On Wednesday I wrote about how a college degree has gotten more economically valuable in the last few decades. A number of readers wrote in asking whether the numbers might be skewed by incomes at the very top. After all, the top 1 percent has received huge raises in the last few decades, and that group is mostly college-educated.

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

The second chart I ran — showing that the typical worker whose highest degree is a bachelor’s earns 5.3 percent more today than in 1994 — referred to medians, not averages. That means the outliers at the tippy top should not have had much effect on the numbers.

But there is actually another way in which the numbers are skewed upward: a much smaller share of working-age men, whatever their level of education, is working today than in past decades.

That means the pay of the “median” college-graduate worker is less representative of the total population of college-educated Americans than was the case in the past. By using the median wage for workers, rather than median wage for the full population, we’re only looking at what’s happened to the earnings of the most successful college graduates today, versus the vast majority of graduates in the past.

In a study for the Milken Institute, Adam Looney and Michael Greenstone at the Hamilton Project crunched numbers for the wages of all men, broken down by education, regardless of whether they were working. The findings are somewhat terrifying.

After adjusting for inflation, the typical male college graduate earned about 12 percent less in 2009 than his counterpart did in 1969. Sounds pretty bad, right?

The numbers are even worse for men without a bachelor’s:
 

As you can see from the last column in this table, the median man whose highest educational attainment was a high school diploma had his earnings fall by 47 percent in the last four decades.

Workers who didn’t even graduate from high school had a median income decline of 66 percent, largely because so many of these high school dropouts subsequently dropped out of the labor force, too, once they saw what job opportunities awaited them.

The numbers do reinforce that college is still a good investment, at least relative to not getting any postsecondary education. But they also indicate that when you look at the median earnings of the entire population of Americans who have received a degree, a college education seems less economically valuable today than it did in 1969.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=0ac7c807b373502290ead4b46a897c41