Why Does Income Increase In College

If you look at the period from the turn of the millennium to the present, it appears that households at all sorts of different income levels have stagnated, not just those in the middle or bottom of the income distribution. In other words, the vast majority of us appear to be in a holding pattern together, and this really underscores the point that the vast majority of economic gains in recent years have gone not only to the upper end of the distribution but to the upper end of the upper end. If most people don't go to college, we've seen historically that there are significant returns to going to college, so the numbers above seem reasonable if you count "College" as college cost ammortized over years of work and the numbers represent yearly income.
(Empirically, we do see increases in educational attainment over time, so it stands to reason that the median earning household is more educated now than in, say, 1989.) Instead, we see incomes stagnating and tuition skyrocketing. Even if we hypothesize that the people at the bottom of the income distribution are pretty consistent over time in not going to college and vice versa for the top of the income distribution, the evidence suggests that there is a decent amount of education flux in the middle of the distribution that is not being matched by increases in economic prosperity. In fact, it still appears to an individual that college is still worth the investment, but, rather than the investment earning a college premium, the investment appears to help people avoid a non-college