These comparisons compare salaries of largely illiterate and innumerate people who dropped out of high school to people who have graduated with an engineering d

These comparisons compare salaries of largely illiterate and innumerate people who dropped out of high school to people who have graduated with an engineering degree. They articles always then declare the difference in salaries to be the value of any college degree. These comparisons are absurd and statistically invalid. People who drop out of high school are more likely to be mentally incapable of doing high paid engineering work than those who are also able to graduate from an engineering program. The people capable of graduating from an engineering program were capable before graduating. Those who are high school drop outs are more likely to be incapable. There's a cool study (can't find the cite) where they looked at lifetime wages of people who were ACCEPTED to a given university and then compared those who actually went to college and graduated to those who decided not to go to college after being accepted. The lifetime wages were the same, showing that it was the selection process of getting admitted to college that was simply choosing for talent and not anything that college does to anyone. Those who benefit from burdening the next generation with massive education debt don't discuss this though and claim that it is not selecting for talent. To show that is the case, take people who are in that illiterate high school dropout category, send them to college, and then compare their lifetime salaries to the ones who were not illiterate. This study has not been done. Yes, I am aware there are hundreds of studies proving that college graduates make more than non-graduates, I am not contesting that there are such studies or that they are the majority of studies on this topic. In any case regardless of whether you believe in the existence of the unnamed study I regret I can't name, I hope it is obvious that the set of people who are high school drop outs and the set of people who have graduated with an engineering degree are not randomly selected people differing only in if a machine called college molded them into a higher earning resource asset. Since they are not randomly selected people differing only if a engineering education has been applied to them as a black box function, it is not correct to assume that salary differences between the two are solely attributable to whether or not they have been run through this black box.