Statics do show that college educated people tend to make considerably more money than non college educated. If you pick a good major, don't take out tons or loans, and actually dedicate yourself, it's still a solid choice to build a productive career.
Well, yes. Some of that comes down to college people 'make' more money given they have hundreds of dollars of student loans a month. They need more money so they only will work jobs that pay more money. But their 'net profit' as it were tends to be low until they pay those loans off. Which now-a-days is like late forties.
(I'd be interested in seeing if that gap is closing along generational lines. Given rising wages for big chunks of blue collar work as more and more people go to college, it might be tighter than it was. And more and more college goers aren't getting good jobs they thought they were going to get.)
But it requires effort and forethought. Most of those good majors are useful ones. Like Petrochemical Engineer. Not Theater. Geologists get way more use out of their degree in all sorts of fields than a Dance major.
Even then most people who do give the effort and forethought would likely get better and more modern educations from intensive technical courses over six months. Colleges, by their nature, tend to be a few years behind industry standards in a number of cases.
Nearly every peer I've spoken to IRL with a college education, who went for longer than I did (I realized college wasn't for me after a year), thinks college is a scam. Even the ones who went into their field.
My art major friends who are very progressive and left leaning? They say they could've been doing what they're doing now, four years earlier if they hadn't focused on college.
I don't know what to call her, my just short of the actual crazy libtard friend, actual major but she assists IEP students with primarily mental disabilities (From what I've heard her say) and her job and her major match, and when I said 'college is a scam' she couldn't agree with me fast enough, and she went to one of the better private colleges in the country. She learned most of her job, on the job.
My sister has a master's in history, is living paycheck to paycheck, has
no student debt, and hasn't worked a history job since like her senior year of high school. I couldn't afford college (I was planning on being a HS math teacher so I absolutely would have had a well paying union job in 2012-3) and she went to six years of it and blew almost her entire inheritance on it.
My position is a bit harsh in it's opening statement, but the general sentiment is that a student needs to go into college with some forethought. And far, far too many aren't and they're paying huge tuition prices that they would never be able to afford without the gov't assistance that baits them into going and paying ridiculous amounts in student loans.
College costs have far outstripped inflation and the overall quality is going plummeting. More students, every year, are getting scammed, and being conditioned into getting scammed by parents and teachers, with huge debt and degrees that aren't really worth anything.
You can't even go bankrupt to get rid of them. There's no way to get out of the debt.
That's why I think it's a scam.
Because people are being scammed.