[InclinedPlane]

There absolutely is an education bubble. That doesn't mean that education is worthless, far from it. Houses are never worthless even when there are huge housing bubbles. The problem is the runaway, unsustainable cost.

I got my degree from a local state school in the mid 90s. And then I went back and pursued another degree in a dual-major for another 3 years before finally deciding I wanted to do something else and leaving school. That was a luxury I had because school was so cheap, my parents paid for most of school and I was able to graduate without any debt. Today that same educational experience at the same school would cost nearly twice as much per year adjusted for inflation. Which is just not supportable without taking on most of it as debt for most people. And if you go to out of state tuition plus rent the costs are enormous, and also unsustainable for even people from reasonably affluent families.

Meanwhile, it's become oh so much easier to take on massive amounts of student loan debt, which has no doubt helped fuel some of this bubble.

No matter how valuable an education is, and I consider mine plenty valuable, when the cost doubles or more the benefit to cost ratio goes down substantially. And that's the core problem of the education bubble today. It used to be that moderately valuable degrees were still good, because they could be gotten cheaply enough, but now every degree is hugely expensive so the less valuable degrees now have a much lower RoI and are much less worthwhile investments.

[muzz]

If there is "absolutely" a bubble, please explain the motivation for individuals to participate in the "bubble"?

I.e. with the housing bubble and the stock market bubble, the motivation was to buy those assets solely in anticipation of being able to sell them at higher prices later on, thus being able to profit (and handsomely so).