This is a really interesting addition to the literature if you dig through it, with subtle distinctions between income gains and wealth gains and interactions with demographics.

It's not a simple "college ain't what it used to be" story. The biggest puzzle is how to explain why recent grads still command significantly higher incomes than nongrads without accumulating significantly more wealth.

Increasing tuition is a factor, as is the declining return on capital gains over successive generations. Limited financial literacy and predatory lending seem to be hurting recent grads too.

Most notably, the inability to discharge school debt in bankruptcy since 2005 may have had strong effects.

That last legal change remains bewildering to me. You have three parties: schools, financial institutions, and teenagers. So uneducated teenagers are expected to know whether or not their choice in school, degree, expenses, and personal background will make their education worth it? When the other parties have all the data and experience? And if it turns out everybody was wrong, the now barely-employed twenty-something is least prepared to absorb the burden. More importantly, the least susceptible to incentives to improve this endemic situation for other future students. It creates a moral hazard which drives schools to overprice courses of education that are higher risk, and removes any incentive for lenders to educate borrowers on expected returns from different choices.

Policy circles are hotly debating right now how to overhaul the entire system. Maybe we should acknowledge the policy changes that helped break everything in the first place, and reverse those as soon as possible.