> there’s really no debate over whether getting the degree is causal
Is there no debate in the sense of "this is completely settled science that getting a degree causes a doubling of income on an aptitude-independent, statistically-sound, population-wide basis"? Or "it's not being debated because that debate is uncomfortable"? Or in some other sense of that phrase?
Your question is getting at the reasons for causality, and not necessarily whether there is a causality. The answer of course is complicated, in that school aptitude depends on family history of education and socio-economic status, and a wide variety of other factors. As far as I can tell, it is clear and widely agreed that just having a degree provides some degree of earnings benefits regardless of aptitude or history or social class (for reasons of selection and social signaling and other things). And there also seems to be widespread agreement that getting the degree yields skills that also translate into some degree of earnings benefits, statistically. Studies are trying to control for aptitude and measure how much education alone contributes -- and it’s not 100%. But nobody is arguing about whether having the degree puts one in the higher earnings camp.
And mine is that the existence of causation has been established. The debate amongst researchers is over the weights of various causes, not whether it’s just a correlation.
I’m only skimming quickly, this doesn’t fully back me up, but section III talks about some causal analysis, for example: “mediation tests causal relationships between variables. While the SCF is not longitudinal and thus a pure causal effect cannot be tested, we can be confident that reverse causality in the ordering of these variables is not possible.”
I have to be fair and note that there are also several comments about what is not causal as well as data that implies more causation than what their analysis reveals.
The references in this paper point to a couple of other papers that have “causal” in the title. Unfortunately I don’t have the time right now to read these again, but I recall seeing causal analysis during that previous discussion about the St. Louis Fed study, research that studied education outcomes and controlled for people with similar SES backgrounds, similar family history of education, etc., and found the apparent causal contributions of education.
BTW, there is absolutely a fuzzy gray line here. What I’m calling causation (social bias) may be what you’re calling correlation (education alone is not the entire causal reason for higher incomes - to your point that one cause is the people). Lest we get too stuck on terminology, I’m perfectly happy pointing out that the correlation is extremely high, and the statistical difference between with degree and without degree is surprisingly large.
Thanks. I will take a deeper look at the aspects of the Fed data which tend to indicate causality. There's zero question and I'm in complete agreement that the correlation between degree and income is extremely high.
For me, the key question here is where does "lots more people should attend four-year university" fall on the spectrum between "people should eat healthy food, exercise more, and refrain from smoking because the data shows that people who do that are healthier and live longer" (IMO causal for health) and "people should fly first-class because the data shows that people who do that are wealthier"? I suspect that college is at least 75% in the latter category. If it's 75% in the former, we should push for it. If it's 75% in the latter, maybe we shouldn't.
(I also could be unduly influenced by the SWE field wherein the same intelligent, qualified person who did or didn't attend college would still have very similar [excellent] career prospects with or without a framed piece of paper. In medicine and law, it's more causal.)
Yeah, totally, it’s a reasonable question and not necessarily clear, especially when there are political voices in this arena distributing some degree of misinformation.
Even though that older Fed article is warning that for some people the “wealth premium” of a college degree is waning, it does talk about the stability and causation of the “income premium” that people with degrees enjoy, and since some of the reasons identified for the income premium have to do with social signaling and employer selection bias (as in, many high paying jobs require a degree in the first place), I believe it lands much more closely to the causal eat healthy for a longer life correlation. The more recent Fed link I posted above agrees in the sense that they’ve concluded after many studies on this subject that taking loans in order to go to school is absolutely worth the cost, that the financial returns are very very likely to pay off. At least for now...
Is there no debate in the sense of "this is completely settled science that getting a degree causes a doubling of income on an aptitude-independent, statistically-sound, population-wide basis"? Or "it's not being debated because that debate is uncomfortable"? Or in some other sense of that phrase?