Is it silly or overly romantic to suggest that there are other benefits to higher education, and overselling the economic benefits may lead to underselling the other benefits? Some of these are probably personal and subjective: issues how satisfied a person is with his/her life and accomplishments.

But there is one thing which gets overlooked: social class isn't exclusively an economic matter. Education conveys status, and in some instances that may be more important than "incrementally higher future incomes". Wage/salary scales for "blue collar" and "white collar" occupations surely overlap. Statistics make my head ache, but not enough to say "lies, damn lies and statistics." The Bureau of Labor Statistics offers enough numbers to make nearly anyone happy, I guess. Find some pertinent ones at  http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm  

Here's my point...we "pay" people in respect and prestige as well as in dollars. If I were to ask the man or woman on the street, which job was "higher class", a street car operator or a medical social worker or a plumber, I suspect most would reply medical social worker Yet of the three professions I've cherry-picked, the mean annual wage for street car operators is $46,660, for plumbers, $44,850 and for Medical Social workers, $42,690.

None of these do as well as in purely economic terms dental hygienists at $60,620.

So one has to ask, Which of these jobs would be most likely to elevate a person's social class? Or, thinking of it from the other side: a son or daughter of a social worker comes home and says to doting parent, I've found my vocation: I've decided I really want to be a plumber. How would the parents react? While they might support their child regardless, I suspect that someplace deep inside they'd be thinking, How am I going to explain this to the gang at work?

So let's not discount a college education as a class elevator regardless of "incremental higher income".

And, going into flights of idealism, let me conclude by suggesting that college education is good for The Commonwealth as well as for common wealth. Jefferson knew that democracy depended on an enlightened citizenry, and that alone ought to be sufficient reason for progressives to make it as broadly available as humanly possible.

I had a student who returned to college in his late '30s to take a degree in Historic Preservation. He was a plumber by profession. After graduation, he was still a plumber, but a plumber with a college degree. He called himself a "historic plumber". I asked him what the difference was, he replied, "$75.00 an hour," then assured me that he was joking, that the education was intrinsically valuable.

Mike

Mike's example would be better if a plumber making $60k a year were compared to a college-educated barista making $20k. (For Democrats, another lesson is that we should respect plumbers more. I'm astonished at the genteel biases of the Democrats I meet on the net).

While education is "the biggest single factor" in life success, that's to a large degree because education subsumes a lot of other things such as innate ability and parental income. The specific contribution of education is not the biggest single factor. (IE, the difference between two talented, problem-free kids from prosperous families, one with and one without a BS). And not having a degree is often a sign of other problems.

It's also true to a large degree because education is used as a selector -- so if we reaise the general level of education, we just raise the bar. Already many jobs that used to be train-on-the-job require a year or two of school, and many jobs that used to require a BS now require an MS.