alt Hacker NewsAssuming a grad income of $80k is an insane starting assumption. MAYBE you’re making that in software (good luck getting your foot in the door).
Any other industry? Biology? Social sciences? Academia? Manufacturing?
I struggle to think of anything other than finance that has a shot of STARTING at $80k. Hell I didn’t hit $80k in software industry until ~3 years in and I thought I was (I indeed WAS) very lucky.
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Academia at $80k? After a PhD, sure. There may be some grad programs where you get a stipend north of $60k, but those are probably located in very HCoL places, so you can be assured you won't be saving anything.
Your numbers seem to be a couple years out of date, or maybe you're (no offense) living in an economic backwater like Florida where salaries are severely depressed due to the tourism effect.
The base salaries for Entry level SWE roles are in the $80k-100k range nationally [0].
Additionally, most finance roles start in that ranges, though high finance has starting salaries comparable to Big Tech new grad.
Even Biotech new grad salaries tend to be in the $60k-80k range.
Same with manufacturing engineering roles [1]
[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/entry-leve...
[1] - https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/entry-manuf...
>Assuming a grad income of $80k is an insane starting assumption.
It doesn't really matter if you consider it to be insane. The studies on this stuff always compare averages to averages, and average college grads do better in the long run no matter how optimistically you cook the books to make the inverse seem likely.