[candybar]

It's even worse than that - $44,356 is the median salary for high school graduates aged 25 or over with a full-time job (it's extrapolated from the median weekly wage of $853) in 2022:

https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2023/data-on-display/educa...

It's unclear exactly what qualifications apply to "a third of students earn less than $40,000" - I was not able locate an actual source for this claim - but the way it's written, it appears to include everyone, possibly even those that are not in the workforce at all. Also, given a huge increase in nominal income over the past couple years, it's difficult to evaluate this claim without a clear sense of what time frame this covers.

It's also unreasonable to compare college graduates 4 years after graduation to a cohort that includes mid-career professionals decades into their career. Consider for instance, how much doctors tend to make 4 years after graduating from college and how unrepresentative that would be of their full career earning potential.

[dahart]

It’s pretty bad, right? Is it possible for this to be an accident on the part of the author? I don’t see how. It seems like a clear case of bending over backwards to distort the data to tell a summary story that is opposite from the truth. This intentionally misleading comparison undermines the entire article, to me. I’m curious about why they’re trying so hard to spin the yarn that college isn’t worth it, when the data they had to look through in order to write this story demonstrates a somewhat different narrative.