The degrees do pay for themselves on average. Bachelor's degreeholders have median earnings $525/week higher than high school graduates (https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2022/data-on-display/educa...), which over the course of a career would cover even the most egregious student debt loads. That's precisely why it's a hard problem; we could just warn kids not to jump into the debt trap if it weren't genuinely worth the cost.
The median student that graduated from college starting in 2009 had more debt than what they started with after 12 years and it's only gotten worse.
So your belief that it will cover the most egregious is not true for the median student. Given that, I'm also interested in how those lifetime earnings increases are distributed across degrees.
This kind of "fact" always raises alarm bells for me. Did you hear it because it's true, or because it sounds compelling while being impractical to disprove?
This source strongly suggests that the original claim is not true. I don't understand exactly what the X axis is meant to be, but if we assume the 2012 number is meant to represent 2009 graduates, it seems incredibly unlikely that the median graduate has made no progress after 12 years if ~62% of them began making progress after 3 years.
(Can you come up with a story where the two numbers might be consistent? Probably, yeah. Thus the impracticality of disproving weird conditional statistics like this.)
I can't find the source for the stat I mentioned originally but the data I did find doesn't paint the rosy picture of a getting college degree with debt being an unambiguously +EV decision.
