Carrying debt obviously diminishes your net worth through simple subtraction, but it can also prevent you from taking important wealth-generating steps as a young adult, like buying a house or starting a small business.

Douglas Webber, who was a professor at Temple University until he joined the Federal Reserve Board last year as a senior economist, has spent the last decade looking for new ways to calculate the value of a college degree.

What has changed, he has written, is that the premium now varies much more than it used to among individuals and groups: The “downside risk” to enrolling in college, he argues, has become “nontrivial.” When you look at Webber’s data, higher education no longer resembles a safe, reliable blue-chip investment, like buying a Treasury bill.

In July, the economists Raj Chetty, John Friedman and David Deming helped illuminate exactly how that system works when they published the most recent in their series of research papers analyzing the intersections of social class and higher education.

More recently, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who served as the chief economist of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, wrote, with Tom Lee, a series of papers predicting an even greater shortage: 8.5 million missing American B.A.

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