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Getting a four-year degree is still a good investment.
By David Deming October 3, 2023, 7 AM ET
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Americans are losing their faith in higher education. In a recent Wall Street
Journal poll, more than half of respondents said that a bachelor’s degree
isn’t worth the cost. Young people were the most skeptical. As a recent New
York Times Magazine cover story put it, “For most people, the new
economics of higher ed make going to college a risky bet.” The article drew
heavily on research from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which found
that rising student-loan burdens have lowered the value proposition of a
four-year degree.
American higher education certainly has its problems. But the bad vibes
around college threaten to obscure an important economic reality: Most
young people are still far better off with a four-year college degree than
without one.
The debt timeline is basically the reverse. Most federal student loans have a
repayment period of only 10 years, which begins shortly after graduation.
(The exception is income-based and income-driven repayment loans, which
charge a share of borrowers’ discretionary income for 20 to 25 years. These
are about a quarter of all loans today and were less common several years
ago. Private loans vary in term length, but most are about 10 years.) This
means that the typical college graduate must completely repay their loans
by their mid-30s. In other words, the earnings premium from a bachelor’s
degree is smallest in the years when graduates are also paying down their
debts. We are effectively asking a 17-year-old high-school student to delay
gratification until age 35 or later—longer than they have been alive. But the
rewards are worth it.
Of course, we cannot know for certain whether today’s college graduates will
experience the same earnings growth as past generations. The tightness of
the post-pandemic labor market has created upward pressure on wages in
sectors such as retail and hospitality, leading to especially strong wage
growth for less-educated workers. As a result, the college wage premium
has been falling since 2020, after three decades of growth. Could this time
be different?
His timing was impeccably bad. Shortly after the book’s publication, the
college wage premium rose rapidly, increasing by more than 20 percentage
points from 1976 to 1988. At age 50, the college graduates who entered the
labor market in the 1970s were earning about 70 percent more than their
less-educated contemporaries. College had been worth it after all; it just felt
riskier and took longer to pay off.
Sanjay Sarma and Luke Yoquinto: The Toyota Corolla theory of college
As a labor economist, I have argued elsewhere that the U.S. should invest
more in workforce development to increase economic mobility for people
who don’t have a four-year degree. At the same time, public investment in
higher education, including making public-college tuition free, would help
more students afford getting a degree. Until that happens, however, young
people must play the cards they’ve been dealt. Taking on debt to go to
college can feel risky, especially for first-generation students who don’t have
examples from their own family, or for any young person without
generational wealth. But the long-term value of a bachelor’s degree is much
greater than it initially appears. If a college professor or pundit tries to
convince you otherwise, ask them what they would choose for their own
children.