It may be time for the public to accept that college isn't always the best route.

According to a Rutgers University study, vocational schools are seeing job placement rates close to 100 percent, whereas the rates for college students are about half of this.

It also costs an average of less than $5,000 to complete a vocational school program, says a Better Business Bureau survey, and starting salaries for graduates can run as high as $80,000.

“Five of our students were hired in just one day,” Bryant Redd, the lead instructor of Wilbur Wright-Humboldt Park vocational college tells CNN after a local job fair.

That's five out of 41 students — all of whom still had four months until graduation.

In the past, high school graduates went to college to get jobs that required a postgraduate degree, with the assumption that these jobs would bring bigger paychecks. But college graduates have earned an average starting salary of $27,000 since 2009, versus $42,000 for trade school graduates.

Ilana Garon, a teacher at a public high school in the Bronx, is no longer surprised when students tell her they have no plans to go to college.

“The current 'college for all' trend in education is neither economically viable nor beneficial to all students,” she writes in a Huffington Post editorial. “There isn't enough demand in the market for every bachelor's degree produced at a four-year college.”

Even college professors agree.

“All too often, college graduates incur crippling debt and don't improve their job prospects,” Richard Vedder, a professor of economics at Ohio University, tells Richard Vedder at Forbes. “It is still gospel among politicians that college education makes people better off...the job market, though, is telling us that this is wasted effort.”

The bottom line is, choosing to go to college is an investment and everyone should decide for themselves whether they want to take that investment depending on their own financial situation and career goals.

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