A degree worth the price tag

And more of the week's best financial insight

College graduates toss their caps in the air.
(Image credit: Jens Schlueter/Getty Images)

Here are three of the week's top pieces of financial insight, gathered from around the web:

A degree worth the price tag

Getting an MBA still pays off for most graduates, said Patrick Thomas and Andrea Fuller at The Wall Street Journal. The sticker price for many graduate business programs can go well into six figures for just two years on campus. But a recent analysis of federal loan data for nearly 600 programs found that "at about 98 percent of universities that offer MBA programs, graduates typically made more money two years out of school than they had borrowed." Contrast that with law schools: Only 6 percent of them sent graduates home with higher earnings than debt in the same time frame. "Not everybody who attends a well-known school catapults into a new income bracket." But the debt loads from some of the most expensive MBA programs were generally among the most manageable.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

A disappointing office return

"Many workers are finding their return to the office isn't going as hoped," said Sawdah Bhaimiya at Business Insider. In a survey of 1,000 adult workers by the software firm BambooHR in August, 37 percent said "they felt worse in the office than even at their lowest point in the pandemic." Among respondents, "61 percent hoped for more in-person collaboration" at the workplace "but only 49 percent actually reported experiencing it." The majority of workers expected their productivity to go up after returning, but nearly two-thirds of them have found that has not been the case. An overwhelming majority — 79 percent — also said their company's culture hasn't improved since they got to see colleagues in person.

Job-board identity theft

Fake ads are popping up on job boards everywhere from scammers trying to steal people's personal data, said Cezary Podkul at ProPublica. A few of the telltale signs of fraudulent want ads are "unusually generous pay, using suspicious email domains, and requiring that one verify one's identity upfront." A ubiquitous fake listing, for instance, is looking for an airport shuttle driver "at a pay rate that works out to more than $100,000 a year." A version of the ad was shared among a well-known Nigerian scam group "along with instructions on what to tell applicants to get them to share their Social Security number." Other fraudsters are going to elaborate lengths to bolster their authenticity. One created a fake application site that "uses Spirit Airlines' photos, text, font, and color code."

This article was first published in the latest issue of The Week magazine. If you want to read more like it, you can try six risk-free issues of the magazine here.

Continue reading for free

We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.

Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.