College isn't worth it, but that's the whole point. It's becoming what economists call a Giffen Good, that is, something people consume even more of the more ex

College isn't worth it, but that's the whole point. It's becoming what economists call a Giffen Good, that is, something people consume even more of the more expensive it becomes. The biggest value factor of all is Metcalfe's Law of network effects, where the almost universal availability of higher education means that not pursuing it places your starting position in life on the outer long tail of the success curve. Not going to college is like being a business that decided to just never bother getting on the internet, or a person who doesn't know how to drive. Unless you move to some isolated backwater that isn't subject to the network or are some kind of extreme outlier, you are at a huge disadvantage. Notable that these articles about the doubtful value of a university degree are written exclusively by people who have one. The wider availability of education (via cheap debt) and downward mobility means a degree (all things equal) is no longer as distinguishing and does not have the same impact on life outcomes as it once might have. Even previously, the people who went to college had such a huge social head start anyway, it would be difficult to control for education as the determining factor in success. University is starting to resemble a "radical monopoly," (Ivan Illich, summarized here: https://twitter.com/fietsprofessor/status/1122073725862600705 https://twitter.com/fietsprofessor/status/112207372586260070...) where there is nothing discretionary about it. Outside of STEM, I'd argue modern colleges offer students very little more than a tribal affiliation, which is the elephant in the room for articles like these. If you told kids why they need to go to college, it would devalue the degree even further as they re-tribalized around other rites of passage. This doesn't mean don't go to college, it means do absolutely everything in your power to graduate college, because the arbitrary biases and disadvantages of the alternative defy all reason and make anyone with an IQ above 90 insane. When you look at college as a Giffen Good, which people need for participation in a radical monopoly over the labour market, created by a network effect from its debt fueled availability, of course it seems like a college education is not worth it - but it's only ever not worth it to people who already have one. I'd like a mainstream platform to write that view and put these "is college worth it?" navel gazer articles to rest. If only there were an institution to affiliate with...