> Meanwhile, some people are more than happy to spend $100,000 on a graphic design degree that may get them a job paying roughly $40,000 a year
> A lot of that has to do with what Goldfarb likes to call the narrative—one that convinced kids that the only route to middle-class respectability was to get a college degree and that suggested failing to do so meant having failed at the American dream of upward mobility. To keep using the economist's terms, I would also say that 18-year-old high school seniors definitely qualify as "novice investors." Their philosophy can be summarized by Colin Hanks in the 2002 movie Orange County. When asked why he's so obsessed with getting into Stanford University and college more generally, he snaps back, "Because that's what you do after high school!"
Too often I see articles about student debt make a comment about how students have been tricked or misled into pursuing a degree. Why does no one talk about the alternative?
Let's talk about the alternative: You don't get a degree and now you're resume gets automatically thrown out of most applications. Only a small fraction of those without degrees manage to get well-paying jobs; they're the outliers. Albeit unrelated to employment rate, look at the salary differences: https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2018/data-on-display/educa...
Some might say it's worth making $X/yr and debt-free than making $Y/yr with $Z debt but this only holds true when Y > (P*Z + X) where P is the percentage of the total initial debt being paid off per year (e.g. P = 0.2 if you're paying $10k/yr to get rid of a $50k debt). And these values are hard to predict.