Return on Investment: College

Yeah, good luck with this.

I mean, you can't.

It's virtually impossible.

The only thing that I would do, I mean, you can look at calculators.

The schools will give you estimates of, oh, this is what it costs, room and board, this is what you need to budget, et cetera.

But it's always a moving target.

You never know.

But the only time I use some sort of hard and fast calculation is when somebody is looking at one career over another.

or not going to college altogether and really just doesn't have a plan.

And what I mean by that is, let's say that you're going to college and you're like, I want to be an engineer as opposed to going to college for a liberal arts degree.

Again, no knock against a liberal arts degree, but if you're spending $150,000 for a liberal arts degree and the average pay in someone who graduates with a liberal arts degree is $35,000, that is a... very, very small return on investment.

You can spend the same $150,000 over the four years or whatever, get an engineering degree.

You're going to make a hundred thousand dollars a year.

That's a 70 or $65,000 Delta or difference in between the two, um, and a much higher ROI.

So I, I mean, this is very, very difficult.

How do you put a price tag on the social aspect? Like many people argue that today's colleges and universities are pointless.

Like there's no reason you could go, you know, learn how to code online for, from Google, or you could learn how to, you know, build a data center from meta and they're guaranteeing you a job, right? I saw an ad on that recently, or you don't go to a traditional school.

You go to, you know, a school to get your master's license in electrician or plumbing or whatever.

Yes.

I mean, all that is, they're great arguments, but there's also an element of sending your kid who's 19 off to another state or another school and to figure out life and get out of the house and learn how to handle himself and handle a checkbook or pay bills on his own and not be in his room upstairs.

I mean, you know, I know you're like, that sounds very familiar, Quint.

Yeah, that's my son.

And what is the value of that? I don't know, but it's a lot, in my opinion.

It's incredible.

Now, that being said...