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A $60k degree plus two years out of the workforce really costs $192k — a $25k/yr raise pays it back in career year 13, but a $10k raise never does.
The advertised cost of grad school is tuition; the real cost is tuition plus the salary you stop earning while enrolled — on a $70k job and a two-year full-time program, that's $192,000 in present value, not $60,000. The payback side is equally misunderstood: what matters is the raise over what you'd have earned anyway, discounted over your remaining career. At a 4% real discount rate, a $25k/yr premium over 30 years is worth $385k — the degree wins by $193k, breakeven in year 13. A $10k/yr premium loses $38k and never recovers. This calculator runs the full NPV so the decision rests on your field's actual post-degree premium — not the program brochure's "average graduate earns."
Professionals use it before applying: a $60k master's plus two years out of a $70k job really costs $192k in present value — a $25k/yr premium wins by $193k (breakeven year 13), a $10k premium never pays back.
Because money you stop earning is as real as money you spend — it's just less visible. Two years out of a $70k job is $132k of present-value income gone, more than double most master's tuitions. This is exactly why the structure of the program changes the decision more than the sticker price: a part-time or employer-sponsored degree keeps the salary flowing, collapsing the true cost from $192k to near tuition alone — the same degree at a third of the economic price. If your employer offers tuition assistance, that benefit is worth more than most raises: use it before you evaluate quitting to study full-time.
Your field's actual premium, from hard data: the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook for licensed professions, levels.fyi and pay-transparency postings for tech, and real offer letters if you have them. Never the program's marketing average — it's survivorship-biased (sponsored students who kept their jobs inflate it) and it blends fields where the degree is a license (nursing, engineering, accounting) with fields where it's decoration. The honest sensitivity test: run the calculator at your pessimistic salary assumption, not your hopeful one. If the NPV is negative at pessimistic and positive at optimistic, you're making a bet, not an investment — size it accordingly.
Deliberately: loan interest (a $60k degree financed at 7% costs real money — model the debt separately with the loan payoff calculator), completion risk (roughly 4 in 10 graduate enrollees don't finish within six years, and a half-finished degree pays nothing), the non-salary option value of credentials that unlock licensed roles, and career-pivot upside that doesn't show in salary immediately. The discount rate does quiet work too: at 4% real it prices the fact that your foregone salary invested in index funds would compound. A degree that barely clears NPV zero at 4% is losing to doing nothing and investing the difference.