Afford Anything - Is a Computer Science Degree Still Worth the Debt?, with Ron Lieber

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

#711: A computer science degree used to feel like a sure thing. Job placement rates topped 90 percent. Starting salaries cleared $80,000. You could do the math on your student loans before you enrolled. That math doesn't work the same way anymore. New York Times "Your Money" columnist Ron Lieber joins us to walk through what families actually need to know before borrowing for college. He covers how to use the federal College Scorecard to look up earnings by school and by major. He explains why the scariest student loan headlines are almost always about graduate school rather than undergraduate debt. And he makes the case that liberal arts majors tend to catch up to their STEM peers by mid-career - even if the early numbers don't show it. Lieber also makes a case that the financial return on college extends beyond salary data. Alumni networks, mentorship, and lifelong friendships all factor into the equation. He suggests asking schools pointed questions about reunion attendance and alumni giving rates as a way to gauge how connected - and how useful - a community actually stays after graduation. On the debt question, Lieber draws a clear line between federal undergraduate loans, which cap around $31,000, and the more dangerous combinations of Parent PLUS loans and private debt that drive the horror stories you see in the news. He also addresses the community college path in detail - including what it actually takes to pull it off without losing time or credits along the way. The conversation closes with a framework for parents: keep sparking conversations with your kids, stay curious about what they're drawn to, and treat yourself less as an advice-giver and more as someone planting seeds. Share this episode with a friend, colleagues, and your mailman: https://affordanything.com/episode711https://affordanything.com/episode711 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There is no jobs report today. It's the first Friday of the month, Friday May 1st. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the BLS, puts out a jobs report normally on the first Friday of every month, and that is the basis of a monthly feature that we publish here called the First Friday macroeconomic update. Today, however, they are not putting out a report. That report is delayed until May 8th. And so what we will do is follow the BLS's lead. And after the jobs report comes out, we will air a short bonus episode with a macroeconomic update. That episode will air on Monday, May 11th. Until then, we've got a great conversation to share with you. It's an interview with Ron Lieber, a financial journalist for The New York Times. He's the author of the Your Money column,

and he's the recipient of three Gerald Loeb Awards. Those are prestigious business journalism awards, which he won for personal finance business journalism and personal service business journalism. Previously, he was at the Wall Street Journal. He's also been a staff reporter at Fortune and Fast Company, and he's the author of many, many books and articles about student loans and student debt. And so we're going to have a conversation about college in light of the current labor market, given how tough it is for college grads to get entry-level jobs, is going to college still worth it?

If so, how much money should you borrow? What are the new rules in 2020? How does today's job market? How do today's factors? How does AI play a role in thinking about decisions around college? That's what we're going to discuss with Ron Lieber right now. Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that knows you can afford anything, not everything. This show covers five pillars. Financial Psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate and entrepreneurship, acronym Double I Fire. I'm your host, Paula Pantt. I have a master's in economic journalism from Columbia. And I am currently in Italy, where I just spoke at a financial independence event called Camp Phi, Camp FI. So it's gathering a financial independence enthusiasts. I'm recording this from Rome, and I'll be sharing stories and photos in my newsletter. You can follow along by going to afford anything.com slash newsletter, totally free. Now, here to talk about how to think through college, student loan, student debt in today's job market and in today's

AI powered world. Here is award-winning personal finance columnist Ron Lieber. Hi, Ron. Hello. Ron, we look at the labor market stats. Then there's also from colleges. Fewer college grads are getting entry-level jobs. What do we do in the face of that data? Yeah, it is true that the numbers are changing and in some instances that they're going down by a lot, but I am not backing away from the overarching macroeconomic thesis that says that people who are educated and get a bachelor's degree are not going to be better off financially by

hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars over their lifetimes than people who aren't. It is the people who don't have degrees, right? It is possible to get radically unlucky in the short term. You know, nobody saw this coming. Four years ago, there was nobody shouting from the rooftop saying the large language models are coming for us. Do not major in computer science. There were, you know, radical shortages of people who could actually teach computer science. And it was like impossible to get into compsite classes four years ago. So, you know, that's not anybody's fault. It's just a reminder, right, that the world can change very quickly, and then it could change very quickly again within four years. And in the

meantime, I trust that these comp side graduates, and hopefully the universities that they attended, are about to step up and help them figure out a way to use their skills in some other way in the short term before things change again in the medium term. You mentioned the earnings potential of a person by the college degree is many, many times greater than somebody without, and I think the stat is around 2 million, but that's like a flat stat. And when we dig into that, there's a huge level of a variation, depending on choice of major, depending on choice of career, depending on whether or not you take a mid-career break for, let's say, full-time parenting or caregiving, depending on geography, depending on all of these

hyper-personalized factors that can play a role in your compensation over the span of a 40-year career. When we're looking at the data and when we're trying to make intelligent decisions about whether or not to go to college and if so, how much debt to take on, how do we parse through some of these stats and separate the signal from the noise? You start with the best quantitative data that we have, which is the earnings outcomes. Through something called the College Scorecard, which is the federal website that tracks all of the stuff, you can go and look up colleges that you may. might be interested in or that your kid might be interested in. And you actually have the ability now, and this is new just within the last year or two, to drill down by major and see what people who got particular majors are earning in their first handful of years out of school. Right. So this is helpful data in many, maybe most circumstances. You won't want to borrow tens of thousands of

dollars yourself as a teenager and have your parents borrow tens of thousands of dollars more to major in something that is not going to deliver all that much economically. But one of the things that people miss, and this is not in the scorecard, is that at mid-career liberal arts majors, right, people who don't have STEM majors or econ majors or business majors, they often catch up. They tend to be adaptable, right? People who are easier to train and find easier ways to pivot and maneuver. The short-term data on what you earn in the immediate years after you graduate, it's not always predictive of how things are going to look in the long run. Now, what we've just spoken about, right, is just earnings outcomes. What we haven't talked about is the return on

friendship, right? The return on learning, the overall life satisfaction that comes from having had this really incredible experience. So these are things that you can't always are often measuring dollars, but they're not nothing either, right? If you find your crew of five or 10 or 20 people who kind of, you know, carry you through life and lift you up over their shoulders when you get married and carry your coffin when it's time to put you in the ground and everything in between, that's worth a lot. And I think we sort of underestimate that too when thinking about, you know, what is and is not worth pain for when it's time to think about where our kids go to college. Right. But to play devil's advocate, I mean, wouldn't it be equally as likely to be able to find

those people at a job, at a religious institution, at a community group, you know, in any other place where large numbers of people congregate? It is possible. I don't know if it's as likely because you're not thrown together and living together in that really intense way. But it's absolutely possible, right? You don't have to go to college to make friends for a life. It can come through all sorts of other community activities. It's a completely fair point. But I think it's worth, you know, thinking about as a component of the return when assessing whether something's worth paying for or not. Because there are some schools that have, you know, sort of really strong alumni networks. And then there's some where people just sort of scatter to the winds.

You know, one thing that you can ask about that most people don't think to ask about is, well, okay, you know, do you have reunions at this school? Because if they don't, it's a sign that people don't feel any sort of a tie that binds. If you do have reunions, you know, what percentage of the class comes back for them? And what percentage of the people who went school here feel move to contribute financially or through volunteer hours to do something, you know, sort of for future alumni or fellow alumni? And that gives you a sense of kind of how close-knit the places. Are smaller schools more highly likely to be close-knit than larger schools? Maybe, but not always. Some large schools are better.

than others in creating micro communities of interest, right? And that could be anything from, you know, an honors college where people with more intense academic interests or who have higher grades or test scores coming out of high school can be in a sort of smaller or more focused group. Obviously, the Greek system can be a real kind of lifelong bond former and athletic team. You know, there are lots of other ways to be in community, you know, at a large institution in a way that makes a difference. And, you know, not everybody needs to come out of school with 10 or 20 or 30 best friends. Five would be an incredible return on investment. I think if they stayed with you for your entire life. One of the things to think about when we think about

the struggles of 22-year-olds is who else is out there from your community who is 24 or 27 or 37 or 67, who will throw the rope back for you. When I came out of college, I went to work for an alum who had posted the job only at our school. At my second job, I was edited by someone who went to my school. At my third job, I was hired and edited by someone who went to my school. And it wasn't a very big school, right? So some places have stronger binds than others, and it's another thing that you can shop for. What can you tell me college that I'm thinking about paying 100 or 200 or wherever, $100,000 for, prove to me with data and numbers that you have an alumni base that likes to help, right? Because, you know, all you need is one person to kind of

send you in the right direction for you not to be among the five or 10 percent of college graduates who are unemployed. And I'm pretty sure it's still in the single digits. It's definitely higher than it was two years ago. But, you know, on the whole, people who graduate from college do get jobs. You know, there may be fewer of them right now who have jobs that require a bachelor's degree. That's one of the things that changes when the economy changes. But when you have this ready-made built-in network, it can be a difference maker. It is for a lot of people. Square note that in hospitality, efficiency is everything. That's why their system lets you take payments. Track sales, handle inventory, manage staff, send invoices, and keep up with finances all in one place.

order is with zero mistakes. Get the data you need and keep everything working together. So you're ready for whatever's next. Learn more about their customizable plans at squareup.com. I think the challenge that a lot of people struggle with, and I hear this a lot from people in my community, is when it comes to taking out debt, it sounds all well and good to invest in a thing that might bring you friends for life, a thing that makes you well-rounded, you know, to engage in hobbies and extracurriculars and athletics and all of the elements of a nice well-rounded college experience. That sounds great until debt gets involved. And once debt gets involved, then the question must become, all right, how much are we willing to borrow in order to be

able to do this? Now there's higher variance in the expected return. And just by virtue of having that variance, it makes the question even harder, right? What sort of variance and who's expected return on what? So pre-AI, a computer science grad, could fairly reliably predict, all right, within six months of graduation, I will likely have a job. I will likely earn at least, we'll say, $80,000 straight out of college. And maybe it'll be better, but I think this would at least be the floor. And based on that floor, then you could say, you could take a rule of thumb. You could say, all right, I will borrow up to $80,000. I will borrow up to my first year starting salary. And that way, if I repay 10% of my gross income per year, then I'll have my student loans paid off within 10 years of graduation. And now you can't really do that math anymore.

I guess my feeling about that is that any notion of kind of guarantees or expectations around some kind of virtual certainty were probably misplaced, would be misplaced now, and will be misplaced forever. I mean, to be an American maneuvering around the economy as it changes and swerves in a capitalist system is almost always to be subject to risk, right? There are very few guaranteed jobs for life anymore, and we can't all be Supreme Court justices, right? Or tenured professors. Or tenured professors, although some of them are starting to lose jobs as colleges close or they shrink. And yeah, it's almost as hard to get tenure these days as it is to become a Supreme Court justice, right? So there aren't very many of these things left.

There is always risk. But to bring it back to your question, I guess I would think about it this way. The maximum amount that the federal government will lend you as an undergraduate is about $31,000 under most circumstances. If you borrow $31,000 and you get out of college and you can't afford to make what would be a, you know, it's called a $350,400 a month payment, you can enter an income-driven repayment plan that will lower that amount. But most people, under most circumstances, can make a three or four. $400 a month payment. So that's not a bad bet if it's the difference between getting a degree and not getting a degree or getting to a program, you know, where that campus is tighter and the alumni network is more cohesive. And it seems like a lot of money. One way to think about it is, okay, I'm going to live at home if my family will let me. I'm going to go to community college for two years. And I'm going to bust my butt to make sure that I nail every credit that I need to nail and get

into every class that I need to get into to transfer to the four-year institution. Then I'll go live there and have that experience for two years. I'll be done in four years and I will have spent, let's call it, $60,000 total overall for the whole thing. Your debt is half of that. The rest of it can come from current income as a student. It can come from family income. It can come from savings if someone has been able to save something along the way.

The numbers go a little higher if you go and live at your... go to and live at your state university for four years, but it doesn't get much above $125,000. This seems like a lot, right? But if you break it down and you start planning, you know, when the kid is younger, right, maybe you get 15 years of savings. You put 50 bucks a month away. You invest it, get a 7% return on those investments. Maybe the grandparents can toss a $20 bill, you know, into the account each month instead of, you know, getting them crazy Christmas presents or whatever. And, you know, pretty soon you've saved 30, 40, 50%, right? And so all of a sudden, you've got, you know, 30 or 40 or 50 grand in savings over here.

You've got 30 grand in debt over here. You've got a teenager who can earn $5,000 $10,000 a year over 12 months there. Maybe the parents are able to pitch in a little bit along the way and suddenly you're there. A lot of the conversation and the culture around student loan debt and outsized student loan debt is around graduate programs, right? That's a whole other conversation. I am happy to take my fair share of the blame for not making that distinction over the 15 years that I've been writing about student loans. But I think, you know, when we talk about student loans, sometimes we're talking about large numbers that don't have anything to do with what the undergraduate alone would borrow. Something else we should not do, too, is that, you know, if you borrow 10 or 20 grand and then don't finish the degree, then you have the debt, but you don't.

have the economic boost that comes from the degree, that's kind of the worst situation of all. And that is definitely an issue because there are lots of people that start their degrees and don't finish. I want to dig into both of those, starting with the distinction between the conversation around student loan debt undergrad versus grad, because you're right, that is not something that we typically hear about. We live in an environment in which the headlines that get clicks are the ones that provoke an emotional reaction. And the ones that provoke an emotional reaction are often the

really scary headlines around student loan debt, which may be misleading. So can you shed some more light on kind of fear versus reality or myth versus reality when it comes to student loans, particularly for undergraduates? Sure. The fear around student debt for undergraduates is mostly misplaced if we're talking about federal loans for people who stand a very good chance of finishing because the family is not, you know, having some personal or health crisis and it, you know, looks like there's going to be enough money to get somebody through. And, you know, I get the crack ups happen midstream. You know, somebody loses a job or a parent dies and people need to leave school or there's a mental health crisis or something else. But if you feel like things look good in terms of

your ability to get through school, you know, taking that $31,000 of debt is a reasonable bet. But there are other kinds of undergraduate student loans that can get you in trouble. Private student loans require a co-signer. The undergraduate plus a grown-up, usually a parent, but not always, will co-sign for debt, and then you'll have more debt, presumably on top of that $31,000 that you've already borrowed. It used to be that people would borrow, you know, in the private markets and not get their federal debt. Loan counseling has gotten better now, and so that doesn't happen as often as it used to. And even the private lenders will say, go borrow your $31,000 first and then talk to us in some instances. If you're a teenager and you co-sign for more debt and then you end up

with $80,000 in debt instead of $31,000, that's a problem. And you should not be doing that until you have certainty, right, that the engineering degree, you know, will pay off in four years. And I think people used to say five years ago, well, you know, one rule of thumb suggests that you should only borrow as much money as the amount equal to whatever your first year salary. Yeah, the first year starting salary. Right? Yeah. All the comp side grads two or three years ago were earning 70, 80, you know, whatever it was right out of school. So borrowing $80,000 sort of seem to make sense. But now, I don't know, right? Doesn't, I'm not sure how much. much it makes sense now. You know, the other thing that happens is that parents will take on debt

by themselves. But sometimes what they'll do is the parents will borrow from a different federal program called the Federal Plus program with the understanding or maybe the explicit agreement, if not in writing, that the kid will repay the parents' debt while also repaying the debt that they themselves took on. And then pretty soon, you know, you're looking at $1,000 a month, And if you can't pay it, then your parents have to pay it or bail you out. And if they don't have it, then, you know, they default. And, you know, you default on your federal loans and they come for your social security checks. So you can definitely get in trouble that way.

I think the disruption, whatever disruption AI causes in the medium to long term. And maybe more importantly, whatever fear it inspires among 17 and 18-year-olds in their families will be reflected. in a market disruption that we're already seen, right? Which is that just because people have the ability to pay $100,000 for the University of Indiana, you know, for in-state, you know, undergraduate education, or just because they have the ability to pay $300,000 for their kids to go to Southern Methodist University doesn't mean that they're going to have the willingness to do so. And, you know, we may see a lot more small-sea conservatism along the ability willingness continuum.

And, you know, you can see it, you know, each April now, I wrote about this last year with Syracuse University, where Syracuse radically overestimated the number of people who were going to say yes to their offers. And when they came up short by a lot, they had to start, like, throw. $150,000 coupons around at people who had decided not to come to try to get them to change their minds. Because to them, getting $35,000 a year is much better than getting $0 a year and having a bed be empty. We'll see it again this year. I'm reasonably sure. We just don't know who's going to run into trouble again. You know, out there in the market, people are thinking this through. and, you know, I think on balance, there are fewer people willing to pay more, even though,

interestingly, because of income inequality, we haven't seen a decline in the number of families with the ability to pay a big price, but the decline in people with the willingness is market. Right, right. Because if parents have assets, often the schools will ask them, hey, borrow against that asset. You know, you've written about families that might live in California and the value of their home has significantly increased since the time that they purchased it. So they might have a low income, but they have a lot of equity in this non-performing asset, which is just costing them high property taxes, really. I mean, the lived reality is not one of wealth, but because they have equity in a primary residence, they're being asked to borrow against it. Yeah, this is sort of a niche problem. and you could argue that it's a high class problem, but it's a real one. And this very issue is in my inbox right now. Sometimes people who have taken my Meridate course, you know, sort of track me down and send me a note. And they're like, okay, I did all my homework. And, you know, I studied through everything. But here is the very particular situation I'm in right now. And like, what should I say to these people to change the result? And it is a divorced family. Neither parent is a big earner. But they were both lucky enough.

to buy small apartments in New York City many years ago, right? And they have equity, but they think of that equity as, you know, part of their retirement. But that equity isn't protected in the financial aid formula the same way that actual retirement accounts are. So it doesn't really matter to the colleges what your mental accounting is, right? What they see is an actual asset that could be used. to them, it's not fair to let you, you know, kind of keep all of that asset and they feel like you should hand 5% of it over a year so that they're not taking money from their endowment and then

they can take whatever budget they do have and give it to a family that does not benefit from rising housing values. And you sort of see where the college is coming from. And you see where this, you know, divorced family is coming from here in New York City, like with both parents just trying to make ends meet. And then you start to ask yourself, well, wait a second, why is this, why is this thing so expensive again? And why is anybody even trying to, you know, pay $35,000 or $45,000 or $100,000 a year for it? It's tricky. And it's all mixed up and messed up by the intense emotions that we all feel about our children.

Right. Right. It seems to me like this specific type of problem might be growing because what we're seeing right now in the economy is especially over the last five, like since the pandemic, assets have grown. And so anyone who possessed assets pre-pandemic have seen the value of their index funds rise significantly. They've seen the value of their homes rise significantly. But they haven't necessarily seen their wages go up, at least not at the pace of inflation. And so you now have a lot of people who have mediocre income, but heavy assets on paper. That seems to be a bigger chunk of the population today than it was six years ago.

I think that's right. And sort of cue the course of small violence for them, right? But if people have this equity and these assets locked up, you know, what are you supposed to do about them if you're assessing their ability to pay for something, or you're trying to get them to part with it to like kind of get the wheels of the housing market, grease it again. You know, several weeks ago, it sure seemed like the Trump administration was about to issue an executive order and maybe try to write some legislation. They would allow people to yank money from those assets, from their 401ks without penalty and possibly without taxes. It was never clear exactly what they're in. tensions were, but the rumors were so strong that I wrote a whole story for the New York Times

with the understanding that it was about to happen, right? And I talked to experts about whether it was a good idea or a bad idea. This was for home buying? What they might do, yeah, for home buying specifically, right? That proposal came out right around the same time that the idea of the 50-year mortgage also came out. Right. And neither of those things have come to pass yet. And look, I'm all for spitballing ideas. It sure seems like we need to do something. Yeah. But it turns out that. legally, there are only so many levers that any administration, Democrat or Republican, can pull on the executive side without actually enacting legislation. And as we talk, there's a housing bill percolating.

I just took a look at it because it passed the Senate. It's still a very long way from becoming law. But there's really nothing in it from a direct personal finance perspective. There's nothing in there around changing how low. work for a wide variety of people. There's nothing in there that would allow people to, you know, tap these assets that you asked about in a way that they hadn't before. It's mostly designed to spur building and, you know, help more on the supply. Yeah. Which is its own thing. Yeah. You know, not my area of expertise, but, you know, I think there's almost a universal agreement at this

point that we could use some more housing. Yeah. And we could use some more starter homes. And we could use some more loan income housing, and then we could use some more building. Right, right. Hopefully it happens. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because actually that was my criticism of particularly the 50-year mortgage. I talked about it on this show. I said, you know what, this is a demand-side solution to a supply-side problem.

So supply-side interventions, I think, are very needed. Yeah. So part of this bill has a provision that will keep private equity and other investment firms from buying vast tracts of housing. the way that they started to during the financial crisis. And that's all well and good. But most of those institutional buyers are no longer buying all that much. More of them are selling than buying right now. So it's sort of like we're closing the barn door after the animals have escaped. But it's good to see activity. And it's a bipartisan bill. Yeah. Could AI help you do more of what you love?

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is that oftentimes, and I think many people don't think about this, the people working at the financial aid office are people who don't actually make that much. They might be making $60,000 a year, and they're reading a letter from somebody who makes 120,000, who makes double what they do. Like, this is something that other than you, I have never heard anyone else talk about, but the people who are working at the financial aid office are often making less than the people

that they're trying to help. Yeah, gosh, where do we start with this? I mean, let's begin with the ending, right? This is a story about empathy. And if you can't summon up empathy because you actually earn more than the people you're going to be talking to in the financial aid office, at least try to put yourself in their shoes, try to have a little sympathy. Understand that these are really difficult jobs, right?

What's actually going on at the vast majority of undergraduate institutions and graduate ones too is that they are worried sick that they will not meet their revenue goal. They need a certain number of dollars to make the budget. And if they come up short by 10%, their colleagues might lose their jobs, right? A 10% shortage in revenue creates real problems. And that problem cascades through four years, right? Because people, you know, the shortage just isn't in first year, right? If you can't get a bunch of transfer students to show up paying a lot of money,

that shortage persists over at least four years. So the pressure is on. Their job is to close. but they also have very real sort of targets and budgets that they have to deal with. And in the summer and fall, they're getting calls from all sorts of parents who are doing this for the first time, who don't have the faintest idea how the system works. The system is complicated as heck. It is not the parent's fault, but it's also not the fault of the financial aid professionals either.

Sure, their websites could be better, they could explain more, they could have better tools, but they did not create the system as it exists, and most of them, if they had a blank sheet of paper, would build something new that's completely different. So they're dealing with ignorance, well-meaning ignorance on the front end. And then on the back end, when the offers go out, they're dealing with intense anxiety, a ton of questions, and all sorts of people treating them like used car salespeople, which is not how you do it. These are human beings. They are often human beings who earn less than you do. So, deep down, you know, they may not be coming into the conversation with as much, you know, sympathy for your position as they expect. You have to treat them as equals. You have to talk to them in a calm and kind tone of voice. And you have to think about the priorities and stresses that they have before you even begin to try to persuade them to give you more. Otherwise, you're not doing a good job as a human being of thinking about other human beings and, you know, their needs and the roles that they play. You mentioned the need for colleges to hit revenue goals, and earlier you

talked about Syracuse University dramatically underestimating how many of their accepted students would say yes. Are college enrollments across the board, are they declining? Is that like a piece of what's happening when it comes to colleges not meeting revenue goals? It depends where you are and different schools are worried about different things. In terms of pure macro demographics, we have reached peak 18-year-olds, right? We're not going to get back to where we are in terms of the number of 18-year-olds turning 18 each year for a good long while here.

Because Gen Z is smaller than millennials and Gen Alpha is smaller than Gen Z. Right. So on the surface of it, that's bad news for colleges. Now, lots of people go and get their degrees when they're 30 or 40 or 50, right? So if you're a college, you can try to pivot to the grownups, right? Or you can say, you know what?

I want to win here. I'm going to get more than my fair share of 18-year-olds. I feel like I can beat that other school down the street. So you get sort of aggressive and capitalistic about it. Or you can also say, well, all right, if only whatever the figure is, you know, 40, 50, 60 percent of people coming out of high school pursue some form of higher education, you could say to yourself, you know, I'm going to make it my lifelong goal to get more people to choose college. Now, that may seem like a really hard thing right now when in Washington, you know, I don't think all that much of the colleges and universities. You know, the sort of rhetoric in the culture is, well, you know, college isn't worth it, right? Well, to that, I say, what do you need by college? What do you need by

worth? And what do you mean by it? Right. We can interrogate each of those things for an hour each, which we won't do right now. You know, much depends on where you sit, right? And if people are getting the willies about, you know, value and spending, that's really good for you if you're a community college. In fact, it may be so good that you end up oversubscribed, right? And if you're the regional state university, I mean, we're talking in New York right now, so I'll use New York as example, the most prominent, prestigious, elite, elitist, depending on who you ask, schools in the state university system, you know, are SUNY-Stony Brook, that's state University of New York, right? Sunni Stony Brook, Sunni Binghamton, right? But those schools are getting

harder to get into. They're not cheap. And so if I'm running Sunni Buffalo right now, I feel pretty good about where I'm sitting because I think I can pick off more people than I used to and maybe, you know, better students, right, who will stick around for all four years and my faculty will be psyched to teach them and I can send them off into the world to do great things. Like, I'm pretty excited if I'm there right now. So so much depends. on where you sit, what you charge, who your demographic is, where you are in America, right? Because, you know, most of the growth is in the south, southwest. There are a lot of small private colleges in the Midwest, Upper Midwest. Some of those are going to, you know, be in some

real trouble in the coming year. So it just sort of depends. Hmm. Why are private colleges in the upper Midwest specifically going to be in trouble? Oh, just like declining populations, you know, the kind of net migration out. They're in smaller towns. where people don't necessarily want to spend four years. Many of them are various iterations of, you know, liberal arts colleges. That's a terrible name. It just means that a more than average number of their degree programs are not like ardently pre-professional, right?

You know, it's not nursing. It's not accounting. You know, may not be an education degree that gets you a teaching credential by the time you're done in four years. So, you know, it's much harder to sell something that isn't pre-profession. pre-professional right now than it was, you know, 10 or maybe even five years ago. So those are some of the challenges they face. And, you know, the smaller, the school, look, there are lots of people who want to go to small schools and there are lots of people who can benefit from them.

But if you're living home and you want like a radically new experience and you want to, you know, see the world, there's a better than average chance that you're going to want to go someplace bigger, right? A school with more people and a school that's in a place that's in a place that It's bigger than where you come from. Otherwise, how else are you going to expand your horizons? I mean, it's one kind of easy way to grow as a person, right, is to be in a bigger municipality and be around more people, because more people often means more different people,

and being around more different people means you learn more in most instances. Right, right. Yeah, and it would make sense that any program that is not explicitly pre-professional in a job's uncertain environment, like we are in. right now, and many people expect that we will be in for a while, any program that is not pre-professional would just be, it's a tougher sell. It's a tougher sell to take out debt for it. Yeah, exactly.

And also, me, just thinking about geography, right, as the list price goes up and as the net price remains high enough to scare people, people are thinking ever more seriously and ever more granularly, right, in ever more granular fashion. about like job, job, job, job, job, job, job, job, job, how is this place going to help me get a job? And if it's a small school that's far from a big city, are recruiters even going to come? Do recruiters know it exists?

Are recruiters going to bother because it's such a small population? Which is why small liberal arts colleges in cities actually have an advantage right now. You think about a place like, oh, I don't know, Occidental College in Los Angeles or read college in Portland, Oregon, or, you know, take any of the colleges

in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, you know, there's like a large handful of Fortune 500 companies that are, you know, within 25 miles of downtown Minneapolis. You can, you know, get in an Uber after class at 2 p.m. with the associate director of career counseling and go tour the Target headquarters

for two hours and maybe, you know, press some flesh and meet some people and make sure your school's known over there. and then, you know, maybe Target thinks of you for, you know, this or that corporate internship program. And is that going to happen in Coe College in Iowa or Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois? I don't know, but they can't get into an Uber and go to, you know, 10 Fortune 500 companies, you know, within five miles after class. Which is harder. It's harder to make the sell.

Right. And particularly, this is something I noticed when I was graduating, you go to job fairs. And by definition, it's large companies that are there because smaller companies that only have one opening or two openings are never going to take out a booth at a job fair or a career fair. Yeah, I think that's true. And it is a challenge for really every 17-year-old in their family trying to, you know, shop these colleges. And I think it's a, you know, a challenge for the undergraduate institutions as well that they don't do a

particularly good job of meeting or even explaining or defining, which is this, what is to become of the undergraduate who is at least partially undecided? And this is no sin, right? It's okay not to know. But if you don't know, how exactly is that undergraduate institution servicing you? Right? because, you know, Target or Deloitte consulting probably isn't so interested in hiring people who are honest about the fact that they have no idea what they want to do with their lives, right? You've got to have some passion for retail or some passion for business, you know, to get hired by Deloitte or Target. But if you don't actually know, there needs to be a non-AI human-centered counseling mechanism that exists at that undergraduate institution. to help you. And it is totally reasonable to expect that that exists. But it's hard to even

conceive of how to shop for it if you are a 17-year-old who doesn't know what they want, or even the parent of a 17-year-old. You know, everybody's a little lost on this. But I feel like all these colleges need to have ministers of the clueless or whatever. And I don't use that in a pejorative way. I mean, we're all clueless in some way, shape, or form. But college students are supposed to be clueless. There's nothing wrong with that, right? Our job as the grownups is to guide them, and those schools in particular should be doing more. You mentioned earlier Community College. That's something that we've talked about quite a bit on the show in terms of providing a cheaper first two years so that the total price of four years in aggregate gets reduced. Of course,

by doing so, there are often problems with transferring credits and you have to navigate that very closely. What is the role of community college in all of this? And how should people be thinking about it if they are considering something like that? Community college is not just one thing, but for the families and the high school students that want to use it as a sort of launching pad to a four-year school, you've got to think about a couple of things. You need a pretty good sense of where you want to end up after the community college. It would be helpful if you, you knew what you want your major to be there. And then you want to get in touch with the admissions folks at that four-year institution.

And maybe even someone in the academic department where you want to land to say, this is my plan. I want to go to this community college. I want to get out in two years. I want all my credits to transfer. What do I need to do to make sure that happens? And you don't just do that once. You do that like every six weeks, right, to make sure that nothing is changing so you don't

screw it up. So you're constantly in touch with your destination institution. And then at the community college, well, before you even pick one, you got to make sure that they have classes that you'll need, that they have them every semester, that they have them at times that are going to work for you if you're working or you have family responsibilities. And you want to make sure that you can actually get in, right? And is priority given to people who didn't get in last year or the year before? Is priority given to the people who camp out at the registrar's office? Is it like trying to get Beyonce tickets online when, you know, the slots drop at 10 a.m. on any given, you know, morning to like get into the classes? Like, what are the granular logistics involved with actually getting into the classes? Because if you don't get into the classes, right, you're not going to be done in two years. And if it takes you three or four, then on the back end, you've lost time in the workplace when you could be earning, right? So, you know, you don't want that to happen. And then you want to basically like sleep at the foot of the bed of, of, the counselors at the community college who kind of, you know, grease the path out of the community

college to the four-year institution. Because there's usually at least one person and often a small army of them whose job it is to help people get from the community college to their intended four-year destination. So there's a whole bunch of people you've got to make friends with. And a whole bunch of communication you need to be doing on an ongoing basis, and then you need to be, like, vigilant about getting into the classes at the first possible moment, right? So what we've just described is something that requires you to be in, I don't know, the 80th percentile, maybe the 90th percentile of executive functioning skills, and lots of teenagers can do that, and lots of teenagers will not be able to do that or will slip up, and then it won't take them

four years, and it maybe not, maybe won't even take them five, right? It could take them six. There's a lot that's great about community college, super dedicated teachers in many instances who don't have to worry so much about, you know, research the way that people do at four-year schools, an incredible diversity in the classroom, you know, often much more so than you'll see a lot of four-year schools and the ability to save money, right? But you have got to be on top of your game. Right, right. And that poses challenges if, you know, for example, you don't have the certainty of knowing that you're going to be admitted to a given four-year institution or maybe there There are, you know, just like what high school seniors experience, you might have your reach school.

And ideally, when you transfer to a four-year institution, there's a reach school that you would love to get into, but then you have a handful of kind of realistic plan B, plan C, plan D schools. So that lack of certainty about where you're going to go next can really be a challenge. You've also made the point that once you get to that school, professors might not want to mentor you. if they're looking for a lab assistant, they're more likely to hire the junior that they've already known for two years, that they've taught as a freshman and sophomore rather than the junior who shows up as the new kid on the scene. You know, there are those drawbacks. But to your point, there's also the benefit of mentorship from your community college teachers.

Exactly, right? Part of the reason to go to college, any college in the first place, is to find the grownups who will teach you and preach to you and preach to you and pick you up and carry you through life. Finding a mentor or mentors is one of the most valuable parts about going to college. And the challenge of being in one place for two years and another place for two years is that you just don't have as much concentrated time to kind of insert yourself into these grown-ups lives and have them take you under their wing, which is not to say that it's impossible. It's just a little bit harder. We're reaching the end of our time. And I haven't even yet had a chance to talk about some of the other methods that people use to pay for college.

But if we zoom out more broadly, like what framework should a parent who's listening to this or an 18-year-old who's listening to this use as they're sorting through this menu of possible tactics and trying to figure out those next steps? Yeah, I mean, to my mind, one of the most important things and maybe the most important thing is just awareness and communication. In terms of awareness, I think it does behoove you as a parent to always be looking for news stories, podcasts, stuff you're seeing on social media that are sort of conversation sparkers. I'm trying to remember the last one I sent to my 20-year-old.

I think it was some advice about how to answer particular job interview questions. Your kid might be the type of kid that, you know, rolls their eyes every time you send them a tip or a piece of advice or a newspaper article about a 24-year-old who's doing something cool. That's fine if they think that you're full of it. As long as you can engage them in the conversation about why. Oh, okay. So what is it that I don't understand about why it's harder for you than it was for me or different for you than it was for me or different for you than it was for that 24-year-old who's in the newspaper or that random person, you know, sort of spouting off on TikTok. Like, tell me, right? Because once you

engage in conversation, then you have a better framework as a parent for what to send them next time that they might actually be more willing to ingest. You know, looking for every opportunity to engage and then have the conversations that will both allow you to get to know your kid and their interests better, or if they are, you know, among the undecided, help them think a little harder about what it is that they're good at in the world or what it is that they're most interested in and then, you know, start flinging little things at them from time to time that are related to that. You know, part of your job, especially when they don't want to take your advice, you know, when they become adolescents, is to be somebody that's just like the pop-ups that, you know,

appear above people's heads like a light bulb, you know, when an idea sparks. You want to be an idea sparker. And even if they rejects 97, 98, 99 out of 100 things you send to them, something's going to land and it can make a difference. And depending on how good their undergraduate institution is, if they're at one, or how good their friends are, the culture is, you know, at helping them along, you might be the only person doing that, right? And you know, them best in many instances. Well, thank you so much for spending this time with us. How can people find you if they want more depth, more detail?

How can people seek out your knowledge? Sure, thank you. So I'm easy to find. Ron Lieber.com is my website. You can send me an email from there. All of my New York Times work is archived at NYTimes.com slash Lieber. And I'm on Instagram and threads and blue sky at Ron Lieber. Thank you, Ron.

What are three key takeaways that we got from this? conversation. Key takeaway number one, use the college scorecard as a starting point, but remember that liberal arts majors often catch up in mid-career. We'll unpack what that means. So the college scorecard is a starting point for evaluating whether or not a degree is worth it. So the college scorecard is the best quantitative data that we have. It is a federal website that tracks earnings outcomes, and you can sort both by school as well as by major. The drawback is that it only reflects early career earnings, and that doesn't really tell the whole story, because oftentimes, at least historically, STEM and business majors tend to out-earn liberal arts grads straight out

of the gate, but oftentimes by mid-career, that gap often closes. Use it as a starting point, use it as a data point, but don't over-rely on it or use it as your sole source of decision-making. But one of the things that people miss, and this is not in the scorecard, is that at mid-career, liberal arts majors, right, people who don't have STEM majors or econ majors or business majors, they often catch up. They tend to be adaptable, right? People who are easier to train and find easier ways to pivot and maneuver. The short-term, term data on what you earn in the immediate years after you graduate, it's not always predictive of how things are going to look in the long run. You start with the best quantitative data that

we have, which is the earnings outcomes. Through something called the college scorecard, which is the federal website that tracks all of this stuff, you can go and look up colleges that you might be interested in or that your kid might be interested in. And you actually have the ability now, and this is new just within the last year or two, to drill down by major and see what people who got particular majors are earning in their first handful of years out of school. That is the first key takeaway. Key takeaway number two. If you're an undergrad, your worst-case scenario is debt of $31,000. That is the federal limit to how much you can borrow. As long as you don't convince your parents to take out a parent plus loan, and as long as you don't

take out private loans, if you only take out your own loans, not your parents, your own loans from the federal government, you will be capped at $31,000. That's a manageable number. Many of the scary headlines that we hear, you know, you read about somebody drowning in $200,000 of student debt. Oftentimes that person went to grad school, and that's where that number comes from. It often doesn't come from undergrad. Or that person's parents took out parent plus loans, which means the loans actually belong to their parents, not to them, or the person took out private loans. Those are the things that make total debt cross into a really scary place. But if we're just talking about federal student borrowing that's done by the student at the undergrad level, there's a limit to how bad that can be.

The maximum amount that the federal government will lend you as an undergraduate is about $31,000 under most circumstances. If you borrow $31,000 and you get out of college and you can't afford to make what would be a, you know, it's called a $350,400 a month payment, you can enter an income-driven repayment plan that will lower that amount. But most people, under most circumstances, can make a $300 a month payment. So that's not a bad bet. That is the second key takeaway. Key takeaway number three. As you're considering what school to go to, ask yourself how active and helpful their alumni are. Because a major part of why you're going to any given college or university is access to the alumni network.

Especially now when entry-level jobs in some fields can be tighter, a tight-knit community of alumni who will make referrals and make introductions, that's incredibly helpful in getting internships and getting jobs. According to Ron, one of the most underrated questions that you can ask a school is, what percentage of your alumni come back for reunions? What percentage of your alumni donate or volunteer? The reason that matters is because those are signals of alumni who are going to show up for you in the job market. All you need is one person to kind of send you in the right direction for you not to be among the five or 10 percent of college graduates who are unemployed.

When I came out of college, I went to work for an alum who had posted the job only at our school. At my second job, I was edited by someone who went to my school. At my third job, I was hired and edited by someone who went to my school. And it wasn't a very big school, right? So some places have stronger binds than others, and it's another thing that you can shop for. Those are three key takeaways from this conversation with personal finance columnist Ron Lieber. He writes the Your Money column. in the New York Times. Thank you so much for being an afforder. Thank you for listening to this

episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Again, even though this is the first Friday of the month, there is no BLS jobs report out today. Normally on the first Friday of the month, we do a macroeconomic update, but we are going to follow the lead of the BLS and release a bonus episode with a macroeconomic monthly update after the BLS puts out its jobs report. So the BLS is going to release that report on May 8th. We will put out an episode, a bonus episode on Monday, May 11th. Open up your favorite podcast playing app, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, whatever it is that you use to listen to this show, and hit the follow button so that you don't miss that episode. While you're there, please leave us up to a five-star review. Also, I am hosting a webinar on

rental property investing. Can you still make money in rental properties in 2026? That webinar will take place on Tuesday, May 12th. In a previous episode, I'd announced the sign-up website a little early. I didn't realize that our team didn't have it up yet. We looked at our stats. We had a couple hundred people go there and the website was like Lorum Ipsum. It was like totally not ready. So if you were one of the few hundred people who saw that, thank you for your enthusiasm. Sorry to prematurely announce that website before it was ready. I didn't realize. But it's ready now and you can go to that website. It is afford anything.com slash rentals 2026.

That's afford anything.com slash rentals 2026. Sign up for the webinar. It's free and it's a presentation on the realities of investing in rental properties in today's economic landscape. So, I mean, you want to talk about a macroeconomic update. that is the real estate macroeconomic update. Afford Anything.com slash rentals 2026. Thank you so much for being an afforder.

I'm so thrilled that you're part of this community. Please share this episode, all of these episodes with the people in your life, friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, because that's how we build this community together. Being here, again, I'm in Rome, Italy right now, and I've just spent the last several days with afforders, with people who listen to this show. I've had so many amazing conversations with people who've told me that they have been listening to afford anything for years and they've talked about

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