Guest opinion: What a degree pays back

At two in the morning an ambulance runs hard for town, two emergency technicians working on a man having a heart attack. A mechanic had it in the shop last week to be sure it ran. It crosses a bridge an engineer designed and rolls into an emergency room where a doctor and medical team wait. The lights are on because an electrician wired the place, the heat because a plumber keeps it running. Every argument about education gets settled in that hallway. We need all of the specialties.

Our shop and ag teachers spend careers turning out kids who can weld, wire, and fix what breaks. I am a product of that training, a past FFA president who won the state mechanics contest. My businesses, like most across Montana, depend on mechanics and parts men. That is why I have argued career and technical education deserves equal standing. Our welders, electricians, plumbers, and diesel techs are too often treated like second cousins at the family reunion. Plenty of Montanans never sat in a lecture hall past high school and do better than most of us.

I am not a neutral party. I believe in education. My wife and I hold graduate degrees, hers in technology, mine in economics. Our oldest son is a surgeon, our second son carries a law degree and an MBA, our daughter the same, our youngest a business degree. When I have a medical, legal, plumbing, or electrical problem, I am glad someone made the investment.

Faith in the value of college degrees has slipped. Whether college pays back its cost is a fair question. I participated in a national legislators' seminar focused on the actual data.

Here is the arithmetic. A Montana high school graduate earns about $34,557 a year. Ten years out, the typical Montana State graduate earns $53,263, or $18,700 more. Four years there runs about $78,400 out of pocket after grants and scholarships. The extra income covers that in a little over four years.

All nine of our four-year campuses pay students back in under seven years — Carroll College at 3.3, Montana Tech at 3.36, Montana State-Northern at 3.40. Nationally, 80 percent pay back inside ten years.

The program matters more than the campus. Ninety-seven percent of engineering programs net half a million dollars or better over a working life. Ninety-nine percent of two-year nursing programs clear the same bar. In the trades, associate degrees in heavy equipment repair, precision metalworking, and heating and cooling typically top $250,000, matching the average bachelor's degree, and sooner. Sixty-eight percent of programs in visual arts and music never pay back.

Washington noticed. Under the 2025 reconciliation law, programs whose graduates earn less than a high school graduate in their state start losing federal loans in 2027. A program that leaves a young person worse off than not going has not earned a taxpayer-backed loan. That test is a scalpel, not a reason to swing a hammer at the whole system.

Economic gain is not the only value in education. Jefferson wrote in 1816 that if a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. A republic run by neighbors needs neighbors who can read a budget, sit on a school board, and tell fact from rumor. That return never shows up on a pay stub.

Montanans have invested in keeping college affordable. Resident tuition and fees average $8,766, fourth lowest in the West, a quarter below the national average.

Which brings us to the six mills. Since 1948, Montanans have voted every ten years on this university levy. It raises about $35 million this year. The authorization ends December 31, 2028, so the 2027 Legislature decides whether it returns to the ballot. The free-market Frontier Institute has asked us to keep it off the ballot, arguing that letting it expire would cut property taxes.

As a legislator, I believe this choice belongs to the people, especially when they have passed it by about 60 percent. I support putting it on the ballot. Show Montanans the numbers and the outcomes, and let them choose. They have not gotten it wrong yet.

Rep. Llew Jones, R-Conrad, is chairman of House Appropriations.