“..and for that 22K difference per year, in 6 years the guy with no college will still be making $28K and the guy who originally made $50K per year has paid off his debt and has moved up to making $75K”
Your analysis is over simplified. The costs of higher education have substantially increased and the value in many areas has decreased. The analysis has changed dramatically in the last 10 years.
The issue involves obtaining the level of training necessary for a rewarding career. A side issue is having the mindset to adapt to changing conditions in employment and skill sets as you age. The current higher education model is a cottage industry, highly inefficient and resistant to change. Higher education should be going through the same types of gut wrenching changes as the news business. Instead, higher education, facilitated by large government subsidies and barriers to entry for competitors, is stagnant. For example, online education is an innovation of the internet age. The university model of online education involves higher costs than the traditional classroom model.
A new mindset and new competitors should embrace commodization of content, standardization of assessment, unbundling of related services, and lower cost labor. All these elements can combine to lower costs, improve accessibility, and maintain quality for large numbers of students. The technology is available now for a revolution in higher education. Entrenched mindsets, government subsidies, and a lack of development capital hinder the effort.
I think you’re right and I think I know why. As colleges and universities are taken over by politically correct Anger Studies majors, which are taught to kids who graduated knowing less than what we had to know to make it out of the sixth grade to junior high, the college degree becomes less and less valuable to employers looking to hire somebody who can actually THINK, DO, and PRODUCE something meaningful and profitable for the company rather than somebody whose only skill is to oversee human resource diversity and sensitivity.
Beyond that, expecting academia to respond to the needs of the business world is akin to expecting oil to volunatrily emulsify with water. The cocky, snotty, angry, arrogant snobs of academia who loathe capitalism and hate America wouldn’t be caught dead curtailing curricula to the needs of the industries that will actually have to harvest from the crop of indoctrinated leftwing grads pumped out by these commie institutions every year. Of course, they expect the capitalist system to FUND their overpaid, fat-assed jobs within these academic Disneylands.