The Wall Street Journal has this report The Declining Value of Your College Degree.

A snippet:

A four-year college degree, seen for generations as a ticket to a better life, is no longer enough to guarantee a steadily rising paycheck. …

College-educated workers are more plentiful, more commoditized and more subject to the downsizings that used to be the purview of blue-collar workers only. What employers want from workers nowadays is more narrow, more abstract and less easily learned in college.

To be sure, the average American with a college diploma still earns about 75% more than a worker with a high-school diploma and is less likely to be unemployed. Yet while that so-called college premium is up from 40% in 1979, it is little changed from 2001, according to data compiled by Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank.

The MonroeTalkers have been chatting up this story.

I do know college graduates who have had a difficult time finding or keeping a job. One of my best friends, a divorced mom with two children, is struggling to finish her master’s degree because a bachelor’s degree doesn’t provide her with much beyond a secretary post.

There aren’t too many people who have the luxury of pursuing a college education solely for education’s sake.

There needs to be a solid financial return on that investment for middle class and working class families to pursue that goal — otherwise the money spent on college could be put to other, more practical, uses.