Student loan up 24%. Earnings down 15%. Do the math!

Won't it be in the interests of full disclosure if colleges and universities provided incoming freshman students with information like the following graph?

Source

I am increasingly convinced that right from the early years of schooling, students hear all the time that they will suffer a loss of prestige if they do not go to college.  That they will be labeled "losers."  That they would be thought of as stupid if they didn't transition to college straight away from high school.  As one student told me, he was made to think that there were only two options he had: either go to college or sign up with the military.

Such an approach to higher education not only leads to a terrible misallocation of taxpayer and household capital, and to high levels of student debt, but it also defeats the whole idea of education that is to enable the youth realize their full potentials, whatever they might be.  Instead, we shove them through a higher education factory system in which the real beneficiaries are those suckling at the teats of the education-industry-complex!

Furthermore, as I noted earlier:

We push teenagers to higher education by scaring them about the earnings they could lose. Here, we commit two huge mistakes. First, we simply equate higher education to nothing but a passport to a job, instead of instilling in the young a joy for lifelong-learning as a path towards understanding their own respective potentials, of which earnings is merely one. On top of this, by constantly dangling the dollar sign in front of them, we are almost brainwashing teenagers to think that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is nothing but the pursuit of money.

Instead, the young ought to understand something entirely different--life entails making decisions all the time, and that this will mean difficult tradeoffs, which sometimes can be expensive. Thus, we would not simply push teenagers to college because they would otherwise be losers, but we would help them think and act every time they reached a fork in the road of life.  The tradeoffs that Robert Frost so elegantly articulated as "the road not taken."

By focusing on an economic argument, which is weak at best, in order to get students out the high school doors into college, we are rapidly reducing them to mere worker bees who have to compete against those in India and elsewhere.  Is that really what we want from the billions we invest in education?

Who ever listens to what I have to say, eh!  But then, hey, every once in a while students--yes, even students--tell me they read my blog.  I am sure they will do all right with all the warnings I provide them here.