What a College Degree is Worth

(MoneyWatch)  Is a college degree still worth the cost?
The average college student graduates with about $21,000 in debt. And what most people don't realize is that figure doesn't include what parents borrow.

Regardless of the price, millions of families believe that earning a college degree is nonnegotiable. After all, without the diploma, earning power shrinks.

Everybody knows that, but newly released figures from the U.S. Census Bureau pinpoint the earnings advantage that college graduates enjoy.

According to the Census Bureau, the mean salary for a high school graduate in 2007 was $31,286. Someone with a high school diploma made just 55% of the salary ($57,181) of a typical college graduate. And the person who quit school after 12th grade was making just 39% of the paycheck of someone possessing an advanced degree.

I pulled those figures off the Census Bureau's Excel spreadsheet, but what I found even more fascinating were figures that went back to the mid 1970's. Over the years, the salary gap between college grads and everybody else has been slowly widening.

In 1977, for instance, the typical high school grad's salary was $9,013, which represented 63% of the college grad's take-home pay and 47% of what someone with a master's or PhD was earning. In 1987, those respective numbers had shrunk to 59% and 44%. The erosion has continued. Ten years ago, a high school graduate was making just 56% of a college-educated worker's paycheck.

Nearly 69% of last year's high school graduates ended up attending college. If more students checked out the Census Bureau's numbers, I bet the percentage would be even higher.

Hat image by David Michale Morris, CC.0.