The Department of Education calculated the percentage of students at each college who earned more than $25,000 per year, which is about what high school graduates earn. At hundreds of colleges, less than half of students met this threshold 10 years after enrolling. The list includes a raft of barber academies, cosmetology schools and for-profit colleges that often leave students with few job prospects and mountains of debt.
But some more well-known institutions weren’t far behind. At Bennington College in Vermont, over 48 percent of former students were earning less than $25,000 per year. A quarter were earning less than $10,600 per year. At Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, the median annual earnings were only $35,700. Results at the University of New Mexico were almost exactly the same.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
It would be useful to report and discuss separately high-ranked colleges typically attended by kids from wealthy families–who benefit from their financial support and might decide to spend a few years trying to make it as an artist or writer–from those colleges whose students do not have such a financial safety net.
Either way, the lesson overlooked by most in the media and (seemingly) many academics is: the *marginal* value of college is very low (or if you prefer, the value of college to the marginal student–marginal in the economic sense).
Some student consumer welfare that was perhaps not captured in the data:
http://www.bestcollegevalues.org/best-college-dorms/
A few of those dorms are part of the Florida system which spends less per student than almost any other state.
I would suggest reviewing the data for any effects from that portion of the population, a partner in a couple, who is working part-time, or not at all, as a contributor to “joint” income.
The increasing percentage of female graduates, many of whom are subsumed into “joint incomes” might skew that data.