>Maybe looking at the following line from your table will help get at
>what Michael and Kelly are concerned about:
>
> 1.9 Bachelor's degree 40,100
>
>
>
>O.K. Half of all holders of the Bachelor's degree earn less than 40K.
>And that includes many earnaing only 20k to 30k. That's a large number
>of college graduates who (unless they are two-income households) are not
>making all that much. I don't know how this corresponds to the
>expectations of these workers -- and the relationship of expectations to
>actuality would, I imagine, have most to do with political implications.
This is really quite extraordinary, like a caricature of left glass half-fullness. So the bottom third of the distribution feels that certain promises haven't been fulfilled (though many of them may be young, and looking forward to raises in the future). The upper 50-70% doesn't feel that, aside from the normal disappointment of human life. Of course half of people make below the median; this isn't Lake Wobegon. I know the wage and income distribution literature pretty well, and I know that the U.S. is characterized by a large and widening dispersion within demographic categories as well as across them. But all other things being equal (which of course they rarely are) you're more likely to be better off with a BA than without one, and more likely to be better off with a master's than a bachelor's. What is the point of questioning this so stubbornly?
Doug