I have read that Newton would not put numerical examples in his writing because he feared people would pick over some small error and use it to claim the whole

I have read that Newton would not put numerical examples in his writing because he feared people would pick over some small error and use it to claim the whole work was wrong. I think that's what most of the negative comments here are like that - you guys are probably right about different ways to run the numbers, but you are missing the forest for the trees. The investment in a college degree is so large, and involves speculating on payoffs that are so far in future, at a time when whatever you think you will do as a career will likely change several times, that the pay off has to be an enormous no-brainer. If the college investment pays off if the interest rate is 8% but not if it is 5%, the college loses just by a bird-in-hand rule. The college guy has to beat the non-college guy by something like 10 times no matter what back of the envelope estimates you make. Some related personal observations: -- Ten years ago online forums argued about how to get into the best college, no one even raised the question of if college itself is useful. Now articles and discussions like this are commonplace. -- No one I know really uses anything they learned in college to make money. Even people working in the same field their degree is in, had to learn how to really work in that field on the job after they left college. College was a big time and money consuming initiation ritual. -- Most the people I know who earned a large amount of money -- not those who inherited it -- either did not attend college at all or did very poorly in it; nad none of them admitts to using any college education to make money. -- A handful of the most agressively and purposely stupid people I have ever met have advanced degrees ( medical and legal). I suspect that some part of the culture of those evironments educates people in the stupid direction, not the smart direction, in a kind of "reverse education", encouraging aggressive pronouncements of certainty on uncertain questions, for example. -- Taking a personal sample of the people I know who have made a lot of money (avoiding those I hear about elsewhere -- just people I personally know, to avoid a media bias but replace it with a personal bias), the way to get rich is to fail out of college after one year of hard drinking, and inherit enough money to buy a small business such as a restaurant or retail franchise and work your ass off for about 15 years, expanding to a chain of those businesses. -- Most of the people who I know who are going to college now, don't really actively want to go to college. They want to not be at home, and to be around people their age particularly of the opposite sex, and they are passively following the path of least resistence. All of this sounds bad, but I see a great thing in it: if we as a society really only should be sending about 5 to 10 percent of people to college (perhaps half of them only after a few years in the work force), then we can hugely increase the productivity of our economy very easily. I think, like medical care, we spend a lot on education in this country to get something that is at best only the same as what is available in countries that spend much less.