I always wonder about articles like this one from the Wall Street Journal’s Career Journal section entitled, The Declining Value of Your College Degree. What are they trying to say? That your college degree isn’t worth getting anymore? Don’t worry, just get your high school diploma, right?

Here’s the reality that is buried deep down in the piece:

To be sure, the average American with a college diploma still earns about 75% more than a worker with a high-school diploma and is less likely to be unemployed.

The reason I think these articles are written is because they are controversial. It’s almost always a ploy to get people to read more rather than a true treatise on the state of compensation. The anecdotal stories don’t necessarily roll up into the experience of everyone.

Springraise is built to answer many of these questions. This is precisely why we collect the education and compensation information that we do. As we scale to collect millions of profiles, we’ll be able to tell you the value of a bachelor’s degree, but YOUR bachelor’s degree. We’ll tell you how much a BA degree from the University of Michigan is worth versus one from Harvard. We’ll tell you how much a person who works in pharma sales should make with a particular background.

The great news? You have the power to make this all possible. Just add your profile to Springraise and immediately you can see how your career progression stacks up to others with our background. The more people we have, the better the data. It’s in your hands.

And by the way, if you are in college right now and read that article, think twice before dropping out.