A University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill first-year graduate with a degree in the Romance languages can expect to owe as much as 84 percent of his or her first-year salary in student debt.
Those findings are part of the latest research composed by College Scorecard, a Department of Education initiative that publishes data on student debt and earnings after graduation for thousands of schools.
The measurement comes as a new wrinkle by the Education Department that allows prospective students to take such forecasts into consideration when contemplating what area of study to pursue as a major. Overall, the advanced data include median student debt and average earnings after having earned a degree for at least 41,000 programs.
On average, researchers found students enrolled in the average bachelor’s degree program leave school with a debt burden equal to about 80 percent of their salary in the first year after graduating college, while master’s degree graduates owe out about 86 percent of their first-year earnings.
With the federal government now capping the amount undergraduate students can borrow at $31,000, most graduates can expect to earn more than they owe upon completing requirements toward a B.A.
Presently, there is no lending cap placed on students at the graduate level, where researchers found in fields of study such as film the debt-to-earnings ratio can swell to as high as of 150 percent or higher.
In other fields of study such as law and medicine, researchers found average ratios could be as high as 257 percent.
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