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It Depends What You Study, Not Where

economist.com

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Re: It Depends What You Study, Not Where

#61

Post by nostrademons »

a_small_island wrote: post #60
nostrademons wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In technical fields this is usually reliable (someone who went to CMU or MIT and graduated probably put in a pretty high baseline level of work), but in more liberal arts fields school quality correlates much less to a baseline quality level. At my alma mater (Amherst), for example, the easiest course of study would be to take 4 humanities classes / semester, spend 12 hours/week in classes, write 3 papers/semester fo…

>"You really did a lot of work but just missed the cutoff" to "You learned basically nothing from your undergraduate education." Or maybe they learned exactly what they needed to do to game the system. Does doing a lot of work correlate to learning more? Seems both sides of the huge distribution got the same perceived outcome, just one did it easier.

Parent poster is speaking from the perspective of a hiring manager trying to evaluate the candidate. From that perspective, the critical question is "Will this person perform well at my company if I hire them?" Gaming the college degree system and learning the domain-specific information needed to perform well at a job are very different skillsets. Assuming a small team with a focused mission, general work ethic and ability to quickly absorb information correlate well with the latter, but not the former. (In a big company where nobody knows what anybody else is doing, the correlation often goes the other way and ability to game the system correlates better with success, but usually those don't have individual hiring managers evaluating resumes.)

Re: It Depends What You Study, Not Where

#62

Post by s4chin »

madengr wrote: post #57
shawndumas wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

interesting; happen to have a link or a term that'll help me find it? thx

Sorry, no. I have been trying to find it myself. It was within the last 6 months.

Was it this, by any chance? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11013997

Re: It Depends What You Study, Not Where

#63

Post by brockf »

nostrademons wrote: post #58
_asummers wrote: post #18

The big thing for me with top schools is the "baseline quality of the degree". I didn't go to a top school, but spent my time studying everything math and CS related I could, and managed to get an awesome education. At the same time, I am fully cognizant of the fact that peers who were less driven likely were more easily able to skate by, for the most part. So when a resume comes across my desk from a guy from my alm…

In technical fields this is usually reliable (someone who went to CMU or MIT and graduated probably put in a pretty high baseline level of work), but in more liberal arts fields school quality correlates much less to a baseline quality level. At my alma mater (Amherst), for example, the easiest course of study would be to take 4 humanities classes / semester, spend 12 hours/week in classes, write 3 papers/semester fo…

Grade inflation has really made these inferences even more difficult; for example, the median grade at Harvard is actually an A- (not the well-balanced distribution you hypothesized).

Re: It Depends What You Study, Not Where

#64

Post by madengr »

s4chin wrote: post #62
madengr wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, no. I have been trying to find it myself. It was within the last 6 months.

Was it this, by any chance? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11013997

Maybe. It's pay walled for me. It has a chart with compensation.

Re: It Depends What You Study, Not Where

#65

Post by aab0 »

RyanZAG wrote: post #53

> compare the career earnings of graduates with the present-day cost of a degree at their alma maters, net of financial aid Woah, what? So a degree that cost $1 but raised your career earnings by $100 would be at 100%? 1000%? Not sure how they're doing the math, but it completely dwarfs the rest. And shows how obviously flawed the measure itself is. One of the key things left out is the baseline cost of time. A few y…

> One of the key things left out is the baseline cost of time. A few years of your life is not free and probably makes for a pretty high baseline cost.

Hm, wouldn't that already be accounted for in using 'lifetime earnings'? If someone doesn't go to college and earns $1m, and another person goes to college and earns $1.1m, then the extra 4 working years apparently didn't compensate enough. Plus, college can be a lot more fun than working.

Re: It Depends What You Study, Not Where

#66

Post by enraged_camel »

rishubhav wrote: post #56

When will journalists finally learn that Payscale is absolutely useless for this kind of analysis? The Payscale sample is solely graduates who never got a grad degree. All this data suggests is that STEM majors are more likely to get high-paying jobs with only their undergrad degrees. It completely omits the many humanities/arts majors who go on to graduate study and thence to perfectly lucrative careers.

>>It completely omits the many humanities/arts majors who go on to graduate study and thence to perfectly lucrative careers.

Do you have any sources for this?

Re: It Depends What You Study, Not Where

#70

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

hibikir wrote: post #35
copperx wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard this from my peers in undergrad all the time and it befuddled me. I thought "so ... you have no curiosity about the world? about how stuff works?." I'm not claiming that I had hifalutin ideals; I knew that money was important, but I had this (perhaps naive) idea that if I became an excellent practitioner in whatever I did the money would follow. I just wasn't prepared to hear "I'm just here to get a good job"…

It's really easy to think that a set of life decisions are good because they worked well for you, but that's not how the world works: Across every road, there are a lot of events we cannot control, decisions made with imperfect information. We make mistakes, we fail, through no special fault of our own. Every path is great if you are talented AND lucky. But it makes no sense to evaluate a road by just looking at the…

There is no "the world". There are only people making choices, often on the basis of a default morality they've never thought about.

The kinds of failures you're describing are exactly what you get when the default morality is "Make as much money as possible".

You can say it's currently maladapted to expect more, and that's possibly true.

That doesn't mean it's an ideal situation, or a praise-worthy one. If the talents of smart people are consistently underutilised, that's a social problem and not just a series of unrelated individual failures.

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