No. of Recommendations: 4
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:
Let’s start with the number the college panic ignores. In 2025, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York asked the question, “Is college still worth it?” and came back with a very specific answer: Yes — to the tune of 12.5 percent.
“That was the median return on investment in a college degree, after accounting for the cost of tuition and the amount lost by not spending those years working. College graduates in recent years have earned a median of around $80,000 a year, compared to around $47,000 a year for high school graduates. Government data in 2024 put median weekly earnings for workers with a bachelor’s degree at $1,543, compared with $930 for workers with only a high school diploma — about 66 percent more. And while it’s true that the growth of this premium has largely flattened over the past two decades, after roughly doubling between 1980 and 2000, it hasn’t disappeared. Graduating from college, even in 2026, still puts you on a better path than skipping it.”
Excerpt From
“Is a college degree still worth it? What surprising data reveals.”
Bryan Walsh
Vox (June 2026 issue)
apple.news: New college grads are doing better than the vibes suggestMuch of the angst has come from the fact that recent grads have had a hard time entering the market (or at least at the level they think they deserve.) The reality is that there have been plenty of times when it’s been tough. Try right after the 2008 financial crisis, or the dot-com bust, for example.
But yes, there are some speed bumps, as the article explains:
“Outcomes are also influenced by what a graduate chooses to study: Underemployment runs under 10 percent for nursing graduates and above 65 percent for criminal justice majors. (I realize telling someone who just claimed their diploma that maybe they should have picked a different major is not exactly actionable advice.) And the financing has gotten tougher — for Gen Z, it cost 32 percent of the typical American family’s annual income to pay for one year at a state university in 2021, compared to mid-20s for Gen X in the 1990s and 15 percent for Boomers in 1975.
But generational comparisons obscure as well. When people say college doesn’t pay like it used to, they may not realize they’re comparing against a past when a far smaller and more homogenous slice of Americans got their degree: Among 25- to 29-year-olds, the share holding a bachelor’s has roughly doubled between 1980 and 2021” 