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A new poll survey about the financial health, debt and earnings of Americans show that nearly half of respondents with a college degree and student loan debt think that their degrees won’t help them earn more money.
The truth is that having a college degree won’t necessarily make you get a higher-paying job. A new survey from Insider and Morning Consult, where 2,096 Americans were polled, show that 17% of its respondents have undergrad student-loan debt and 7.5% have graduate student-loan debt, according to Business Insider.
Only 36.7% of indebted college grads think that their degree helped them get a higher-earning job, while 49% think that their degree won’t help them get a higher salary.
Having student-debt loan does lead undergrad graduates to be more stressed and potentially influence their answers on this poll. In fact, 54% of respondents who are experiencing a lot of stress due to their student-loan debt said that they don’t think their college degrees will help them get a higher salary.
College tuition has more than doubled since the 1980s, the national student-debt loan is more than 1.5 trillion and student-debt is at a record high, with nearly $30,000 being borrowed per student who graduated in 2018, according to Business Insider.
The average tuition for top schools hovers around $60,000 per year, but going to a top, the expensive school doesn’t guarantee you will have a higher-earning job once you graduate.
Students who graduated from very expensive schools usually start earning higher-salaries a decade after they enrolled in college, the Department of Education’s College Scorecard program shows.
A previous article written by Business Insider stated that students attending expensive schools usually earn less than what they spent on yearly tuition. The students who graduated from these expensive schools still make more than what the average millennial earns ($35,455).
A recent survey by SoFi, a personal finance company, showed that 42% of millennials stated that their biggest mistake was to assume that their first job after college would have helped them pay off their monthly payments of their student-debt loan.
