Actually, I'll argue that college educations can pay off in a third way. It's not just brand-name prestige and useful skills. There's a lot to be said for the way that four years of residential education imbues grads with a valuable lifetime network of allies.

The third reason explains why small, residential liberal arts schools carry on semi-successfully for decades (centuries!?) even though they aren't exactly towering champions on the first two metrics.

It's easy to mock the English major from Knox College in downstate Illinois or the psychology major from Prairie View in Texas. But I'll argue that in the Before Times, these schools and their graduates did a lot to hold the social fabric of the United States together. Liberal arts grads do quite nicely in sales, administration, community law practices and more. They've got people skills that some high-earning Stanford grads lack. They take care of one another and provide a strong baseline economy that creates customers for us all.

What's changed is that with the pandemic, we've lost the residential-college benefits of meeting those freshman hallmates turned allies for life. In that case, paying big $$ for what's really just an online education without a valuable network stops having much appeal.