You will be able to price further study including the income and CPF you give up.
Siti is 29 and works in marketing. She has been looking at a one-year full-time master's programme, and the fee on the university's page is S$40,000. Her first thought was that she could save that in a few years. Her second, after a conversation with a friend who had done one, was less comfortable: "The fee was the small part. It was the year without a salary that hurt."
This lesson prices further study the way it actually costs you, and that means counting what you give up while you study. All figures are made up for the example.
Any course has direct costs: the tuition fee, application and registration fees, books and materials, and sometimes a laptop or software. Those are easy to find on the course page and easy to plan for.
Full-time study adds a second, larger cost: the income you would have earned if you had kept working. That includes your salary and, for employees in Singapore, the employer's CPF contributions that come with it. Both stop while you study, and neither appears on any invoice.
Here is Siti's full-time option.
The fees are S$40,000, and she estimates S$1,500 for materials, a laptop upgrade and other costs, so the direct cost is S$41,500.
Her gross salary is S$5,000 a month. Over a year of full-time study she gives up S$60,000 of salary. Her employer also contributes to her CPF each month, S$850 in this example, which comes to S$10,200 over the year. Check the current contribution rates for your age on the CPF Board website.
The full cost is S$41,500 plus S$60,000 plus S$10,200, which is S$111,700. The fee she first looked at is a little over a third of that.
Use gross salary for this rather than take-home pay, because your own CPF contribution is part of what you earn, and it stops too. If you want to plan the cash side separately, you can also note the take-home pay you would lose each month, since that is what your monthly budget will feel.
Siti's university also runs the programme part-time over two years, for S$42,000. With S$1,500 for materials, the direct cost is S$43,500, a little more than the full-time fees. But she keeps her salary and her CPF contributions throughout.
The cost of part-time study is time. The programme estimates around ten hours a week of classes and study, which over two years is about 1,040 hours. Those hours come from evenings and weekends that currently go to rest, family, a side income or exercise. For someone with a young child, or a job with long or unpredictable hours, that can be the deciding cost. For someone with free evenings, it may be the obvious choice.
So the comparison is S$111,700 and one year, against S$43,500 and about 1,040 hours of evenings and weekends over two years. Which suits you depends on your job and your home life, and writing both down stops you comparing the full-time fee with the part-time fee and concluding that they cost about the same.
Further study is often justified by what it leads to: a higher salary, a move into a new field, or a role that requires the qualification. Those gains are real for some people and small or absent for others, and they are much harder to estimate than the cost.
Write down three things. First, what specifically would change: a promotion that requires the degree, a job switch you've seen advertised, a pay range you have checked. Second, roughly how much it is worth per year. Third, how sure you are, in plain words.
Siti thinks the master's could help her move into a strategy role paying about S$800 a month more. That is S$9,600 a year, and she rates her confidence as "maybe half". At that gain, the full-time cost of S$111,700 would take about 11.6 years to earn back, and the part-time cost of S$43,500 about 4.5 years, before allowing for the chance that the move never happens.
That simple payback figure ignores interest and future pay rises, so treat it as a rough guide. Its job is to stop a large decision being made on a fee alone. Siti may still choose full-time, for the network or the change of direction. She will just know what that choice costs.
The career move itself, from CVs to interviews, is covered in Career strategy: CVs, interviews and networking in Singapore, so this course can stay with the money.
One more check. Some part-time courses require time off for exams, residential weeks or projects. If you would need unpaid leave, add it to the part-time cost the same way as full-time lost income.
Now take the course you are thinking about and put both versions side by side, if both exist.
Price one course you are considering as fees plus lost income, for both full-time and part-time study if available.
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