Well, I've looked at the links and the studies provided earlier in this thread, and I'm not finding a bunch of solid information on the negative effects of encouraging people to go to college. Of course, the articles I've read--if they are the ones you are talking about--have been heavily interpreted, watered-down, and filtered for a mass audience.
If you're talking about the anecdotal evidence of a very specific and self-selected group of people on this board, I take that evidence and weigh it against the data of the Pew report, which found that 86% of people with college degrees thought it was a worthwhile investment. This is a board devoted to issues surrounding gifted students, who have historically not enjoyed their schooling experiences, found fault with their teachers, and been bored in class, whether it was general education or a gifted class. My classes have a handful of gifted students. Some of them, not all, are the ones who can recites the speech they got from their parents on the same topic.
The data I have for our school's community show that it is slightly better educated than the rest of the state. Just under 30% of adults have college degrees. More than a third have "some college", and just over 10% did not finish high school. Now, not everybody in the community has children or sends them to public school, so you keep that in mind as you interpret the data.
I do think that many young people in this country make uninformed choices about higher education and careers, and that many of them make irrational decisions even when given good information. For example, when I was in school, I thought that employers would be impressed by my education, and that a college degree in economics would help me land a position that required a college degree in economics.
However, I graduated into the beginning of a recession. Having come from a working class background, I did not really understand what white collar bosses were looking for and how to sell the skills that I did have. Since my professors had pretty much gone straight through to the PhD, there was not much advice they could give me on other paths, even if they thought that was their job instead of mine to figure that out (with assistance from the career services office, of course). My --now late--advisor was a returned Peace Corps volunteer, and his advice was for me to realize that I couldn't change much of anything.
It was not until I was in my 30s and had graduated again, into another recession, with yet more student loans, that an admiral's widow told me what I have found again and again in data. This includes US Census data which is available to everybody on the internet but you may have to graph it yourself. People in their twenties do not make much money, so there is not a big difference in income between the ones who have degrees, and the ones who do not.
I often found, in those years, that my bosses had not gone to college. Instead they had worked for the same company for a few years and been promoted. They had knowledge of the workings of the company that was more directly applicable than the philosophy, anthropology and economics classes I had taken.
Nor have I based my assumptions on a single, outdated, ten year old study. The Pew report and census data also show that "some college" is beneficial to income. And I have a couple of decades of my own post-college experience, as well as contact with a wide variety of friends from high school and college. This also inform my understanding of how education impacts income, quality of life, and standard of living. And how who goes to college is often determined by factors that have nothing to do with ability.
