Stigma can have a huge effect. The obvious example is funeral directors and undertakers - they don't need a college degree and make an average of $62,000, but a

Stigma can have a huge effect. The obvious example is funeral directors and undertakers - they don't need a college degree and make an average of $62,000, but a lot of people would refuse to even consider the job. A very large proportion of parents would say that their ambition is for their children to go to college and get a "good" job, with "good" invariably meaning white-collar. There's still a widespread intuition that college is the best or only route into a middle-class lifestyle, but many degrees have a negligible impact on earning potential net of tuition costs. Most college graduates aren't going into six-figure jobs in the tech industry. A large proportion are aspiring to relatively poorly-paid roles in education, healthcare and the service industry. Plumbing pays better than most non-tenure track jobs in academia, but "my son the plumber" carries a very different set of cultural and emotional baggage than "my son the lecturer".