The best examples I can give:
1. College educated people smoke less on average. This is true regardless of income even though typically less income correlates to more smoking.
2. In poor neighborhoods, when the number of residents without college drops below a certain threshold (like 4 percent maybe), crime skyrockets. The neighborhood stops being merely poor and becomes a dangerous slum.
A liberal arts education is widely scoffed at. There's some joke about what kind of careers different majors lead to and the punchline is that liberal arts major say "Would you like fries with that?" which is shorthand in this day and age for "You will probably be drowning in college debt and a wage slave working to pay off your student loans while living in Mom's basement if you are lucky enough to have supportive parents."
But they are called liberal arts because they are supposed to be liberating. They are supposed to free and empower you to live well and know how to cope effectively with crap life throws at you.
The Clemente Course is intended to be a free liberal arts college education for people living with terrible circumstances like generational poverty or in prison and has been taught in prison. It was founded on the theory that the right kind of education is the antidote to these kinds of intractable problems that routinely fail to be resolved by throwing money at them.
https://www.clementecourse.org/
I homeschooled my twice exceptional sons and a primary goal of mine was making sure my extremely bright but socially challenged children didn't wind up in jail. I provided them a humanities education defined as "learning how to live effectively with the inconvenient, inescapable fact of their own humanity and that of other people."
I'm a huge fan of liberal arts education and my AA is in Humanities. Yes, I'm very well aware it doesn't give you a lot of marketable skills to make bank promptly upon graduation.
I also have a Certificate in GIS from probably the most prestigious GIS program in the world and it promised everyone good salaries in short order which never materialized for me.
I don't regret it and it wasn't a waste of time or money but the historic tendency for college to correlate to good salaries is probably rooted in the fact that until they decided to milk poor people for student loans interest and turn a generation of college graduates into over educated wage slaves, a college degree was a proxy for "Someone with adequate resources and mojo and drive who knows what they want to do."
It wasn't the degree per se that made them successful. They had what it took to get the degree and that correlated strongly to having what it took to establish a serious career that paid well.
A sheepskin is a necessary but insufficient prerequisite for some careers. It's not a guarantee you will succeed though and someone somewhere along the way imagined it was and many people are suffering horribly because of it.