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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

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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.
    - wutbrodo 4y 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. I'm not assuming this. I have independent reason to consider universities to be corrupt, extractive institutions. This is downstream of their oligopolistic position wrt the labor market, but a hypothetical set of less-evil institutions than our current universities would still be an efficiency problem to be solved. The early steps places like Google have taken towards accepting certification programs are an example of (attempting to) cleanly separate the value that a degree confers, without cutting off access to large swathes of the population or condemning them to mountains of debt. Ie, there's a lot of signal in degrees, but there's a LOT of noise, and there's a massive amount of economic and moral value in finding better-quality signal. > I see reasons why the state of things might have evolved this way and might not necessarily be broken to a first approximation Yes, I hope this comment makes it clear that I'm not assuming that degrees are literally useless for hiring. But that is an extremely low bar, and I think it's similarly difficult to justify the claim that degrees are a remotely efficient bar for a big chunk of what they're currently used for. I grew up rich enough that I was able to deeply enjoy four years of intellectual exploration and partying, but that's cold comfort for the people locked out from being a firefighter or starting medical school or a thousand other productive pursuits, because they couldn't surmount the barrier of an additional tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars that the inefficient degree requirement confers. This isn't just theoretical: the choking-off of opportunity is IMO a massive tragedy relative to a world that was less enamored with the degree. That doesn't suggest we can simply burn the job market's credentialism down, but we can be clear-eyed about the current system's flaws and set our headings correctly for incremental change.
      - dahart 4y ago
        I see; and I pretty much completely agree. It is indeed a shame that we allow citizens to bear the cost of education personally, and that it even has to be a choice or justified as investment. You’re right that the cost acts as a pre-filter for income just to get in, and that the university system has flaws and is inefficient. I like the way you summarized it at the end and aspire to stay clear-eyed and oriented towards incremental improvement. Thanks for clarifying!

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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.
  - wutbrodo 4y 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. I'm not assuming this. I have independent reason to consider universities to be corrupt, extractive institutions. This is downstream of their oligopolistic position wrt the labor market, but a hypothetical set of less-evil institutions than our current universities would still be an efficiency problem to be solved. The early steps places like Google have taken towards accepting certification programs are an example of (attempting to) cleanly separate the value that a degree confers, without cutting off access to large swathes of the population or condemning them to mountains of debt. Ie, there's a lot of signal in degrees, but there's a LOT of noise, and there's a massive amount of economic and moral value in finding better-quality signal. > I see reasons why the state of things might have evolved this way and might not necessarily be broken to a first approximation Yes, I hope this comment makes it clear that I'm not assuming that degrees are literally useless for hiring. But that is an extremely low bar, and I think it's similarly difficult to justify the claim that degrees are a remotely efficient bar for a big chunk of what they're currently used for. I grew up rich enough that I was able to deeply enjoy four years of intellectual exploration and partying, but that's cold comfort for the people locked out from being a firefighter or starting medical school or a thousand other productive pursuits, because they couldn't surmount the barrier of an additional tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars that the inefficient degree requirement confers. This isn't just theoretical: the choking-off of opportunity is IMO a massive tragedy relative to a world that was less enamored with the degree. That doesn't suggest we can simply burn the job market's credentialism down, but we can be clear-eyed about the current system's flaws and set our headings correctly for incremental change.
    - dahart 4y ago
      I see; and I pretty much completely agree. It is indeed a shame that we allow citizens to bear the cost of education personally, and that it even has to be a choice or justified as investment. You’re right that the cost acts as a pre-filter for income just to get in, and that the university system has flaws and is inefficient. I like the way you summarized it at the end and aspire to stay clear-eyed and oriented towards incremental improvement. Thanks for clarifying!