What’s the cost and financial value of college?
What’s the right price for a college education? And what is its value? Those are crucial questions at a time of rising student debt and high unemployment. But a group of scholars and policymakers at an MIT forum on Thursday suggested that one thing about college remains clear: Expensive though it can be, higher education pays off for Americans as a whole.Indeed, the much-discussed idea of an “education bubble” — that college costs have soared too high to make a degree worthwhile — is a “dangerous myth that leads people to make bad choices,” said David Autor, an MIT labor economist who has extensively studied the relationship between education and earnings. Instead, Autor said, the best evidence shows that a college degree leads to a lifetime earnings increase of $250,000 to $300,000, even after subtracting the cost of higher education. Those returns, Autor noted, apply to graduates regardless of their...