Now, if you could invest that money at 3% compound interest over 30 years, you're talking about $650k -- that's 33% of your final career totals. (When I do that calculation for my 10 years of BS+PhD engineering, its pretty dramatic!)
So where are those types of values in the calculations?
Now that I've graduated my starting job is ~$60k with a $20k annual raise once I've been in this position for a little over three years. There's not one friend that started work directly out of school that I can say that for.
Not to mention my degree allows me to venture to the upper ends of this company where education is a requirement while they'll plateau in seniority because of that.
Again, way too many variables and gray areas for us to do a number to number comparison because no two situations are identical and the idea of "average" or "typical" probably only makes up a small percentage of personae anyway.
Like you, I lived frugally during my entire educational experience, and the tuition was largely paid for through scholarship / fellowship. For talented people (who could prosper after dropping out), college expenses can be fairly minimal.
I'm not sold either way on the debate myself. I think there are a lot of people in college who'd be better off outside, and a lot of people outside who'd be better off in. More to the point: I think that society as a whole would be better off with a different distribution of higher education opportunity.
Paraphrasing William Gibson: higher education is here, it's just not evenly distributed.
- In the current economy, the number of high school grads making $40k/year is vanishingly small. It's more likely he'd be making 25k or less if he has a job at all. - 25k for living expenses and books for a college student is way too high unless she's going to school across the country and flies home a ton. - The average student doesn't pay 40k/year in tuition unless he has rich parents and is a below-average student. The average is less than 20k.
Let's redo the math: Tuition: 20k * 4 = 80k Living Expenses: 15k * 4 = 60k Total Expense: 140k
Let's say that our college student gets a below-average job that pays 32k/year.
In a 35 year career with 3% raises, our high school grad makes a total of $1,511,552. In a 31 year career with 3% raises, our college grad makes a total of $1,600,086.
Considering the time value of that $140,000, it's a wash. Go to college and study poetry if you want. The impact to your long-term bottom line is negligible.