The first one was about the fact that college is still incredibly important, both to the individual and for society. The second was about why AI makes this even more so.

This one is about cost, because while college CAN be expensive, it does not HAVE to be, and for millions and millions of Americans, it ISN’T.

Now, does that mean higher education gets a free pass? Of course not. Colleges absolutely should be called out for bloated costs, weak programs, and the absurdity of charging premium prices without being able to explain value in plain English.

But we need to stop pretending that going into massive debt is the only way to get a degree, especially a bachelor’s. I really want to focus on bachelor’s degrees here for a couple of reasons. First, that’s what most people mean when they say ‘a college degree.’ Second, there are so many different types of graduate degrees that it becomes impossible to compare apples to apples.

I do want to acknowledge, though, that master’s degrees have become one of the prime ways that universities have responded to market demand by providing a host of often very expensive programs that don’t add a lot of long-term financial value for students. They also account for much of the inflated debt figures that are used to discredit the value of colleges in general.

However, even bachelor’s degrees can be outrageously expensive, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is obvious when you see the “sticker price” of private institutions. The median annual cost of a year of tuition and fees at a private university in the US is about $40,000. That doubles if you look at the top-tier private schools, with some topping out at just over $90,000.

Don’t Pay Retail!

“See,” you say, “if you want to attend an Ivy League school for 4 years, and you’re not wealthy, you will end up $300,000 or more in debt!” I get why that seems shocking. But in doing so, you’re ignoring the concept of the “net price”: what students actually pay out of pocket after grants and aid. It turns out that the most expensive, elite schools are also the most generous with financial aid.

Northwestern, for example, has a sticker price of about $73,000 a year or almost $95,000 with room and board. However, most families with a household income of $70,000 or less pay ZERO in tuition and room or board after you factor in federal Pell grants. That covers about 42% of American households. If your family makes less than $150,000, like about 75% of Americans, you can likely attend tuition free. Almost every other selective private college has a similar program.

That distinction matters, because it is the heart of the whole cost debate. The sticker price gets the headlines. The net price is what people actually pay. And those are very different numbers. In fact, the net price for tuition and fees at private, nonprofit four-year institutions was $16,910 in 2025-26. Guess what, that’s actually DOWN almost 15% over the past two decades!

Yeah, But What About State U?

So far, I’ve only talked about expensive private colleges. I get it, kids today, mine included, are obsessed with the endless TikToks about which schools are ‘the best.’ If you WANT to and CAN pay for those ‘selective’ schools, go for it. There are obviously some reputational advantages.

But as a caveat, understand that it’s likely not nearly as much of a financial layup as you think. The largest study, now somewhat dated, on this topic found that there was a large lifetime monetary advantage to attending an elite college compared to a less selective one. However, when you control for the students themselves, this bump disappears. That is, if a great student (judged by grades and SAT scores) got into an Ivy League school but chose to attend their local state school, they ended up just as well off financially as a similar student who went to the Ivy.

That brings up the other path: state universities. Because there are excellent public institutions where the price is nowhere near what people imagine. The median in-state tuition at a public university in America is less than $12,000 a year. The University of Florida, for example, publishes in-state undergraduate tuition and fees at roughly $6,400 a year. That is not nothing. But it is also not the cartoon version of college pricing that dominates so much of this debate. Again, this is BEFORE any aid is factored in.

After aid, the net tuition at a public four-year college is about $2,300. And this is going to blow your mind… that is down 48% in inflation-adjusted dollars since 2006.

And at a great public urban research university like Wayne State University, the story is even more revealing. Almost no undergrad at Wayne State pays sticker price. Last I looked there were fewer than 10. Not 10%. Ten. About 60% of undergraduate students pay NOTHING for tuition out of pocket, thanks to programs that cover tuition and standard fees for eligible students after grants and aid. And the majority graduate with zero debt.

But, I Keep Reading About Big Tuition Increases

You might be asking, “Why are those sticker prices accelerating so much at state universities in the first place, making it seem so expensive?” The answer involves another factor that adds confusion to the discussion: state support. Most state universities have two types of revenue: state appropriation and tuition. Once upon a time, the public valued higher education as a public good that led to more prosperous places and invested in it, providing the vast majority of the cost of tuition at public universities. But for decades, this support has been waning.

Look at Michigan, which is a perfect case study. In 1979, state appropriations covered 70% of Michigan public university operating revenues, with tuition covering just 30%. The state paid the majority of the bill. Today, the numbers have almost exactly flipped: students and families now provide a full 78% of institutional operating dollars, and the state provides just 22%.

The education still costs what it costs. What changed is that the state walked away from its share of the bill and handed it to students and families in the form of tuition. The cost of a degree hasn’t changed dramatically… who’s paying for it has.

So, You’re saying Paying Through the Nose is a Choice?

Even so, most people are not paying hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most people do it for much less. Many do it for free. Among those who do borrow, fewer than one in five graduates with $30,000 or more in student debt. For most of the rest, the price of the degree, however real, is far from the apocalyptic picture the headlines paint.

Between community college transfer pathways, state grants, institutional aid, and smart university selection, a high-quality, low-debt degree is not a unicorn. It is the reality for millions of students who treat college as a strategic financial project rather than a luxury purchase.

That does not mean the affordability problem is fake. It isn’t. It means the problem is more specific than the headlines suggest. That is why the way we talk about cost is so misleading.

Yes, if you want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on college, you absolutely can. No one is denying that. You can drive a Ferrari if you want to. But if you CHOOSE to drive a Ferrari, don’t complain about the cost of gas.

We Need To Reframe The Debate

The scandal is not that college no longer works. The scandal is that something this valuable has been made so confusing, so expensive in some places, and so easy to caricature.

So, let’s stop saying college is not worth it.

For most people, the evidence says the opposite. The return is still strong. The earnings premium is still massive. The unemployment bonus is still real. The long-term life advantages are still obvious. And in the age of AI, when content is cheap and judgment is priceless, the core things college is supposed to teach are even more important.

This one, however, is about the new scare tactic — that “AI is killing the entry-level job,” rendering recent graduates obsolete before their careers even begin.

We’ve all seen the headlines and heard the stories, but again the data tell a different story.

The theory is that AI is obviating the need for college grads, reducing their value. Why would someone hire a new grad with little to no experience, when they could use AI much more cheaply? If this were true we would expect to see lower wages for recent college grads and higher unemployment rates.

But, this simply isn’t the case. While the gap between recent grads and their 22-27 year-old peers without a degree has shrunk a little over the past decade, median wages for recent college grads have risen by about 7.5% over the past 7 years even adjusted for inflation. And, while the gap has narrowed from its high of 45-50% a decade or so ago, it still sits at over 40%, a remarkably high historic level.

Wages aside, how about the claims that recent grads can’t even get a job today? Yes, young adults are facing increased headwinds when entering the workforce. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates (aged 22-27) is indeed about a point higher than it was a decade ago. That part is real. But it is still meaningfully lower than the rate for 22- to 27-year-olds without a college degree. Degrees still matter.

Furthermore, while the unemployment gap has narrowed, this is almost entirely due to more recent college graduates actually entering and staying in the job market, likely because of those higher wages I mentioned above. According to the Economic Policy Institute “nearly all (98%) of the increase in the unemployment rate between 2024 and 2026 for young college graduates was driven by the increase in the labor force.” “Rising wages for graduates in a tight labor market, paired with the steep cost of graduate school, have pushed more recent grads straight into the workforce, effectively increasing competition among themselves.”

And, of course, when the COVID pandemic hit, that degree was a remarkably valuable stabilizing force. Graduates’ unemployment rate rose as hiring slowed, but a far larger share of young adults without a degree became unemployed, peaking at over 22%. This is the same resilience factor I discussed in my last post, and the world of AI is likely going to make this even more important.

When the economy shifts, it is educated workers who have the flexibility to pivot, adapt, and secure stable footing. A college degree doesn’t make you immune to a tough job market, but it cuts your risk of unemployment dramatically. And that remains true even in an economy being reshaped by AI.

And the reason why is the part too many critics miss: the value of college is not really about your major. It’s about the process.

Today, anyone can use AI to generate a memo, a slogan, a strategy deck, a bad legal paragraph, or a fake confident answer in two seconds. The essential thing is judgment. What should we do? What matters? What is true? What is persuasive? What is humane? What is worth building? What should be ignored? What deserves skepticism? What requires taste?

Those are not software questions. Those are human questions.

And they are exactly the kinds of capacities a good bachelor’s degree is supposed to build. Regardless of whether a student is studying English, or math, or philosophy, or science, what they’re really learning is the ability to think critically, communicate, persuade, and collaborate in teams while becoming facile with new technologies. They’re not getting ready for a job. They’re preparing for a career.

I always say that AI is great at taking things out of my head and putting them on paper or in a deck. But often when I ask AI to make something, it comes out sounding plausible, looking like a BCG consultant made it, and also just plain wrong. That’s fine for me. I can keep the beautiful presentation and correct the data. But I had to KNOW that it was wrong in the first place, and it was my education and experience that allows me to do it.

AI isn’t going to take my job… but someone with my background and the skills I learned getting my education who is USING AI might.

That’s the point.

The age of AI doesn't make judgment or communication less important… it makes them indispensable. It does not make taste, skepticism, reasoning, and synthesis less valuable. It makes them more valuable, because all of a sudden content is cheap and abundant while discernment is scarce.

That is why I think people who argue that AI is making college obsolete have the argument exactly backwards.

If the world were moving toward a future where raw output was all that mattered, then maybe the case against college would get stronger. But that is not the world AI is creating. AI is creating a world flooded with output — some of it useful, much of it mediocre, and plenty of it wrong. In that world, the people who can evaluate, refine, question, and direct are the ones who become more valuable.

Which is another way of saying: the core things college is supposed to teach are not less important now. They are more important now.

To be even more blunt: AI is not reducing the value of human capital. It is increasing the premium on the parts of human capital that are hardest to automate: judgment, taste, communication, adaptability, and the ability to tell the difference between what merely sounds smart and what actually is.

Which is why I keep coming back to a simple point: the deepest value of college was never just vocational training. It was always broader than that.

Yes, majors matter somewhat. Yes, technical skills matter. Yes, internships matter. But the larger thing a good college education does is prepare you not just for your first job, but for a career that will keep forcing you to adapt, over and over, for decades. In an AI economy, that matters even more.

The workers who do best will not be the ones who refuse to use AI. They will not be the ones who worship it, either. They will be the ones who use it as an amplifier without surrendering their standards, taste, judgment, or responsibility.

So no, I do not think AI is making college irrelevant. I think AI is exposing what college was always supposed to be for.

Not credentialism. Not box-checking. Not four expensive years of vague personal branding.

But the hard, durable human work of learning how to reason well, communicate clearly, and exercise judgment in a noisy world.

If college fails to do that, then yes, it deserves criticism. But if college does do that, then the age of AI does not weaken the case for it.

It sharpens it.

Stay Tuned

In the final column, I want to turn to the argument that gives the anti-college position most of its emotional force: the price tag.

Because college can absolutely be expensive. But it doesn’t have to be… and for the majority of people it isn’t. Don’t believe me? Keep reading. Part 3 coming soon…

Gallup found in 2026 that only 38% of Americans had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, down from 57% in 2015. An NBC poll in 2025 showed that 63% of voters said a four-year degree was not worth the cost if it meant taking on debt and graduating without concrete job skills. Those numbers are real.

But the folks who write those headlines (AI?) didn’t choose them because the polling is interesting. They choose them because they get clicks. And they get clicks because people see that headline and interpret it as “college isn’t worth it anymore” or “AI is obviating the need for a degree.”

Those lazy conclusions are wrong. You can often learn this even by just reading the actual articles under those headlines. Because if the author of the article — often not even the same person who wrote the headline — actually attempts to present a balanced narrative, you very quickly learn that the argument for the value of a bachelor’s degree is based in data and the counternarrative is mostly what I call “anecdata,” which is essentially where people take an anecdote and extrapolate it to be true for the majority of people.

I want to break this up into three separate posts, because these are three related but separate arguments, and they each deserve some attention. If you don’t want to read any further but are willing to take my word for it, here they are:

1. College is more “worth it” today than ever before, both for individuals and for society.

2. In the age of AI, that is still true and will only become more so.

3. While college can be expensive, it doesn’t have to be, and for millions and millions of Americans it isn’t. (See, you’re going to want to keep reading.)

College is ‘Worth It’

Still with me? OK. Let’s start with the individual case, because it remains overwhelming.

A bachelor’s degree is still one of the best investments most people can make. The New York Fed estimated in 2025 that the return on investment for a bachelor’s degree was 12.5% annually. That’s better than stocks or bonds. The median worker with a bachelor’s degree earned about $80,000, a premium of more than $32,000 a year versus the median worker with only a high school diploma.

And this difference is most pronounced when people are in their prime. Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce has found that prime-age workers with a bachelor’s degree earn about 70% more at the median than workers with only a high school diploma.

Before you jump in to say that “not all degrees are created equal and some of them are worthless,” I want to point out that while it’s true that STEM majors have, on average, a significantly higher starting salary than humanities majors after graduation, by mid-career humanities majors tend to catch up to and in some cases pass many of their science- and math-based classmates.

Then there is unemployment, which is where the anti-college case starts to collapse entirely. In 2026, the unemployment rate for Americans 25 and older with only a high school diploma remained well above the unemployment rate for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher. In April, for example, it was 4.7% for high school graduates and just 2.8% for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

But in times of recession, a degree provides incredible resilience. At its peak during the Great Recession in 2010, unemployment for workers with a bachelor’s degree spiked to 5.1%, but for those with only a high school diploma it was dramatically worse, reaching 10.6%. During the peak of the COVID employment shock of 2020, workers with a bachelor’s degree saw their unemployment rate surge to 8.4%, but it was workers without that degree who bore the brunt of the upheaval, facing unemployment at a whopping 17.3%. That is not a rounding error. That is a different level of economic stability.

When the economy shifts, it is educated workers who have the flexibility to pivot, adapt, and secure stable footing. A college degree doesn’t make you immune to a tough job market, but it cuts your risk of unemployment dramatically.

Education is Economic Development

The economic case goes beyond the individual. Countries do not become richer by convincing themselves education is a luxury. They become richer by building human capital. A workforce with more college graduates is more productive, more innovative, and more capable of absorbing technological change. If you want a high-wage economy, you need a highly educated population. That is not ideology. That is arithmetic.

There's a strong positive correlation between the education level of a state's residents and the prosperity of that state. It’s no surprise that the places with the most residents with bachelor’s degrees (MA, CO, MD, NJ, CT) are also among the top states for median household income. When I wrote my master’s dissertation more than two decades ago, I found only three statistically significant factors that correlated with increased per capita income growth. The education level of a population was the strongest of them, explaining most of the difference.

More than Money

And the benefits do not stop at wages. More education is associated with better health, more civic participation, safer communities, increased philanthropy and generally higher levels of happiness. In fact, recent research found that college graduates in the United States now live about 11 years longer on average than Americans who never finished high school. A degree is not just a labor-market asset. It is one of the clearest markers we have of whether someone will have a more stable, more capable, more resilient life.

Now, does that mean higher education gets a free pass? Of course not. Some colleges absolutely should be attacked for bloated costs, weak programs, and the absurdity of charging premium prices without being able to explain value in plain English.

But the scandal is not that college no longer works. The scandal is that something this valuable has been made so confusing, so expensive, and so easy to caricature.

So let’s stop saying college is not worth it.

For most people, the evidence says the opposite. The return is still strong. The earnings premium is still massive. The unemployment gap is still real. The long-term life advantages are still obvious.

And in the age of AI, when content is cheap and judgment is priceless, the core things college is supposed to teach are not less important.

In the next post, I’m going to dig into that directly — because if anything, I think AI makes the case for college stronger, not weaker. Stay tuned….