It’d also be helpful if we taught people the difference between correlation and causation. Of course, to teach that would require understanding it. There are certainly more lucrative pathways that require college, but that’s not what the majority of people completing college are doing. People ambitious enough to stick through college are more ambitious in other avenues of life and thus make more money. That’s one variable that accounts for at least a large part of the variance. However, as college has been more and more sold as a cultural expectation, even those less ambitious are sticking through, especially when it’s much easier now to just take out loans and not have to work as hard, so the numbers saying it’s an advantage are going to reduce.
My generation was always told “go get a college degree,” as if there was some pot of gold at the end of that rainbow, but we never clarified why people attending college made more money. Part of it is correlation, but the other part is that college put people on paths to specific careers. Now it’s about “learning” with the expectation that employability comes after all of said learning.
