Better ROI than Harvard & Yale? 6Figr Identifies the Right School & Majors to Maximize Student Loan ROI

In a Nutshell: Many large corporations rely on metrics to measure their performance against the competition. 6Figr brings those robust analytics tools to help individual students and workers gain a similar level of perspective about salaries and job prospects at top companies. The platform is ideal for students and young professionals who want to maximize the return on their student loan investment. 6Figr draws on publicly available data to rank salaries, visualize talent flows between schools and companies, and predict long-term career potential.

When students decide to go to college, they start making a significant investment in themselves. And as college tuition continues to rise, many students choose to fund all or part of that higher education investment through loans.

That’s why Americans now have more than $1.7 trillion in student loan debt, with the federal loan forbearance and interest waiver scheduled to end in January 2022.

For students who want to maximize the ROI on their educational experience, 6Figr is a data and AI solution that identifies and compares salaries and future career prospects across different industries. As students compete for opportunities available at elite institutions in the U.S., 6Figr can help them forge career pathways and make more informed decisions on areas of study to pursue.

6Figr also works for people already in the industry. Professionals contemplating moves within or outside their chosen fields can turn to 6Figr for insights and metrics to help chart the most rewarding path forward.

Success means something different for each user, depending on their priorities. That’s why 6Figr draws on verified salary data and municipal and payroll data to assess jobs within a larger context. Salary is just one of many factors that can lead to a better opportunity.

6Figr was created by former Amazon executives and has attracted millions of users in more than 150 countries. Platform users have conducted more than 12 million salary searches since it launched in 2016.

“All anonymous, self reported salary sites have a major problem: Trust. There just wasn’t a place to get verified insights on compensation, ” said Vinod Chandrashekar, 6Figr Founder and CEO. “It would be a disaster to make career decisions based on unverified data.”

6Figr offers users many ways to probe this data amalgam for insights, including an intuitive dashboard structure and sophisticated visualizations. The platform emphasizes accuracy and exclusivity when it comes to verifying individual salaries.

Partnerships with recruiters, HR tech firms, and payroll providers generate salary data that correlates exact compensation information with parameters that affect it — including years of experience, location, school, major, company, and title.

Users can browse personal salary stats and rankings according to age, graduating year, alumni, company peers, and job title on its Career dashboard. The dashboard provides graphics to visualize the results and has other ways to view sets of rankings against the user’s performance.

The Career Charisma score on the Career dashboard provides users with a metric to quantify how the market values an individual over time based on educational and corporate affiliations.

The Salary dashboard promotes better student loan ROI on a primary level, with limited availability to all registered users. Those who sign up for the platform’s premium or professional tiers gain unlimited access to salaries, greater functionality, and additional community features.

“Compensation is the best metric out there for competence,” Chandrashekar said. “If I want to improve on anything, I first need to know where I stand.”

Among the platform’s most used dashboards is Switch, which visualizes connections between higher education institutions and tech companies through a web of data. Switch helps students pivot when ROI imperatives need precedence by associating majors and degrees with individual companies.

“Even Mark Zuckerberg started off as a psychology major,” Chandrashekar said. “Maybe the most interesting part of school is that one can always take more credits and graduate with a major with better ROI prospects.”

6Figr is also building a business directly with employers, leveraging its platform and intelligence to serve companies looking for compensation benchmarks, merit cycles, budget planning, and hiring insights.

6Figr’s has two prominent employer offerings: compensation benchmarking and merit cycle planning software; and hiring and talent Intelligence.

Compensation benchmarking is completely free for companies, wherein companies can benchmark compensation and total rewards against their peers in near real time and yet staying compliant by integrating payroll and cap table softwares.

Some of these employers have also opted in to share their salary data anonymized as it attracts large pool of candidates who express interest to work at these companies on the 6Figr website.

“The team you build is the company you build” quoting Venture Capitalist Vinod Khosla.

And these employers very well understand this and want to be forthcoming in marketing their best in class pay and the pedigree of talent that would be your future peers, Chandrashekar said.

Another premium tier feature that attracts users is the job referral dashboard, which connects students and professionals to people of similar career backgrounds who register as leads on the platform. Those leads make themselves available for formal referrals, often to earn their own company’s referral incentive.

It’s an effective way for students and new entrants to get a leg up on the competition and connect directly with hiring professionals at the companies they want to work for.

Users can also connect with 6Figr salary negotiation professionals to develop their communication skills with recruiters and hiring managers. Equipping users with proven salary negotiation strategies can maximize their potential offers for compensation clubbed with the evidence-driven data.

Sometimes, all it takes is a couple of internships or an entry-level job to establish a candidate on the market. From there, negotiation skills can be significant differentiators.

“One good thing in the tech industry, at least in Silicon Valley, is that hiring emphasis is more on skills than on what school the person went to,” Chandrashekar said. “College choice is pretty much flexible as long as the skills can be proven.”

The biggest threat today for the labor economy is AI automation of jobs.

It’s not a concern just for the individuals, but for governments too as massive job losses puts a huge burden on unemployment checks.

6Figr makes visualizing career trajectories more intuitive with maps like features that highlight different educational and career moves. Through Future of Work, the platform supplies an additional piece of the puzzle by quantifying the overall economic viability of a long-term career path.

“As with anything in life or a career, if there’s a reward, there’s also a risk,” Chandrashekar said. “So while there are always upsides of compensation and opportunities, we have to be aware of what the downsides are.”

Future of Work is based on University of Oxford research that assesses job classifications in accordance with 27 variables judged to be influenced by automation. Future of Work matches its own data with the Oxford research through the U.S. Department of Labor Standard Occupational Classification System. It computes a single number to help users understand when layoffs may be on the horizon in a particular industry and even whether a job will survive long term.

“A radiologist today might earn $400K, but that job is not going to exist in the next five to eight years,” Chandrashekar said. “These are things we want the public to know about.”

For example, when looking at radiology specifically through the lens of the University of Oxford research, one sees that radiologists solve computer vision problems by poring over medical scans to identify anomalies. But computers are improving at that task.

“Once we can calculate the AI automation risk of a job title, then we suggest what skills to learn to make the transition,” Chandrashekar said.

It’s one more way 6Figr generates actionable insights from verified data to help students and professionals go where they’re needed.

“With a very high automation risk job, we can show the different career paths people have traced to move to a safe zone and remain employed,” Chandrashekar said. “And we can show what skill sets are required to make that transition.”