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Is College Worth It?

priceonomics.com

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Re: Is College Worth It?

#81

Post by beambot »

zeteo wrote: post #67
btilly wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gr…

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.

Re: Is College Worth It?

#82

Post by randomdata »

Zimahl wrote: post #80
randomdata wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_U... [2…

Is that assertion based on more than emotion? Emotion? It's based on honest assessment. 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…

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.

Re: Is College Worth It?

#84

Post by [deleted] »

beambot wrote: post #81
zeteo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 / communica…

[deleted]

Re: Is College Worth It?

#85

Post by zeteo »

beambot wrote: post #81
zeteo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 / communica…

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.

Re: Is College Worth It?

#86

Post by rjbwork »

zeteo wrote: post #53
ppereira wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

>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.

Re: Is College Worth It?

#87

Post by brey »

zeteo wrote: post #45

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…

anyone can buy a suit.

not anyone can complete a 4 year degree from MIT; employers know this, and use it as a signal to show intelligence.

Re: Is College Worth It?

#89

Post by daemonk »

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.

Re: Is College Worth It?

#90

Post by therobot24 »

daemonk wrote: post #89

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 high…

couldn't agree more

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'

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