it's not just the principal, it is the interest: loans get up to 6.8 and 8.0 percent. still subsidized rates, but much higher than less valuable investments like houses.
Rates are also fixed with no possibility to refinance. you have to make other decisions, like buying a house and borrowing extra to pay off your student loan. this could have other repercussions and is not very "free market."
but in the end, the degree itself is supposed to be worth about a million in lifetime earnings. for professional degrees it is multiple millions. maybe it is all worth it anyway and the price of education is still too low.
As long as the lifetime earnings are substantially higher, you should be willing to put up the NPV of your annuity (income). As long as you make even one dollar more than you would, you are better off.
If you compare the entire education investment to the return during year one in the workforce, it isn't going to look good.
If you compare the entire education investment to the impact it has on that person's lifetime, e.g. lower unemployment, easier time getting into grad school if the economy goes sour, easier time retraining, and just general high earnings, then the investment makes a bit more sense. I assume if this were a business, Thiel would wonder why education is underpriced.
I tried this when I was just starting out with programming and there were a lot of logical jumps in the exercises. Especially early on, I would check the solutions after a tough one and find syntax that I was not familiar with (and wasn't previously introduced). I ended up having to combine it with other resources and then just hobble through.
There are a bunch of papers on what counts. My take away was that many courses of study say they have a way of reasoning, but at the end of 4 years (or an additional 3), most students perform no better on abstract tests of whatever metric was selected for that major (e.g. law, analogic reasoning
All lawyers take the bar exam. No law firm or government organization asks for a lawyer's score on the bar. They only thing that matters is your GPA, given to you by your own university. Law GPAs are heavily curved; most students can only receive A's or B's. Everyone knows that law schools regularly adjust their curves to give their students higher GPAs and therefore an advantage in the hiring market. Still, nothing changes in legal education. If anything, legal education changes less than other forms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...