Well I guess if anything it's time to stop viewing college as an inevitably great investment. If you feel that an English major college degree would be an enriching experience, then treat it as such, not as an investment.
From this vantage point it's comparable to taking a year off to travel (except 4X longer) or taking a couple of years off to volunteer. The question then becomes, can I afford it?
An interesting excercise is thinking about creative alternatives with similar costs. Say a parent was willing to give their 17-18 yr old child 100k in capital (maybe also help getting financed) + a 4 year stipend to start a business. Every cent must be reinvested. I'm not saying go start Microsoft. Maybe buy an ice cream franchise, mobile dog wash or double up & spring for an existing small business. Would they emerge 'more likely to succeed' at 22 then they would have otherwise?
All of these things seem to focus on skills. For better or worse, college is one of the rites of passage to being part of the economic elite – doubly so at institutions like Harvard – membership in which tends to be a better predictor of weath than practical skills. That's why it's really seen as an investment; for most degrees awarded it's been poor vocational training for a long time.
mostly the second. A study showed that people who get into Harvard/Yale/Princeton and instead go to state school make almost as much money as they would have otherwise.
I'm not sure if this is a generally available link; I am using it from a Stanford IP which may have purchased access. The paper is Dale and Krueger, "Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College: An Application of Selection on Observables and Unobservables."
What this post is arguing is that a Harvard english degree is not useful to that end. If you reject this claim then mine makes no sense either. I was writing in the context that college does not improve job prospects.
In looking at things as an investment, like the article, I don't think it matures at graduation, but I'd suspect that the net worth of a person at 50 is significantly higher with a degree from Harvard in English than a person who did a gap year traveling. I suppose my point is, and this is confused by the article, good investment and delivers a job straight out of college aren't equivalent.
I can't really speak to net worth at 50, except to note that the lifetime earnings of my dad, with a Ph.D in nuclear chemistry from MIT, are significantly lower than the lifetime earnings of most of my coworkers, with bachelors from Berkeley or Ann Arbor.
But 4 years out of college, I can say that the salaries of my friends with no college degree and significant marketable skills are much, much higher than the salaries of my Amherst friends with English, history, or foreign language degrees. Like 4x higher. What you study seems to make a far bigger difference than where you go to school.
All of the schools that you listed there are in the top 1% of American universities. As for "a rite of passage into the economic elite", any of those will do. And there I don't mean "the Harvard elite" – I'm just talking about the upper middle class and above that most tech entrepreneurs, and presumably most of the people reading this site, come from.
Here's what I'm getting at: As per the article, parents who send their kids to an elite university to get a degree in creative writing aren't doing it because they're under the impression that they're getting vocational training, and nevertheless, it's probably a smart investment. Class cohesion is a pretty powerful force.
(Note: With all of this I'm not saying this is a good thing; just that social factors are as powerful as skills in determining at where someone falls in the economic ladder.)
The problem is (particularly under the current US system) is that it is very hard to distinguish between likelihood to succeed & likelihood of going to a good college @ 18.
There are also feedback effects like mingling with those likely to succeed.
From this vantage point it's comparable to taking a year off to travel (except 4X longer) or taking a couple of years off to volunteer. The question then becomes, can I afford it?
An interesting excercise is thinking about creative alternatives with similar costs. Say a parent was willing to give their 17-18 yr old child 100k in capital (maybe also help getting financed) + a 4 year stipend to start a business. Every cent must be reinvested. I'm not saying go start Microsoft. Maybe buy an ice cream franchise, mobile dog wash or double up & spring for an existing small business. Would they emerge 'more likely to succeed' at 22 then they would have otherwise?