[jdhopeunique]

"College grads do better then those who did not went to college..."

This is simply selection bias or survivorship bias:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias

"They do worst then grads of previous generation though"

Again, selection bias. Currently everyone except a limited few are encouraged to go to college therefore the effect of selection bias has weakened over time and current grads don't do as well as grads of generations past.

[AnimalMuppet]

Hmm. So if only 10% of people go to college, you'd expect that the best 10% go, and you'd expect the best 10% to do better than the other 90%. But if 70% of people go to college, well, we don't have 70% "winner" positions available in society, so a bunch of those who go to college have to accept not-so-good outcomes. That makes some sense.

[VLM]

Yes its a variation on the interview suit injustice problem

If you require job applicants to buy a $1K suit to wear to interviews, that's merely a weird tax if there's one applicant per job and therefore everyone ends up with a $100K job for their $1K investment and everyone who buys a suit is ridiculously happy and thinks everyone should be forced to buy a suit to be as happy as they are.

Of course if you have ten dudes buying ten $1K suits to interview for one job, thats net $9K of injustice, and the vast majority of people who buy an interview suit see it as a wasteful horrible racket designed to extract money from the very people who have the least opportunity in life to begin with, etc.

The army recruitment analogy is similar. The army needs 200K recruits, as long as more than 200K show up, its not a problem (for the army, anyway) if 350K show up one year or 375K the next year, only 200K are gonna make it anyway, so trying to make a relevant story about 350K vs 375K is going to be deaf ears.

[watwut]

I am not saying that college is magical place where everyone has guaranteed success.

The parent argues that college grads made "poor investment" because "only 27% of college grads in America work in a job closely related to their degree, and 'The chances of finding a job related to your degree or major go up a few points if you move to a big city'."

That is ridiculous argument. That group of people is doing better then anyone else, whether they work in field they studied or not. There are many jobs that require you to have some college degree or related college degree and people without degrees wont get them.

If parent wants to prove that some people would be even better off without going to school, he should give us more (e.g. prove that these would be even better off if they did not went) or pick different group of people.

Otherwise it is just the usual misleading talking point based on wishful thinking and bias.