EduBubble

The Wall Street Journal’s Mary Pilon digs a bit deeper into the hypefest from last year and finds that we should be skeptical about the $800,000 extra that supposedly rains down on the heads of those anointed with college degrees. The College Board was just a bit too optimistic. Sure, they were pushing the number $800k on their website, but the survey’s author says that the number is really $450k. Mark Schneider, a skeptic, says that $280k is an even better estimate.

Those numbers are just the average, of course, built by mixing in the pre-law, engineers and football players. The top earning graduates of Stanford often make $2m+ because they go right to the major leagues and their numbers are rolled into these averages. In cases like this, most of us are below average and there’s nothing that Garrison Keillor and the folks from Lake Woebegone can do to gloss it over. Imagine that 1000 people in the class make $30k on graduating and 1 person makes $1 million. Then 1000 are below average and 1 is above average. Yet the College Board wants to talk about averages!

It is entirely possible that more than half of all college degrees are a net loss for student because engineers distort the averages.

Related posts:

1. What to do about the College Board stats?
2. Rensselaer’s new castle plans knocked back down to earth
3. Remember, debt colors your future
4. Chicago Tribune asks whether college is worth it
5. How to think about those low average debt figures.