If you look at some CS graduate making $200,000 a year and assume they'd have made $50,000 without the degree, college looks like an incredibly good investment.
On the other hand, if you look at someone paying $1000 per credit hour for online video lectures? I've seen online video at 1% that price being described as overpriced.
This is the problem with assessing how valuable college is: you don't know how well off the person would've been if they had chosen not to go to college. You can't just compare all the people who went to college with all the people who didn't. You end up with a selection bias. You need to compare people who went to college with people who could've gone to college, but didn't.
Also, there might be (is) a difference between what's good for the individual and what's good for society.
I think this is absolutely the key. If you just look at some of the figures given in [0], and do some simple math, you find out that someone with a bachelor's degree makes just a hair more than $26k per year more than someone with only a high school diploma. Over the course of, say, 40 years working, that comes out to a hair over $1M difference in favor of the college grad. So, it would seem that even if a 4 year degree cost $200k (which, sadly, is not an insane estimate these days [1]), it still seems like a no-brainer.
But, that's as far as statistics can take us, I think, because, as you mentioned, we don't see what happens to people who choose not to go to college, but who could have successfully gotten a bachelor's degree. There's no literal way for us to ethically conduct that experiment.
If I were to speculate a bit, I might wonder if the answer lies in looking at children of college graduates and comparing those children who went to college vs those who didn't. I have no idea if such a study is available or not, unfortunately.
The other idea I have is that, although it pays off in the long run, maybe acquiring a significant amount of debt at a young age makes it harder to get by in the initial, post-college years harder. Considering the cost of housing and health care, this seems like a reasonable hypothesis, but I'd also like to see if there's research on that.
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[0]: https://www.northeastern.edu/bachelors-completion/news/avera...
[1]: https://www.collegeavestudentloans.com/blog/estimating-the-t...
For men, [1] shows the median lifetime earnings for high school graduates is $882,300. The median lifetime earnings for men with a bachelor's degree is 1,517,200. The lowest field is Fine and Applied Arts at $843,900, which is lower than the median lifetime earnings for those with a high school education, up to the highest median field of engineering with earnings of $1,845,000.
For women, [1] shows median high school lifetime earnings of $458,900, median bachelor's earnings for all fields of $972,500, and lowest median bachelor's earnings of $652,100 (Fine and Applied Arts), and a highest of $1,169,100 (Business Administration). The interesting thing to note is for women there is only 1 of 18 field degree combinations (earnings are provided for bachelor's and associate's) where the woman's lifetime earnings decreases relative to a high school education alone (Fine and Applied Arts associates median earnings are $437,300). For men, 4 of 18 field degree combinations will result in lower lifetime earnings relative to high school education alone.
There is further analysis in [1] of the earnings percentiles by each field showing that men with a business degree earn the most at the 90 percentile. This holds for women with a business degree.
I don't see if this has been restricted to those whose highest education is a bachelor's degree or not, but there is also work that has shown increases in earnings by field for graduate or professional degrees [3]. It's possible that those earnings premiums have been captured in the reporting of [1], but [3] seems to come to the conclusion that most business, arts, and social sciences fields gain a large increase in salary for graduate or professional degrees.
Hopefully those familiar with similar analysis from the US could help to provide that information.
[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-626-x/11-626-x2014040...
[2] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/150911/dq150...
[3] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2018001/article...
They’re a litmus test to see if you’d likely be good for doing a job you don’t enjoy either. End of the day - work is work and they need history to show you can do more than the bare legal minimum of graduating high school.
If I get charged $100 to cross a toll bridge in my car to get to my job, I wouldn’t consider myself to have gotten a good deal, regardless of pay.
Even in markets that still pay well outside the valley like Boston, that level of compensation is still extremely limited and are < 1% of available positions most of which are quite senior.
