Want college costs to come down and relieve debt carried by borrowers…..cut the amount the students.

Empirical evidence runs rampant in the article produced at Liberty Street Economics. Here is more from the article titled “College May Not Pay Off for Everyone”.

  The chart below plots the median annual wage for full-time employed workers with a bachelor’s degree between 1970 and 2013, together with the median annual wage for those with only a high school diploma. We also plot the annual wage for the 25th percentile of college graduates. All figures are expressed in constant 2013 dollars.

However, when we look at wages for the 25th percentile of college graduates, the picture is not quite so rosy. In fact, there is almost no difference in the wages for this percentile ranking of college graduates and the median wage for high school graduates throughout the entire period. This means that the wages for a sizable share of college graduates below the 25th percentile are actually less than the wages earned by a typical worker with a high school diploma. While we can’t be sure that the wages of this group wouldn’t have been lower if they had never gone to college, this pattern strongly suggests that the economic benefit of a college education is relatively small for at least a quarter of those graduating with a bachelor’s degree.

When we look at men and women separately, the same basic wage pattern holds, although a wider gap opens up among men. The 25th percentile for male college graduates has been about $4,000 to $5,000 more than the median male high school graduate in recent years, whereas among women, the gap has recently been around $2,000. This difference between genders suggests that some people may be choosing lower paying jobs because of occupational preferences or family considerations.

     Overall, these figures suggest that perhaps a quarter of those who earn a bachelor’s degree pay the costs to attend school but reap little, if any, economic benefit. In fact, once the costs of attending college are considered, it is likely that earning a bachelor’s degree would not have been a good investment for many in the lowest 25 percent of college graduate wage earners. So while a college degree appears to be a good investment on average, it may not pay off for everyone.