I work with others who do not have a degree at all so in some respects, my degree is worthless. However, I cannot say my degree did not help me get my entry-level job and quick promotion. It may have moved my applications near the top of the stack. I did have some small student loan debts but I also worked full-time throughout my college years. Thankfully, I was able to afford the bulk of my education without a loan. If I judge my degree's value with a strict financial lens, I probably could have saved money with hard work and experience alone. I do not regret my degree, however, because my extra education helped me incalculably in multiple areas of my life.
Comparing myself to many of my high-school friends (some barely graduated from 12th grade and some could not even accomplish that) I was better suited for higher education. First off, I had a willingness to attend college whereas they were already a foot out of academia and happy to abandon the discipline of study complex thoughts. I also chose self-improvement. I saw myself at the beginning of a long road of discovery and accomplishments whereas their only interests were, dope and fast food jobs and romances.
Only one of them matured and abandoned the moocher-lifestyle. He obtained a G.E.D. and then an Associates. He eventually became a responsible career man, husband, father, and neighbor. He started much later but now we are about equal by all measurements I can imagine.
Higher education is definitely not the only means to knowledge and influence; books, documentaries, internships, trials and errors, experience etc. can get you as far as, if not further than, and undergrad. What matters most, regardless of institutional educations, are drive, long term goals and personal responsibilities.

I do have a child, and I am encouraging her to go to college. The courses themselves might not be the most important part, but the experience can be. I can tell you right now that I don't spend my days programming in Pascal and Snobol and Lisp, but for many years I worked in a field to which I was introduced by working on the school paper, and I'm still friends and professional colleagues with my classmates.

Yes, but as a necessity - not because I expect them to learn much of value. And I have done my due diligence to teach them real economics and critical thinking skills before they ever get there so they can ignore all the ideological nonsense from the left-leaning, ivory tower elitists.

I have a high school diploma and a few completed college courses. I have 4 years in the United States Navy with an honorable discharge. I have many years experience in diverse occupations like banking (4), mortgage loan servicing research (5), design and sales of shipping cases (8) with expert customer service underlying each occupation. Yet, I am barred from most related positions that would complement my experiences because I do not have a 4 year degree. I am and have been relegated to accepting wages no more than twice to 2.5 times the minimum, state-mandated wages plus benefits. I am not a liar and I will not apply for any job that states a degree is required. I would say, YES, a degree is MANDATORY if you wish to be able to achieve a position and salary that is above the average.

I would definitely tell them not to go. I graduated 30 years ago with a business degree and feel that I would have been better off putting that money in an investment account. I have a family retail business and practical experience has been more important in my opinion. I also believe in the old adage "those who can do---those who can't teach". I was amazed at the poor quality of my professors then and I am quite certain it has only gotten worse.

I would say depends on what they wanted to be. Honestly, I don't like the debt I have from my degrees, but I think they've helped in a small way, at least getting my foot more in the door than I would have without. I originally wanted to be a doctor or nurse. I think I've gotten more job interviews because of my degrees, plus experience. And I've been told prior to finishing my bachelors that I wasn't being considered because I didn't have the degree.

Oddly, I decided I'd get a Bachelors in something else, since I got beat out of a spot in Nursing school by someone with a degree already!" (don't ask... that's just what I was told. Basically it was a point system, and that gave them more points than me). So I have a degree in computers instead of Nursing! haha. I do miss nursing and medical stuff. But I do like playing with my routers and switches and servers! :D But I have a friend who is a very successful programmer, with no degree. So, honestly, depends on what they want to be.

I will say my education isn't worth the amount of debt I have with my degrees (I Have a bachelors and masters). Masters I only did out of boredom and unemployment. Hoping that saying I was at least in school would look better than saying I'm sitting on my ass looking for work. And I also think having my degrees made me more appealing when applying for my visa into the UK. Basically saying, I won't be a drain on their society! Only my husband! hahaha.

As a university professor, perhaps I am a bit biased. My older daughter is an acorn who did not fall far from the tree. In her field, university is in her self-interest and the best way to achieve her objectives. My younger daughter, on the other hand, is struggling a bit in a year that is both high school and community college. I wonder whether college is correct for her. As of yet, she hasn't narrowed her focus sufficiently to choose a major. Consequently, I do not think she is ready for university yet, if ever. She is doing quite well as a restaurant hostess and likely will soon manage and later own a restaurant, I think, but she doesn't yet realize it.

First I would make sure they were home schooled including how to see through propaganda dust storm. I wouldn't send any unprepared young person to college to be brainwashed without the ability to recognize and reject the rubbish. I didn't have that, and I would have had a great benefit in college if I had. I think the conditioning young people receive has much to do with how poorly they acknowledge/recognize the costs and benefits of liberty and free markets today.
I agree with your comments on the economic value of college today being very different from the past. My cost for a 4 year degree from Ga Tech (with a local taxpayer discount) was about $1,800 for tuition and about $900 for books (all in ~1975 USD.) According to government inflation (which I think is understated) those costs should be about 4.6 times higher in 2016, or a 4 year degree from Ga Tech would cost about $12,500 including books. Per Ga Tech a 4 year degree without cost of books at 2015 rates is about $45,600. Obviously cost of higher education has inflated much more than government figures.

I didn't work in my specific field of study except for during my college years and the 5 years after graduation although my knowledge from the study in college was invaluable. That said, I had learned in high school virtually everything that I had to "study" in the first 2 years of college. I learned more in my day job which was in my field of study. Today college is a near total waste of time and an extravagant waste of financial resources for at least 90% of those who attend, imo.
I think this Gulch could offer much better education.
(With apologies to Gulchers who teach college and are the exception.)

I think it depends a lot on what your child wants to do when they "grow up" as it were.

Practically speaking, obviously, if they think they even might want to do something like practice law, then yes, I would encourage them, because seven years of school is a long time, and you don't want to be trying to do that in your 40s (take it from me).

Now, that said, as you point out, a LOT of careers require next to no formal higher education in order to get it done. I've had something of a decent career in UNIX system administration / infrastructure design for 20 years now, and other than being kicked out of college at the start of it ("0.0 ... Fat drunk and stupid is no way to go through life son" was in fact ME), I had no college background.

Along the way, though, as I developed an interest in politics (and more specifically political thought) I decided that I wanted a more formal education specifically in that area, to get a better more thorough "primer" as it were, and so I majored in Political Science at a mid-price liberal-arts college (the one who had kicked me out 20 years earlier, mostly because a part of me wanted to prove to myself that I was better than that earlier version of me). And while I've definitely noticed that the majority of my PoliSci profs have a "left-leaning bent", I will also say that classes tended to be a better blend than one might expect (maybe 60/35/5 left/right/other mix), and my professors at any rate were much better than I expected at welcoming all viewpoints (even when I did a final paper confirming that the Sons of Liberty were terrorists, or that democracy is inherently anti-freedom).

Lastly, one consideration to think about is what a future employer might want. I know a number of folks in my field who don't need degrees, but where the employers they want to work at that are solving the problems they want to solve are requiring them (Google is the textbook case-study in this). Sometimes having the piece of paper is enough to check a box somewhere to get someone an opportunity they might not otherwise have.

I definitely did encourage her, and she definitely did not, though, she did, indeed, give it "the old college try." It just was not for her.

I did go off and on for 35 years. I enjoy learning. I got to teach. I went back and learned more. I believe that you get out of it what you want, based pretty much on what you put into it.

Yes, I had the same Marxist and Post-Modernist professors that everyone complains about. I learned a lot from most of them, for what they had that I could benefit from. On the other hand, another one of them and I took each other to the Judiciary Office on a classroom complaint. That was part of the experience, also, and I still got an A-minus in her class.

As for the "brainwashing" after one class, walking down the stairwell, I heard two girls above me. The one said to the other in a nattering tone, "American sucks, America sucks, week after week it's the same stuff, America sucks." In other words, she was not buying what the instructor was selling.

The same sort of thing happened a year or so later in a graduate class in international economics. The professor was a committed Marxist. He knew another student and me to be "Republicans" (close enough), but he gave us our due. When the Bush-Obama Bailouts pumped $3 trillion into the money supply, he put up a graph of that and asked what will happen to prices. No one answered. He nodded first to Jim and then to me. "You know. Tell them." We did. But on the flip side, he delivered a great lecture on extractive industries, the multinationals that go in, dig out a landscape and leave it worse than they found it. The Gabon is a perfect example: the only paved road is the five miles from the palace to the airport. The ruling family is paid in cash by the oil companies. Literally: suitcases of it. For the paper on the chapter, about half the class wrote about the great things that multinationals do for little countries, like build roads. So, all that Marxist brainwashing was sort of down the drain...

I have had classes in astronomy and geology that were not practical for me, but which did give me a better understanding of the physical universe around and under me. Could I have learned that on my own? Perhaps. I just read In Suspect Terrain by John McPhee. But the thing with an instructor is that they know how to organize and present material. They correct your mistakes, and give you challenges.

Is it always that way? No. On my blog, I have many articles about numismatics. Numismatics provides the evidence in support or contradiction to economic theories. Murray Rothbard was a faker. Even von Mises and Hayek were ignorant of the "stuff" of commerce, and so they left their students, readers, and followers equally ignorant. No college teaches numismatics. It is also the largest unregulated money market in the world.

It is one reason why my daughter never finished more than a year of college. When she was 12, she started working coin shows as a page, and later worked in a coin store. It was obvious that everyone knew a lot. "Knowledge is king" is a by-word, along with "Buy the book before you buy the coin." But none of it was taught to any of them in college... though they all had educations and degrees of various kinds and sorts from business or engineering or whatever.