Bryan Walsh Is Almost Right About College

Bryan Walsh wrote a piece for Vox’s Future Perfect in June with a headline I was glad to see someone finally write.[1] New college grads are doing better than the vibes suggest. He is right. The panic is overblown. A rough launch is not a rough life, and an AI commencement speech is not a prophecy.

He also did something most “is college worth it” writers refuse to do. He put the hard numbers in his own article. Forty-one percent of recent graduates underemployed, working jobs that never required a degree. Nursing graduates underemployed under ten percent, criminal justice graduates over sixty-five. The fact that finishing is not guaranteed, and that when you graduate can matter as much as whether you do. He even cites the economist Doug Webber, whose work shows how much the risk of not completing drives the whole result.

I read all of that and thought he was standing on the doorstep of the argument I have spent years making. He just did not walk through it. Here is the one step.

Walsh’s headline answer leans hardest on one number. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York asked “is college still worth it” and answered 12.5 percent.[2] That is a real number, but read what it measures. It is the return for the students who finish. It sets aside the roughly four in ten who start and do not,[3] the group Walsh himself flags through Webber, the people for whom college is the worst outcome in the deal: the debt, the lost years, and no degree to show for them. Adjust that 12.5 percent for the share who actually finish and it falls to about 7.6 percent.[4] And that is the generous version, because it assumes the four in ten who do not finish simply broke even. They did not. They lost. The real return on enrolling is lower still, before anyone has said a word about which school or which major.

That is the gap between the number on the wall and the bet an actual eighteen-year-old is making.

Then there is the deeper problem, and Walsh’s own article proves it better than I could. He tells you nursing graduates are underemployed under ten percent and criminal justice graduates over sixty-five. Those are not two points near an average. They are opposite ends of the board. A single figure that holds both of them describes neither. When the Fed says 12.5 percent, the student headed into nursing and the student headed into an oversupplied field hear the same number, and both are told it is safe. One of them is being misled.

So the honest answer to “is college worth it” is not yes, and it is not no. It is that this is the wrong question. It asks about a national average, and no one sends a national average to college. They send one student, to one school, for one program, at one price. And here is the part that should make a Future Perfect writer happy, because it is genuinely good news. That individual question is answerable. Before you sign anything, you can look up what graduates of that exact program earn, how many of them finish, and what you would actually pay after aid. The data are public. The math runs in minutes.

Walsh wants to tell the class of 2026 that the diploma is the most seaworthy raft they can find. For many of them, at the right price, it is. For others it is an anchor. The good news is not that the raft floats on average. The good news is that you can check your own before you push off.

That is not pessimism about college. It is the opposite. It is the only version of this conversation that puts the family in control, instead of handing them an average and calling it an answer.

Reference Sources

1. Walsh, Bryan. “New College Grads Are Doing Better Than the Vibes Suggest.” Vox, Future Perfect, June 2026. The source piece. Its figures (the 12.5 percent return, the $80,000 vs $47,000 median earnings, ~41 percent recent-graduate underemployment, nursing under 10 percent and criminal justice over 65 percent underemployment by major) are quoted as his.
2. Abel, Jaison R., and Richard Deitz. “Is College Still Worth It?” Liberty Street Economics, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 16 Apr. 2025. Accessed June 28, 2026. The 12.5 percent median return for graduates.
3. National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. “Completing College.” National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. About 61 percent of students who start complete a credential within six years counting transfers, so roughly four in ten do not finish.
4. Shivamber, Leon. “Degrees of Assumption: Examining the Fed’s College ROI Math.” collegeroi.org, The completion-weighting that takes the 12.5 percent graduate return to about 7.6 percent once the non-finishers are counted, and lower once their losses are weighted in rather than assumed to break even.