<p>As pointed out above this is way off topic for this thread, but probably is the most important issue about college today. What you wrote above is fine if the family is well off and the child is smart enough to get into a very selective school. Unfortunately this only accounts for maybe 5% or at most 10% of the students in college. Are you saying it makes economic sense for most students to spend 250k on getting a humanities degree? Where exactly are the jobs? A friend’s daughter just finished up a history degree at Columbia this year and the only job she could find was entry level as a “healthcare consultant”. So her 250k degree from Columbia really only served as a convenient screening tool for the company to hire entry level 35-40k workers. The educational system as it exists today is wasting trillions of dollars on nearly worthless degrees. The sad truth is that the colleges along with the gov’t loan system are well on the way to destroying the educational system in the US and very soon this bubble will burst.</p>