6 ms·

Even for Cashiers, College Pays Off

41 points by kingkawn 15y ago

delinquentme 15y ago
published in NYT .. who within NYT has vested interests in the college market?
teyc 15y ago
The article failed to make the case that college graduates are better adapted to the current economic environment.
TomOfTTB 15y ago
The problem here is the author is mischaracterizing the debate. Right now we have a job environment where most good jobs require a college degree. The debate as to whether college is necessary asks if that environment is appropriate since college costs a lot of money and often falls short when it comes to imparting lifelong knowledge. When all those TV Shows, Newspapers and Blogs are having this debate the question they are asking is whether the environment that requires a degree should exist. So arguing that people with a degree make more money in the current environment is irrelevant to the debate itself. (He does set up a straw man of parents on the edge deciding not to send their kids to college but I see that as unrealistic. No parent who is going to send their kid to college changes their mind based on what Katie Couric says or what they read on a blog)
dereg 15y ago
College provides the greatest benefit for specialized fields like engineering, for example, in which the college education is effectively the job training.
reader5000 15y ago
Construction workers, police officers, plumbers, retail salespeople and secretaries, among others, make significantly more with a degree than without one. Why? Education helps people do higher-skilled work, get jobs with better-paying companies or open their own businesses. I would argue they earn more simply because of the signalling dynamics of possessing the degree, not that a college grad can do higher skilled work than a similarly situated non-grad. The question is is it fair/efficient to saddle young people with exorbitant debt and four extra years of classroom lecturing just to be able to competitively signal.
- tesseract 15y ago
  Signaling works precisely because the signal is expensive. I would be curious to see some data on whether, in countries where higher education is even more highly subsidized than it is in the US, having a degree has less of a signaling effect.
- HaloZero 15y ago
  It's also an indicator of a pursuit of knowledge beyond required. High school is mandatory, college is not. Acquiring a college degree is a sign that you were able to persist and acquire something without any enforcement. (There are cases when parents force you to college, etc. but I think those are less frequent and usually finishing college is a sign of dedication on your part).
- jdhopeunique 15y ago
  Also lost in the debate, it is not just the signalling effect or the acquired knowledge but the selection bias that is not taken into account. Consider this science experiment: A scientist is testing a "success" pill. He picks 2 groups filtered by standardized test scores. He gives the pill to the high scoring group and a placebo to the low scoring group. Those in the group receiving the non-placebo are found to be more successful and the scientist concludes that the "success" pill is effective. Preposterous? Yes. The scientist is not randomly selecting groups. This is precisely what happens in stories linking college and success. The filtering or selection bias is not addressed and would occur even if the signalling advantages were ruled out.
  - randomdata 15y ago
    Exactly. It seems like a lot of potentially false conclusions are drawn from the data. Successfully completing a degree requires a significant amount of motivation and determination. Finding a good, high paying, job also requires a signifiant amount of motivation and determination. Perhaps motivated and determined people will earn more on average? People in higher class families are more likely to further their education. People in higher class families are more likely to have more business connections. Perhaps people from higher class families earn more on average? People who are good at and enjoy learning are more likely to go to college. People who are good at and enjoy learning are highly valued on the job. Perhaps people who learn quickly earn more? When all you have is correlation, an infinite number of conclusions can be reached. Why is it assumed that the degree is what makes the difference? It seems more likely to me that the attributes one is born with are much greater indicators of success.
tokenadult 15y ago
Charles Murray points out http://www.openeducation.net/2008/08/20/charles-murray-%E2%80%93-for-most-people-college-is-a-waste-of-time/ http://www.openeducation.net/2008/08/20/charles-murray-%E2%8... that what employers need is a signal of competence, but a four-year college degree is a very costly signal for a job-seeker to obtain. Many poor, hard-working people are locked out of the job market by the price of a college degree. Isn't it possible that college degree holders are at an advantage in seeking employment by comparison to persons without college degrees simply because of the signaling effect of possessing a degree? The current job market seems to say that possessing a college degree is an advantage even if students are learning very little during their four years of college. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/01/18/106949/study-many-college-students-not.html http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/01/18/106949/study-many-coll...
- kenjackson 15y ago
  The current job market seems to say that possessing a college degree is an advantage even if students are learning very little during their four years of college. The problem with these studies is that what they actually say and the spin are two very different things. For example, from your link: "After four years, 36 percent showed no significant gains in these so-called "higher order" thinking skills." So 64% of students showed significant gains in higher order thinkings skills? That's non-trivial. This says to me that a good majority of college students are much stronger than when they left high school. And I suspect, much to the chagrin of many on HN, that many of those in the 64% are also top students. And for those that aren't top students, they're obvious in other ways. The other thing the article seems to point out is that you can get through college with minimal effort if you choose to, but if you do put in the effort you reap the rewards. While college is too expensive, I'm not sure its failing as an institution of learning. Its biggest problem appears to be making it too easy on those who want to take the easy way out.
Pinckney 15y ago
The article conflates two different questions: a) whether universal higher education is sensible, and b) whether it makes financial sense for an individual to get a college education. Do individuals benefit financially from a college degree, given certain assumptions about degree and institution? Yes. But a more interesting question is to what extent those degrees provide increased human capital, and to what extent it is a signal of existing quality. For instance, if the value of certain college degrees is only as a method to differentiate between good and bad employees, universal higher education accomplishes nothing but to destroy that signal, without adding value. This provides an example scenario under which it is sensible for individuals to obtain higher education, but universal higher education is nevertheless inferior as a policy to limited higher education. Thus the author errs in providing the individual benefit as a justification for universal higher education.
Duff 15y ago
The college vs. no college debate is bunk. The real question is: Why doesn't high school prepare folks with the skills needed to succeed in one of the professions mentioned in the article. The key to succeeding in all of those jobs is command of reading and arithmetic. If you can read a manual and do enough math to handle money at some scale, you're 80% of the way to succeeding somewhere. Public schools utterly fail at helping students achieve this. 99% of 18 year olds should be able to interpret a train schedule or read and understand a big-city newspaper. 99% of 18 year olds should be capable of doing long division and computing percentages without tools. The reality is far less. Getting through college is essentially a filter that eliminates the folks who are not appropriately literate or capable of doing math. As an extreme anecdotal example, I worked with an illiterate retail computer salesman in his 30's while I was in college. He was a good salesman who relied on memorization and mastery of the legacy, AS/400 terminal based system. He was an intelligent, driven man -- but he couldn't advance, and struggled when the company introduced a browser based configure to order system.
- socillion 15y ago
  Both you and TFA make the assumption that college increases your skill in fields such as plumbing. Correlation (college & higher pay) =/= Causation (college => more skill => more pay), and that is why people debate the current college situation. Why is it that a future plumber needs to go to college to maximize his earnings, when it will have little to no benefit to his plumbing prowess, and would in fact hinder it due to the opportunity cost of those 4 years? > Getting through college is essentially a filter that eliminates the folks who are not appropriately literate or capable of doing math. What a ridiculously wasteful filter. > Public schools utterly fail at helping students achieve this. 99% of 18 year olds should be able to interpret a train schedule or read and understand a big-city newspaper. 99% of 18 year olds should be capable of doing long division and computing percentages without tools. The reality is far less. Are you sure about that? Long division is admittedly rapidly becoming a lost art (calculators, cell phones, anything electronic has a way to divide!) However, I'd be surprised if nearly everyone wasn't capable of the rest.
  - klbarry 15y ago
dusklight 15y ago
Just a quick comment about averages .. the writer makes the argument that the average income of a college graduate is much higher than someone who did not go to college but this is a very misleading statistic .. because the incomes of college graduates who got engineering, finance, medicine and law degrees have much higher incomes, but someone who got a history degree for example, does not.
rkon 15y ago
Correlation doesn't imply causation. How is that still so hard for some people to grasp? His entire argument is invalid because it's based on that simple fallacy. The selection process will obviously skew any results in favor of colleges. It's the same as trying to argue that playing for the San Francisco Giants automatically makes you better at baseball. Is that really the case, or did they just do a good job of picking players who were already the best?
bugsy 15y ago
This article is a very annoying piece of propaganda. The worst fallacy is the poisoned well ad hominem at the end where he claims that those who advise against college have degrees and therefore are selfish meanie "elitists" who are trying to stomp down the poor collegeless masses and keep them from advancing. It goes without saying that those who haven't been to college likewise are not allowed to advise against it, since they haven't been, how would they know? Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Whether you have been to college or not, you are not allowed to have an opinion or advice others that one should consider carefully whether they want to go into significant debt in return for college. Regarding the fallacy it can easily be turned around to argue that the author is not qualified to argue for college because he has been and therefore has been brainwashed into the cult. Just as absurd an argument and the same reasoning. He also claims that the average current cost of attending 4 year public colleges in the US is $2000. This is complete nonsense. As others have pointed out here, the reason degreed people are better plumbers is because they were smarter to begin with, not because they learned plumbing in college. There was a study a couple years ago (sorry, no citation, can't find it) that compared people who were accepted into college but didn't go to those who were accepted and did go. He found that there was no difference in their earnings. The study showed that earnings differences are not due to "learning advanced skills" or such in college, but due to the fact that people who were already more capable to begin with were the ones that got accepted in the first place. Duh.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  He also claims that the average current cost of attending 4 year public colleges in the US is $2000. This is complete nonsense. I think the author is correct, but you're largely misquoting him. The author actually said this: "First, many colleges are not very expensive, once financial aid is taken into account. Average net tuition and fees at public four-year colleges this past year were only about $2,000 (though Congress may soon cut federal financial aid). " And if you read the cited article it points out that over the five years from 2004 to 2009 (when the cited article was written), while the "sticker price" of college has gone up dramatically, the actual amount paid by students has actually declined (for tuition and fees): "Yes. At public four-year colleges, the sticker price rose by 20 percent over the past five years (these are inflation-adjusted dollars, as are all historical comparisons I’m making), but the average net price fell $400 — from about $2,000 to $1,600. At private four-year colleges the sticker price rose by 15 percent, but the average net price fell 9 percent, or about $1,100. It is important to note that these figures are just for tuition and fees. Students also have to live, eat, buy books, and cover other expenses while they are in school. "
petegrif 15y ago
My faith in some of the research underlying this article took a fatal hit when I read that the researchers discovered that whereas a dishwasher with no degree earned $19K, a college graduate earned $34K for the same menial task. It may just be me but that rings so untrue that it bears investigation. To me it is unfathomable why an employer would pay a dishwasher 15K a year more because he/she has a degree. I don't buy it.
paganel 15y ago
> The educated American masses helped create the American century, as the economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have written More evidence needed. IMHO, the Nazis and their craziness did a lot more for creating "the American century" than US schools. First, by forcing to emigrate all the smart Jewish University professors in the 1930s, and then by getting defeated in WW2 and allowing both the Americans and the Soviets to take advantage of their research in rocket-related fields.
bhickey 15y ago
I didn't see any mention of cost of living adjustment. Could it be that plumbers living in Boston are more likely to have college degrees than plumbers living in Salem?

41 points by kingkawn 15y ago

delinquentme 15y ago

published in NYT .. who within NYT has vested interests in the college market?

teyc 15y ago

The article failed to make the case that college graduates are better adapted to the current economic environment.

TomOfTTB 15y ago

The problem here is the author is mischaracterizing the debate. Right now we have a job environment where most good jobs require a college degree. The debate as to whether college is necessary asks if that environment is appropriate since college costs a lot of money and often falls short when it comes to imparting lifelong knowledge. When all those TV Shows, Newspapers and Blogs are having this debate the question they are asking is whether the environment that requires a degree should exist. So arguing that people with a degree make more money in the current environment is irrelevant to the debate itself. (He does set up a straw man of parents on the edge deciding not to send their kids to college but I see that as unrealistic. No parent who is going to send their kid to college changes their mind based on what Katie Couric says or what they read on a blog)

dereg 15y ago

College provides the greatest benefit for specialized fields like engineering, for example, in which the college education is effectively the job training.

reader5000 15y ago

Construction workers, police officers, plumbers, retail salespeople and secretaries, among others, make significantly more with a degree than without one. Why? Education helps people do higher-skilled work, get jobs with better-paying companies or open their own businesses. I would argue they earn more simply because of the signalling dynamics of possessing the degree, not that a college grad can do higher skilled work than a similarly situated non-grad. The question is is it fair/efficient to saddle young people with exorbitant debt and four extra years of classroom lecturing just to be able to competitively signal.

tesseract 15y ago
Signaling works precisely because the signal is expensive. I would be curious to see some data on whether, in countries where higher education is even more highly subsidized than it is in the US, having a degree has less of a signaling effect.
HaloZero 15y ago
It's also an indicator of a pursuit of knowledge beyond required. High school is mandatory, college is not. Acquiring a college degree is a sign that you were able to persist and acquire something without any enforcement. (There are cases when parents force you to college, etc. but I think those are less frequent and usually finishing college is a sign of dedication on your part).
jdhopeunique 15y ago
Also lost in the debate, it is not just the signalling effect or the acquired knowledge but the selection bias that is not taken into account. Consider this science experiment: A scientist is testing a "success" pill. He picks 2 groups filtered by standardized test scores. He gives the pill to the high scoring group and a placebo to the low scoring group. Those in the group receiving the non-placebo are found to be more successful and the scientist concludes that the "success" pill is effective. Preposterous? Yes. The scientist is not randomly selecting groups. This is precisely what happens in stories linking college and success. The filtering or selection bias is not addressed and would occur even if the signalling advantages were ruled out.
- randomdata 15y ago
  Exactly. It seems like a lot of potentially false conclusions are drawn from the data. Successfully completing a degree requires a significant amount of motivation and determination. Finding a good, high paying, job also requires a signifiant amount of motivation and determination. Perhaps motivated and determined people will earn more on average? People in higher class families are more likely to further their education. People in higher class families are more likely to have more business connections. Perhaps people from higher class families earn more on average? People who are good at and enjoy learning are more likely to go to college. People who are good at and enjoy learning are highly valued on the job. Perhaps people who learn quickly earn more? When all you have is correlation, an infinite number of conclusions can be reached. Why is it assumed that the degree is what makes the difference? It seems more likely to me that the attributes one is born with are much greater indicators of success.

tokenadult 15y ago

Charles Murray points out http://www.openeducation.net/2008/08/20/charles-murray-%E2%80%93-for-most-people-college-is-a-waste-of-time/ http://www.openeducation.net/2008/08/20/charles-murray-%E2%8... that what employers need is a signal of competence, but a four-year college degree is a very costly signal for a job-seeker to obtain. Many poor, hard-working people are locked out of the job market by the price of a college degree. Isn't it possible that college degree holders are at an advantage in seeking employment by comparison to persons without college degrees simply because of the signaling effect of possessing a degree? The current job market seems to say that possessing a college degree is an advantage even if students are learning very little during their four years of college. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/01/18/106949/study-many-college-students-not.html http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/01/18/106949/study-many-coll...

kenjackson 15y ago
The current job market seems to say that possessing a college degree is an advantage even if students are learning very little during their four years of college. The problem with these studies is that what they actually say and the spin are two very different things. For example, from your link: "After four years, 36 percent showed no significant gains in these so-called "higher order" thinking skills." So 64% of students showed significant gains in higher order thinkings skills? That's non-trivial. This says to me that a good majority of college students are much stronger than when they left high school. And I suspect, much to the chagrin of many on HN, that many of those in the 64% are also top students. And for those that aren't top students, they're obvious in other ways. The other thing the article seems to point out is that you can get through college with minimal effort if you choose to, but if you do put in the effort you reap the rewards. While college is too expensive, I'm not sure its failing as an institution of learning. Its biggest problem appears to be making it too easy on those who want to take the easy way out.

Pinckney 15y ago

The article conflates two different questions: a) whether universal higher education is sensible, and b) whether it makes financial sense for an individual to get a college education. Do individuals benefit financially from a college degree, given certain assumptions about degree and institution? Yes. But a more interesting question is to what extent those degrees provide increased human capital, and to what extent it is a signal of existing quality. For instance, if the value of certain college degrees is only as a method to differentiate between good and bad employees, universal higher education accomplishes nothing but to destroy that signal, without adding value. This provides an example scenario under which it is sensible for individuals to obtain higher education, but universal higher education is nevertheless inferior as a policy to limited higher education. Thus the author errs in providing the individual benefit as a justification for universal higher education.

Duff 15y ago

The college vs. no college debate is bunk. The real question is: Why doesn't high school prepare folks with the skills needed to succeed in one of the professions mentioned in the article. The key to succeeding in all of those jobs is command of reading and arithmetic. If you can read a manual and do enough math to handle money at some scale, you're 80% of the way to succeeding somewhere. Public schools utterly fail at helping students achieve this. 99% of 18 year olds should be able to interpret a train schedule or read and understand a big-city newspaper. 99% of 18 year olds should be capable of doing long division and computing percentages without tools. The reality is far less. Getting through college is essentially a filter that eliminates the folks who are not appropriately literate or capable of doing math. As an extreme anecdotal example, I worked with an illiterate retail computer salesman in his 30's while I was in college. He was a good salesman who relied on memorization and mastery of the legacy, AS/400 terminal based system. He was an intelligent, driven man -- but he couldn't advance, and struggled when the company introduced a browser based configure to order system.

socillion 15y ago
Both you and TFA make the assumption that college increases your skill in fields such as plumbing. Correlation (college & higher pay) =/= Causation (college => more skill => more pay), and that is why people debate the current college situation. Why is it that a future plumber needs to go to college to maximize his earnings, when it will have little to no benefit to his plumbing prowess, and would in fact hinder it due to the opportunity cost of those 4 years? > Getting through college is essentially a filter that eliminates the folks who are not appropriately literate or capable of doing math. What a ridiculously wasteful filter. > Public schools utterly fail at helping students achieve this. 99% of 18 year olds should be able to interpret a train schedule or read and understand a big-city newspaper. 99% of 18 year olds should be capable of doing long division and computing percentages without tools. The reality is far less. Are you sure about that? Long division is admittedly rapidly becoming a lost art (calculators, cell phones, anything electronic has a way to divide!) However, I'd be surprised if nearly everyone wasn't capable of the rest.
- klbarry 15y ago

dusklight 15y ago

Just a quick comment about averages .. the writer makes the argument that the average income of a college graduate is much higher than someone who did not go to college but this is a very misleading statistic .. because the incomes of college graduates who got engineering, finance, medicine and law degrees have much higher incomes, but someone who got a history degree for example, does not.

rkon 15y ago

Correlation doesn't imply causation. How is that still so hard for some people to grasp? His entire argument is invalid because it's based on that simple fallacy. The selection process will obviously skew any results in favor of colleges. It's the same as trying to argue that playing for the San Francisco Giants automatically makes you better at baseball. Is that really the case, or did they just do a good job of picking players who were already the best?

bugsy 15y ago

This article is a very annoying piece of propaganda. The worst fallacy is the poisoned well ad hominem at the end where he claims that those who advise against college have degrees and therefore are selfish meanie "elitists" who are trying to stomp down the poor collegeless masses and keep them from advancing. It goes without saying that those who haven't been to college likewise are not allowed to advise against it, since they haven't been, how would they know? Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Whether you have been to college or not, you are not allowed to have an opinion or advice others that one should consider carefully whether they want to go into significant debt in return for college. Regarding the fallacy it can easily be turned around to argue that the author is not qualified to argue for college because he has been and therefore has been brainwashed into the cult. Just as absurd an argument and the same reasoning. He also claims that the average current cost of attending 4 year public colleges in the US is $2000. This is complete nonsense. As others have pointed out here, the reason degreed people are better plumbers is because they were smarter to begin with, not because they learned plumbing in college. There was a study a couple years ago (sorry, no citation, can't find it) that compared people who were accepted into college but didn't go to those who were accepted and did go. He found that there was no difference in their earnings. The study showed that earnings differences are not due to "learning advanced skills" or such in college, but due to the fact that people who were already more capable to begin with were the ones that got accepted in the first place. Duh.

kenjackson 15y ago
He also claims that the average current cost of attending 4 year public colleges in the US is $2000. This is complete nonsense. I think the author is correct, but you're largely misquoting him. The author actually said this: "First, many colleges are not very expensive, once financial aid is taken into account. Average net tuition and fees at public four-year colleges this past year were only about $2,000 (though Congress may soon cut federal financial aid). " And if you read the cited article it points out that over the five years from 2004 to 2009 (when the cited article was written), while the "sticker price" of college has gone up dramatically, the actual amount paid by students has actually declined (for tuition and fees): "Yes. At public four-year colleges, the sticker price rose by 20 percent over the past five years (these are inflation-adjusted dollars, as are all historical comparisons I’m making), but the average net price fell $400 — from about $2,000 to $1,600. At private four-year colleges the sticker price rose by 15 percent, but the average net price fell 9 percent, or about $1,100. It is important to note that these figures are just for tuition and fees. Students also have to live, eat, buy books, and cover other expenses while they are in school. "

petegrif 15y ago

My faith in some of the research underlying this article took a fatal hit when I read that the researchers discovered that whereas a dishwasher with no degree earned $19K, a college graduate earned $34K for the same menial task. It may just be me but that rings so untrue that it bears investigation. To me it is unfathomable why an employer would pay a dishwasher 15K a year more because he/she has a degree. I don't buy it.

paganel 15y ago

> The educated American masses helped create the American century, as the economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have written More evidence needed. IMHO, the Nazis and their craziness did a lot more for creating "the American century" than US schools. First, by forcing to emigrate all the smart Jewish University professors in the 1930s, and then by getting defeated in WW2 and allowing both the Americans and the Soviets to take advantage of their research in rocket-related fields.

bhickey 15y ago

I didn't see any mention of cost of living adjustment. Could it be that plumbers living in Boston are more likely to have college degrees than plumbers living in Salem?