4 ms·

This article starts of interesting but goes totally off the rails. If you want to make an argument that college tuition is a fraud, you need to quantify and qua

This article starts of interesting but goes totally off the rails. If you want to make an argument that college tuition is a fraud, you need to quantify and quality that. Other than evidence for administrative bloat, the real number to look at is ROI. If you look at ROI, the numbers are positive. People who go to college have higher lifetime incomes that folks that don't. If you were to go into that in more detail, you'd find that this differs drastically by major, with certain majors being negative. A good article would've broken this down further and asked the question of whether return on college education was causation or reverse-causation or whether lucrative engineering education can now be done online for lower cost. There's also the idea of college as a means of accreditation for the job market. The author goes into none of this. What about the development of nuclear energy, football, DNA fingerprinting, birth-control and LSD? All created in American colleges.

devwastaken 4y ago
People whom go to university would have higher ROI regardless. Before covid companies continued to argue "no remote, this is how things are done and we know it's right". Then rules came along that forced industries to actually do things differently, and what do you know, we didn't need offices. Efficiency increased, useless corporate bloat deleted. If tomorrow we closed all public uni doors, the companies that profit from it will finally be pushed to fund education. Especially tech. They have the money, but we keep pulling money out of our neighbors pockets instead. R&D in private industry does far more than any uni can. They don't have the market to be attracting top talent, or equipment nor facilities. Which is why you see everything under a company, not a university. These are institutions far out of date. All we need to do is push it and it'll crumble.
randomdata 4y ago
> People who go to college have higher lifetime incomes that folks that don't. A flawed comparison, though. Nobody was ever expecting the academic superstar, who breezed his way through college, to make the same or less than someone who suffers from crippling down syndrome, who was rejected by college admissions. Clearly people exist on a spectrum. Some people are much more capable than others and the marketplace will pay more for those who are more capable. Contrary to popular belief, down syndrome is established in the womb, not caused by not going to college. What we really want to know is if the same person will realize a higher lifetime income by going to college verses not. That's impossible to determine experimentally, but what we can do is observe people on the spectrum over time. Within a sufficiently large population, the spectrum will remain continuous even as individuals come and go. Unfortunately, when we do that we find that incomes have held stagnant. The matching person of the past without a college degree made the same amount of money as the equivalent person today with a degree. This means that college does not provide an income boost. The selection bias you point out is real, but doesn't provide anything useful other than to remind us that correlation does not imply causation.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  > Unfortunately, when we do that we find that incomes have held stagnant. The matching person of the past without a college degree made the same amount of money as the equivalent person today with a degree. This means that college does not provide an income boost. Citation?
  - randomdata 4y ago
    Don't have a degree? Well, let me tell you, while it may not help with your income it will teach you how to conduct basic research. Consider it.
tengbretson 4y ago
> People who go to college have higher lifetime incomes that folks that don't. The stat you are trying to cite relates to graduating college, not simply "going to". Currently the 4 year graduation rate is ~40%, and the 6 year graduation rate only around 60%. That is an incredible population to have yoked with debt through their most productive years with nothing to show for it.

devwastaken 4y ago

People whom go to university would have higher ROI regardless. Before covid companies continued to argue "no remote, this is how things are done and we know it's right". Then rules came along that forced industries to actually do things differently, and what do you know, we didn't need offices. Efficiency increased, useless corporate bloat deleted. If tomorrow we closed all public uni doors, the companies that profit from it will finally be pushed to fund education. Especially tech. They have the money, but we keep pulling money out of our neighbors pockets instead. R&D in private industry does far more than any uni can. They don't have the market to be attracting top talent, or equipment nor facilities. Which is why you see everything under a company, not a university. These are institutions far out of date. All we need to do is push it and it'll crumble.

randomdata 4y ago

> People who go to college have higher lifetime incomes that folks that don't. A flawed comparison, though. Nobody was ever expecting the academic superstar, who breezed his way through college, to make the same or less than someone who suffers from crippling down syndrome, who was rejected by college admissions. Clearly people exist on a spectrum. Some people are much more capable than others and the marketplace will pay more for those who are more capable. Contrary to popular belief, down syndrome is established in the womb, not caused by not going to college. What we really want to know is if the same person will realize a higher lifetime income by going to college verses not. That's impossible to determine experimentally, but what we can do is observe people on the spectrum over time. Within a sufficiently large population, the spectrum will remain continuous even as individuals come and go. Unfortunately, when we do that we find that incomes have held stagnant. The matching person of the past without a college degree made the same amount of money as the equivalent person today with a degree. This means that college does not provide an income boost. The selection bias you point out is real, but doesn't provide anything useful other than to remind us that correlation does not imply causation.

endisneigh 4y ago
> Unfortunately, when we do that we find that incomes have held stagnant. The matching person of the past without a college degree made the same amount of money as the equivalent person today with a degree. This means that college does not provide an income boost. Citation?
- randomdata 4y ago
  Don't have a degree? Well, let me tell you, while it may not help with your income it will teach you how to conduct basic research. Consider it.

tengbretson 4y ago

> People who go to college have higher lifetime incomes that folks that don't. The stat you are trying to cite relates to graduating college, not simply "going to". Currently the 4 year graduation rate is ~40%, and the 6 year graduation rate only around 60%. That is an incredible population to have yoked with debt through their most productive years with nothing to show for it.