They seem to have forgotten to mention that the average person of the generation born in the 1990's will not retire until about 70, due to their excessive college debts (some in excess of 100,000 U.S. dollars).

Nice infograph, but it about sums up what I've been discovering for years: the Bachelors Degree is the new High School Diploma and won't (on average) make you wealthy than your average counterpart who either got an Associates Degree, learned a trade, or didn't go to college at all.

[Note: The writer of this comment does not necessarily discourage youth to attend college. Please consult better sources than a guy who made a comment on a blog before making such an important decision in life.]

I dunno, having a college degree got me into a higher-than-minimum-wage job compared to others who did not get a degree and are earning more-than-minimum-wage-but-not-that-much-more. But I also aimed for a more technical degree, which can be all the difference really.

My comment was really aimed at the idea that as long as you have a college degree (in anything) you will end up making more money than not. Of course, an extreme example of that fallacy is Maurice Johnson; a homeless man with two Masters Degrees. More common stories are about people who took out thousands of dollars worth of student loans in order to get degrees, only to wind up working jobs they could have easily gotten straight out of High School.

In general though, being harder working, more driven and other stuff like that decides how much money you will make in life; regardless (mostly) of whether you got a college degree or not.

I'm working towards an Associates degree right now - I'm thinking of getting a couple of those.

[Note: The author of this blog entry does not discourage youth from attending college. Please consult more reliable sources before making such an important decision in life.

The author of this blog entry also acknowledges bias coming from current life circumstances.]

What I've found on this subject is degrees in stuffs like English and Classical Studies won't help you much, whereas degrees in technical stuff like Computer Science and Engineering will. But I've heard enough stories to know that if you really want a job with an English degree, you can find one - it's just that more graduates in the field don't know where to look and have trouble hunting, whereas with CS the workplaces go to colleges to recruit before you've even graduated.

I'm finishing my last year of High School right now, while I'm still trying to decide whether I want to go to college or not. I mostly lean towards going (mostly because I have a lot of people pointing me in that direction), but statistics like: 53 percent of all young college graduates in America are either unemployed or underemployed, certainly make me pause and reconsider.

But that, is a decision to be made in the future and we all only live in the present.

One of the people I read stuff about this said that you should take a year off between high school and college and do something you really wanted to do with it. That way you would have a better perspective on this sort of thing: not only whether to go to college, but what degree to take.

I sort of did this, but not really, but the parts of it I did do make me think it might be sound advice.

The main thing to remember here is that what your degree is in makes a significant difference. I'm going into mechanical engineering, and that's a degree that is basically guaranteed to get you a job somewhere, and why I find it interesting that on the graphic, they leave out the statistics on STEM majors, with only peeps like CompSci on there. Computer science majors, incidentally, are in a bit of a pickle due to market dilution, but topic for another time.

Really, it's a topic that can't be explored in a cheeky infographic like that. There's tons of statistics that have to be looked at, essays can be written on the subject, and ultimately what you do with your education is best left to the advice of a college counselor, who's entire job revolves around understanding these trends. Nothing you do is going to give you a 100% certainty of getting a good job, but there are some fields that will simply always be better paying.