Why don’t more people get college degrees? In a new working paper, Sang Yoon Lee, Yongseok Shin and Donghoon Lee write: “In the early 1980s, American men with at least four years of college education earned about 40 percent more on average than those whose education ended with high school. By 2005, this college wage premium rose to above 90 percent. During the same time period, the fraction of men with a four-year college degree in the working-age population all but remained constant.”
This is a bit of a mystery. College tuition has gone up, to be sure, but financing that tuition is easier than it used to be, what with the panoply of repayment options for government-sponsored student loans. Moreover, more people start college than did in 1985; it’s just that they don’t finish. So you can’t explain this by saying that people are avoiding college because of the size of the potential tuition bills.