I’m 31 with $58K debt and eyeing an $80K degree for a $20K raise. Should I go back to school?

On a recent episode of The Ramsey Show, a 31-year-old caller named Jason laid out a plan many mid-career workers are weighing: borrow heavily for a degree that promises a modest raise. “I’m basically contemplating if it’s a good decision to go back to school and accrue about $65,000 to $80,000 worth of debt,” he said. He already owes $58,000 across a mobile home and two vehicles. The new debt would fund an online civil engineering degree from Oregon State and lift his salary from $62,000 to $82,000.

Co-host George Kamel did the math out loud and reached an uncomfortable answer fast.

The break-even math that kills the easy version of this plan

Kamel’s verdict: “We’re going to spend $80,000 to make $20,000 more, take you 4 years to break even. That’s without interest and without the payments.” He is right, and the cleaner you do the arithmetic, the worse the picture gets.

Borrow $80,000 and earn an extra $20,000 a year before tax. Four years of that raise just gets you back the sticker price of the loan. Taxes on the raise eat a chunk. So do interest charges. The 10-year Treasury sits near 4%, which benchmarks federal and private student loan pricing. Plug a realistic loan rate into an $80,000 balance over 10 years and you face tens of thousands of dollars in interest layered on top of the principal.

Now stretch the program over six years of part-time study, which was Jason’s plan. The raise does not arrive until year seven. Interest accrues the entire time. Real break-even on cash flow, after tax and after interest, is closer to seven or eight years, assuming the new salary materializes when the diploma arrives.

That is the part of borrowed-degree math that gets glossed over. The brochure compares sticker tuition to lifetime salary gains. The honest comparison is after-tax incremental income against principal plus interest plus years of foregone earnings during study. Run it that way and a $20,000 raise stops looking like an obvious win.

The alternative: liquidate the depreciating stuff and cash flow the degree

Kamel’s counter-proposal is where the episode earns its keep. Jason owns a mobile home worth $64,000 with $35,000 still owed and $20,000 of vehicle loans against assets worth $34,000, including a side-by-side toy. Sell the house, walk away with roughly $29,000 in equity. Sell the vehicles, clear about $14,000. That is roughly $43,000 in cash, generated from assets losing value every month while charging him interest.

Rent something modest. Kamel suggested keeping rent under $1,000 a month on Jason’s $4,000-plus monthly take-home. Pay tuition in cash as you go. Finish the degree in four years instead of six. Graduate with zero new student debt and start collecting the raise two years sooner. Kamel’s line was: “Everything in your life right now is going down in value, and you owe payments on it.”

The variable that decides this for you

Forget the degree question for a second. The factor that determines whether this plan works is the interest rate on your existing assets versus their depreciation. A mobile home depreciates like a car, not like a house. A recreational vehicle does the same. Paying interest on an asset that is shrinking is a wealth drain on both sides.

Compare that to a 30-year mortgage on a real house with land. The asset typically appreciates. The interest is potentially deductible. The math flips. Same dollar of debt, opposite outcome. If your $58,000 sat against an appreciating primary residence, selling to cash flow tuition would be wrong. Against a depreciating mobile home and toys, it is obvious.

The macro backdrop reinforces urgency. CPI sits at 332.4, up 0.6% in a single month. Consumer sentiment is at 49.8, well into recessionary territory. Borrowing $80,000 into that environment, on top of $58,000 you already owe, is a thin margin for error.

What to do with this if you are Jason, or close to him

1. List every debt with its interest rate and the asset behind it. Mark each asset as appreciating or depreciating. Anything depreciating with a payment is a sell candidate before you take on new debt.
2. Run an honest break-even on the degree. Take the after-tax raise, subtract loan interest, divide into total borrowed plus interest. If the answer is more than five years, the degree needs a cheaper path or a bigger payoff.
3. Price the cash-flow version. Add up tuition per term at your target school, compare to your monthly surplus after a smaller housing footprint, and see how many credits you can pay for without borrowing.
4. Check the salary claim. Pull current civil engineering salary data for your metro from BLS before assuming the $20,000 raise is real. A degree that pays $10,000 more changes everything.

The principle underneath Kamel’s advice is worth carrying forward: a depreciating asset with a payment attached is a slow leak, and you cannot fix a slow leak by adding a bigger one.