The Wall Street Journal spent fourteen years testing stock pickers against darts, and fifty years of fund scoreboards say the professionals rarely beat the plain index after costs. The same belief is reassembling around AI: predictive language models read as insight engines, with no scoreboard at all. Same error, new tape. Here is the test that would settle it, and the reason its result will not.
Bryan Walsh’s Vox piece says college is still worth it, and he is right that the panic is overblown. But his “yes” leans hardest on one number, the Fed’s 12.5 percent, which is the return for the students who finish. Count everyone who starts and the honest answer is not yes or no. It is that “is college worth it” is the wrong question.
Forbes ranked the “most versatile” college majors from LinkedIn data. But LinkedIn defines versatility as the share working outside their major’s top two industries, counted only among graduates employed full time who keep a profile. For most majors, it is praising underemployment and calling it a skill.
I audited the famous numbers that say college pays, the million dollars, the 12.5 percent. None of them survives as a real return on investment.
College is a bet, and most families are never shown the odds. Count the dropouts and the underemployed, and about two in five tickets win.
A high-earning parent ran the real numbers on a $400,000 Cornell degree and published the uncomfortable result. The math is not what families are told.