Good points! There must be a law of diminishing returns in education just like in almost everything else. As the opportunities to get more education have great

Good points! There must be a law of diminishing returns in education just like in almost everything else. As the opportunities to get more education have greatly expanded, the quality of both the students and that education have probably suffered. This at least partially explains the decline in the average income of college graduates. While we are probably better off as a society overall, it does mean the net benefit of education is narrowing. And the margin is where we should focus. A basic law of decision making (in economics, business, public policy, engineering) is to always look at the marginal impact of decisions as that is where the impact will be. Unfortunately this analysis is very difficult in this case (forecasts, discounting, preferences, controls) and the results will not be very comforting: for some people, some subjects and some professions the costs will not be justified by future earnings. I don't see our society rationally acting on this kind of information. So the trend will continue or even exacerbated with more lending and subsidies. This is similar to the problems we have dealing with healthcare or global warming. However the cost of college has increased by about 7% a year inflation-adjusted for over 30 years. This doubles the real cost every decade! Meanwhile median incomes of college graduates have been flat or declining since 2000. This clearly cannot go on forever and something that can't go on forever won't. But it is not clear to me how this will end. My hope is that technology like MOOCs can bring down the cost of education and that incomes increase as the benefits of both that education and globalization are finally realized. Then we would have both a better educated and richer society. Alternatively more people may decide higher eduction is simply not worth it - probably resulting in negative outcomes for some. Or something more messy such as mass loan defaults and university bankruptcies resulting in even more negative outcomes. This may take a vey long time to fully play out.