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ROI on a college degree depends what you study, not where

economist.com

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Re: ROI on a college degree depends what you study, not where

#101

Post by rjsw »

rayiner wrote: post #53
CPLX wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For an opposing viewpoint, today might actually be an excellent day to ponder the effect of a lack of understanding of basic math, science, and history has on the general electorate.

I assume you're talking about Trump. We've had universal basic education in those subjects for decades, so that cannot be the explanation. I suspect the problem is not a lack of education, but a lack of indoctrinating the right values. Consider climate change. I believe climate change is happening and needs to be addressed. But I don't really understand the mechanics. Neither do the people who think it doesn't exist.…

I see climate change denial as an example of a cargo cult.

I suspect that the majority of believers in all cargo cults don't independently come up with the same idea, someone will think of it and the rest will follow them. The followers were in a clientelist relationship with the leader and want that to continue and keep providing them with the cargo in future.

Maybe we need to look at the education of the kind of people who end up as our leaders.

Re: ROI on a college degree depends what you study, not where

#102

Post by dagw »

Tideflat wrote: post #66
emodendroket wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're studying Japanese because you think it will make you money it is a bad idea

Less well known languages like Japanese tend to have higher returns on investment than common ones like Spanish. IIRC Spanish has a return on investment of about 3%.

I forget if it was Planet Money or Freakonomics, but there was a podcast about the ROI of learning a foreign language and according to the research they cited the only foreign language worth learning from a pure ROI perspective was English.

Re: ROI on a college degree depends what you study, not where

#103

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #53
CPLX wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For an opposing viewpoint, today might actually be an excellent day to ponder the effect of a lack of understanding of basic math, science, and history has on the general electorate.

I assume you're talking about Trump. We've had universal basic education in those subjects for decades, so that cannot be the explanation. I suspect the problem is not a lack of education, but a lack of indoctrinating the right values. Consider climate change. I believe climate change is happening and needs to be addressed. But I don't really understand the mechanics. Neither do the people who think it doesn't exist.…

[deleted]

Re: ROI on a college degree depends what you study, not where

#104

Post by jessriedel »

bisRepetita wrote: post #67

This study, like pretty much all the ones I have read on such topic, seems to compare income people going to college vs people not going to college. And they attribute all the benefits and ROI to college. While often it just measures that people that are smarter and motivated (because they can and want to go to college) do better financially than the one less smart and less motivated. I wish I could find a study of s…

> I wish I could find a study of similarly smart and motivated people who decided themselves to go or not to college. As a choice.

I don't think that's actually the ideal study design you want. Any measure of intelligence/motivation is going to be imperfect, so any time you try to control for it but still allow a "free choice", that free choice will be correlated with variables that plausibly impact future success (e.g., maybe "cool, rational thought" is distinct from intelligence and motivation, and influences both the choice to go to college and long-term success).

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/04/02/co...

That said, if you're just asking whether anyone has studied the impact of attending college on lifetime earnings after controlling for several sensible variables that correlate with intelligence, the answer is "yes".

> Students who go to more selective colleges make more money later in life...This partially reflects students who go to more selective colleges being more able and ambitious, as opposed to attending a more selective college boosting one's income. How much does attending boost income? The famous paper Estimating the Return to College Selectivity Over the Career Using Administrative Earning Data (2011) by Dale and Krueger raises the possibility that on average, attending a more selective college doesn't raise earnings at all. Specifically, controlling for

> * Student high school GPA

> * Student SAT score

> * The average SAT score of the colleges that a student applied for

> * The number of applications that the student submitted

> * Various demographic factors (race, sex, parental education)

> they found that as a group, there was no statistically significant difference in income later in life between students who went to more selective colleges and students who went to less selective colleges. Their finding is somewhat robust: it's based on a large (~10k) sample size, it's true both of the class of 1976 and the class of 1989, it's true of the class of 1976 from age 25 through age 50 and it's true both of men and of women.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/k0w/how_much_does_where_you_go_to_co...

Some things to note:

(1) This sort of study is obviously the very first thing you would do if you were investigating this topic seriously, yet extremely few of the popular articles on this topic mention this study. So 99% of popular discussion on this topic is hopeless uninformed, and no one cares.

(2) In the absence of a controlled randomized trial, you can still hope for high-quality pseudo experiments using techniques like differences in differences, or the effect of arbitrary numerical cutoffs, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_in_differences

Re: ROI on a college degree depends what you study, not where

#105

Post by emodendroket »

mtberatwork wrote: post #62
emodendroket wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, is it, or is the rising cost a result of us thinking of it as some "investment" in a future career? I think it's a sort of vicious cycle.

The rising cost is a direct result of cutbacks in public funding. http://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/16/why-college-costs-are-so-high...

Yes, no kidding. But why are those happening?

Re: ROI on a college degree depends what you study, not where

#106

Post by dagw »

crispyambulance wrote: post #23
emodendroket wrote: post #8

I find it disheartening that the only way it seems we can think about college anymore is a sort of vocational school where we train for careers.

Yes, and it is odious that "value" is measured based on ROI from getting the degree. Do STEM degrees yield more ROI? Perhaps, but if the article is attempting to help an individual student frame their thinking about what to major in, it is very bad advice. People should follow their aptitudes. Study what compels them and what they're talented in, regardless of statistical ROI's that apply NOT to individuals but to a…

People should follow their aptitudes.

Only to an extent. I am, for example, a better skier than I am programmer. Yet it would be financial folly for me to follow that aptitude. Pretty good skier make on avg. $0 a year while pretty good programmers make a very comfortable living.

Re: ROI on a college degree depends what you study, not where

#107

Post by soundwave106 »

jerf wrote: post #86
keiferski wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd add the observation that it is way easier to go to college and get a formal education in science, math, or engineering, and pursue an ongoing adhoc self-directed education in the arts and humanities in your remaining decades of life, than the other way around. Yeah, not really. There is a huge difference between reading a book by yourself, and reading a book then discussing it with a room full of other intelligen…

That's a null argument. It cuts both ways equally, and therefore can not distinguish between the two.

In these days when STEM is so promoted, I think sometimes there is too much tendency to dismiss the arts and humanities as complete lightweight fluff compared to STEM. Perhaps there are some subjects which fall in this category. But I know, for instance, with music theory and composition, the heavy stuff can get fairly complicated and technical very fast. Certainly few people would be dismissive of the technical training required to be a virtuoso player.

I think this is the same for other "liberal arts" subjects too. Take linguistics -- from what I know about some of the linguistics concepts that pioneer translation software, speech synthesis, natural language processing, etc., linguistics is hardly "fluff" and requires some years of deep study to be an expert at.

The Economist's monetary chart is solely based on supply vs. demand.

In many subjects, I think extremely gifted autodidacts are pretty rare. No matter whether its the STEM subjects or the arts or anything else, I think most people benefit from an environment where like minded peers can bounce ideas off of each other.

When I look at Wikipedia's list of autodidacts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autodidacts

I know this is just a sample, but at first glance, the list of autodidact scientists and engineers certainly seem to be of comparable size with artists / musicians / etc.

EDIT: I will add that I agree with other above posts, that one of the biggest barriers for the modern autodidact scientist / engineer is that it is really hard to home-tinker with certain concepts. You can program at home very easily. You can make circuits and robotics at home. You can even "group buy" small order electronic bare boards from contract manufacturers with all the difficult-to-hand-solder parts already taken care of.

It is nearly impossible, however, for a home tinkerer to get access to $100K scopes, electron microscopes, GCMS / NMR machines, or any other "big equipment" of this nature that you can think of. Heck, depending on what you are doing, you probably even risk a run in with "the law" these days from tinkering in certain sectors of hobbies like home chemistry or home biology.

To me, that's pretty much the barrier for non-college STEM in a nutshell.

Re: ROI on a college degree depends what you study, not where

#108

Post by morgante »

School-Cotton wrote: post #87
cableshaft wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that what general education is for? I majored in Computer Science, but I took classes on Japanese, Theater, Poly Sci, Criminal Justice, Communications, Literature, and probably a couple others I can't remember right now. In several of those subjects I took two or three classes.

In countries with a functioning education system (take your pick), this is what high school is for. Edit for downvoters: In France, this was the high-school leaving exam (literary track) in history for 2015. Four hours to write an essay on each of the following two topics: 1. "South and East Asia: The challenges of population and growth." 2. "The paths of power: The United States and the world at the end of the 1960s…

I went to a very elite high school in the US and my final exams included questions similar to that (the IB). Some of my teachers literally wrote the textbooks on their subjects.

That doesn't mean my high school classes were anywhere near the depth or intensity of my college classes. While high school provided me with a solid foundation in all the disciplines, it's not set up to go in depth on specific areas.

As a computer science major in college, I have had the opportunity to do in-depth, semester-long investigations of the Armenian genocide, the evolution of interactive media, laughter in theater, the 2008 financial crisis, Arab history in China, the philosophy of consciousness and dozens of other interesting subjects. These are not at all equivalent to what's offered at even the best high schools in the world and I wouldn't give it up to have a slightly cheaper or more efficient college career.

Re: ROI on a college degree depends what you study, not where

#109

Post by jschwartzi »

TDL wrote: post #88
jhspaybar wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider myself smart and motivated, I was in sales for about 8 years by choice rather than going to college. I was good at it, but 2 years of college(a double major), and a few years in industry and I'm now making 5x what I did. It's an anecdote sure, but I haven't changed at all, my degree simply qualified me for a different industry.

"2 years of college..." This bit right here might need some clarification. I believe the current U.S. average time in college is more than 4 years. I'm guessing you were motivated to get your degree as quickly as possible. I don't believe young adults in developed nations have the same motivation. 8 years in the real world will disabuse anyone of a desire to spend more time then necessary in school.

Or they got an associate's degree, which is a 2-year degree which typically requires some lower-division coursework.

Re: ROI on a college degree depends what you study, not where

#110

Post by saint_fiasco »

JackFr wrote: post #61
rayiner wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that point of view to be a conceit. It's an emulation of the noble classes of yore, who learned things they didn't need to know as a way of signaling that they could afford to do so because they didn't need to work. Most people are no better off 10-years down the line for having learned about what native Americans used to live in Virginia or what covalent bonds are.

> Most people are no better off 10-years down the line for having learned about what native Americans used to live in Virginia or what covalent bonds are. That all depends on how you measure better off. Knowledge, understanding, wisdom are goods unto themselves. No doubt, we need to eat, but I'd rather know Latin, Norse mythology, Anselm's ontological proof, the Platonic solids, and the major players in the Glorious…

>Knowledge, understanding, wisdom

You can get the first two for free on a library.

You are making a mistake when you compare the knowledge, understanding and wisdom you would get in College against nothing and then decide that College is better than nothing. You should compare it against all the other things people could be doing with that time and money. The opportunity cost.

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