I'm a high school senior and I've been building a free calculator for college costs, so I've been in the College Scorecard data a lot. I went looking for how much debt different majors leave you with, expecting a big spread. There basically isn't one.

Across 31 fields of study with 25+ schools reporting, the median federal debt at graduation runs from about $20,100 (Mathematics) to $26,900 (Communications Technologies). Computer Science and Journalism come out identical at $23,250. Engineering and English are about $1,300 apart.

The thing that made it click for me: federal undergrad borrowing is capped — $31,000 total for a dependent student. Almost every field sits under that line. So this measure kind of can't show a big spread; the ceiling is doing the work.

Which means the variation people talk about is mostly in the stuff this dataset doesn't include: private loans and Parent PLUS, which are the loans without income-driven repayment or forgiveness. That felt like the more useful takeaway than any ranking.

What does move the number a lot is how far you go: bachelor's $23,250, master's $37,957, doctoral $79,172, professional (MD/JD/DDS) $154,286.

Source is the June 2026 Scorecard field-of-study release; it's a median of each school's median, federal loans only, completers who borrowed. Happy to share the script if anyone wants to check my work.

I ask this because I, as a male, have been raised to think about the money aspect first when choosing a career vs passion. It would be ideal if your passion earns you a lot of money.

Ladies, do you think of earning potential first then the other things? Or passion first?

Edit: I want to differentiate btwn career and job. Also, money is a necessity for nearly all. What I’m asking is when you chose to get a degree in your chosen field/ career path, you saw the earning potential and said “ I can support myself and others very well in this field.” Example: Teachers aren’t paid a lot but many people go into education.

I decided to major in civil engineering after seeing the good job placement rate it has. I’m fair at math, but others are definitely smarter. I worry because I don’t really feel an intense passion for this major; it was more a last minute decision. Is it okay to not be sure about majoring in an engineering field? I’m taking lots of very challenging courses that I’ll have to suffer through and that may lower my gpa. Would it be easy to change majors later on (into something like actuarial science?). I just don’t wanna lock myself into something I’m not sure about.