Get It

You were told the same thing your whole life. Stay in school, get good grades, go to university, get a degree, and the rest will take care of itself. But here is the question nobody asked you before you signed those loan documents. What if the degree costs more than it actually pays back? Because the numbers tell a very different story from the one you were sold. My name is Dexter and this channel exists because somebody needs to tell you what they never taught you about money. Subscribe and let us get into it. Let us start with the basic promise of a degree. The idea is simple. You pay for an education, you earn a higher salary, and over time that higher salary more than covers what you spent. And on the surface, that still holds some truth. Degree holders do earn more on average than those without one. But the gap between what a degree costs and what it actually pays back has been quietly shrinking for decades. And most people signing up for student loans have no idea how dramatic that shift has been. In 1980, a bachelor's degree gave you roughly a 65% wage advantage over someone without one. By 2024, that advantage had fallen to 39%. Meanwhile, the cost of getting that degree rose by 180% in real terms over the same period. The return is shrinking, the price is exploding, and the gap between those two things is being filled entirely by debt. Right now, Americans collectively owe over 1.7 trillion dollars in student loan debt. The average borrower is carrying around $39,000 and that number has nearly doubled since 2008. More than 43 million people in the United States alone are currently paying off student loans. And according to Pew Research, 35% of degree holders aged 25 to 39 who are still repaying loans say the benefits of their degree were simply not worth the financial cost. One in three saying it was not worth it. But here is where it gets really uncomfortable. When you factor in debt repayment, the actual financial advantage of a degree shrinks dramatically. Research from the Brookings Institution shows that bachelor's degree holders spend roughly 19% of their extra earnings on student loan repayments. For master's degree holders, that figure jumps to 57%. More than half of every extra dollar a master's graduate earns goes straight back to paying off the cost of earning that degree. And that is assuming the lands you in a job that actually requires one. According to Federal Reserve data, 52% of graduates enter the workforce underemployed, meaning they are working in jobs that do not require a degree at all. And 45% of those graduates are still in that same situation a full decade later. An underemployed graduate earns only about 25% more than a high school graduate, not the 39% premium the degree was supposed to deliver. Now to be fair, the picture is not the same for everyone. The major you choose matters enormously. A nursing graduate, an engineering graduate, a computer science graduate, these degrees tend to pay well enough to justify the debt fairly quickly. But a drama graduate, a criminal justice graduate, a performing arts graduate, these fields see underemployment rates above 60%. And for the bottom 25% of all degree holders, earnings frequently fall below the median income of a high school graduate who never went to university at all. You read that correctly, the bottom quarter of degree holders earn less than the average person who skipped university entirely. And the job market itself is beginning to shift. In the growing AI and tech sector, mentions of degree requirements in job postings dropped 15% between 2018 and 2023. 60% of employers in that space now say they prioritize certifications and hands-on experience over formal degrees. Harvard Business School has documented what they call degree inflation, where employers demanded degrees for roles that never historically required them, only to find that workers without degrees performed just as well and stayed in their jobs longer. So here is the honest picture. A degree can still be worth it, but whether it is worth it depends entirely on what you study, where you study, how much debt you take on, and what the job market looks like when you graduate. The blanket promise that a degree automatically pays for itself is no longer true across the board. The system was built on that assumption, the numbers have moved, the advice has not. This is not about telling you not to get a degree, it is about making sure that if you do, you go in with your eyes open, you know what you are borrowing, you know what your chosen field typically pays, and you know that the decision you make at 18 with someone else's money will follow you for a very long time. Because the most expensive education is the one you paid for without understanding the return. If this made you think, subscribe, because we drop new videos every week. And tell me in the comments, do you think your degree was worth what you paid for it? See you in the next one.