Edit: You know, I started this comment just wanting to point out the interesting economic relationship of "hours worked to total cost", but apparently got much

Edit: You know, I started this comment just wanting to point out the interesting economic relationship of "hours worked to total cost", but apparently got much more rant-y. I'll leave this here as an example of the anxiety I still feel about college, even after 3 years out of it. The important part of the comment is the three of so paragraphs. ===== Not even less in terms of money. Not even less money adjusted for inflation. Less in terms of time. This website[0] lets you look at how much time of minimum wage work it would have taken to pay for a college degree in 1987 vs now, Because of vastly inflating tuition prices and relatively stagnant minimum wage, there's a very significant difference. For the college that I went to, working part time at a minimum wage job not only would have paid for the entirety of tuition, it would have paid 156% of tuition. What I would have had left over would have been more than what my parents paid for the down payment of the house my family of 5 grew up in. (warning: projection time) Now I could barely pay half on a part time job, so I either start my adult life with absolutely crushing debt, hope that my parents set aside what would have been way more that the original tuition to cover what would have been left, kill myself trying to work full time and be a student full time, or stunt my career by a few years doing school part time and coming into the workforce years behind in a fairly ageist sector. And all this for a piece of paper that was pounded into our head that we needed in order to have any kind of hope of getting into even a reasonably basic field. If you can't tell, I can empathize with why college might give someone depression and anxiety. That's not to mention the general artificial competitiveness of getting into a "good" school, internships, and everything else to make sure that your resume is good enough to even find a job after college, lest you spend a year or two floating and having to explain an every growing gap in your resume. There was also the special bureaucratic that I ended up falling into (though those were just unfortunate circumstances). I ended up getting the amazing job I have right now by almost pure luck. I know a lot of my classmates that aren't so lucky and have simply very little extra value (other than the worthy pursuit of knowledge and life experience) for the incredibly expensive piece of paper gathering dust in their closet. [0]: https://www.marketwatch.com/graphics/college-debt-now-and-then/ https://www.marketwatch.com/graphics/college-debt-now-and-th...