Yeah, totally, it’s a reasonable question and not necessarily clear, especially when there are political voices in this arena distributing some degree of misinformation.

Even though that older Fed article is warning that for some people the “wealth premium” of a college degree is waning, it does talk about the stability and causation of the “income premium” that people with degrees enjoy, and since some of the reasons identified for the income premium have to do with social signaling and employer selection bias (as in, many high paying jobs require a degree in the first place), I believe it lands much more closely to the causal eat healthy for a longer life correlation. The more recent Fed link I posted above agrees in the sense that they’ve concluded after many studies on this subject that taking loans in order to go to school is absolutely worth the cost, that the financial returns are very very likely to pay off. At least for now...