Is College Worth It?
priceonomics.com
Is College Worth It?
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Re: Is College Worth It?
#2I have a problem with this method:
"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?
Re: Is College Worth It?
#3The schools doing well didn't surprise me. $120K for a Petroleum Engineer - wow!
Re: Is College Worth It?
#4Given 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...
Re: Is College Worth It?
#5It'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...
Re: Is College Worth It?
#6This 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.
Re: Is College Worth It?
#7"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."
Re: Is College Worth It?
#8From 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:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/business/economy/25leonhar...
http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/18586.html
http://siepr.stanford.edu/publicationsprofile/2555
https://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/2011sum...
http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap....
Re: Is College Worth It?
#9I have a problem with this method: "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 q…
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)
Re: Is College Worth It?
#10This 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.