College degrees are either incredibly overpriced, or incredibly good value for money, depending on how you analyse them.

If you look at some CS graduate making $200,000 a year and assume they'd have made $50,000 without the degree, college looks like an incredibly good investment.

On the other hand, if you look at someone paying $1000 per credit hour for online video lectures? I've seen online video at 1% that price being described as overpriced.

>If you look at some CS graduate making $200,000 a year and assume they'd have made $50,000 without the degree

This is the problem with assessing how valuable college is: you don't know how well off the person would've been if they had chosen not to go to college. You can't just compare all the people who went to college with all the people who didn't. You end up with a selection bias. You need to compare people who went to college with people who could've gone to college, but didn't.

Also, there might be (is) a difference between what's good for the individual and what's good for society.

> This is the problem with assessing how valuable college is: you don't know how well off the person would've been if they had chosen not to go to college.

I think this is absolutely the key. If you just look at some of the figures given in [0], and do some simple math, you find out that someone with a bachelor's degree makes just a hair more than $26k per year more than someone with only a high school diploma. Over the course of, say, 40 years working, that comes out to a hair over $1M difference in favor of the college grad. So, it would seem that even if a 4 year degree cost $200k (which, sadly, is not an insane estimate these days [1]), it still seems like a no-brainer.

But, that's as far as statistics can take us, I think, because, as you mentioned, we don't see what happens to people who choose not to go to college, but who could have successfully gotten a bachelor's degree. There's no literal way for us to ethically conduct that experiment.

If I were to speculate a bit, I might wonder if the answer lies in looking at children of college graduates and comparing those children who went to college vs those who didn't. I have no idea if such a study is available or not, unfortunately.

The other idea I have is that, although it pays off in the long run, maybe acquiring a significant amount of debt at a young age makes it harder to get by in the initial, post-college years harder. Considering the cost of housing and health care, this seems like a reasonable hypothesis, but I'd also like to see if there's research on that.

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[0]: https://www.northeastern.edu/bachelors-completion/news/avera...

[1]: https://www.collegeavestudentloans.com/blog/estimating-the-t...

The challenge with looking at the statistics for an ROI is that lifetime earnings will vary by field of study, highest degree attained, and location. I am not familiar with US statistics agencies, but Stats Canada has looked at lifetime earnings by field of study. It is a little out of date as this is from 2010 [1], but it shows there are some large differences in earnings by field. In some cases a bachelor's degree results in lower earnings than a high school graduate. [2] shows that depending on major about 30% of graduates go on for further study. That further study may be a lower credential (e.g., certificate or diploma) or a higher credential (e.g., masters or professional degree). [3] shows an analysis of differences in earnings by field, gender, and highest degree level; with the largest increases in earnings coming for those from business, social sciences, and arts. Unfortunately [2] and [3] do not seem to be looking at lifetime earnings.

For men, [1] shows the median lifetime earnings for high school graduates is $882,300. The median lifetime earnings for men with a bachelor's degree is 1,517,200. The lowest field is Fine and Applied Arts at $843,900, which is lower than the median lifetime earnings for those with a high school education, up to the highest median field of engineering with earnings of $1,845,000.

For women, [1] shows median high school lifetime earnings of $458,900, median bachelor's earnings for all fields of $972,500, and lowest median bachelor's earnings of $652,100 (Fine and Applied Arts), and a highest of $1,169,100 (Business Administration). The interesting thing to note is for women there is only 1 of 18 field degree combinations (earnings are provided for bachelor's and associate's) where the woman's lifetime earnings decreases relative to a high school education alone (Fine and Applied Arts associates median earnings are $437,300). For men, 4 of 18 field degree combinations will result in lower lifetime earnings relative to high school education alone.

There is further analysis in [1] of the earnings percentiles by each field showing that men with a business degree earn the most at the 90 percentile. This holds for women with a business degree.

I don't see if this has been restricted to those whose highest education is a bachelor's degree or not, but there is also work that has shown increases in earnings by field for graduate or professional degrees [3]. It's possible that those earnings premiums have been captured in the reporting of [1], but [3] seems to come to the conclusion that most business, arts, and social sciences fields gain a large increase in salary for graduate or professional degrees.

Hopefully those familiar with similar analysis from the US could help to provide that information.

[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-626-x/11-626-x2014040...

[2] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/150911/dq150...

[3] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2018001/article...

Also, to the degree that college is used as a signal of intelligence/skill, it's a waste for individually and collectively. You could just have the college entry exams and hand out diplomas for those, and it would be nearly as good.

Except they’re not used as a measure of intelligence or skill? They’re used as a measure of ability to go through a series of rigorous tests and do a bunch of work you might not like doing.

They’re a litmus test to see if you’d likely be good for doing a job you don’t enjoy either. End of the day - work is work and they need history to show you can do more than the bare legal minimum of graduating high school.

Wouldn't 4 years of work history be a better assessment?

Yes. However - why would an employer take a risk on a high school graduate when plenty of people with college degrees (often with internship experience) are applying?

My question is, to what degree is college a training center, and to what degree is it a toll bridge to the middle class?

If I get charged $100 to cross a toll bridge in my car to get to my job, I wouldn’t consider myself to have gotten a good deal, regardless of pay.

What percentage of all college students are going straight into a $200,000 a year job?

Not only that, but in most markets those salaries do not exist.

Even in markets that still pay well outside the valley like Boston, that level of compensation is still extremely limited and are < 1% of available positions most of which are quite senior.

Everyone going to college has turned it into high school- in every metric. I'm a professor, and college is a lifestyle, the classes are a part time job, and there is greatly reduced academic rigor and seriousness. At some age, general education should become a personal journey, or soon we'll have PhDs in general studies and everyone will need one.

My kids will be strongly discouraged from going to college. Colleges have somehow devolved from centers of education into something else entirely. Colleges now often push extreme viewpoints that lack evidence, colleges have dangerous drinking and drug cultures, and colleges bury their students in debt that enslaves them for life.

A good education can now be had on YouTube... I have spent the last year learning construction there and the quality of content is excellent. Years ago, I learned to program quite well using online courses and I am sure those have improved even further. I tried to learn diesel mechanics from a textbook That was the top rated in the field, it is shocking how terrible learning from a textbook is.

I am going to have my kids do a combination of apprenticeships and online learning.

This is a vastly overgeneralized statement. Where I went to college [in the US] was much more than a "part time job" and academic rigor was incredibly high. It was not uncommon for students to work 60-80 hours a week.

> I'm a professor, and college is a lifestyle, the classes are a part time job, and there is greatly reduced academic rigor and seriousness.

Where/what do you teach? When I was doing math & cs - they (especially math) were more than a full time job. Rigor was pretty high - lots of kids failing, dropping out, or transferring schools out. I see this still happening with people I know in school now - mind you not as severe since they’re not in math.

>> Going to college is and always has been a reliable way towards earning more money[0]. The issue isn’t that college doesn’t work, the issue is that it’s basically an asset bubble of sorts and the cost exceeded its value.

That last part about exceeding it's value contradicts the notion that it currently IS a reliable way toward earning more money. At least net more money.

IMHO a bunch of professors should be able to start their own "non-profit" college with minimal overhead. But I suppose a lot of them aren't really into teaching anyway. Maybe we need to separate education from funding their hobbies (research).

It depends on what you're comparing it to. You can go to a trade school and learn contracting, or be an electrician, or an HVAC installer, and in your late teens and early 20's you'll make a lot more than most college grads. But unless you branch out into your own business your income is capped lower than a generic college grad's probably is. And importantly, those careers are typically hell on your body. I know we all like to talk about the dangers of sitting all day but it doesn't compare to doing physical labor for a living, by any stretch. If you have particularly onerous private loans funding a marginal degree from a for-profit institution, you might net less lifetime earnings than a very skilled electrician in an in-demand market.

If you're comparing it to unskilled labor, retail, customer service, or stuff like that, it's absolutely no contest you're still better off with the degree.

And yeah your last bit there seems like the typical HN "let's reinvent this thing that already exist but 'from first principles!!1' but forgetting all the reasons it exists in the state it does now." Public colleges have too much overhead but some of it is justified and necessary to ensure licensing, credentialing, etc.

> and in your late teens and early 20's you'll make a lot more than most college grads.

I question even this. I live in an area of the US without a strong union culture, and known a lot of people in the trades and it doesn’t seem uncommon to see job postings for X apprentice starting at $13-$15 and hour. I could get close to that at a shitty gas station clerk job.

Compare the apprentice to the college student: the apprentice gets paid to learn, while the student has to pay (borrow).

Isn't "apprentice" like an intern. Just the first 1-2 years of on the job training until the wage goes up?

I have a cousin he started as an electrician making $18 an hour as an apprentice. He started making six figures 4 years into the job. Granted he works quite a bit.

It's a feast or famine industry. It's been a feast for a while, and a lot of people who are relatively new to the industry haven't experienced a famine.

My father is/was an electrician and 2008 decimated the industry. He was de facto laid off and worked part time for the better part of three years after. Of course, today there's tons of work and no one to do it. Any young'uns who came in between like 2002-2008 didn't make it through the GFC and switched careers, and the old-timers who weathered the storm don't have enough juice left to work the insane hours.

How competitive are these apprenticeships? A super smart super hard working friend of mine really wanted to do an electrician apprenticeship but at the time (about a decade ago) the wait-list was several year long so he went to college instead.

I'd like to see some harder numbers on this, too. I'm from a similar area, but, maybe things are different in other places. It would be great to see the figures adjusted for cost of living.

It’s hard to get good data broken when you’re looking into things like career level, etc. but when I go on the BLS salary page for my MSA I can see the following

HVAC Repair. It’s a pretty common trade out here. I have a number of family who’s done it at one point. There’s probably a pretty strong demand given how miserable I was when my AC died the other day. Annual median is $42,640

Insurance Claims Processors, which in the particular city I live in tends to be one of the big options for otherwise unskilled college graduates. Annual median: $43,570

Not that big of a difference, though I suppose you could argue the former has the slight advantage of not having as much educational debt burden, which probably exceeds that ~$1k difference.

However like the GP noted, a person in the latter position likely has better options late career.

Your idea sounds like a public university.

We could even collectively own it through our state government.

> It would be much better to reduce the cost of college so that it’s more valuable for more people

To do that, would be very helpful if the government stopped giving zero interest loans. This is resulting in costs skyrocketing.

LOL. I wish the government gave 0-interest loans. As it stands in the US, Stafford Loans are higher than most car loans [3.73% undergrad, 5.28% graduate, 6.28% PLUS]. Costs are skyrocketing despite government loans. It's not the working/middle class students asking for new buildings, new "centers of research", new dorms, etc. Colleges are building these things, giving you the bill, and your options are go:not go.

As the percentage goes lower the amount of debt will increase. The same thing happened in mortgages. The monthly payment stayed relative constant (plus inflation).

We're talking about teenagers, not adults with several years of household finance experience.

It doesn't matter. People care more about the monthly payment than they do the debt #. You can afford a much higher debt burden if the interest rate is smaller.

For fun, assume you can afford $1000/month in housing costs. With a 30yr mortgage and 20% interest rate. How expensive of a house can you afford? What if interst rates dropped to 10%? 5? 2.5?

Very strong correlation with home prices over the last 40 years.

> If huge chunks of future generations skip college because it’s unaffordable, that will be bad for us as a society. It would be much better to reduce the cost of college so that it’s more valuable for more people, rather than having younger generations opt out due to the high cost.

You'd think so. But then again look at healthcare in the US.

Bad for us as a society how?

Personally, I don't know. But I find it interesting that the only politically permissible way to even discuss it is by looking at how it could hurt women:

> Yet the stakes are too high to ignore, she said. “If you care about our society, one, and, two, if you care about women, you have to care about the boys, too. If you have equally educated numbers of men and women that just makes a better society, and it makes it better for women.”

The possibility that it could be bad for men I guess is not a relevant consideration when evaluating the impact on society.

Well, two ways. First, broadly speaking across the economy, a college graduate 2000 hours a year typically produces more GDP$ to the real economy than a non-college graduate. There are a lot of caveats to that statement, but broadly it's true and that's why people will refer to education as human capital. Second (and I believe this is the more controversial claim), as a society we really do benefit from intellectuals expert in history, literature and other liberal arts and from basic research, by which I mean scientific research which has no immediately forseeable practicable application.

I imagine their point is people forgoing a post secondary education.

The conflation of college with education was natural and understandable until the last 10-15 years, but that appears to be changing.

I agree as well. I'm just speculating about OP's point.

Now you can get a pretty decent education from watching lots of videos and an education that commensurate with one that you'd plunk down thousands of dollars for at a university or college.

Especially in the era of COVID where they would have you watch videos anyways during a period of lockdown.

So glad I'm not a student right now. I'd feel so ripped off.

Well said. Today it's a dating camp that you attend after high school before you settle into the debt economy.