Americans "all seem to agree that a college education is wonderful," says Megan McArdle at The Daily Beast, but our obsession with getting a degree at all costs is getting out of hand. We're telling students that college grads make 80 percent more than their counterparts with just a high-school diploma, and that the student-loan debt they're piling up is a necessary investment. As a result, the number of bachelor's degrees awarded jumped by 50 percent between 1992 and 2008. The trouble is, 60 percent of those additional students wound up in jobs they probably could have landed without a degree — waitress, electrician, secretary, mail carrier. Indeed, many young Americans who arrive on campus expecting a diploma to propel them to success are finding "it won't even get them out of the spare bedroom at Mom and Dad's." Which begs the question: "Is all this investment in college education really worth it? The answer, I fear, is that it's not." Is this too pessimistic a view on college, or is the bill for four years of tuition really a bad investment?
College doesn't always pay off, but not going is worse: McArdle says an increasing number of kids are worse off, financially speaking, when they leave campus than when they arrived, says Daniel Luzer at Washington Monthly. "This is a good point. But it doesn't mean that college wasn't worth it." These financially hobbled grads are still more likely to get a job, and earn more, than if they "never set foot on campus." The problem is that we're pumping fewer public resources into education, so students are having to pay a bigger chunk of the bill.
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