Is going to grad school even a good idea (financially)?

[DJC_Analytics]

Hi everyone,

With decision deadlines coming up, a few friends of mine have been trying to figure out whether going to grad school actually makes financial sense for them. Most of the discussions we were having kept coming back to the same issue: people tend to look at tuition, but the opportunity cost of leaving the workforce can be just as large (or larger).

So I ended up building a small (free) spreadsheet-style calculator to help model the decision a bit more explicitly.

It lets you plug in things like:

• current salary

• program length

• tuition / debt

• expected salary after graduation

• salary growth assumptions

and then estimate things like:

• total cost of the degree (including lost earnings)

• how long it takes to break even

• how sensitive the outcome is to different salary assumptions

It’s definitely not perfect — the biggest challenge is still estimating realistic salary trajectories — but it helped make the tradeoffs much clearer for us.

Given that a lot of people here are deciding whether to accept offers right now, I thought it might be useful to share.

The tool is currently free while I’m gathering feedback:

djcanalytics.gumroad.com/l/fxpsqw

Curious if anyone here has used a similar approach when deciding between grad school offers.

[DJC_Analytics]

I've played around with the tool quite a bit myself and one thing that surprised us when using this was how much the opportunity cost changes the calculation, especially for longer programs.

Would love to hear feedback if anyone takes the time to use this.

[prospective1234]

This is really interesting!

I actually did something similar to this last year when I was debating applying to grad school. I'm currently working and I was getting lots of conflicting advice so I tried to model the outcome in a somewhat similar approach.

I actually ended up delaying applying, I might apply later this year or next year but I just thought it was cool that you built something that accounts for factors like opportunity cost. All of the tools I found when I was looking last year were too general.

Thanks for sharing!

[DJC_Analytics]

That’s really interesting -- especially that you tried modeling it yourself.

One thing that pushed me to build this was realizing how much people underestimate the real cost of grad school by focusing only on tuition, while ignoring lost income. Once you factor that in, the decision often looks very different.

I’ve also found that even small changes in post-grad salary assumptions can completely change the outcome, which makes the decision a lot less obvious than people expect.

Appreciate you sharing your experience; it’s exactly the kind of situation I had in mind when building this.