Just because degree holders have higher lifetime earnings, that doesn't necessarily mean graduating from college will increase lifetime earnings. The alternative hypothesis is that the attributes that drive someone to both go to college and succeed in passing classes are also the same attributes that cause success at work.

I'm not saying a college degree doesn't open doors for you, it absolutely does, I'm saying you can't look at the numbers like that and make that conclusion.

(The dropout rate is also ~45% so you take a significant risk of taking on the cost burden without a payout)

But going to college makes the path much easier, even for talented and motivated people. So I take that into account and look at the numbers, and stand by my assertion that except for maybe the most unique cases college makes sense for the vast majority.

Now the market is flooded with bullshit degrees (assuming no one drops out, putting themselves in an even worse financial situation) and the value of a college degree just went down. Now what?

The "college is inherently good" model is flawed.

It certainly is worth noting what you are mentioning, that there is more to life than college. The overall summary still is true, though, that college educated students do better career earnings wise. There's just a lot of variance and spread you have to take in account.

This website is good, in that it gives some details of the spread inherent in lifetime earnings per college majors. (http://www.hamiltonproject.org/papers/major_decisions_what_g...)

There is a lot of spread depending on your major. In addition to the lifetime earnings, the site does note that there is huge variance within each major itself. As quoted, "the highest-earning 10 percent of high school graduates out-earn the bottom tenth of graduates in every single major".

Unfortunately this report does not seem to go in much detail on two year degrees. Because community / 2-year college in the US is so much cheaper than 4 year colleges typically, I am willing to bet that -- especially if you have to go into debt -- there are some good paths there where the pure rate of return is higher than some college paths these days. (The high school diploma path only OTOH doesn't seem that great unless your atypically REALLY self-motivated.)

I do think that chasing career paths solely based on current income is a bad strategy. If you are really into music and meh on molecules, no matter what the average numbers say, it's probably better to be a top 10% musician degree holder than a bottom 10% chemical engineer degree holder.

> As a self-taught IT worker my lifetime earning have far exceeded all of my University-degreed peers (some Ivy!)

What were their degrees in? Did any of them go to private liberal arts colleges? Those are more important facts when assessing their careers than the mere fact they went to college, especially when comparing with someone like yourself, who seems to have had good timing jumping into a new-ish, growing industry.