Higher Education is outdated for the millennial generation

I would actually agree that higher education is outdated for the millennial generation, but I believe it is still necessary. The first point I shall make is that, while I agree that there is probably not much to gain from a college education since we have access to all of the information at our fingertips through the internet(though, I would argue that in many ways the internet has made us dumber; however if you're smart, you know how to find high quality articles on matters, such as using google scholar instead of plain google) the formality of going through a college education does have a lot of bonuses to it.1) What one will earn with a college degree is almost double the amount of money that a high school graduate will earn. While what my opponent said that a college degree earns you less than it did in the past, it still is a fact that a college degree earns you more than a high school degree does today. "According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the annual salary average differences between educational levels is staggering: High school drop outs: $18,734 High school graduates: $27,915 College grads (with a bachelor’s degree): $51,206 Advanced degree holders: $74,602" [1] Now, while a high school graduate will be able to earn more money upfront, whereas a college student will be spending a lot of time on college, probably after a few years of a college graduate being in the workforce will ballance out to the money that the high school grad earned. If you take these numbers(which are not what the person makes first out of college or first out of high school, so these numbers would be lower for that, but I'll use them anyways).Suppose you have person A who is going to college before doing any kind of work, and Person B who started working full time right out of high school. Person A is not earning anything while Person B is earning money. Person B, in 4 years(the amount of time the average college degree takes to earn) would earn $111,660. At this point, the college grad would then be able to start working in the work force, and they would be getting $51,206 a year. After another 6 years the college grad will have earned 307,236, while the high school graduate, in 10 years(4 years of working while person A was in school, and 6 years while both were working) of working will have earned 279,150. So, in the long-run, a college education will earn you much more. And that's not taking into account that as a college student, you can easily have a part-time job while going to school full-time. I did this myself and still retained excellent grades.I suppose Person A, however, may have a lot of college debt, which my opponent mentioned that higher education is very expensive. However, this is not true for every college graduate. Some had such good grades that they earned scholarships, others came from a family that was well off enough to afford to put them into college, and others went to a community college(which are much more affordable than 4 year universities) and then transfered to a 4 year university and saved a lot of money going that route. In addition, this is not exactly a problem that needs to be solved by getting rid of college education or necessarily reforming it, but it could be solved by making colleges tuition free and paid for by taxes.However, now that I looked into the average debt a college student has when coming out of college, it's $30,100[6]. This amount can be paid for by less than two years of work, since the average college student makes $24,000 more per year than a high school student. Sure, for the first year and half, they would in reality be making the same as a high school graduate since they have to pay off their debt, but after that they will catch up to the high school graduate in less than 10 years and surpass them in the amount of money they gained over the years.Here's another example where a college education would greatly benefit a person. Depending on what field a person goes into, they will earn a lot more than others too. So, people could easily choose the higher-paying careers. For example, I'm currently going to school to become a psychiatrist. This takes an addiitonal 4 years after a bachelor's degree to complete, usually. The average annual salary a psychiatrist has is $193,680.[2] A psychiatrist earns more than double the amount the average wage for advanced degrees, and doctors and other specialists are in the same boat. If more people were to consider going into the medical field, they would earn a lot more and it would definitely be worth it. There are also other fields which pay well as well. 2) College education easily indicates to employers of higher-skilled jobs that you are qualified. Now, if you take a high school graduate who learned everything online, there is no way that employers validate that you have knowledge enough for the field they employ in. Unless employers started giving some sort of examination on their field of work instead of requiring a bachelor's degree, a high school graduate who learned all of the necessary things for that career via online with no degree is at a disadvantage for getting that job, and probably will earn around the average a high school graduate makes. So, in order to make what my opponent proposes come true, where people could just self-educate themselves via the internet instead of a formal education, we would have to force employers to stop looking for college degrees from people and have them hand out some sort of examination to test if the person is qualified for the job. There's no guarantee employers would do this either, unless we forced them to. 3) College education helps you go into a career you really wantAs mentioned in the previous point, to get a specific career, it's often the case you need a college degree. Even if it's not earning enough to ballance out the fact that maybe you have some debt and that you weren't earning more money while you were going to college, it still means you got to go into a career you enjoy which you may not have been able to if you didn't have a college degree. RE: University education today fosters a grade-oriented, disengaged, depressed culture that fails to prepare students for real life. As for my opponent's argument that university causes depression and anxiety disorders, I would like to point out that the study they linked to says " The estimated prevalence of any depressive or anxiety disorder was 15.6% for undergraduates and 13.0% for graduate students" [3] while my opponent was slightly off for the numbers, that's not what my point is going to be about. Let's compare that to the anxiety and depression rates of the general population. In the general population 18.1% of adults have an anxiety disorder[4] while 6.7% of all adults have depression[5] for a combined total of 24.8% of the general population with either. In other words, anxiety and depression is lower among college students than the general population. This is a good thing that the rate of depression and anxiety is lower amongst college students than the general population. It indicates that college is not as big of a stressor on people than events later on in life. Sources:[1] http://howtoedu.org...; [2] https://www.bls.gov...;[3] https://www.researchgate.net...;[4] https://www.nimh.nih.gov...;[5] https://www.nimh.nih.gov...;[6] http://ticas.org...;