Student loans are now the biggest form of debt surpassing $1 trillion and essentially the only kind of debt one can’t claim bankruptcy on, so why would it be appealing to anyone?
The Pew Research Center, a non-partisan think tank assessed the rising costs of not going to college in a study that was released in February.
The study was based on a new nationally representative Pew Research Center survey of 2,002 adults and economic data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The study also comparatively looked at college and high school educated individuals within four different generations.
The study found that college graduates from ages 25 to 32 known as Millennials who are working full-time are earning $17,500 more than their high school diploma holding counterparts so the pay gap has gotten significantly wider compared to previous generations. The median income for today’s adults is $45,500 for college graduates and $28,000 for high school graduates.
People with a college education are also more likely to be employed and they are considerably less likely to be in poverty.
Although, today’s adults are the most educated in U.S. history, about one third of adults aged 25 to 32 has at least a bachelor’s degree. At the same time, median annual earnings have remained relatively flat, meaning that wages across the board are quite stagnant.
About 90 percent of Millennials with a college education say that the benefits of college outweigh the financial burdens or that it will pay off in the future.
The analysis is quite right to say that the great recession has taken its toll on adults regardless of education. Today’s college graduates are far more likely to be unemployed than college graduates in previous generations, but using that same description to describe the hardships of people that don’t go to college, that’s shortsighted.
Even before the great recession hit in 2007, the U.S. has been experiencing a labor excess that really enables employers in various industries to be more picky with who they hire and more control over the wages of their employees especially if their enterprise isn’t unionized.
What has contributed to this labor excess has been the massive decline of union membership in recent years and international trade legislation such as the North American Free Trade Agreement that made it easier for firms to outsource jobs to other countries for cheaper labor in the field of manufacturing. Jobs that are attainable and filled by high school graduates and well paid. This trend has created a situation where more and more people are pressured to get jobs in the service industry where people are traditionally underpaid and it’s a demand that the industry doesn’t fulfill.
College is increasingly important in this era, but for economic reasons.