We have all heard for years that having a bachelor’s degree will help you earn several hundred thousand dollars more over your lifetime than someone without a college degree. In fact, many publications have touted a difference of $800,000 to $1,000,000 between those with a degree and without a degree. According to an article in Yahoo! News, however, these estimates may no longer be as accurate as they once were.

Although there is no doubt that having a college degree will generally put you in a better position to earn more money over your lifetime, some experts maintain that the difference isn’t as great as we have long thought. In fact, when considering the amount of money that is put into earning a college degree, coupled with the fact that tuition costs are continually rising, experts believe the gap in overall earnings between those without a degree and those with a degree is closing.

In the past, estimates regarding the difference in earnings between those with a degree and those without have been largely based on a simple formula. In short, it involved calculating the average earnings of those with a high school diploma and those with a college degree as reported on the Census. According to the 1999 Census, high school graduates earned an average of $25,900 while college graduates earned an average of $45,400. This comes to a difference of $19,500 per year. When multiplied by 40 years, this comes to $780,000.

“The idea was not to produce a definitive ‘This is what you’ll earn’ number, but to try and give some measure of the relative value of education attainments,” says Eric Newburger, who is a lead researcher at the Census and the co-author of the paper that determined this figure. “It’s not a statement about the future, it’s a statement about today.”

According to Mark Schneider, who is a vice president of the American Institutes for Research, which is a nonprofit research organization, these figures have been very misleading. This because these figures do not take several important things into consideration. Some of these include:

· Income tax deductions
· Breaks in employment
· Debt, particularly due to student loans

The 1999 Census also shows that the total average expense of attending a four-year private college was $15,518 per year. For the 2009-2010 school year, this number ballooned up to $26,273 and the costs continue to rise. As such, Schneider estimates that the actual difference in lifetime is more like $279,893. To obtain this figure, Schneider also used salary figures from graduates ten years after they completed their degrees.

So, what’s the moral of the story? In short, don’t go to college with the expectation that you will automatically be richer for it. Rather, go to college because you want to take your learning to the next level or because you want to receive the education you need to pursue a career you can truly love.