On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
I think a lot of people are looking at this as &quot;maybe this article is offering advice&quot; instead, the way I&#x27;m looking at it is this is giving us a rough quantification of what we all know intuitively: that college is so expensive it&#x27;s reaching a natural ceiling.<p>The way this manifests in reality isn&#x27;t millions of people all doing a cost&#x2F;benefit calculus like this and coming to the rational conclusion they can skip college. What happens is that slowly, the meme that &quot;Jim went to college and he doesn&#x27;t seem better off&quot; seeps into the collective consciousness. More and more people start running into this evidence, and reconsider mortgaging the house (figuratively) to send their kids to college, and the upward pressure on college tuition starts to lessen.<p>After a while this meme that college is a tradeoff becomes well established, and it becomes common knowledge that you think hard about it before you send your kid to college. The underlying reason is something like &quot;You can make a better return in principle investing in the S&amp;P&quot; but the way it becomes a force in the real world is by a collective bayesian reasoning process we all engage in as a society.