Are college degrees worth the price paid for them?

From Rory:

As someone in education, and heading into academia, it is. But that's my very particular situation. Now I don't have much experience in the real world, but I'm willing to say: (a) It probably is, but (b) It shouldn't oughta be that way.

The way it works today, it's more of a culturally accepted standard for weeding out potential recruits. And it's not totally terrible: those who have a degree (at least a good one) show some willingness to commit to hard work, over a long time. That kind of long-sighted attitude is certainly a worthy thing to look for.
That said, it really ought not to be that way. Thanks to a variety of factors, you are expected to get such a degree if you want to succeed, regardless of the actual utility of what you learn. Ideally you would spend those 3/4 years (outside of professions that absolutely need prior training, like Med Schol) working your way up somewhere. That experience, combined with recommendation(s) from your employer(s), would be a much better indicator of your worthiness than a degree. As it stands, it's a rather arbitrary barrier, particularly for the poor. Even for the middle-class, it's just another lump of debt which one really does not need in this or any economic climate.

Anyway, looking forward to hearing what you have to say on this!

From Ari:

One thing I'm not sure has been carefully done is to count the cost of lost income and interest that comes with getting a college degree. If you worked for four years, rather than spend money to go to college, that would offer a huge long-term benefit in terms of getting financially ahead. I know that's only a small aspect of the question you're considering, but it's an interesting one, I think. (Plus, the correlations of college to income are largely bogus, because the type of people who go to college generally would be more successful even if they didn't go to college.)