Yep. We're finally seeing some prices go the other way after their meteoric government bubble inspired rise that far outstripped income and reality, not to mention the "industry's" own abysmal ROI.

But the water behind the dam is still rising rapidly. While the mass quantity of debt can't be shaken like other debt, its being capped and artificially limited by numerous goverment (artificial) methods that will only exacerbate its inevitable failure when the college bubble explodes.

And so dellusional are the politicos they keep throwing money at the problem with grants and subsidies in a failing attempt to shift some of the ballooning debt to the federal balance sheet while in reality both will crash and crash hard.

But try to get anything done. Try to hire a mechanic, plumber, electrician, landscaper, anything. Odds are, especially if you want a good one, you will wait a long time and pay someone making far, far, far more than many hundreds of thousands of recent college graduates. Yet we keep meniacly feeding the 529 slot machine hoping for a payoff for our kids. "A million dollars more over a career" is the mantra, but that's not only debatable its merely an average that includes valid fields like engineering, medical and the small portion of lawyers that go on to make big incomes. Yet the overschooled, undereducated masses keep trying to ride that magic carpet with their 6 figure degrees in art history appreciaton with minors in political sophistry. Who knows though, maybe by the time some of these kids graduate Occupy Wall Street will be hiring again.

Nevermind that if you invested that same amount of money into a savings/retirement plan for your kid instead, they'd be guaranteed to retire a millionaire. But that doesn't justify all those years force feeding Baby Einstein videos to the entitled millenials now does it?

Its too far gone now anyway, and you can't even point out the obvious to most people. They, especially airline pilots, faithfully blow their savings and their own future retirements on what could literally be the single worst "investment" sector in society and they do it without question and without limits.

That said, while college has very little to nothing to do with being an airline pilot, I'm in favor of keeping the requirement to drive up the barrier of admission and restrict the supply. Its not up to me though, and so I predict we will slowly start to see the degree requirement turn into a preference at more and more places. Eventually we will see the rise of alternative higher education at pennies on the dollar that, combined with life experience/career credits will provide a pathway to pay as you go, work as you go, debt free, low cost degrees, kind of like it used to be. Those that get in the early phases of the hiring boom at regionals, etc at young ages and work on/worry about degrees later while building flight time and upgrading rapidly will smoke the careers of the "traditional" college first crowd, and they will make way more money sooner, have way less debt and way, way more seniority.