The importance of education?

From the Federal Reserve as cited in the NYT's economix blog:

Decreases in incomes were much larger for the higher education groups, and mean income actually rose for the no-high-school-diploma group

The data that this is looking at is family income from 2007-2010. The writer notes that this is "a finding that seems at odds with the vast majority of recent research on the economic importance of education", but in the next few sentences suggests "I’m afraid this isn’t the kind of post where I now proceed to explicate the puzzle. Maybe we’ll have one of those later today, after the lights come on."

I wonder if some of this may be the start of the bursting of the higher education bubble, with the number of degrees in technical areas holding stable or decreasing in science/technology over the last 25 years and a doubling of the number of arts/humanities/social-sciences degrees.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education back in April 2012:

According to government projections released last month, only three of the 30 occupations with the largest projected number of job openings by 2020 will require a bachelor's degree or higher to fill the position — teachers, college professors and accountants. Most job openings are in professions such as retail sales, fast food and truck driving, jobs which aren't easily replaced by computers.

College graduates who majored in zoology, anthropology, philosophy, art history and humanities were among the least likely to find jobs appropriate to their education level; those with nursing, teaching, accounting or computer science degrees were among the most likely.

The Chronicle of Higher Education mentions that a lot of these jobs aren't easily replaceable with computers but automation seems likely to increase in areas like fast food and self-checkouts are becoming a lot more common in stores. Add in Google's research into autonomous vehicles and perhaps in that 30 year time frame automation might be more of a challenge to things like trucking.