The economists show that U.S. workers with a bachelor's degree earn at least about $32,000 more per year than people with only a high school degree, even without adjusting for the fact that college-educated workers are more likely to have full-time, year-round work than people with no college education. That amounts to about $1.2 million in extra earnings over a 40-year career.

The full average cost of getting a degree includes about $30,000 in tuition payments, after netting out financial aid, and about $150,000 in lost earnings.

Income v. assets: The paper suffers from several of the weaknesses that plague a lot of papers like these.

One is the menace of averages.

Some college graduates die poor. There are no guarantees that going to college, or even doing well in college, will lead to students earning a high income. One study, for example, found that the COVID-19 pandemic held down starting pay for members of the college Class of 2021.

Getting buried by student loan debt is awful. Plenty of students who drop out of high school are brilliant, hard-working people who go on to earn a high income, live a great life and die rich, old and happy.

A second problem with the economists' analysis of the value of a college degree is the difficulty distinguishing between the impact of education and the reality that the people who get more education tend to be different from the people who get less education. To get around the difficulty, you have to find about 1,000 identical twins, force half to get bachelor's degrees and forbid half to go to college.

For some reason, economists have a hard time finding thousands of identical twins who will let researchers control their lives.

A third problem is that we have a much easier time thinking about income than about asset values. The United States obsesses about "gross domestic product" — a term for "national income" — and buries the data we need to calculate the asset value of the United States deep inside the Federal Reserve Board and the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis websites.

Baird Wealth analysts found the data in 2021 and came up with an estimate of total U.S. asset value of $542 trillion, or $1.6 million per person.

That means our $82,000 gross domestic product per person, or national income per person, amounts to a 5% annual yield on our share of U.S. assets.

Say half of the financial impact of a college degree is the result of the degree itself, not just the fact a typical student who earns a college degree starts off with better health and more family money than the average person who earns only a high school diploma.

If a bachelor's degree itself adds an average of $600,000 in income over the course of an individual's career, that means it's the equivalent of an asset worth about $12 million, because, if you get an average investment yield of 5%, you need $12 million in an investment fund to generate $600,000 in income payments.

Life, health and money: Then there's a more subtle hole in the college value analysis paper: a lack of discussion about health and life expectancy.

Average people who get bachelor's degrees are much healthier throughout the course of their lives than average people with only a high school diploma, and average people with college degrees live longer than people with only a high school diploma.

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U.S. residents who will earn a bachelor's degree have a life expectancy of about 84 years at birth, compared with an average life expectancy of about 77 years for U.S. residents who will not earn a bachelor's degree, according to a paper that appeared in The Lancet in February.

Analysts at Stanford have estimated that a year of life might be worth about $129,000.

Those figures suggest that a college graduate's extra years of life are worth about $800,000.

The wellness connection: An obvious implication of this analysis is that this kind of math is even more directly relevant to calculating the value of employer-sponsored health benefits, and especially of the wellness benefits and routine care benefits, than to estimating the value of a college degree.

For an employee who has a checkup benefit, gets the checkup, goes on statins that prevent a heart attack at age 35, and gains 40 extra years of life, the wellness benefit may easily provide $6 million in value, based on the Stanford estimate of the value of a year of life.

If the wellness benefits and related benefits simply add one month to the average employee's life, that's about $10,000 in extra value per employee.

If only the workers understood the value and were as quick to rush to use their benefits to get their checkups as they are to buy lottery tickets....