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Here is the full report, which covered roughly 1 million students for 10 years and goes into detail about how the benefits vary. It highlights the type of degree, major, quality of the institutions, demographics of the students, and whether students complete the programs.
It's by no means perfect, nothing like this ever will be, but it is another sign.
I don’t doubt that the data quality is great. It’s just that you can’t infer from simple averages what the returns are.
In order to estimate returns, you also need a measure of each student’s counterfactual earnings, which is very difficult.
Who is the reference group? The charts say "people who didn't enroll". The footnote says "data from public colleges". I can only assume that the reference group is "people who didn't enroll in a public college"?
That seems like a mish-mash of a lot of different kinds of people.
I thought they were just looking at earnings minus financial cost of college for those who attended, which has a great many shortcomings.
You really can’t draw those kinds of conclusions from this kind of data.
Returns to education might be the most heavily studied topic in economics because it’s so tricky.
What you’re seeing here is mostly just the differences in productivity between people who pursue each type of degree. That’s called “ability bias”.