You just made my overall point - people are making stupid decisions. But they are doing it in public, private, and for profit schools. And the for profits shouldnt be singled out when the problem is endemic to the entire system/industry.

Average nationwide tuition at a 4 year public school is 7.6k per year (30k total)
4 year private school averages 30k per year (120k! total!)
google says ITT costs 30k per year
google says devry costs 14k per year

Traditionally people at public/private schools are also going to pay for room and board as well, which many places double the cost. However, Since everyone has the option to stay at home or rent we can ignore that.

So these schools are more expensive than state school, and up to as expensive as the average private school (but significantly less than the elite private schools)

So i will admit my cost estimates were off, but I still hold that job prospects for the public school people are pretty bad too. For the masses/sheeple, going to community college or straight out into the workforce is quite often cost effective.

Those who can specialize in areas with shortages will be better off.

I absolutely agree that education leads to higher earnings and better employment options. My point (perhaps poorly made) was that even accounting for your 2-3x better job prospects, employment in the chosen field (especially for "soft" degrees) is still bad (even though you are better off than someone with no degree), and the cost of that degree was huge.

My fiance has a masters in art history and metalsmithing. 80k in debt, and her one department (highly ranked and respected) turns out about 10-15 people like her every year. A few thousand of them across the country.

Nationwide, there are a handful of (mostly academic) positions, some industrial positions, and the rest are the proverbial "starving artist"

Other departments like english, the humanities, womens studies, etc are the same, except they don't have the industrial positions.

I agree, and this somewhat reinforces my point.

Liberal arts colelges, for the most part, dump out hundreds of thousands of interchangeable people with no real skills. There are of course exceptions. Doctors, engineers, some of the scientists (although many are just recycled into faculty), some of the tech people (although in my experience any person with a masters or phd in comp sci is 100% worthless on the job)

Tech schools are focusing on areas where there are more shortages of workers (or at least the impression of shortages of workers). Now, they of course have a perverse incentive to make the shortage appear worse than it is, and continue its existence even after the shortage is no longer there. But they are responding to at least some level of market dynamics, which by and large traditional schools are insulated from completely.

There is a reason all schools (private and public) do not publish good salary or job sector data. They just give the number of people having any job. You might have gone to school for engineering, and be serving fries - thats a win to the school

But you also can't trust public colleges, and for the same reason.

Public colleges in general cost SIGNIFICANTLY more than these tech schools, and the job prospects for 4 year grads are dismal. Go to grad school (especially in something like English, Art, and the Humanities), and your only job prospects are probably working for the same school that gave you the degree.

Even formally "instant upper class" things like law school are not a good payout anymore.