3 ms·

> people with a 4 year degree on average earn 2x the income of people without a degree I feel like the better measure would be comparing their productivity, r

> people with a 4 year degree on average earn 2x the income of people without a degree I feel like the better measure would be comparing their productivity, rather than the base rate at which society, on average, appears to value degrees.

bawolff 5y ago
Why? I can't eat productivity.
dahart 5y ago
The question was whether education is a good investment, which poses the idea of some kind of return on an initial cost. The investment question was posed in the form of personal cost and personal return. In that sense, productivity is not a measure of the personal return of an education. I mean a few people might see it that way, and it could be associated indirectly with success, but by and large productivity on it’s own is not a benefit. Productivity could be seen as the social return for a social (tax based) investment in education, and indeed we do measure things like GDP and compare nations on a global scale. In that sense, education appears to be a good investment socially. Countries that have high rates of education also have high GDP. Aside from that, unfortunately, it’s extremely difficult to measure “productivity”. You might want to take a stab at trying to define what that even means for people in various careers. It’s easy to measure the productivity of factory workers, but insanely hard to measure productivity for doctors or writers or advertisers or nearly any white collar job. Is productivity measured by how much output there is, regardless of quality? Is productivity measured by how much money exchanges hands? These things could be even worse than valuing education, no?
wutbrodo 5y ago
Not to mention the selection effect: if you took the cohort that would finish four year degrees and didn't send them to college, they would still be making more money.
- dahart 5y ago
  This has been studied. It’s true but only with caveats and qualifications. Yes they’d be making “more”, but the only important question is how much more, and the answer is that it’s not nearly as much as the degree holders. One really big reason for this is that income is partly based on having the degree, not some kind of objective idea of skill or intelligence or determination.
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    Of course, there's a dramatic premium on college degrees, no question about that. But the selection effect in that statistic is disproportionately important to understand, even if at this moment in time its magnitude is low. It helps understand the counterfactuals necessary to think about how the credentialist dynamic can or may change. Eg if you can cleanly extract the signal that employers are getting from it, you can decouple it from the corrupt, extractive institutions that are currently squatting over the credential.
    - dahart 5y ago
      I’d be careful not to jump to the conclusion that credentials are bad or requiring them amounts to anything corrupt, extractive or squatting. There’s nothing inherently wrong with requiring that a job applicant meet minimum standards, in fact most people are wildly in favor of requirements when it comes to, say, doctors & lawyers, not to mention our infrastructure designers and safety inspectors, etc.. It’s certainly within the purview of the employer to define those requirements, and okay for them to require some well rounded ness and non-vocational skills, right? The selection effect has, like I mentioned earlier, been studied extensively, and many researchers have come to the conclusion that despite the credentialism, college degrees also do impart useful knowledge and skills on the degree holders, even when attempting to adjust for many possible confounding factors such as family income, family education, and the filtering weight of the credential system. It’s not that hard to accept that the majority of people who spend 4 or more years trying to learn actually do learn something and achieve some general skills, right? It’s complicated, but I don’t necessarily see it as a bad thing that society & business widely agree to allow the bachelor’s degree to represent a certain level of preparedness. Yes, it’s a wildly blunt measure, often inaccurate, and it may be commonly misinterpreted too, since we’re really talking about minimum standards, and not a measure of skill, but I see reasons why the state of things might have evolved this way and might not necessarily be broken to a first approximation.
tharne 5y ago
Also, this doesn't take into account the fact that people who get a 4 year degree are more likely to have parents who are well off. In a lot of ways a college degree is just a measure of your parent's socioeconomic status.

bawolff 5y ago

Why? I can't eat productivity.

dahart 5y ago

The question was whether education is a good investment, which poses the idea of some kind of return on an initial cost. The investment question was posed in the form of personal cost and personal return. In that sense, productivity is not a measure of the personal return of an education. I mean a few people might see it that way, and it could be associated indirectly with success, but by and large productivity on it’s own is not a benefit. Productivity could be seen as the social return for a social (tax based) investment in education, and indeed we do measure things like GDP and compare nations on a global scale. In that sense, education appears to be a good investment socially. Countries that have high rates of education also have high GDP. Aside from that, unfortunately, it’s extremely difficult to measure “productivity”. You might want to take a stab at trying to define what that even means for people in various careers. It’s easy to measure the productivity of factory workers, but insanely hard to measure productivity for doctors or writers or advertisers or nearly any white collar job. Is productivity measured by how much output there is, regardless of quality? Is productivity measured by how much money exchanges hands? These things could be even worse than valuing education, no?

wutbrodo 5y ago

Not to mention the selection effect: if you took the cohort that would finish four year degrees and didn't send them to college, they would still be making more money.

dahart 5y ago
This has been studied. It’s true but only with caveats and qualifications. Yes they’d be making “more”, but the only important question is how much more, and the answer is that it’s not nearly as much as the degree holders. One really big reason for this is that income is partly based on having the degree, not some kind of objective idea of skill or intelligence or determination.
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  Of course, there's a dramatic premium on college degrees, no question about that. But the selection effect in that statistic is disproportionately important to understand, even if at this moment in time its magnitude is low. It helps understand the counterfactuals necessary to think about how the credentialist dynamic can or may change. Eg if you can cleanly extract the signal that employers are getting from it, you can decouple it from the corrupt, extractive institutions that are currently squatting over the credential.
  - dahart 5y ago
    I’d be careful not to jump to the conclusion that credentials are bad or requiring them amounts to anything corrupt, extractive or squatting. There’s nothing inherently wrong with requiring that a job applicant meet minimum standards, in fact most people are wildly in favor of requirements when it comes to, say, doctors & lawyers, not to mention our infrastructure designers and safety inspectors, etc.. It’s certainly within the purview of the employer to define those requirements, and okay for them to require some well rounded ness and non-vocational skills, right? The selection effect has, like I mentioned earlier, been studied extensively, and many researchers have come to the conclusion that despite the credentialism, college degrees also do impart useful knowledge and skills on the degree holders, even when attempting to adjust for many possible confounding factors such as family income, family education, and the filtering weight of the credential system. It’s not that hard to accept that the majority of people who spend 4 or more years trying to learn actually do learn something and achieve some general skills, right? It’s complicated, but I don’t necessarily see it as a bad thing that society & business widely agree to allow the bachelor’s degree to represent a certain level of preparedness. Yes, it’s a wildly blunt measure, often inaccurate, and it may be commonly misinterpreted too, since we’re really talking about minimum standards, and not a measure of skill, but I see reasons why the state of things might have evolved this way and might not necessarily be broken to a first approximation.

tharne 5y ago

Also, this doesn't take into account the fact that people who get a 4 year degree are more likely to have parents who are well off. In a lot of ways a college degree is just a measure of your parent's socioeconomic status.