This kind of BS analyses are exactly the root of the current problems with the higher education system (insane tuition, CS majors who can't do fizbuzz etc.) - because they are self-fulfilling prophecies.
For comparison, let's imagine that some evil marketing genius decides to examine the corresponding statistical impacts of wearing a business suit. "Our data indicate that people who wear a business suit to work earn a career average of $1M extra over people who don't. Considering many quality suits cost under $2000, this results into a higher than 100:1 return on investment." Before long, tailor shops are doing a booming business, wearing a $400 suit becomes a faux pas, and candidates get dismissed early from interviews because they showed up with an Armani at a Dolce&Gabbana shop. People no longer care whether a suit is useful or even comfortable in their line of work, and prices shoot through the roof for apparel that offers little beyond a famous label.
I don't know who started the trend of promoting flawed statistical studies [1] in this regard, but if they worked for higher education they must have been a very evil marketing genius indeed.
[1] Why are people who couldn't go to college lumped to bring down those who wouldn't? Is "college" a monolithical category where e.g. differences between majors matter much less than four years's experience in specific industries?
You did not read the article all the way through, nor did the people who voted you up.
If you had, you would have encountered references to a variety of studies that attempt to control for going to college as opposed to other predictive factors using things like twin studies. They have found that the impact of college is less than simple analyses show, but the largest contribution to the difference between college graduates and non-graduates is college itself.
A lot of the people here are IMO rightfully criticizing that not more thought has been given to the possibility that being able to get into college and pay for college is simply a good indicator for a lifetime premium in earnings.
The only point I found in this article is the FSU study in which they try to control against factors by comparing students who barely made the cut. They came out with a 11% rate of return. (I looked up the study but couldn't find whether it refers to 11% return on the monthly salary or lifetime earnings)
It's left for us to decide whether this is a significant enough, especially given the option value of college and lack of alternatives to college.
P.S.: 75k (the cost of attending FSU) invested in a currently 3.7 treasury bond yields 118k after 30 years.
Oh I've read the article, and many like it. I'm not sure you've read my comment carefully though, because you seem to be missing the main point. Such studies are largely invalidated by their very influence on the phenomenon they purport to describe. Do you think the applicants' belief they would earn 45% (or 70%, or 90%) more has no bearing on the labor and loan markets?
And how would you fix the "flawed statistical studies" and "BS analyses"? Being critical is easy. Making cogent suggestions for improvements is hard.
E.g. What data do you want? Where can you get it? What tests / analyses do you want them to run? This is a hard bloody problem, so I find "Monday quarterbacking" particularly frustrating -- especially when the priceomics folks are doing a good job of showing / communicating data with documented assumptions.
Adjust for socio-economic background. Separate by majors to avoid Simpson's paradox. And get a group of subjects who haven't been influenced by knowledge about this kind of studies.
There are many students who have a choice between a state school and a private school, or an Ivy League school and a top school near their home, or an engineering degree and an arts degree.
I think a detailed study of career outcomes and cost of schooling is incredibly valuable. Your suit analogy is flawed. Students invest in a program and later earn money in their chosen career. In your suit example, the ignoramus already has a job and then chooses to buy an unnecessary suit.
There are many subtleties to an analysis like this. You mention choice of work experience. I would add that the calculation of lifetime earnings is also suspect since far fewer people went to college 30 years ago than today. But please don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. We should look at studies like this.
Well i think you misunderstood the analogy. let me try to explain a bit.
What he means to say is that a Suit is one thing most high earning people HAVE. But they are not necessarily earning high BECAUSE of the suit. "The suit doesn't make the man". But if hypothetically people were ingrained with the idea that it's the SUIT that sets your value! Then of course things would get out of hand like he said.
Now let's look at college. Most really talented and smart people go to college. And then later they excel in their careers. So what is really the COLLEGE due to which they were awesome? Or just like the suits, was it simply a matter of Highly talented people going to college? Now since all of us have been taught that it's the COLLEGE that makes who you are, the education industry in this weird state.
>Students invest in a program and later earn money in their chosen career
And also they invest in a suit and later earn money when they show up at work wearing it. There are definitely professions in which nobody will take them seriously without a nice business suit. Conversely, I think we can agree that many if not most classes taken in college have little bearing on the eventual job.
I dunno, I would say my web programming, data structures, and algorithms classes have direct application to what I'm doing now. Compilers/software engineering also taught me quite a few design patterns. Graphics taught me about the idiosyncrasies of display systems and using coordinate systems in a complicated way to create complex images or systems of graphical entities. I could go on, but I think most STEM classes have direct application to work in those fields.
Somehow I doubt Priceonomics is going to move the needle on anything one way or the other. I really doubt many people would forgo getting a degree based on any kind of statistical evidence. Going to college is often an emotional choice and not a logical choice.
Regardless, their conclusion seemed to me fairly tempered. They acknowledged learning through MOOCs, but talked about the positive externalities of physically being at college. They also said the price of college was far too high, so I'm not sure how your comment relates to the article.
One flaw is the failure to control for intelligence. Or socioeconomic background. Or any number of other factors that influence lifetime earnings that also positively correlate with college attendance.
If you were to only look at people who grow up in a very-middle class household (a very ill-defined term I admit) and who scored in the X to Y percentile (not sure what good numbers would be) on some measure of intelligence then I am nor sure that the numbers would be clearly in favor of college.
Additionally, to observe the value of a college education, you have to compare it to education received without going to college, while excluding the people who choose to not go to college because they were not interested in furthering their education. The high school graduate that spends hours every evening scouring the internet, or the library, for educational purposes is not comparable the person of equal formal education who goes home to watch sitcom TV each night.
"Payscale draws on its information about alumni salaries. It calculates the expected earnings of a newly minted graduate over a 30 year career by summing the median incomes of alumni from his or her school who graduated between one and 30 years ago."
Yes, I know that college was worth it 30 years ago, and even 15 years ago, and even 10 years ago. That is not the real question. The question is will this continue to be true in the future? Those who are challenging the value of a college degree are in essence arguing "We may be at an inflection point where the value of a college degree will, from this point forward, decrease."
You can not prove or disprove the point by pointing out that trend lines from the past, if projected into the future, show that college remains a great investment.
That line of reasoning is irrelevant if we are in fact at an inflection point. What is relevant is any argument for or against the idea that we are at an inflection point. Arguments based on trend lines from 30 years ago miss the heart of this subject.
The strongest argument to be drawn from this chart is one based on the 5 year trend line: if a college degree was worth a great deal during the Great Recession, then surely that proves the enduring value of a college degree? However, there is a counter argument: what is being measured here is the income premium beyond what someone with a high school degree makes, and the Great Recession wiped out millions of jobs in industries that hired large numbers of people who only had high school degrees (for instance, the construction industry).
Again, the question to be answered is are we at an inflection point? When the economy recovers, and jobs in the construction industry have returned, will a college degree still offer the large income premium that it offered in the past?
Another problem with a pure financial projection is that it does not fully consider opportunity cost. The cost/benefit is not simply the difference in earnings, minus tuition, interest, missed earnings and investment on earnings.
The real cost is that being in debt limits your options to pursue possibly more lucrative opportunities, or to enjoy your life outside the system. The better term would be liquidity cost. Every one of us will at some point come across a great investment opportunity. Every one of us can have an idea we would like to pursue. But an employee fully loaded with college debt, added with mortgage and kids, can't afford to do anything else but add to a 401k each paycheck.
Furthermore, every financial investment should have a healthy margin of error to compensate you for risk. This should be at even higher margins when the more leveraged you are. Things like college and a mortgage are a total leverage of your earnings potential as an employee. Thus the question isn't whether college is merely worth it. The question should be if college is totally a no-brainer as an investment.
Interesting point. While college gives you a better chance of a regular salary, it pretty much disables you from taking advantage of BIG (albeit risky) opportunities and thus in a way limit your returns. But isn't that how all financial instruments work? You always have to sacrifice a portion of your potential returns to decrease risk.
(look up derivative market and hedging your position etc)
Yes, I know that college was worth it 30 years ago, and even 15 years ago. That is not the real question. The question is will this continue to be true in the future?
I know this gets brought up all the time on here but HN is not a good indicator of college worth. One of the few (if not the only) disciplines where college might not be necessary is software and this board is primarily software. Even then looking at the difference between the definitions of software developer and a software engineer may make this moot.
That line of reasoning is irrelevant if we are in fact at an inflection point. ... Arguments based on trend lines from 30 years ago miss the heart of this subject.
Not really. Until there is a real, tangible way for the average individual to get an accepted post-secondary education, we aren't at an inflection point. And other than software development, I personally can't think of another engineering or science profession that could be replaced by self-study and/or experience.
> One of the few (if not the only) disciplines where college might not be necessary
I struggle to think of many professions that do require a degree. Doctor, lawyer, and engineer stand out as the obvious ones, but where there is no legal mandate, there is no requirement. 50% of high-level STEM jobs do not even require a degree[1].
One would be hard pressed to learn chemistry or physics without the resources of a university. I don't want a building designed by a self-taught architect or a bridge designed by a self-taught mechanical engineer. I don't want to fly in a plane designed by a self-taught aeronautical engineer.
While 50% of STEM jobs don't explicitly require a degree, it would be prohibitively difficult to get a career in those fields without one.
> it would be prohibitively difficult to get a career in those fields without one.
Is that assertion based on more than emotion? If 20% of all jobs require high-level STEM knowledge as stated in the paper, the degree attainment rate is 30%[1], and less than 20% of the degrees awarded in 2010 were STEM-based[2], the numbers do not appear to add up.
Please show me one architecture firm who will hire a self-taught architect or an aeronautical company that will hire a self-taught aeronautical engineer. Other careers are simply unable to attain without the resources of universities because you can't practice the craft to even begin to be proficient.
The offset in the percentages has a lot to do with IT. I do not consider much of what IT does to be STEM. It's skilled labor with respect to (T)echnology but a lot of it is no more skillful than a carpenter using math to cut a 2x4. Yet some articles put the carpenter as a STEM job[1]. I'm sorry, I just don't consider a mechanic or electrician as a STEM job in most situations.
An honest assessment of all STEM jobs, based on the definition given in the linked paper, or just an honest assessment of the 50% of STEM jobs that do require a degree? I expect you are right that architects and aeronautical engineers do more often than not require a degree, but that just places them in the other 50%. It does not invalidate the study.
Even still, when ~70% of the population do not have degrees, it seems insidious to say that programming is one of the few professions that do not require a degree. Very few jobs actually require one. Again, I struggle to think of more than a few professions that actually do require a degree, even if arbitrarily.
Even still, when ~70% of the population do not have degrees, it seems insidious to say that programming is one of the few professions that do not require a degree.
I never once said that few professions do not require a degree. The article is about whether college is necessary and I said it was necessary for a number of professions due to the difficulty of getting instruction outside of a university.
You are getting hung up on the word "require". Yes, being a doctor requires a license which is vetted by degree. I'm saying that being a chemist (a US chemist, not the UK version of a pharmacist) doesn't require a degree per se, however, you are going to need to head to a university to be able to get the instruction and resources to be able to properly learn as they are both prohibitively unavailable externally.
Again, I struggle to think of more than a few professions that actually do require a degree, even if arbitrarily.
If you are able to think of very few that require a degree (both directly or indirectly), outside of IT, what are those? And please limit yourself to professions that are spawned from degrees. A carpenter, electrician, etc., are not taught at colleges.
> If you are able to think of very few that require a degree (both directly or indirectly), outside of IT, what are those? And please limit yourself to professions that are spawned from degrees. A carpenter, electrician, etc., are not taught at colleges.
I feel like you are moving the posts again to support your argument. In the context of promoting going to college, you have to look at the jobs that everyone will be doing. If 100% of the population had a STEM degree, 100% of the population will not be doing STEM jobs. That is not how it works.
Agriculture comes to mind as a university accredited program, and while I'm sure it can be useful, you do not need a degree in agriculture to be a successful farmer. So, what makes a profession spawn from a degree? An electrician's job is deeply rooted in the research done by physicist and electrical engineers, so why does it not count?
Perhaps it is only those doing cutting edge research who should be counted as a degree-spawned profession? I would be on board with that definition. Reimplementing someone else's algorithm that you learned in a CS program always seemed more like being a carpenter anyway. The people creating new algorithms that have never been seen before are in a different class. Keep in mind that you're also talking about a tiny fraction of the population actually doing that kind of work though, and those types of jobs are almost impossible to get unless you are the best of the best. Promoting more people to get a degree is not going to improve that situation.
Speaking of electrical engineering, there was an article in a national newspaper a month or two ago about the top jobs (pay wise) for people without degrees, and electrical engineer was near the top of the list. Programming and IT work did not even make the cut at all.
I feel like you are moving the posts again to support your argument. ... An electrician's job is deeply rooted in the research done by physicist and electrical engineers, so why does it not count?
Moving the posts? The posts for this entire argument start and end with college. You can't argue that college is worth it for a profession if a college doesn't teach the profession to begin with.
So, if one were to become an electrician is college worth it? No. If one were to become a physicist or electrical engineer, that is the question.
Agriculture comes to mind as a university accredited program, and while I'm sure it can be useful, you do not need a degree in agriculture to be a successful farmer.
The degree from universities for agriculture is typically more of an agri-business degree. No, you probably don't need it to farm and be successful. But, once again, to the root of the article, is college worth it to gain some insight into the business of agriculture?
Speaking of electrical engineering, there was an article in a national newspaper a month or two ago about the top jobs (pay wise) for people without degrees, and electrical engineer was near the top of the list. Programming and IT work did not even make the cut at all.
It's hard to comment on the validity of an article without a link. I find it hard to believe that many people could get their foot in the door without a degree. I assume you are remembering incorrectly and the job was electrician since that is typically a top non-degree profession.
> You can't argue that college is worth it for a profession if a college doesn't teach the profession to begin with.
I disagree. There is a lot of indication that we already have more people with degrees than jobs that require degrees (in all variations of the word require). If you are going to promote the value of eduction, you have to think about what those people are actually going to be doing with that education once they leave academia. It is not simply a matter of: Have degree in basket weaving = weaving basket career.
> But, once again, to the root of the article, is college worth it to gain some insight into the business of agriculture?
It very well might be worth it, but that is a long way from saying it is required, which is the context of this discussion.
> I find it hard to believe that many people could get their foot in the door without a degree.
Given that electrical "engineering" (i.e. you won't become a PE) is taught at the community college level, I'm not sure why you would think that way. Clearly there is a demand for people in this sector without the college education and degree that goes with it.
Therefore, you answered the question of 'Is College Worth It?'. It is, for some professions. Thank you for agreeing with me.
Given that electrical "engineering" (i.e. you won't become a PE) is taught at the community college level, I'm not sure why you would think that way. Clearly there is a demand for people in this sector without the college education and degree that goes with it.
Is community college not college? Are associate degrees not degrees? Hence, you'd still need a professional education to get your foot in the door.
but that is a long way from saying it is required, which is the context of this discussion.
At no point did I, nor the article, argue that degrees should be required for any specific profession. I'm having trouble arguing with someone that doesn't understand what is being argued in the first place. At this point I think you are simply trolling so I bid you good day.
"Yes, I know that college was worth it 30 years ago, and even 15 years ago, and even 10 years ago. That is not the real question. The question is will this continue to be true in the future?"
I think that's a very good point, considering that (1) the cost of college education has been rising very steeply in recent years and (2) unemployment and underemployment among college grads is currently very high (there are tons of college grads who would be overjoyed if they could only get an unpaid internship).
If you really want to treat a college education as an investment, you have to keep in mind the disclaimer that anyone selling an investment has to make:
"Past performance is not a guarantee of future results."
A somewhat more formal argument is the first and/or second derivatives are probably significantly large negative numbers so numerically integrating the past implies very little about the future.
Or if you like an analogy, gravity makes a negative 2nd deriv of height. So if you toss an apple into the air, you can numerically integrate the "foot seconds" underneath the graph of height for the first two seconds. That doesn't mean the number of "foot seconds" area of the graph for time interval 20 seconds to 22 seconds will be identical or even have a linear relationship with "foot seconds" time interval 0 to 2 seconds.
(edited to remove the asterisks in foot seconds which makes the HN software somewhat unhappy)
Of course it isn't perfect information, and of course things are changing. But they can't give you the numbers from the future because nobody has them! So projecting forwards based on past trends is just one of the ways we can speculate.
It can still be useful data, too. Assume we are at an inflection point. Concoct numbers, and tack speculative movement on to the end of the graph. See where that puts you.
Yes, it's speculative, but that's all we've got right now.
Here's the other problem with this method of asking, "Is college worth it?": as far as I know, Alex Mayyasi doesn't collect data on dropouts.
Starting and finishing at a public school in four years is almost certainly worth it for most people. Starting and dropping out, especially when you're more than one semester in, is a disaster, and the dropout numbers for many schools are staggering. I was a grad student at the University of Arizona in English Lit and routinely saw that something like half of those who enrolled as 18-year-old freshmen matriculated within six years.
The rest? Some presumably had parents to pay, but many were stuck with loans that couldn't be effectively discharged through bankruptcy and other normal means. The U of A, and other universities, pay no price for this. They have no skin in the game.
The article does discuss dropouts (although the word "dropout" is not used). Emphasis mine.
"A recent Washington Post article covers some of the studies - investigations of the increased earnings of those who attend college without graduating - that suggest a college education itself leads to increased earnings."
"To accurately measure the earnings bump graduates receive thanks to their bachelor’s degree, Payscale takes this expected income of a college graduate over his or her career and subtracts the total income they would have made during that time if they did not attend college. To do so, Payscale subtracts the median wage of a high school graduate over those 30 years as well as over the four years a college graduate spent attending college instead of working."
"Accurately"? Rubbish. I don't see them controlling for a single confounding factor here.
I'd love to see a study comparing college attendees with those who were accepted into college and did not attend (e.g. for financial or personal reasons). At least then you are controlling somewhat for ability, ambition and circumstance. My suspicion is that being "good enough" to get into a good college is sufficient to wipe out the wage differential for many fields of study, independent of the fact of attendance.
Or, as Groucho might say, "I wouldn't go to a college that would have me as a student."
Payscale subtracts the median wage of a high school graduate...
This is a common mistake, and one which completely invalidates the process. The median high school graduate is someone who wasn't able to get into college, and many of the factors associated with that -- starting with low high school grades -- are also associated with lower earnings. You might as well say that purring results in pets gaining legs, because pets which purr have on average more legs than pets which don't purr.
To get any accurate measure of the value of going to college, you need to compare students who are similar in all ways except college attendance. Of course, this is a difficult thing to do, since it involves looking at high school grades, SAT scores, parental income, parental education, and gender at a minimum -- all of these factors are known to correlate with both individual educational achievement and individual earnings.
The article actually deals with this. "One recent study compared the earnings of students who just made the academic cutoff to attend the Florida State University System with those of students who fell just below the cutoff (and mostly did not attend college as a result). We might expect college not to be worth it for these students on the margins of qualifying, yet they reaped returns of 11%."
While this does not look at high school grades, SAT scores, etc., I think comparing just above the cutoff and just below the cutoff is a valid methodology to counter the effect. What do you think?
When I was in high school, teachers were quite open about adjusting marks if it meant the difference between acceptance and rejection, but you had to put forth the effort to talk with them and make your case.
With that, some studies have suggested that soft-skills, like determination, are what determine future earnings. Someone with average to poor academic performance, but high determination, could ensure that the cutoff is met with a little pressure put on the teachers, while someone less determined would sit back and be accepting of the non-acceptance position.
It is nice to see some other methodologies tested, but I'm not sure this one really addresses the common concerns with the standard interpretation.
The graph titled "Best and Worst Median Starting Salaries
Ranked by College Major" is mislabelled.
Looking at the source material[1], the table it's based on is titled, "[TABLE] 12: TOP 10 MAJORS WITH THE HIGHEST MEDIAN EARNINGS" and is data on "Full-time, full-year workers with a terminal Bachelor’s."
Isn't a $98K median starting salary for math and CS grads a bit high? Yes, the few lucky ones who get a job at Google or Facebook or an investment bank might make six figures right out of school, but it doesn't seem like there would be enough of those jobs to pull the median up that high. The average CS grad probably won't end up working for an internet company; there are probably many more programming jobs in corporate IT departments.
Their data is incorrect. If you pull up the linked article, the table they sourced is #12 on page 15, titled "Top 10 Majors with the highest median earnings".
That's the median of all salaries for all people in that job description where the highest level of education is a Bachelor's degree, NOT the starting salary as indicated.
This data rewards schools that reject more applicants and/or fail more students (prevent them from graduating). Because that increases the average & median of their graduates. Charter schools and private schools do the same thing to increase test scores, but when controlling for other factors they are no better than public schools.
In order words, the data shows which schools do the best job of attracting and filtering out the top students. Many folks including some faculty think that IS their job - to set a high bar and see which few students can make it over, but from my point of view that is only half of the job - the other part, the hard part, is to actually educate students - to help more students get over that high bar.
Wait, 98k starting salary for Math/Computer Science is median? In the US?
What?!?! This does not mesh with my experiences or the experiences of my peers at all. If you want to include the financial industry, you're talking about the top 1% of salaries, if that. Are they so disparate that they drag the median up that much?
Edit: Looking at the source data[0], they've separated "Computer Science" and "Mathematics" from "Math and Computer Science". What is the purpose of this? Is "Math and Computer Science" a specific major?
This article, like nearly all on the topic, ignores the distinction between correlation and causality. Of course those who attend college, particularly a prestigious one, earn more. How much of this is due to college as a symptom of their competence and/or privileged lot in life, and how much of this is due to college as a cause, is rarely discussed.
> This article, like nearly all on the topic, ignores the distinction between correlation and causality
It's sort of interesting that if you look at race breakdowns in the United States, Asians have the highest median income and also highest likelihood in attending college. White Americans are second.
Then if you look at interracial marriage in the United States, the highest median household income combinations are Asian Male - White Female followed closely by White Male - Asian Female. Furthermore, a white marrying an Asian notably has a higher likelihood of possessing a college degree than a white marrying within or Black or Hispanic.
I'm only mentioning these because stats show correlation between income and education levels.
Looks to me like the distribution for the more expensive schools on the Y axis is nearly identical to that of the inexpensive state schools. So no, paying a lot for college is not worth it, when you could get the same result for $50k at a state school.
Unless, of course, you go to one of the top four or five private engineering schools in the country.
The question that really jumps out at me is "What the hell are you paying $150k extra for at a private school?"
Edit to add: If I wrote an article that said, "Buy US Savings Bonds - it's a great investment! You are guaranteed at least to get more money back than you put in!" I'd probably get criticized, because the interest rate of a savings bond is fairly low compared to most other investments. But apparently by the same logic I can feel great about saddling myself with $200k worth of student debt, because hey, eventually I'll make it back and then some.
Given the costliness of most colleges in the US - why not consider getting your degree outside of the country? There are many great universities in Asia, for example, that have a much cheaper price tag. I have not seen very many (if any) US students consider this option. I guess prestige and name-brand recognition is still very important.
But really, I am on a semester abroad in Taiwan at the moment, and I have calculated tuition and airfare combined at the school here is cheaper than just tuition at my school in the US (for 1 semester). Aggregate tuition and costs of living over 4 years and I am sure you could save a ton of money compared to staying in the US. You could then go on to do a master's degree in the States. Indeed, many Taiwanese here do just that - at places like Stanford, Caltech, etc...
This assumes the meaning of a degree is knowledge, or at least input filtering to only accept the worthy.
From experience, its credentialism, a title of nobility. Oh you are an experienced neurosurgeon? Oh from Russia you say? Well, here's a broom, good luck.
Good Luck practicing law, medicine, accounting, becoming a P.E., pretty much anything but IT/CS work with a foreign degree, and you don't even need any degree for IT work.
>Oh you are an experienced neurosurgeon? Oh from Russia you say? Well, here's a broom, good luck.
Planet Money did a podcast on this exact topic at the start of the year. It is near impossible for a doctor to come to the US and start practicing - even those who are top of their field and working in countries with highly respected medical schools (Europe, Asia, etc). I can't find the link to the full episode, but here's a summary and excerpt from All Things Considered:
1. Not speaking $LANGUAGE. Even if courses are taught in English, that makes living there difficult
2. Most people in your field in the US having heard of $UNIVERSITY. How many people in the US are familiar with NTU? Most of the Taiwanese working in the US did graduate level work at a US institution.
3. Having to live a giant ocean away from friends/family, etc.
There's a fairly compelling argument that much of the benefit of college is social, not educational. Studying in another country would negate a lot of that. Don't get me wrong, Taiwan (and I'm sure many other places) is great, but I think you're dramatically underestimating how easy it is for most people to decide to go spend 4 years on the other side of the world.
My wife is an economist and one of her biggest pet peeves is that the idea that a child "must" get a college education has had a dramatic impact on how we perceive trade school or apprenticeship educations.
Certainly, and some people would be better served by not going to college. The point is that you can't just call it a life after high school and expect to earn a respectable (in a financial sense) income. Unskilled union mill work is no longer going to feed a family of 5 and pay for a nice mortgage.
Unskilled, no, but the trades pay reasonably well. By the time you graduate from college you could have been a licensed electrician, for example. And if you were willing to go into enough debt to pay for a four year degree you could start your own business.
College is a pretty damn good resource if you choose to utilize it. Personally, I haven't felt that higher education has actively blocked me from pursuing the knowledge I needed or making resources available to me. The problem is with the mindset of kids going into college thinking it's a mandatory hoop they have to jump through instead of a resource they have to actively utilize.
Ultimately, what you get out of higher education is what you choose put into it.
seeing responses like "the debt i got from college is killing me, totally not worth it" just previews their time in college - oh i'm sure they worked hard, but they probably didn't take advantage to all that was available (clubs, TAing, working with professors, etc). There are many opportunities available throughout just about every university to explore interests and 'make the degree worth it'
From the article kindly submitted here: "The data comes from an analysis by Payscale, a salary data and software company for individuals and businesses."
In other words, the data is correlational, and not based on random assignment to an experimental condition and control condition. So we have no idea what the causation is here. By my observation, the kind of young people who get into private engineering colleges are different already, at high school age, from the kind of young people who don't go to college at all, so it's by no means clear that attending college causes any part of their difference in earnings in adult life.
For someone going to college with someone else's money (whether the someone else is a parent, a government agency, or a fee waiver by the college), sure, go to as much college as you can eat. Being paid to be a student is a very happy condition of life. But for someone who is paying for college out of pocket, the economic calculations become different, because college has to be paid for with present dollars, but its claimed economic return comes in future dollars, if at all. Economists, of course, have finance calculations for figuring out the approximate present value of a future income stream, and quite a few economists think (if only we could resolve that issue of causation) that what colleges charge for tuition is a bargain compared to the economic value of gaining a college degree.
A young person of college-applying age will, according to research,[1] be very strongly dissuaded from applying to college if poor, even if also smart. But dumb high school students from rich families go to college in large numbers. Only some of the Ivy Plus research universities and liberal arts colleges make much of an effort at all to identify high-ability students from low-income families and recruit those. Right now college mostly advantages the economically advantaged.
[1] Partial list of links to commentary and research on low-income, high-ability students:
>In other words, the data is correlational, and not based on random assignment to an experimental condition and control condition.
If you would like to see studies that use random or quasi-random selection into education, there is a huge literature in labor economics on this topic. For various reasons such literature would never make it onto HN.
By "make it onto HN" I mean as a story - the comments tend to be much more varied.
Mainstream economic research covers very similar topics, and uses very similar methods, to stories that make it onto HN. However since it isn't sold as "using data in cool ways", it's not immediately apparent that it is HN material. For example, a very famous economics paper uses school district boundaries to measure some effect (can't remember exactly what they measure). The idea is that people on opposite sides of boundaries should on average be very similar except for being in different districts. This hypothesis can be checked by looking for measurable jumps across boundaries.
Another thing is that economics papers tend to use regression methods that look quite boring and don't involve interesting scatter plots. So to the untrained eye a blog post with scatter diagrams and maps can look like a novel use of data and technology, while in fact the methods are very standard.
"because college has to be paid for with present dollars, but its claimed economic return comes in future dollars"
Please explain how someone who has school loans at low interest rates has to pay for college with present dollars as opposed to future dollars.
Re: "Ivy League" - Separately none of any of these analysis ever takes into account things that simply can't be measured. I can attest to the doors that open when you have attended an "Ivy" school because guess what enough people are impressed to provide a benefit. Perhaps someone can write that off as an "anecdote" but hate to say it I've seen it with others to many times, and, well even the mainstream media always points out when someone goes to a top college (or is a Kennedy for that matter). Of course you could also argue that people aren't impressed when someone is a Physician if you want but that also opens doors and gets better opportunity in many many cases.
Like a pretty girl (or tall handsome man) who gets more attention some things just can't be quantified with all the academic apparatus and analysis known to man. But irl if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck it's a duck usually is correct an overwhelming number of times.
As I always used to tell my students, your degree is just a piece of paper that helps you get your foot in the door. Its worth is equivalent to the effort and energy you put into it. Those that work hard and are passionate about their major, whether it be computer science or whether it be philosophy -- they'll end up doing well in their chosen fields -- or at the very least grow as people. If you're really into what you study, spend a lot of your extracurricular activities in related areas (e.g. being in debate club if you're a political science major), and are excited about working in a field pertaining to your major, you will do well. If you came just to party, socialize, and not major in something that you didn't care about or find challenging...you'll likely not get your return on the investment. I majored with plenty of people in computer science, some were even able to cheat their way to decent grades. However, we all know how well that works when you have to sit down for an interview at Google or wherever and you have a blank stare when you can't tell the difference between a binary tree and an apple tree. Your computer science degree in that case is almost worthless.
So it's worth it if you know what you're getting yourself into. Some people think it's just a rubber stamp to a job that pays a minimum of $50K a year somewhere in the city where they can continue partying. Not true unfortunately. I knew since I was a child what I wanted to study...for most the answer is not that easy. I always suggest that if you don't know what you want to do, don't go into debt by going to college without a plan. Do something else -- join peace corps, volunteer, get an apprenticeship...maybe join a community college first. Getting a college education is one of the most fantastic and redefining experiences a person can have -- you may only have one shot and should feel blessed you have that opportunity. Don't squander it.
It's great to see some research that shows a college education is still worth it. And I certainly believe that, although I'm admittedly part of the academically trained elite.
That said, the work to "democratize post-secondary education" is still an exciting area that can co-exist with traditional higher ed. There's a whole segment of the population for whom higher ed is not appropriate (for a variety of reasons). See what the Gates foundation is doing: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/US-Program/Postsec...
you should really consider that this is very clearly a "snapshot" in time. There is a broad gulf in first-five-year earning potential between someone who got their college degree 30 years ago, versus someone who got their college degree 5 years ago; so already those two cohorts are going to see dramatically different life outcomes.
I was talking to the parent of a boy near college age recently, and he said he's trying to steer his boy off a CS degree, and into one of the lesser studied Engineering careers.
In my country, a relatively inexperienced Mechanical Engineer or Agronomist or Petroleum Engineer makes between 200% to 400% the salary of a CS graduate the same age, and they have no salary "glass ceiling" (CS graduates are not considered for management positions and are topped off as employees here).
I make six figures with just an AA degree that has nothing to do with technology.
When I'm interviewed it is clear I know what I'm doing and have the experience and passion to back it up. Maybe I'm lucky, or maybe I don't think or act like the rest of the "real" college grads.
At some point you have to really be honest with yourself and with others about what it is you're looking for and are willing to work for in life. The rest will fall into place for you.
College is probably worth it but that's not what this graph is really showing. It really should be entitled 'Is Private College Worth It?' because it appears that the only significant cost:wage value is to 'Private Engineering' and even then arguments could be made that state engineering is good enough.
Do you realize that the axes have different scales? Even a state school returns ~$400K with a cost of only ~$75K. I'd like to see the returns converted into net present value, but it still looks like a win.
I'm not sure what you're saying. Of course I see that the axes have different scales but both are linear. State schools (blue/purple/green) are at about $75k in cost but span the same '30 Year Wage Premium' as the private schools (yellow/orange/red) with the only significant difference being in the highest of high-end engineering schools (MIT, Cal Tech, Carnegie Melon).
I sincerely question the data however after looking at it more closely. My alma mater (Washington State) apparently costs more than University of Washington. From a purely tuition perspective this is not true since I've compared them many times. If you add in room and board this should be quite different due to UW being located in a major metropolitan city, and WSU being located in rural eastern Washington.
Who knew BYU was such a good deal? All my cousins I guess (had 4 who went there, with a child of one cousin (second cousin) now attending).
It's not about whether or not college is worth it, but rather what you want to get out of it and your expectations... You can't expect every degree to optain you a good paying job, certainly not without some creativity and a little extra curricular effort anyway...
if you are talking about the knowledge and degree you got, the answer is no. but college also provie you human relationships, this seems very important for most common people, so the answer is yes
All the statistical arguments are detracting from the actual issue. College is not worth it because it is expensive and time consuming but does not guarantee you'll be able to earn a living in the future. And unlike a skill or a business, you can't pass your degree to your children.
For comparison, let's imagine that some evil marketing genius decides to examine the corresponding statistical impacts of wearing a business suit. "Our data indicate that people who wear a business suit to work earn a career average of $1M extra over people who don't. Considering many quality suits cost under $2000, this results into a higher than 100:1 return on investment." Before long, tailor shops are doing a booming business, wearing a $400 suit becomes a faux pas, and candidates get dismissed early from interviews because they showed up with an Armani at a Dolce&Gabbana shop. People no longer care whether a suit is useful or even comfortable in their line of work, and prices shoot through the roof for apparel that offers little beyond a famous label.
I don't know who started the trend of promoting flawed statistical studies [1] in this regard, but if they worked for higher education they must have been a very evil marketing genius indeed.
[1] Why are people who couldn't go to college lumped to bring down those who wouldn't? Is "college" a monolithical category where e.g. differences between majors matter much less than four years's experience in specific industries?