For decades, politicians and higher-education leaders have pushed college as a great investment for students as well as a means of turbo-charging the economy. Obama said that it had to be a national goal for the U.S. to lead the world in the percentage of people with college degrees.

Huge numbers of students swallowed that, plunging into debt (and often draining off family wealth, too) to graduate (or not) with credentials of dubious market value. That’s the point of a recent study by Preston Cooper, who finds that while college appears to be a good choice for some, it’s a waste for many others. In today’s Martin Center article, Jay Schalin looks at Cooper’s work.

Schalin writes, “Initially using a simple measure of ROI that contrasts the expected lifetime earnings of high school graduates with those of college graduates, Cooper found a median ROI for all college ‘students who graduate on time’ of $306,000. But Cooper added an extra step to account for the fact that many students drop out of degree programs without gaining any skills or credentials that increase ROI. And, ‘after accounting for the risk of dropping out,’ the median average ROI drops to ‘only $129,000.’ Given that the lifetime earnings for students are based on 42 years of working, the increased income for roughly half of all degree programs is a paltry $3,000 a year—or less.”