LogFAQs > #879289907

Yes, studies have consistently shown that people with a college degree, on average, make significantly more than those with just a high school diploma.

https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/02/11/study-income-gap-between-young-college-and-high-school-grads-widens

The Pew Research Center has found that the earnings gap between millennials with bachelor’s degrees and those with just a high school diploma is wider than it was for prior generations.

Among millennials ages 25 to 32, median annual earnings for full-time working college-degree holders are $17,500 greater than for those with high school diplomas only. That gap steadily widened for each successive generation in the latter half of the 20th century. As of 1986, the gap for late baby boomers ages 25 to 32 was just more than $14,200, and for early boomers in 1979, it was far smaller at $9,690. The gap for millennials is also more than twice as large as it was for the silent generation in 1965, when the gap for that cohort was just under $7,500 (all figures are in 2012 dollars).


A lot of people counter with the unemployment issues of people with college degrees. Well, guess what, that issue is even worse for high school grads.


The gap has widened considerably, yet many young college graduates are underemployed – how do those two facts square with each other? It’s not just that earnings are improving for college graduates, says one of the report’s authors, it’s that life for high school-only graduates has gotten tougher.

“There’s a reason we call this report ‘The Rising Cost of Not Going to College,'” says Paul Taylor, executive vice president of special projects at the Pew Research Center.

“The driver of that widening is not so much that today’s college graduates are doing better than yesterday’s college graduates are doing; it’s that today’s high school-only graduates are doing worse than yesterday’s high school-only graduates,” he says. “The real story is the collapse in economic opportunity for people who do not continue their education beyond high school.”


They call higher education "the great equalizer" in administrative circles because it gives everyone, from the poor to the rich, a fresh start. It puts you all in the same relative starting line. The success of a college graduate depends less on how rich or poor you were prior to college, and instead depends on how well you performed while in college. Sure, richer/legacy students will have an advantage there because parents have more resources to help them excel in college. But the average student, regardless of their socioeconomic background or class status, becomes more competitive in college depending on how they use their time and the resources for which they take advantage.

You will always have that person who can make themselves rich or at least comfortable by starting a business, developing an app, or going to trade school. But that is more of an exception to the norm.
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