No Felix, they are proven in practice. Have you never worked in Germany? If you had, you’d think differently

Three years of hands-on work experience produce a far better-trained employee than four years of college, except in specialized professions, such as medicine and engineering

The reason corporations demand college degrees is because they think short-term, and don’t want the cost of training apprentices. Paradoxically, they get the cost anyway, because college grads know next to nothing about the job they’re entering. Go figure

“Since the recession of 2001, tuition hikes, as exorbitant as they have been, still haven’t kept pace with the fall in government support.” So the total cost has actually decreased.

Why is this elephant in the room ignored? How can you discuss college costs without talking about the tectonic shift from taxpayer funded to student funded college education?

Your points are well-taken. In particular, many doors open to degrees, even if they aren’t in a relevant field. However, I would argue that starting off an independent life with $30K in student debt (I’m guessing mean, but at a rough approximation, assume median – 50% have more), plus rent, plus a car loan, plus furniture costs, etc), post-college life becomes a bit more complicated than it was when many of us graduated.

She’s speaking from experience, of course.

I can imagine that both problems will be handles the same way in the future – going to Thailand or India for an education or surgery.

Not so fast Felix.
According to the site noted above(the first I could find) high school grads average wage is $41,000 vs $46,000 for a college grad.
Given that college usually eats up four years that’s a $164,000 opportunity cost that would take almost than 33 years to recover. College usually costs something and the present value of that something wouldn’t have to be very high to exceed the present value of the last 17 years of a 50 year working life. In fact the annual cost would have to be under $8,000 a year for each of the four years for there to be any positive payoff from a college education, and that’s using a discount rate of 4%(with any higher rate the payoff is even less).

Crucial question. Is the wage premium awarded to young degree-holders, or old ones? If it’s just a divergence of the already rich (old) degree-holders getting richer, then that doesn’t necessarily imply that young degree-holders will see wage gains relative to the non-pedigreed peer cohort.

A degree is becoming more important, not less, in our digital economy.

Insert snark about all those bloggers who are making out like robber barons. Seriously: in the best paying area of the digital economy that I’m aware of–programming–no one cares if you have a degree, they care if you can ship code.

Both of them are incredibly competent, and would naturally have risen much higher up within their organizations, were it not for the fact that they don’t have degrees. They’ve both been working for many years, to the point at which you’d think that whatever they did or didn’t learn at college would be irrelevant. But it’s not.

The thesis would seem to be “Large organisations are prejudiced in favour of credentialism”. So why not either [a] work for a smaller organisation, if you’re a non-degree-holder, or [b] teach a new approach to those who guard the gates? It doesn’t make sense to spend all these resources on something worthless if the only value comes from getting past stodgy prejudice.

The average amount of student debt per student in this country is large in absolute terms — about $30,000 — but is still a small price to pay for a lifetime of access to jobs and promotions which would otherwise be off-limits.

Just to reiterate my point: macro ≠ micro × 10^6. Is this a wasteful peacock competition or does a degree add to human capital?

In fact, I regularly advise people to go to the school that presents the best value for your intended major and has a good enough reputation to get you interviews. No one is going to turn away a UMass Lowell Engineering graduate for a Northeastern one or even an MIT one. It all depends on your discipline and how you did and what you did while going to school. Some school have better Alumni mafia than others (BC comes to mind) but, really, that will only get you so far. Save the money for graduate school if that’s what you need to do but for Undergrad? Balance it out. It’s not likely to matter much, frankly.

Your point about the English degree only holds water if you think the alternative is being in jail or sitting around doing nothing. There is very few things that most people could spend fours years doing that would make them less employable than having an English degree.

And I don’t understand your logic by which a global economy is supposed to refute the idea that credentialism. Either a collage degree increase a person’s intrinsic productivity or it does not. If it does not, it is a zero sum game regardless of the fact that it is a world wide zero sum game.

And then for the quote really tripped my trigger..

So when McArdle proposes apprenticeship programs in lieu of college, I worry, because they feel anachronistic to me. In theory, they might work. But in practice, they’re wholly unproven, and they’re incredibly hard to simply decree into existence.

Unproven? Germany apprenticeships are widely credited with being a key part of their manufacturing success. In the trades in America, the best still come out of the apprenticeship programs. More to point of your post, the reason so many employers value military experience is precisely because they do apprenticeship style training in a way that few others do.

And the military experience is not valued because of some kind of “values” such as discipline. If this was so, the ground pounders carrying a pack in the mountains would be valued most highly and the enlisted air force would be shunned. But in dollars terms, it is the opposite. This is because it is the training methods used that are valued not pain and self sacrifice.