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Those who earn bachelor's degrees do indeed earn more than those with only a high school education. But many people are vastly overpaying for this benefit.

Not to mention that this is not a controlled experiment. Maybe those who earn degrees would have earned more anyway. (Though I do suspect that college is very beneficial, for the reasons you cite.)

>But many people are vastly overpaying for this benefit.

Exactly. I don't have any issues with getting a degree. I think it is very beneficial both financially in the long term and emotionally. But you shouldn't overpay for it. There is nothing wrong with community college. There is nothing wrong with putting off college for a year or two to save money. Obviously every situation is different, but I think we should be educating high school students about their options and their prospects.

>There is nothing wrong with putting off college for a year or two to save money

Positively agree. In fact, I think entering college directly after high school is absurd. We should encourage if not require everyone to take a year off to really decide what they want before entering college. Lots of people I know who ended up dropping out with debt and no degree reported to me that they were not ready for college and they only went because it was the "thing you're supposed to do."

I entered not knowing what I wanted to do at all and ended up with a history major, which hasn't really been all that useful to me. I discovered too late that I loved programming for me to switch majors to cs.

Now I am not saying that waiting a year or two would have helped me pick a better major, because I still might not have found my passion for programming. But I do know that I would have studied harder and learned more during those years. My grades were fine, but I really did just enough to get good grades. I didn't take advantage of the learning opportunity because I was immature. I would love to go back now and really learn.

The secret of elite colleges is to admit only those who have a high probability of succeeding even without a degree. Then take credit for their success.

> Source? Again and again, people only seem to look at the cost of education like education is a product that you buy at a store that could be gotten cheaper. College education is an experience, an exposure to new ideas, a gradual development of ancillary skills.

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Few people are saying college has no value. Mostly people say what you get is not worth what you pay. My own anecdote - I am by all accounts a successful "business degree" person. While I went to my four year college with a business major, I also started my career in business/marketing, starting at $10 an hour in freshman year, and getting to the 99th percentile of income for my age by age 24. The growth I received from college was a rounding error compared to the growth I got from work experience in the same 4 year period and same amount of effort. And I was paid to get the work experience...

Very similar trajectory; I attended a very middle of the road business school and had a vaguely IT related student job for three years. The classes and degree were largely worthless, outside of being able to tick the box on applications. The student job taught me a little bit, but the majority of my marketable skills are self taught. I did freelance work for about 18 months directly prior to graduation and was able to leverage that experience into an excellent and stable job offer at 23, which I'm still happily employed by two years later.

If you are ambitious and "want it" badly enough, the lack of a degree shouldn't slow you down, and if you aren't ambitious or don't "want it" then no degree will magically make you marketable. Most ambitious will probably choose to pursue the degree anyway, so it's self fulfilling to an extent. The point of the article stands sharply though, the "experience" isn't worth the cost, and the debt we incur is choking other parts of the economy. How many millenials do you know that drive a brand new vehicle or own their own home?

Here's a source that shows a correlation between ice cream sales and homicides: (http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2013/07/09/warm_weather_hom...). I'm sure if we unpacked the BLS data you cite we'd also see a correlation between higher earners coming from intact families and the possession of other forms of social capital in addition to a degree. The question is which is the dominant driver?

As for the citations you requested, I'd point to the raft of sob stories that have been published over the last few years which feature unfortunate stories of people six figures in debt, but working jobs that require no training. It could be these are cherry-picked examples to help advance a faulty narrative (e.g. http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html), but to the extent they reflect a real problem we should examine the broken logic that created it.

So why would I suggest anyone go to a state school? As I mentioned in the last paragraph of my previous post, since WWII we've become more credential-focused and made a BA the bare minimum for many professional career paths——something that should be remedied in my opinion, but the reality.

You suggest the commodification of education is the problem—I'd argue the problem is that we don't treat college enough like a product. Because we treat it like a rite of passage for young adults, and subsidize it heavily, you have horrible colleges offering degrees at the same price as elite schools. Instead of analytically valuing the degree based on the quality of the education offered, we treat degrees as fungible goods and splurge emotionally to obtain them.

In many parts of America you need a car to participate in the workforce. We don't offer subsidies so everyone can go out and buy a Bently.

If you can afford college, go, it's a great, mind-expanding experience for a young mind. It is a good rite of passage into adulthood in the US, but so is joining the military or going on a religious mission. So is night school after you've found a career path you like, but need further education to advance in.

I don't understand the reflexive desire to turn the protection of 3rd rate colleges into a cause célèbre.

>Because we treat it like a rite of passage for young adults, and subsidize it heavily, you have horrible colleges offering degrees at the same price as elite schools.

It's not the rite of passage that raises the cost, but the cheap student loans that incentivize colleges to raise the price of tuition and hire middle-level administrators. This says nothing of the 'value' of education, only the 'cost.' I'm with you that college is too expensive. But the solution is not forgoing education so that the ultra rich continue to have better opportunities. It's making education cheaper so that more people gain more knowledge.

And apparently our society doesn't take this rite of passage too seriously, since only 40% of Americans have a college degree [0].

>I don't understand the reflexive desire to turn the protection of 3rd rate colleges into a cause célèbre.

Me neither. But the existence of third rate colleges is not an indictment of colleges. The post I responded to of yours said that "in most cases a college degree is next to worthless". I'm taking you to task on that claim as being demonstrably false.

I'm sorry that you didn't get what you wanted out of college, I truly am. But please stop advocating for the wholesale elimination of the most accessible path to success for millions of low and middle-income Americans who are not exceptional. (You advocated for this when you suggested we tell parents the college education they hope their children can get is "next to worthless.") More educated adults means a more informed electorate and the higher chance of American innovation that allows the country to be competitive in a global market.

[0]http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/percentage-americans-col...

The stat you linked to is misleading.

40% of Americans aged between 25-64 covers anyone who graduated in the last forty years. You should look at recent graduates to remove any bias from older generations who may have been educated before the 'rite of passage' idea became popular.

On the other hand, the actual figure is around 35% for 25-29 year olds so it's not far off. It goes up to 45% if you include associate degrees. While that doesn't seem like much, it's more than 1 in 3 and 25 years ago it was 1 in 4. For a qualification that was once an elite bit of paper, that's a lot of people. It's also showing no sign of decreasing, increased costs or not.

http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_caa.asp

> But please stop advocating for the wholesale elimination of the most accessible path to success for millions of low and middle-income Americans who are not exceptional.

Is there a citation for that? Median wages, over time, have not improved in line with a more educated populous. More people getting degrees has not translated into a more wealthy population.

Note that in the UK at least, some of the larger firms have stopped asking for degrees and simply require you to pass in-house testing.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/e...