Is Higher Education the Next Bubble?

"Education is a bubble in a classic sense. To call something a bubble, it must be overpriced and there must be an intense belief in it...Probably the only candidate left for a bubble...is education. It’s basically extremely overpriced. People are not getting their money’s worth, objectively, when you do the math. And at the same time it is something that is incredibly intensively believed; there’s this sort of psycho-social component to people taking on these enormous debts when they go to college simply because that’s what everybody’s doing."

"There are a few things that make it worse. One is that when people make a mistake in taking on an education loan, they’re legally much more difficult to get out of than housing loans. With housing, typically they’re non-recourse — you can just walk out of the house. With education, they’re recourse, and they typically survive bankruptcy. If you borrowed money and went to a college where the education didn’t create any value, that is potentially a really big mistake."

 "You know, we’ve looked at the math on this, and I estimate that 70 to 80 percent of the colleges in the U.S. are not generating a positive return on investment. Even at the top universities, it may be positive in some sense — but the counterfactual question is, how well would their students have done had they not gone to college? Are they really just selecting for talented people who would have done well anyway?"

- Peter Thiel via here
In addition to the primeval human desires of food and sex, clothing joined the list as we processed as a civilization. Now education has joined the list except unlike clothing, everything on the market for education are "designer" outfits revealing what it's supposed to hide.