A bunch of researchers have asked that question and tried to answer it the best they can, by using statistical methods to discount for things like high family income, race, family history of college attendance.
From what I’ve seen (and I’ll try to dig up links in a minute if I can) papers often conclude that the causality is definitely not 100% responsible for the income difference between grads and non-grads, but they also generally find the number is much higher than 0% too. It’s somewhere in the middle.
It’s not really a stretch to suggest that something happens during college, right? People do learn things when they spend their time learning, and we have plenty of data to show that people who get an elementary and secondary education are better off than people who get no education… or take it a step further and look at basic literacy. Why is it hard to believe there’s value in college when it’s not hard to believe that literacy and pre-college education has value?
> consider not going to college and achieving great things without burning 4-5 years of opportunity cost
While that can be true for a few naturally motivated and smart (or lucky) people, the aggregate stats don’t really support that view. Most people end up better off going to school, and opening the door to the many higher paying jobs that require a degree.
* edit: here’s an example: https://www.stlouisfed.org/-/media/project/frbstl/stlouisfed...
See “Section III: “The True (Causal) Return on a College Education: Evidence from the 2016 SCF”
The conclusion: “In order to examine the effect of these variables in accounting for some of the relationship between education, income and wealth, we utilized multiple regression. All variables, including age variables, own education, parents’ education, and financial acumen, were regressed onto income and wealth. This model was compared to the simple model of only lifecycle and own education. Results are in Tables 6 and 7. (See Tables B1-B6 for black, Hispanic and other race results).
“Clearly, parents’ education and financial acumen were important variables previously omitted in estimations of the college and post-graduate premiums (see Table 8). Together, these variables reduced the income premium by 32 percent for white terminal bachelor’s degree holders and by 29 percent for white postgraduate degree holders. The reductions of the wealth premium were even starker, with this premium being reduced by over half for graduates and postgraduates (54.4 percent and 60.4 percent, respectively).”