Is College Worth The Cost for Stay at Home Moms?

I just read a very interesting article on Yahoo! Finance called Is College Worth The Cost? For those of you who find this topic appealing, it's a great article with lots of links to other tools and studies--and it considers a broad variety of affected factors, like Social Security benefits and Medicare.

Early in the article, the author qoutes The College Board's website, which asserts that "the median high school graduate age 25 and older earns $26,300, the median college graduate age 25 and older earns $42,200. That's an annual income premium of $15,500, or 59%." That sounds really good, but then the author spends the rest of the article taking into account additional factors; he concludes that the actual income premium for a college grad is more like 10%.

But even according to the College Board, "it takes 14 long years before the four-year college grad's income, net of loan payments, starts to beat what the high school grad earns. During all those 14 years, college doesn't pay. High school pays." My immediate reaction was 'What about all those stay-at-home-moms who spend less than 14 years in the workforce!? Does that mean it's a financial waste for them to go to college?!'

Now don't get me wrong. I think women should all go to college when and if they can comfortably afford to (i.e. if you have to finance it 100% then avoid expensive private schools, work part time, or hold off on college until you can pay for some of the cost outright). And I think that young women of college age should not be planning their lives around having kids anyway--they should assume they'll have careers even if (unfortunately for everyone) they never will. And obviously there are many social and educational benefits to college that are (arguably) priceless.

But this is an intriguing--and completely un-politically correct--prospect. Financially speaking, it is obviously not worth it for many young women to take out massive student loans to get a college education. Even if she has the money to pay tuition (or if her parents do), a woman who ends up not working for the majority of her life is much better off saving that tuition money than investing it in an education on which she won't receive any dividends! Even a female who works for a number of years (14 according to the College Board!) before dropping out of the workforce is unlikely to receive any lifetime return on the investment on a college education--unless perhaps she becomes an investment banker or computer engineer.

So what's the young woman to do? Lets face it; there are much cheaper ways to get great life experiences and build social networks (volunteer work, travel, Peace Corps, live abroad, WORK EXPERIENCE...). Besides, if you're an entrepreneur--or a liberal arts major--college may not be the main factor affecting your earning power anyway. Obviously I'm not advocating that any woman reject a college education who might otherwise get one...but that doesn't mean it's not something to consider.

What do you all think?