> cultural belief that a college degree will guarantee a living wage

I have more than a few friends and acquaintances who are deep in debt from school loans, many of them with degrees from excellent schools but with low market value (compared to e.g. engineering, science, medicine, law). I'd be in the same boat (a lit degree) if it weren't for an obsessive hobby that happened to be lucrative (programming, design).

So I think you're exactly right. Many people are given false expectations about what opportunities a degree confers. Much of what you're paying for is a good brand attached to your name and access to a social network. That's much more of a gamble than med school, where although you're guaranteed to come out with a lot of debt, you're also fairly certain you'll be able to pay it off in ten years or less while making a very comfortable living.

I would love to see more money and effort spent on secondary education, vocational education, and community colleges. I would pay more taxes if that's where they were going. If the collective mindset could be shifted from "I need to go to college" to "I need to get an education, learn how to be creative and work constructively with other people," we'd have fewer people in debt and more functional institutions.

/hand-waving

There's no one deciding whether investing in a particular degree for a particular student makes sense. Which is what would normally happen if you go to the bank and ask for money.

There's a reason we aren't graduating enough people in the difficult high-value fields like engineering. Its financially too easy to take an easy, low-value degree. And young people don't have a good understanding of how things work out in the long run.

So societally we are, once again, sending people down very bad roads paved with good intentions.

We have a mistaken belief that every good thing can and should be subsidized. But in doing so we destroy the decision-making process that normally would weigh the costs and benefits.

The result is decisions that more frequently don't make sense for individuals or society.

Note, though, that they went to "excellent schools". They could have just gone to low end state schools and walked away with much less doubt.

Based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics 2010 data[1] the average college graduate has nearly double the weekly wages of someone with only a hs diploma ($1038 vs $626/week) and is nearly half as likely to be unemployed (5.4% vs 9.2%)

So I think it's a bit unfair to say that this is merely a 'cultural belief'. Do you have any data to support that dramatically improved salary and employment rate is just a myth?

I do agree with the points on students loans, but I just hear way too often how "college isn't worth it" without any data to back this up what-so-ever

[1] http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm

I can assure you there are correlation/causation issues with those stats. I come from a demographic and gene pool of people likely to hold degrees--aside from me everyone in my 6 person family has at least a bachelors and my girlfriend has a masters. However, despite no degree, I had no trouble obtaining a lucrative career as a developer.

You have no control group so the $1038 vs $626 or unemployment numbers are meaningless. The top would natural succeed even without going to college, you can't tell how much value it actually adds.

I'd be way more interested in those statistics over time? A degree has mostly always meant more money/better job eligibility, but is that now a smaller gap compared to years past.

An unintended consequence would be limiting education based on financial ability - a school would not admit a lower income student as opposed to a higher income student. While this does occur in loans, and also in property taxes feeding school districts... to say someone can't go to college here because they don't have the money now is a tough argument. The great equalizer will have taken the final plunge into a wealth-based advantage.

Plenty of rather poor people were going to college 50+ years ago. They worked during the summers, or took a year or more off first to earn money and then went off to school.

The graph in the article show college costs up 300% in the last 21 years.

The economist[1] reports an 11x increase in college tuition from 1978-2011.

The problem is definitely _not_ that people can't get loans but rather that college is so expensive that it requires loans in the first place.

[1] http://crimsoncavalier.blogspot.com/2010/09/who-says-theres-...

Well, if college was cheaper, it wouldn't be so prejudical against poor people. :-/

It might exclude the middle, but the truly needy tend to get scholarships to cover college costs. Scholarship programs might have to be rethought out to compensate for the lack of loans.

I'm afraid of the future you offer.

If I was held to the same standard as your last sentence I would've never made it to a quality college when I had many external circumstances that affected my GPA. And yes, I was, and am, still talented.

Where do others like me fit? Are we to be cast aside? Will you push aside the next genius for something that is more 'safe'?