Jerry Bowyer has a fairly pronounced point of view regarding a bubble phase in higher education and thinks that, from a financial perspective, college education may not be "worth it." It's best to read some of what folks like this are writing about, if only because of who else is reading them. It's the first time we have seen what we consider to be a value of an education (that it can't be taken away) described as a negative (that also means you can't sell it to someone else, used):

And things are only going to get worse. To call the policy drift of the Obama administration pro-college is an understatement. College is becoming the new high school, and the recent nationalization of secondary education financing affords a policy lever through which capital can be shoe-horned toward the only industry in which our president worked for an appreciable span of his life.

Progressivity of income tax rates only shrinks the College E differential. And, most troubling of all, so far the data on the current recovery indicate that a college degree is dropping in employment value relative to the alternative. Perhaps the alleged intangible benefits of a degree--status, socialization and sophistication--can outweigh the increasingly heavy costs, but taken as an economic proposition, a college degree is looking more and more like Nasdaq circa 1999, or Nevada housing circa 2007. Caveat emptor.

[P]rovide a layperson’s guide to the most commonly reported graduation rates and the databases used to calculate these rates. More specifically, this report provides policy makers and policy researchers with a history of the databases that are most often used to calculate graduation rates as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each database (this information also can be found in a summary table in the appendices). Additionally this report suggests several factors for policy makers to consider before using graduation rate data from existing databases as a way to assess institutional success….

Overall, this report highlights the complexities of measuring what many policy makers view as a simple compliance metric with the existing national databases. Just because the existing databases used to calculate graduation rates were not designed with the current policy demands in mind does not render them useless. The databases referenced in this report provide valuable information on graduation rates; however, as the disadvantages of these databases reveal, users of these data should take care in using them to measure the overall effectiveness of postsecondary education institutions.