The decision to attend college deserves the same rigor as any other major financial commitment. The challenge is timing. The costs hit upfront, during enrollment. The benefits, to the extent they exist, accrue over a career that may span four decades. Comparing the two requires a method that accounts for the time value of money: a dollar today is worth more than a dollar decades from now.

That method is discounted cash flow. You project every year of earnings and costs, discount each back to today’s dollars, and sum them into a Net Present Value (NPV). The option with the higher NPV is the better investment. A wage-premium snapshot at age 30 cannot capture this. NPV can.

Run it honestly, with forgone wages, costs, taxes, and discounting, and a result appears that, in my experience, most families do not expect: the median bachelor’s graduate, on national median earnings and costs, finishes behind the median high school graduate. In today’s dollars, the gap is about $82,000 at the full cost of attendance and about $17,500 at the median net price after aid. The book shows every step of that calculation and documents every assumption, so you can test it rather than take it on faith.

You do not have to build the spreadsheet yourself. The model does it for your specific school, field, and price.

This is a short summary of Chapter 29 of the book. See the full model in the book, or run your own numbers now.

Read next: Is College Worth It? The argument in full, or this breakdown of whether a college degree is worth it in 2026.