What is the "value" of a Cal Poly Pomona Civil Engineering B.S. degree diploma? What is Value? Value means different things to different people; even different things to same person. We have our moral value, family value, social value, etc. For this course, we will focus on the definition of financial value. How to define financial value? If you search internet, you will get all sorts of definition of financial value and there is no one clear definition. It is because the definitions are written by whoever define it. We will use the term "Value" a lot in this course and, unfortunately, even the textbook did not define it at all. To make it simple for you to get started, I will provide a very simple definition of "Value" for now with the understanding that there are lots of assumptions attached to this definition. Intuitively, financial value (from now, I will just call it "value") is how much something worth in monetary term. Followed that same logic, my definition of "value" is the sum of all expected future earnings. So, what is the "value" of a Cal Poly Pomona Civil Engineering B.S. degree diploma? Let's say, the starting salary of a civil engineer or a construction manager is about $65,000 a year right now. Assuming you will work for 40 years; that is a reasonable expectation, and your annual salary increase is the same as annual inflation rate. So, the value equals to $65,000 x 40 = $2,600,000; assuming you will not get any promotion or other ways to make more money. Not bad as this is just a minimum, right? Right here, we did not consider the effect of time value of money, inflation, investment opportunities, etc. Later, we will add all these conditions into the definition. But for now, just remember this definition and move on