The Wall Street Journal spent fourteen years testing stock pickers against darts, and more than two decades of fund scoreboards show nearly nine in ten large-cap funds trailing the plain index over fifteen years. The same belief is reassembling around AI: predictive language models read as insight engines, and for most uses there is no scoreboard. 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 most do worse than that number. Then look school by school and major by major, and the answer is not yes or no. It is that “is college worth it” is the wrong question.
I audited the numbers that say college pays. The million dollars is not a return at all, and even the careful 12.5 percent skips taxes and hides a wide spread.
College is a bet, and in my experience few families are shown the odds. Count the students who have not finished and the graduates working below their degree, and the average student’s odds come to roughly two in five.
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.
How I got back on my feet after 9/11 terror killed my startup, and why I won’t allow Coronavirus to knock us down