Invest your own money, let compound effect be your leverage, and avoid debt like the plague.
- Manlobbi
Halls of Shrewd'm / US Policy
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)
https://apple.news/AMNMcB0chSWKetrtfwgLyogMuch 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”
No. of Recommendations: 2
About advising students to change their major after they have already graduated...
The Labor Department publishes the Occupational Outlook Handbook which is based on an ocean of data. It covers the
future outlook of hundreds of professions. Education, salary, number of people employed. (It's much better to enter a profession like nursing that requires hundreds of thousands than a profession like, say, Egyptology, that only requires a handful.)
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/This is free to everyone. It should be required reading in high school!
Wendy
No. of Recommendations: 7
It should be required reading in high school!
There are probably some people who are mature enough in high school to make a decision that will affect them for the rest of their life. I certainly wasn’t.
I just drifted along; I was on “the college track” and I didn’t know any better. I went to Lehigh to become an engineer of some sort, and two years in decided I didn’t like that, spent the vast proportion of time at the college radio stations, and flunked out. I transferred to a small school and got a BA in Speech, and promptly got a minimum wage job in Keene, NH.
I’m sure my parents were aghast having spent all that money. (They paid for everything required, I paid for anything I wanted above that floor.) I didn’t really settle into “a career” until I was 30 or so, so “reading” something in high school would have been totally useless in terms of applicability. (Having the diploma allowed me entrance into the Executive ranks at Westinghouse; I’m sure I never would have gotten there without it even though it was irrelevant to the task.)
That’s why I encourage high schools to give the widest possible spray of knowledge in as many fields as possible, because “exposure” is probably the best juice for future citizens.
I watched a show on CSPAN last night, the guy said he changed major in his 3rd year in college, from a lucrative possible profession to “History’, and his friends assumed he would become a high school teach/slash/football coach or something. Instead, he runs the National Archives in Washington DC. I don’t know how much he makes or whatever, but he goes to work happy every day doing something he loves.
That’s a lesson I tried to instill in my nephew, who only wanted “a high paying job” even though he dislikes it. “Do something you love - and it’s not work” was my motto. It didn’t take.
No. of Recommendations: 1
That makes things easy - become a doctor (else fly a plane).
Jeff
No. of Recommendations: 2
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.
