HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: These U.S. Colleges and Majors Are the Biggest Waste of Money: You can major in art at a lower-tier public university if you want to. Just don’t expect it to make you rich.

This morning we published a review of recent research by PayScale on the most valuable colleges and majors in America, based on self-reported earnings by individuals who graduated from hundreds of schools.

Some of you asked: What about the least valuable colleges and majors in America? What a mischievous question! So we looked into that, too.

Here are the eleven schools in PayScale’s data with a 20-year net return worse than negative-$30,000. In other words: these are the schools where PayScale determined that not going to college is at least $30,000 more valuable than taking the time to pay for and graduate from one of these schools. . . . It gets worse. The self-reported earnings of art majors from Murray State are so low that after two decades, a typical high school grad will have out-earned them by nearly $200,000.

People push “college” as a source of higher earnings like it’s a generic product. But there’s college, and there’s college.