At WhereWeGo, we've always been obsessed with helping people answer one deceptively difficult question: Is this training program worth it for me?
60 percent of gen z is considering the trades and trying to evaluate training programs as we speak. The answer depends on much more than tuition. How much work will you miss while enrolled? What will you earn afterward? How long will it take to make that money back? And how does the calculation change if you receive a grant or need a loan?
Most training program and community college websites don't make those tradeoffs easy to see. So I built a new little experiment for WWG labs this month: the Training Program Cost & Benefits Calculator.
You can choose a real program from our Mississippi Training Program Navigator...or enter information for any program yourself...and get an estimate of:
- The program's total cost
- Wages you may give up while enrolled
- Your potential earnings increase
- How long it could take to earn back your investment
- How grants, loans, and out-of-pocket costs affect the calculation
The calculator also gives the program a one-to-five-star rating based on its estimated payback period and shows how the potential wage gain could add up over time.
The rating isn't a verdict on whether a program is good or bad, and it certainly isn't a prediction of anyone's future. And honestly, it may not even be super accurate at this early phase! It's really just an attempt to make the financial tradeoffs more visible so people can ask better questions before enrolling.
This is very much a lab. I don't know yet whether people will find this level of detail genuinely useful, but I thought it was worth building and testing.
Give it a try, play with the assumptions, and tell me what works, what doesn't, or what's missing.
Refresher on labs! Free tools, built every month, we expand the ones that work, we kill the ones that don't.
