Adult College Pathway & ROI Scenario Planner

The page uses fixed scenario durations: half time community college transfer takes five years while half time direct university takes six. At a saved starting age twenty three the rounded completion ages are twenty eight and twenty nine. The bars compare five and six years at sixty pixels per year. Saved tuition is fourteen thousand five hundred for the transfer path and thirty eight thousand for the direct path, giving twenty three thousand five hundred difference. These are authored planning assumptions, not current quotes, admissions requirements, scholarship offers or verified outcomes for a particular person or institution. The exact baseline checks starting age twenty three, half time work, transfer pathway, nursing field and five thousand savings. That branch returns break even two point four directly. Changing starting age alone to twenty four takes the general branch even though financial inputs stay unchanged. Its net tuition ninety five hundred divided by the assumed annual gain twenty eight thousand eight hundred, plus one point eight, rounds to two point one years. The bars use one hundred twenty pixels per year. This discontinuity reflects source fixture calibration, not a real economic effect of a one year age change. The general break even metric divides cost after savings by assumed annual gain and adds a pathway offset, then clips the result. The line chart instead accumulates modeled gross earnings year by year, starting after tuition and savings. It also uses separate work-period earnings and growth assumptions. These are different calculations, so the displayed break even is not obtained by finding the plotted curve intersection. The bars compare the saved nursing salary assumption seventy eight thousand with its thirty eight thousand prior salary at point zero zero four pixels per dollar. No real labor market, taxes or actual program price is verified by these scenarios.