What it "found" was that "Earning a four-year college degree remains a worthwhile investment for the average student.... The average college graduate paying annual tuition of about $20,000 can recoup the costs of schooling by age 40. After that, the difference between earnings continues such that the average college graduate earns over $800,000 more than the average high school graduate by retirement age... We show that the value of a college degree remains high, and the average college graduate can recover the costs of attending in less than 20 years. Once the investment is paid for, it continues to pay dividends through the rest of the workers life, leaving college graduates with substantially higher lifetime earnings than their peers with a high school degree."

What was left unsaid, of course, is that the SF Fed merely was tasked with goalseeking a study that seeks to perpetuate America's most exponential chart. The one showing federal student loans, which as we showed recently just hit an aggregate total of over $1.1 trillion, increasing 12%, or $125 billion, from this time last year.