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Hard to justify spending $80,000 for a degree that leads to a job that makes $34,000. Something is broken.

Well, that is if you study something useless like art history, sociology, media, communications or english literature. I laugh whenever I come across someone who's spent thousands of dollars going to university to study english.

Well, if you studied engineering, science, medicine, accounting or law. You'll eventually probably make good money. If you can't land a job in the US, you can go abroad and your American degree will be valuable in other countries just for the fact that you studied in the US.

There is a huge glut in some of the sciences. I'll only speak to Biology/Life Sciences, since that's what my degree is in, but I would say well over 50% of graduates, including myself, don't end up working in the field. The jobs I got, and could get, in the Bay Area, were right about in the $34k/year range (and that was for someone fortunate enough to have multiple years of research experience).

Spending a few more years in school and taking on more debt to get a graduate degree might have helped, but I make as much or more now doing IT work than most of the people I know who have Masters degrees in the field.

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