From the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's Macroblog:
There are at least two sides to every debate, but it’s becoming
clearer by the day that the debate over the cost of higher education is
being won by people like University of Tennessee law professor Glenn
Reynolds.
A frequent writer and lecturer, and even more frequent blogger,
Reynolds visited the Atlanta Fed recently to share his views with local
community leaders. He reported that total student loan debt now stands
at over $1 trillion—more than total credit card debt and auto loan
debt combined. As these charts from the New York Fed show,
the increase in total student debt over the past eight years is a
result of greater numbers of students and families taking on educational
debt as well as higher debt balances per student.
One can argue that this trend is not necessarily a bad thing.
Education is an investment in human capital, and if those newly acquired
skills are valued highly by employers, then going to college can be a
positive net present value project, even with debt financing.
And wage data reveal that these skills are indeed valuable. As this Cleveland Fed article
and chart show, the median wage for a worker with a bachelor’s degree
was about 30 percent higher than that of a worker with only a high
school diploma in the late 1970s and grew to more than 60 percent higher
by the early 2000s. However, the data also show that over the last
decade the value of a college degree measured by wages has stagnated.
And here begins the crux of Reynolds’s concern. The cost of attending
college has continued to grow, and grow rapidly. Between the 2000–01
and 2010–11 academic school years, the cost of undergraduate tuition, room, and board rose 42 percent at public institutions and 31 percent at private not-for-profit institutions, after adjusting for inflation, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
A stagnant wage premium with rising costs of attendance suggests
that, at least on average, the value proposition of going to college is
deteriorating. To make matters worse....MORE
