There has been a lot of words spent lately talking about whether college is “worth it”.

A new study from the NY Fed has a conclusion:

Eh. I mean, that's useful data, up to a point. But it doesn't really tell you whether college is "worth it" or not.

First, the analysis doesn't address the main point - whether the people who go to college earn more than those who don't because they went to college, or because the sort of person who goes to college is the sort of person who will earn more because of who they are. There's a huge selection effect. Folks who get into college have to have certain capabilities (intellectual, social, work ethic, etc.) that help them earn more; folks that graduate from college even moreso. Meanwhile, folks that do not even start college are going to have a very different set of capabilities. There's some handwaving to this in the linked documents (and the documents they link to), but nothing recent and nothing that really digs into it.

Second, this is (of course) looking backwards. The median college grad today earns more than the median high school grad today. But the median worker is 42 years old. So certainly, going to college twenty years ago ended up paying off really well - but past performance is no guarantee of future success. Especially when we consider the effects of the above combined with the expansion of the college population. In 2006, about 29% of folks between the ages of 25-30 received a college degree; in 2026, that number is between 40-43%.

Finally, "is college worth it" is a slightly different question than "is getting a college degree worth it" - because a very large number of folks who go to college don't graduate. More than a third don't - and if we included those folks, would bring the returns to starting college way, way down. To be fair - all of the linked articles make it clear they're talking about the value of the degree, not "college" more generally.