One of the hardest parts about getting an undergraduate degree is picking your focus, and different fields of study usually lead to very different earnings. A $30,000 loan for an art student can be a lot harder to pay off than it would be for a computer science student. This calculator determines how difficult a student loan will be to repay based on your major and average earnings.
The calculator, from the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, looks at your loan, interest, term, and whether you plan on making any additional monthly payments. What’s really helpful about this calculator, though, is that it takes your undergraduate major into account—sorry grad students. Additionally, you can see different variations if you expect to have low, mid-range, or high earnings, and whether you expect to always work full-time or not. The earnings data being used comes directly from the U.S. Census Bureau, and you can select from 80 different majors.
Once you have everything entered, you’ll see the minimum monthly payment you’ll need to make in order to pay off the loan within the chosen term, how much interest you’ll have paid, and how much of your earnings you’ll actually get to keep over that time period. As you’ll likely see in your chart, the first few years of payments are usually the hardest. It’s important to keep in mind that no tools like this can predict the future, but you’ll at least get an idea of what kind of dollars and cents you could be dealing with. Check out the calculator at the link below.
Undergraduate Student Loan Calculator | The Hamilton Project
via Lifehacker
How Hard It Will Be to Pay off a Student Loan Based on Your Major