Here’s a timely tool which coincides nicely with part one my jobs in science series. It’s a grad school calculator, presented by the LearnVest website. It’s very simple and dumbed down, but gives you an idea of the costs of grad school in terms of lost wages, student loans, and potential income. You enter your current income, your future income, the costs of tuition, etc. and it provides a comparison between grad school and no grad school.
I feel like it might be a little bit too dumbed down – for example, it doesn’t consider the cost of a “job” as a post-doc following grad school. Instead, it assumes that you would have a regular job after graduating. This is the case in some fields, like engineering or computer science, but not true in fields like life sciences. Perhaps an option for specifying your field of study would be useful. However, it still gives a good big-picture feels for costs and expenses. Try it out!
