Defaulting Into Education

What is a "graduate education"? Are you talking about PhD programs? Masters' degrees for those in professions, like teachers, where pay is directly increased when the degree is granted? MBAs? Law degrees? You are apparently not talking about either associates' programs, or undergraduate college degrees, right?

So what did this paragraph tell us? Instead of explaining what you're not talking about, we should know by now what you are discussing.

You're going to cite a third-rate financial news website for the accuracy of a statement as broad as this one? Did you do any other research, or did you stop with "bankrate.com"?

Doing the same work without the degree is possible, and the augmented salary does not make up for the opportunity cost of formal education. Second, some students enter graduate school with the intention of pursuing a low-paying field to satisfy non-pecuniary desires. After feeling pressure from the magnitude of loans, they abandon their goals and pursue an unwanted career that can fund their degrees (see Nithin Kumar's piece on burdensome law school debt). Although these degrees have great fiscal returns, it can come at a great personal cost. These default students fall victim to the education creed.

Turning your colleagues' anxieties into data doesn't make much sense. Particularly because there isn't any evidence available, nor will there be any evidence available ever, that paying for a Columbia Law degree is a bad lifetime economic investment. So instead of taking an example which would have given solidity to your proposition (of which there is no shortage available), you've plumped your argument down in the middle of a context where it has no life in it.

How much of that do you propose is the result of expenditures on post-tertiary education?

This size should not be surprising; government education loans are easily accessed, conditional upon little more than admission to an accredited school. Such easy access to funds allows borrowers to invest without much critical thought in the value of their degree. Specifically, this practice acts as an enabler for students who attend graduate school by default. Degrees that serve neither financial nor social interests are the most concerning in relation to the ballooning educational debt figures. Encouraging consideration of alternatives before investing will encourage default students to identify the risk of their investments and help avoid regrettable results.

If this essay is about forms of education that do not return their cost to the student, it is not about "graduate education," unless that term has a very idiosyncratic meaning you do not define. Your "evidence," which does not suggest much research effort, is on the "trillion dollar student debt" scale, or else is restricted to comments from law students at Columbia, who—whatever their problems may be—don't face a question about whether a law license is worth the price they are paying for it. The "Nudge" nonsense is just a way of dressing up "someone should tell people how to make good decisions" as though it were social science.

I think the route to improvement here is to decide whether you are writing about people who shouldn't be taking out loans to pay for educations (in which case you are mostly talking about students in vocationally-oriented for-profit education institutions granting associates' or other post-secondary degrees), or about the debt-financing problem in professional education. This latter problem has to do with distortion of the early career choices of the new degree-holder, not with the lifetime economic value of the professional degree. Writing about PhD programs and the economic status of the young scholar requires not an analysis of the role of student debt, but rather an assessment of the future structure of higher education, which is too complex for an analysis at this length even if one can see the possible futures clearly in this area, which pretty much no one can. You can get somewhere cogent if you focus more tightly.