Do the benefits of a college education outweigh the cost?

Spoiler alert: yes.

I do have an objection to strictly financial analyses I see; I hope people aren’t choosing careers based solely on how much money they can make rather than something they enjoy. The general benefits of learning how to think and being intellectually challenged are important as well. I wonder if the high cost amplifies a buyer’s remorse feeling, and/or if it pressures students to avoid certain choices which might mean an extra semester or two at school.

Others note that a college degree is no longer required to get a good job, especially since almost four of every ten college graduates are working at jobs that don’t require a college degree. Fruzsina Eordogh is one of those students who dropped out of college to work as a full-time writer for the Daily Dot (Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and Apple’s Steve Jobs are three of America’s most famous college dropouts.)

The objection here is that people don’t necessarily know what they want to do at 18 years old, so they have no idea that the job they end up in doesn’t require a degree. Plus there’s nothing here that indicates that these 40% are not aspiring to better jobs that do require a degree. And bringing up Zuckerberg, Gates and Jobs as examples is like encouraging people to play the lottery by saying, “I won it, so that means you can, too!”

I’d much rather focus on efforts to make education affordable and available to anyone who wants it and make personal cost/benefit discussions moot.