Is College Worth It? Clearly, New Data Say – NYTimes.com

• Is College Worth It? Clearly, New Data Say – NYTimes.com

  Yes worth the time and money and we know not going to college will cost you $500,000 in lost income and you probably lose out on other money making opportunities but and I say but how can bring down the cost of college? Make college more transparent, faster to graduate and prepare for a satisfying career.

  tags: education schools universities colleges employment job

  • Some newly minted college graduates struggle to find work. Others accept jobs for which they feel overqualified. Student debt, meanwhile, has topped $1 trillion.

  • For all the struggles that many young college graduates face, a four-year degree has probably never been more valuable.

  • pay gap between college graduates and everyone else reached a record high last year, according to the new data,

  • Americans with four-year college degrees made 98 percent more an hour on average in 2013 than people without a degree. That’s up from 89 percent five years earlier, 85 percent a decade earlier and 64 percent in the early 1980s.

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  • If there were more college graduates than the economy needed, the pay gap would shrink

  • That the pay gap has nonetheless continued growing means that we’re still not producing enough of them.

  • “We also have too few people who are prepared for college.”

  • The decision not to attend college for fear that it’s a bad deal is among the most economically irrational decisions anybody could make in 2014.

  • the true cost of a college degree is about negative $500,000. That’s right: Over the long run, college is cheaper than free. Not going to college will cost you about half a million dollars.

  • After adjusting for inflation and the time value of money, the net cost of college is negative $500,000, roughly double what it was three decades ago.

  • The wage gap between people with only a bachelor’s degree and people without such a degree has also kept rising.

  • The big economic returns go to people with four-year degrees.

  • Among four-year college graduates who took out loans, average debt is about $25,000, a sum that is a tiny fraction of the economic benefits of college.

  • And the unemployment rate in April for people between 25 and 34 years old with a bachelor’s degree was a mere 3 percent.

  • College graduates, like almost everyone else, are suffering from the economy’s weak growth and from the disproportionate share of this growth flowing to the very richest households.

  • Lawrence Mishel, the institute’s president, told me. “Wage growth essentially stopped in 2002.”

  • . It’s the most reliable ticket to the middle class and beyond.

  • As the economy becomes more technologically complex, the amount of education that people need will rise. At some point, 15 years or 17 years of education will make more sense as a universal goal.

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