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Is a bachelor’s degree today the financial equivalent of a high school diploma ten years ago? Do you need a master’s degree, or is an associate’s degree viable in today’s job market? Most of all, can you afford to go to college, and will you receive a financial return on your college expenses?

If there's one truism that goes virtually unchallenged these days, it's that a college degree has great value. Beyond the great books, beyond the critical reasoning skills, and beyond the experience itself, there's another way that a college degree has value: Over the course of a working life, college graduates earn more than high school graduates. Over the past decade, research estimates have pegged that figure at $900,000, $1.2 million, and $1.6 million.

But new research suggests that the monetary value of a college degree may be vastly overblown. According to a study conducted by PayScale for Bloomberg Businessweek, the value of a college degree may be a lot closer to $400,000 over 30 years and varies wildly from school to school. According to the PayScale study, the number of schools that actually make good on the estimates of the earlier research is vanishingly small. There are only 17 schools in the study whose graduates can expect to recoup the cost of their education and out-earn a high school graduate by $1.2 million, including four where they can do so to the tune of $1.6 million.

Your Score

The Human Capital Score™ is based on projections of the possible income paths of college students in the 10 years after graduation. This allows the classification of students into various risk categories which lenders can use to consider the capacity of a given group of college students to repay loans of long- and short maturities. The projected income shortly after graduation is a good indicator of short term capacity to pay. Longer-term loans can be assessed by looking at projected income over a longer period.

Some students have lower income projections immediately after graduation, and hence lower scores, but are projected to experience sharper growth in income over time, leading to higher 8-year scores after more time has passed. Others students start with relatively high scores, but see their projected incomes grow at a slower pace, resulting in relatively lower 8-year scores.