12 ms·

Bottom line, a college degree is worth the cost and then some

26 points by null0ranje 3y ago

jdkee 3y ago
Endowments need to be taxed out of existence.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  Why?
- huitzitziltzin 3y ago
  Because if we did that then the missing revenue that schools currently get from their endowments would instead come from… 1.) thin air 2.) the government (??? No.) 3.) higher tuition -> hint: pick this option! The better question is why Harvard and Princeton charge tuition at all! (The answer to that question is not that hard either.)
  - bell-cot 3y ago
    How about: 4.) Cutting their massive bureaucracies so far back that the actual students once again outnumber the administrators?
  - hgsgm 3y ago
    > Harvard and Princeton charge tuition at all! Wealth redistribution / market segmentation.
  - bradfa 3y ago
    To be fair to Harvard and Princeton, neither actually costs very much to attend if you get accepted but come from a lower/middle income family. The hard part is getting accepted. Princeton has quite large aid packages outlined here: https://admission.princeton.edu/cost-aid https://admission.princeton.edu/cost-aid Harvard has different but also quite amazingly large aid packages for lower and middle-income students: https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/why-harvard/affordability https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/why-harvard/affordabi...
whitemary 3y ago
In the aggregate, sure, but this sort of nonsense diminishes the risk and liability involved. These people belong in Hell.
monero-xmr 3y ago
> Christopher Eisgruber is president of Princeton University Completely ignoring the contents of the opinion article, what do you expect this guy to say?
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  Fair point, but IMHO that's just a reason to double check his reasoning, not to discard his conclusion.
ramesh31 3y ago
It is absolutely worth the cost, but not for the education. A college degree is a class filter in this country, and nothing more. It's a ticket that says "I'm one of you" or not to the hiring manager. Us without are seen as inferior people, plain and simple.
TigeriusKirk 3y ago
Awesome. So student loan forgiveness is a wealth transfer to the more successful and therefore undesirable.
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  It's blatantly regressive, but it worked for getting young dems out to vote and likely a quite a few young centrists too.
londons_explore 3y ago
> According to repeated analyses by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a four-year degree generates an annual return of 14 percent over a 40-year career. I fail to see how this statistic can be calculated in a scientifically rigorous way. The only method would be to pick a pool of people, randomly divide the pool in two, and then force half to go to college, while you force the other half not to. Any other approach suffers from sampling bias - the smart motivated ones find a way to go to college, while the rest stay home and stack shelves at walmart for a lifetime. And now you're saying that being smart and motivated earns you more... Well no surprise there!
- huitzitziltzin 3y ago
  Congratulations you’ve identified exactly the problem which concerns literally every economist who has ever worked on this question. Education Econ people work very hard to get around exactly your worry. Education is not my field but there are ways to identify causal effects outside of experiments. So: you are wrong when you say “the only way to do this is…”
- verteu 3y ago
  One of the linked papers [1] describes several approaches to this problem (known as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_inference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_inference). They generally agree with the 10-15% ROI result. For example: - Regression discontinuity (find a college that accepts people who score >=X on a test, then compare people who scored X vs people who scored X-epsilon) - Instrumental variables (find something that would nudge people to go to college, like living close to a college) - Natural experiments (find an event that 'forced' many people to suddenly sign up, like 'avoiding the Vietnam war draft'). [1] Section 4 of https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-economics-080614-115510 https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-economics...
- marktangotango 3y ago
  Even that methodology is flawed. Walmart has a lot of store manager/assistant managers that do quite well with high school diplomas or GEDs. Smart motivated people also do well starting businesses or working in trades. The incessant narrative that a college degree as the path to prosperity is tired and worn and rightly perceived as bogus imo. University is now a business, and the product is degrees and "college experience", the customers are students. The product has suffered; degrees are no longer rigorous. Teaching faculty have suffered; tenure tracks has disappeared in favor of adjunct part time faculty. Students suffer under mountains of debt. The only winners are the legions of administrators. Some schools have as many as 1 administrator per 1 student. It's absurd.
anotherhue 3y ago
I had a flight of fancy recently where I thought I might try lecturing. I saw the below as required 'Qualifications' on a CUNY [0] posting for "Distinguished Lecturer - Curriculum & Teaching, Computer Science Education" [1]. I will leave it to you to determine if the qualifications they seek would lead you to believe your child would benefit from being under the instruction of such a person. Edit: See comment below, this particular institution has specific goals. MA Degree in Computer Science, Educational Technology, Education, or a closely related field; earned doctorate preferred but not required Expertise in computer science educational pedagogies Experience with outreach and community engagement Demonstrated commitment to social justice, multimodal learning, anti-racist pedagogies, multilingualism, and culturally and linguistically responsive and sustaining pedagogy Ability to collaborate in recruiting students for graduate programs Demonstrated ability to effectively teach adults in college level education programs in various modalities including in person, hybrid, synchronous and asynchronous modalities Experience with outreach and community engagement which are seen as important for developing the Computer Science Education Program at Hunter College. Demonstrated knowledge of computer science K-12 learning standards and curricula Experience integrating issues of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in teaching, scholarship, and service Experience teaching in classrooms, educational settings and communities with culturally diverse populations including multilingual learners Evidence of excellent written, oral, organizational, and interpersonal communication skills 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_University_of_New_York https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_University_of_New_York > The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City. It is the largest urban university system in the United States 1: https://cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/distinguished-lecturer-curriculum-teaching-computer-science-education/252659E7642E4ADDA14C8E9C37BB0E2F/job/ https://cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/distinguished-lecturer-curricu...
- dsfyu404ed 3y ago
  Sounds like they're looking for a career academic who happens to have a CS undergrad and not a CS professional who can teach and work in an academic environment.
  - anotherhue 3y ago
djoldman 3y ago
This piece is almost entirely about the cost of college. There is little about the benefits. As far as I can tell, all the statements about benefits are: > According to repeated analyses by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a four-year degree generates an annual return of 14 percent over a 40-year career. > ...a weakening job market for new grads (true, but better than the market for non-grads)... The first quote links to a much better analysis: https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2019/06/despite-rising-costs-college-is-still-a-good-investment/ https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2019/06/despit... As someone who works with statistics, this is the oldest trick in the book: talk about the average when it tells the story you want to tell as opposed to the distribution. Given the massive variability in total cost to attend, the average loses meaning.
- AwaAwa 3y ago
  If you need to speak about averages, doesn't that imply a net loss? Unless the average is overwhelmingly made up of folk with college degrees, which I don't believe holds water.
- ttul 3y ago
  And what about causality? People who go to college are likely the smartest, wealthiest, and best supported people to begin with. How do you find a matched control group of people who didn’t go to college but who could have? What were their outcomes in life? I think college is overrated. By all means, go to college if you’d like to learn at the highest level academically. But also consider not going to college and achieving great things without burning 4-5 years of opportunity cost.
  - dahart 3y ago
    > what about causality? A bunch of researchers have asked that question and tried to answer it the best they can, by using statistical methods to discount for things like high family income, race, family history of college attendance. From what I’ve seen (and I’ll try to dig up links in a minute if I can) papers often conclude that the causality is definitely not 100% responsible for the income difference between grads and non-grads, but they also generally find the number is much higher than 0% too. It’s somewhere in the middle. It’s not really a stretch to suggest that something happens during college, right? People do learn things when they spend their time learning, and we have plenty of data to show that people who get an elementary and secondary education are better off than people who get no education… or take it a step further and look at basic literacy. Why is it hard to believe there’s value in college when it’s not hard to believe that literacy and pre-college education has value? > consider not going to college and achieving great things without burning 4-5 years of opportunity cost While that can be true for a few naturally motivated and smart (or lucky) people, the aggregate stats don’t really support that view. Most people end up better off going to school, and opening the door to the many higher paying jobs that require a degree. * edit: here’s an example: https://www.stlouisfed.org/-/media/project/frbstl/stlouisfed/files/pdfs/hfs/is-college-worth-it/emmons_kent_ricketts_college_still_worth_it.pdf https://www.stlouisfed.org/-/media/project/frbstl/stlouisfed... See “Section III: “The True (Causal) Return on a College Education: Evidence from the 2016 SCF” The conclusion: “In order to examine the effect of these variables in accounting for some of the relationship between education, income and wealth, we utilized multiple regression. All variables, including age variables, own education, parents’ education, and financial acumen, were regressed onto income and wealth. This model was compared to the simple model of only lifecycle and own education. Results are in Tables 6 and 7. (See Tables B1-B6 for black, Hispanic and other race results). “Clearly, parents’ education and financial acumen were important variables previously omitted in estimations of the college and post-graduate premiums (see Table 8). Together, these variables reduced the income premium by 32 percent for white terminal bachelor’s degree holders and by 29 percent for white postgraduate degree holders. The reductions of the wealth premium were even starker, with this premium being reduced by over half for graduates and postgraduates (54.4 percent and 60.4 percent, respectively).”
efields 3y ago
How do we reconcile this with the increased demand for trade skills?
- alistairSH 3y ago
  What is there to reconcile? Nobody is claiming you can't make good money running a small plumbing company or finding a niche trade. The claim is "on average, those with college degrees out-earn those without college degrees." The existence of skilled tradesmen who earn good incomes doesn't discredit the analysis. They just contribute to average. More specifically, the path to making good money in the trades can be long and arduous (relative to college and a desk job). Years as an electrician's apprentice earning low wages. A journeyman electrician makes reasonable money, but it's not until you either strike out on your own (with the risk that entails) OR specialize in something in high demand (time to acquire that skill) that the income really goes up into the range most of us would consider high/good. Welding is one trade I see mentioned a lot. Skilled welders (food-grade, off-shore, underwater) can make excelling money. But, the job is still pretty crap compared to many desk jobs. The food-grade jobs are hot, long-hours, on-call, and wages are only good, not great. The off-shore stuff is dangerous and requires weeks/months away from home.
  - pasttense01 3y ago
    The claim is "on average, those with college degrees out-earn those without college degrees." No it's not: instead it's the prescriptive advice that high school graduates should go to college. But if you follow up one of the references: "However, when we look at wages for the 25th percentile of college graduates, the picture is not quite so rosy. In fact, there is almost no difference in the wages for this percentile ranking of college graduates and the median wage for high school graduates throughout the entire period. This means that the wages for a sizable share of college graduates below the 25th percentile are actually less than the wages earned by a typical worker with a high school diploma." https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2014/09/college-may-not-pay-off-for-everyone/ https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2014/09/colleg...
    - 3y ago
habosa 3y ago
I strongly believe that going to college in the US is a good financial investment and that this will become increasingly true over time. I don’t believe that it’s just, but there are fewer decent jobs for people without a degree every day. That said, everyone should also read this post explaining why college costs so much. It’s probably not what you think: https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-uncharity-of-college-the-big-business-nobody-understands https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-uncharity-of-colle...
Throw389 3y ago
There is 20% chance person gets raped at college. No degree is worth that!
alphanullmeric 3y ago
A better title would be that some college degrees are worth their cost. Those averages hide a heavily skewed income distribution with arts majors living off government money or working a job their degree didn’t help them get, whereas STEM/medicine graduates quickly earn back their degree’s cost. Go to college if you want to be an engineer, if you want to write books you’d be wasting other people’s money as much as your own.
- ethbr0 3y ago
  Eh. I'd look at it a little differently. We need both engineering and arts/culture in society. And it behooves us that those who produce arts and culture are educated to a higher level in their disciplines. The Western capitalist system isn't set up to compensate arts/culture (at least outside of lowest-denominator, mass-market stuff). Consequently, we explicitly create government transfer systems to fund these. Hard economic activity -> profit -> taxes -> funding for arts/culture If we want to live in a capitalist society, that seems like a fair setup. There are alternative economic systems that fund arts/culture in different ways, which generally aren't as successful on the whole as capitalism. Are there excesses and easy dead-horse majors to beat in arts/culture? Absolutely. But part of progress is exploring ideas that seem silly, crazy, or anathema to people at one point. Individual rights and land ownership? Democracy? Universal sufferage? Everything seems preordained, looking backwards through history. Looking forward, it often seems radical or stupid.
  - logicchains 3y ago
    >We need both engineering and arts/culture in society. And it behooves us that those who produce arts and culture are educated to a higher level in their disciplines You don't learn how to make good art/literature in college, you learn it from doing. Most of history's greatest writers and artists didn't go to college.
    - ethbr0 3y ago
      > Most of history's greatest writers and artists didn't go to college. Citation needed.
newswasboring 3y ago
I feel like these analysis don't take into account how societies change. Past performance is not entirely predictors of future gains. Especially when talking about 40 year windows. People who participate in these experiments, probably started their education in 1970s/early 80s. They were probably born in late 60s/early 70s. Can someone, with a straight face, tell me society is remotely similar today than it was then?
- linuxftw 3y ago
  Of course they can tell you with a straight face, they're sociopaths. The higher education ponzi scheme needs new blood every year. The value exists solely in the fact that it's a mechanism of exclusion by those who hold degrees.
  - newswasboring 3y ago
    Is this just hyperbole or you actually believe this literally? I have never met an American University administrator or education economist, but from what I have read in pop science I don't think my point is lost on them. Economists, at least the ones I regularly read from, spend a lot of time fighting this kind of thing.
lapcat 3y ago
> Christopher Eisgruber is president of Princeton University. Wow that's a massive conflict of interest in this "opinion" piece. Please, please, keep coming to my obscenely expensive institution, which pays my bloated salary!
FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
Arms races are rational for each individual, but they impoverish their participants as a group.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Lacerda69 3y ago
Bottom line, a college degree is massively overrated and expensive and then some. Source: Im not the president of Princeton.
Scubabear68 3y ago
The author: “Christopher Eisgruber is president of Princeton University”.
treespace8 3y ago
I find the requirement for having a college degree is similar to the pre-covid world where you had to work from an office. Some jobs absolutely require a person to be on site. And some jobs absolutely require a college degree. But unlike work from home I don't see a revolution coming where its ok to not have a degree. It would not benefit those that have already invested in getting one. Where work from home is beneficial to many.
motohagiography 3y ago
The value of a degree seemed to have a stepping function, where up until about the late '80's, it was a luxury, but by the 90's it was almost instantaneously necessary for basic jobs, then the dotcom boom reduced its necessity to where by the mid'00's, a generation of young men eschewed them went into tech or trades instead while young women went to school, and then the last decade of the '10's, if you didn't have a degree you were among the left behind. The economic downturn we are in now will mean "safe jobs" based on government spending will mostly go to the degreed, but any economic growth will come from people who are good enough at what they do to make things others want and build new firms, imo. The value is sort of polarized, where if your future is rural, trades oriented, or entrepreneurial, school is neither sufficient or necessary, but if you want to participate in the urban(e), managerial, and career oriented economy, there is not a single other qualification. If you are thinking about school, do it. If you didn't do it, maintain no illusions about your opportuntities, but if you didn't go and still think you're somehow equal or on a level field to people who did, know that they don't.
abeppu 3y ago
Ok, maybe college is typically "worth it" in the sense of typically paying for itself. But ... costs for American schools have gotten a bit out of control, and I think it's entirely appropriate to view them critically, ask what their purpose is, and how they can achieve that purpose more efficiently. - colleges and universities have seen a large increase in the number of administrators, over a period of decades - simultaneously, an increasing share of instruction is shifted to adjuncts - we're now at the point where a year of private school tuition is less than the salary of an adjunct professor in many cases So while students are paying more for education, they're getting less (or at least less instruction from actual faculty). If the point of colleges is education, I think we should begin tracking the fraction of schools' budgets which go to teaching costs (faculty who actually teach, facilities costs for instruction buildings) vs everything else, and only institutions that spend more than k% of their budget on teaching should be eligible for loans and grants. k can be brought down over time. As a very distant alternative, perhaps we're now at the point where we should offer a way to track, recognize and acknowledge work done with a private instructor. Suppose we normalized the practice of one to five students pooling funds to hire a different instructor every semester for intensive and personalized instruction with virtually no administration costs, or a small pool of instructors convening a short-lived "school" on a topic. If we were willing to recognize students demonstrating the same amount of proficiency in their chosen area gained outside of a "college", perhaps we could strip away the less useful parts of colleges as institutions.
rektide 3y ago
It feels really hard to pull apart that those who would get a degree are probably folks who'd push themselves higher up market anyways. Going to college is a self-selection towards achievement. Of course those who self select towards elite achievement will do better. I don't think we can, but if we could ask this question of are self selecters - college or no - making more money, I don't think college would be as clear a win. But it's near impossible to split up & categorize the non-college bound would be elite achievers from the rest of non-college bound. Also college is just so the default path...
glitchc 3y ago
The biggest value of college is exposure. Just as travel exposes you to different ways of living, college exposes you to different ways of thinking.
Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
Doctors make a lot of money, therefore going to med school is worth the cost. So in order to increase economic prosperity we made more and more med schools until EVERYONE went to med school. Would doctors still make lots of money in this case? The general case for college is similar. Graduates only make more (and not all of them too by the way) because they are of limited number and companies use degrees as a metric of competence. It bothers me when I hear politicians and the like saying that everyone should go to collage and get a degree because then everyone will have a highly paid job. It doesn't work like that.

26 points by null0ranje 3y ago

jdkee 3y ago

Endowments need to be taxed out of existence.

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
Why?
huitzitziltzin 3y ago
Because if we did that then the missing revenue that schools currently get from their endowments would instead come from… 1.) thin air 2.) the government (??? No.) 3.) higher tuition -> hint: pick this option! The better question is why Harvard and Princeton charge tuition at all! (The answer to that question is not that hard either.)
- bell-cot 3y ago
  How about: 4.) Cutting their massive bureaucracies so far back that the actual students once again outnumber the administrators?
- hgsgm 3y ago
  > Harvard and Princeton charge tuition at all! Wealth redistribution / market segmentation.
- bradfa 3y ago
  To be fair to Harvard and Princeton, neither actually costs very much to attend if you get accepted but come from a lower/middle income family. The hard part is getting accepted. Princeton has quite large aid packages outlined here: https://admission.princeton.edu/cost-aid https://admission.princeton.edu/cost-aid Harvard has different but also quite amazingly large aid packages for lower and middle-income students: https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/why-harvard/affordability https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/why-harvard/affordabi...

whitemary 3y ago

In the aggregate, sure, but this sort of nonsense diminishes the risk and liability involved. These people belong in Hell.

monero-xmr 3y ago

> Christopher Eisgruber is president of Princeton University Completely ignoring the contents of the opinion article, what do you expect this guy to say?

CoastalCoder 3y ago
Fair point, but IMHO that's just a reason to double check his reasoning, not to discard his conclusion.

ramesh31 3y ago

It is absolutely worth the cost, but not for the education. A college degree is a class filter in this country, and nothing more. It's a ticket that says "I'm one of you" or not to the hiring manager. Us without are seen as inferior people, plain and simple.

TigeriusKirk 3y ago

Awesome. So student loan forgiveness is a wealth transfer to the more successful and therefore undesirable.

Workaccount2 3y ago
It's blatantly regressive, but it worked for getting young dems out to vote and likely a quite a few young centrists too.

londons_explore 3y ago

> According to repeated analyses by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a four-year degree generates an annual return of 14 percent over a 40-year career. I fail to see how this statistic can be calculated in a scientifically rigorous way. The only method would be to pick a pool of people, randomly divide the pool in two, and then force half to go to college, while you force the other half not to. Any other approach suffers from sampling bias - the smart motivated ones find a way to go to college, while the rest stay home and stack shelves at walmart for a lifetime. And now you're saying that being smart and motivated earns you more... Well no surprise there!

huitzitziltzin 3y ago
Congratulations you’ve identified exactly the problem which concerns literally every economist who has ever worked on this question. Education Econ people work very hard to get around exactly your worry. Education is not my field but there are ways to identify causal effects outside of experiments. So: you are wrong when you say “the only way to do this is…”
verteu 3y ago
One of the linked papers [1] describes several approaches to this problem (known as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_inference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_inference). They generally agree with the 10-15% ROI result. For example: - Regression discontinuity (find a college that accepts people who score >=X on a test, then compare people who scored X vs people who scored X-epsilon) - Instrumental variables (find something that would nudge people to go to college, like living close to a college) - Natural experiments (find an event that 'forced' many people to suddenly sign up, like 'avoiding the Vietnam war draft'). [1] Section 4 of https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-economics-080614-115510 https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-economics...
marktangotango 3y ago
Even that methodology is flawed. Walmart has a lot of store manager/assistant managers that do quite well with high school diplomas or GEDs. Smart motivated people also do well starting businesses or working in trades. The incessant narrative that a college degree as the path to prosperity is tired and worn and rightly perceived as bogus imo. University is now a business, and the product is degrees and "college experience", the customers are students. The product has suffered; degrees are no longer rigorous. Teaching faculty have suffered; tenure tracks has disappeared in favor of adjunct part time faculty. Students suffer under mountains of debt. The only winners are the legions of administrators. Some schools have as many as 1 administrator per 1 student. It's absurd.

anotherhue 3y ago

I had a flight of fancy recently where I thought I might try lecturing. I saw the below as required 'Qualifications' on a CUNY [0] posting for "Distinguished Lecturer - Curriculum & Teaching, Computer Science Education" [1]. I will leave it to you to determine if the qualifications they seek would lead you to believe your child would benefit from being under the instruction of such a person. Edit: See comment below, this particular institution has specific goals. MA Degree in Computer Science, Educational Technology, Education, or a closely related field; earned doctorate preferred but not required Expertise in computer science educational pedagogies Experience with outreach and community engagement Demonstrated commitment to social justice, multimodal learning, anti-racist pedagogies, multilingualism, and culturally and linguistically responsive and sustaining pedagogy Ability to collaborate in recruiting students for graduate programs Demonstrated ability to effectively teach adults in college level education programs in various modalities including in person, hybrid, synchronous and asynchronous modalities Experience with outreach and community engagement which are seen as important for developing the Computer Science Education Program at Hunter College. Demonstrated knowledge of computer science K-12 learning standards and curricula Experience integrating issues of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in teaching, scholarship, and service Experience teaching in classrooms, educational settings and communities with culturally diverse populations including multilingual learners Evidence of excellent written, oral, organizational, and interpersonal communication skills 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_University_of_New_York https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_University_of_New_York > The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City. It is the largest urban university system in the United States 1: https://cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/distinguished-lecturer-curriculum-teaching-computer-science-education/252659E7642E4ADDA14C8E9C37BB0E2F/job/ https://cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/distinguished-lecturer-curricu...

dsfyu404ed 3y ago
Sounds like they're looking for a career academic who happens to have a CS undergrad and not a CS professional who can teach and work in an academic environment.
- anotherhue 3y ago

djoldman 3y ago

This piece is almost entirely about the cost of college. There is little about the benefits. As far as I can tell, all the statements about benefits are: > According to repeated analyses by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a four-year degree generates an annual return of 14 percent over a 40-year career. > ...a weakening job market for new grads (true, but better than the market for non-grads)... The first quote links to a much better analysis: https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2019/06/despite-rising-costs-college-is-still-a-good-investment/ https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2019/06/despit... As someone who works with statistics, this is the oldest trick in the book: talk about the average when it tells the story you want to tell as opposed to the distribution. Given the massive variability in total cost to attend, the average loses meaning.

AwaAwa 3y ago
If you need to speak about averages, doesn't that imply a net loss? Unless the average is overwhelmingly made up of folk with college degrees, which I don't believe holds water.
ttul 3y ago
And what about causality? People who go to college are likely the smartest, wealthiest, and best supported people to begin with. How do you find a matched control group of people who didn’t go to college but who could have? What were their outcomes in life? I think college is overrated. By all means, go to college if you’d like to learn at the highest level academically. But also consider not going to college and achieving great things without burning 4-5 years of opportunity cost.
- dahart 3y ago
  > what about causality? A bunch of researchers have asked that question and tried to answer it the best they can, by using statistical methods to discount for things like high family income, race, family history of college attendance. From what I’ve seen (and I’ll try to dig up links in a minute if I can) papers often conclude that the causality is definitely not 100% responsible for the income difference between grads and non-grads, but they also generally find the number is much higher than 0% too. It’s somewhere in the middle. It’s not really a stretch to suggest that something happens during college, right? People do learn things when they spend their time learning, and we have plenty of data to show that people who get an elementary and secondary education are better off than people who get no education… or take it a step further and look at basic literacy. Why is it hard to believe there’s value in college when it’s not hard to believe that literacy and pre-college education has value? > consider not going to college and achieving great things without burning 4-5 years of opportunity cost While that can be true for a few naturally motivated and smart (or lucky) people, the aggregate stats don’t really support that view. Most people end up better off going to school, and opening the door to the many higher paying jobs that require a degree. * edit: here’s an example: https://www.stlouisfed.org/-/media/project/frbstl/stlouisfed/files/pdfs/hfs/is-college-worth-it/emmons_kent_ricketts_college_still_worth_it.pdf https://www.stlouisfed.org/-/media/project/frbstl/stlouisfed... See “Section III: “The True (Causal) Return on a College Education: Evidence from the 2016 SCF” The conclusion: “In order to examine the effect of these variables in accounting for some of the relationship between education, income and wealth, we utilized multiple regression. All variables, including age variables, own education, parents’ education, and financial acumen, were regressed onto income and wealth. This model was compared to the simple model of only lifecycle and own education. Results are in Tables 6 and 7. (See Tables B1-B6 for black, Hispanic and other race results). “Clearly, parents’ education and financial acumen were important variables previously omitted in estimations of the college and post-graduate premiums (see Table 8). Together, these variables reduced the income premium by 32 percent for white terminal bachelor’s degree holders and by 29 percent for white postgraduate degree holders. The reductions of the wealth premium were even starker, with this premium being reduced by over half for graduates and postgraduates (54.4 percent and 60.4 percent, respectively).”

efields 3y ago

How do we reconcile this with the increased demand for trade skills?

alistairSH 3y ago
What is there to reconcile? Nobody is claiming you can't make good money running a small plumbing company or finding a niche trade. The claim is "on average, those with college degrees out-earn those without college degrees." The existence of skilled tradesmen who earn good incomes doesn't discredit the analysis. They just contribute to average. More specifically, the path to making good money in the trades can be long and arduous (relative to college and a desk job). Years as an electrician's apprentice earning low wages. A journeyman electrician makes reasonable money, but it's not until you either strike out on your own (with the risk that entails) OR specialize in something in high demand (time to acquire that skill) that the income really goes up into the range most of us would consider high/good. Welding is one trade I see mentioned a lot. Skilled welders (food-grade, off-shore, underwater) can make excelling money. But, the job is still pretty crap compared to many desk jobs. The food-grade jobs are hot, long-hours, on-call, and wages are only good, not great. The off-shore stuff is dangerous and requires weeks/months away from home.
- pasttense01 3y ago
  The claim is "on average, those with college degrees out-earn those without college degrees." No it's not: instead it's the prescriptive advice that high school graduates should go to college. But if you follow up one of the references: "However, when we look at wages for the 25th percentile of college graduates, the picture is not quite so rosy. In fact, there is almost no difference in the wages for this percentile ranking of college graduates and the median wage for high school graduates throughout the entire period. This means that the wages for a sizable share of college graduates below the 25th percentile are actually less than the wages earned by a typical worker with a high school diploma." https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2014/09/college-may-not-pay-off-for-everyone/ https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2014/09/colleg...
  - 3y ago

habosa 3y ago

I strongly believe that going to college in the US is a good financial investment and that this will become increasingly true over time. I don’t believe that it’s just, but there are fewer decent jobs for people without a degree every day. That said, everyone should also read this post explaining why college costs so much. It’s probably not what you think: https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-uncharity-of-college-the-big-business-nobody-understands https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-uncharity-of-colle...

Throw389 3y ago

There is 20% chance person gets raped at college. No degree is worth that!

alphanullmeric 3y ago

A better title would be that some college degrees are worth their cost. Those averages hide a heavily skewed income distribution with arts majors living off government money or working a job their degree didn’t help them get, whereas STEM/medicine graduates quickly earn back their degree’s cost. Go to college if you want to be an engineer, if you want to write books you’d be wasting other people’s money as much as your own.

ethbr0 3y ago
Eh. I'd look at it a little differently. We need both engineering and arts/culture in society. And it behooves us that those who produce arts and culture are educated to a higher level in their disciplines. The Western capitalist system isn't set up to compensate arts/culture (at least outside of lowest-denominator, mass-market stuff). Consequently, we explicitly create government transfer systems to fund these. Hard economic activity -> profit -> taxes -> funding for arts/culture If we want to live in a capitalist society, that seems like a fair setup. There are alternative economic systems that fund arts/culture in different ways, which generally aren't as successful on the whole as capitalism. Are there excesses and easy dead-horse majors to beat in arts/culture? Absolutely. But part of progress is exploring ideas that seem silly, crazy, or anathema to people at one point. Individual rights and land ownership? Democracy? Universal sufferage? Everything seems preordained, looking backwards through history. Looking forward, it often seems radical or stupid.
- logicchains 3y ago
  >We need both engineering and arts/culture in society. And it behooves us that those who produce arts and culture are educated to a higher level in their disciplines You don't learn how to make good art/literature in college, you learn it from doing. Most of history's greatest writers and artists didn't go to college.
  - ethbr0 3y ago
    > Most of history's greatest writers and artists didn't go to college. Citation needed.

newswasboring 3y ago

I feel like these analysis don't take into account how societies change. Past performance is not entirely predictors of future gains. Especially when talking about 40 year windows. People who participate in these experiments, probably started their education in 1970s/early 80s. They were probably born in late 60s/early 70s. Can someone, with a straight face, tell me society is remotely similar today than it was then?

linuxftw 3y ago
Of course they can tell you with a straight face, they're sociopaths. The higher education ponzi scheme needs new blood every year. The value exists solely in the fact that it's a mechanism of exclusion by those who hold degrees.
- newswasboring 3y ago
  Is this just hyperbole or you actually believe this literally? I have never met an American University administrator or education economist, but from what I have read in pop science I don't think my point is lost on them. Economists, at least the ones I regularly read from, spend a lot of time fighting this kind of thing.

lapcat 3y ago

> Christopher Eisgruber is president of Princeton University. Wow that's a massive conflict of interest in this "opinion" piece. Please, please, keep coming to my obscenely expensive institution, which pays my bloated salary!

FooBarBizBazz 3y ago

Arms races are rational for each individual, but they impoverish their participants as a group.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Lacerda69 3y ago

Bottom line, a college degree is massively overrated and expensive and then some. Source: Im not the president of Princeton.

Scubabear68 3y ago

The author: “Christopher Eisgruber is president of Princeton University”.

treespace8 3y ago

I find the requirement for having a college degree is similar to the pre-covid world where you had to work from an office. Some jobs absolutely require a person to be on site. And some jobs absolutely require a college degree. But unlike work from home I don't see a revolution coming where its ok to not have a degree. It would not benefit those that have already invested in getting one. Where work from home is beneficial to many.

motohagiography 3y ago

The value of a degree seemed to have a stepping function, where up until about the late '80's, it was a luxury, but by the 90's it was almost instantaneously necessary for basic jobs, then the dotcom boom reduced its necessity to where by the mid'00's, a generation of young men eschewed them went into tech or trades instead while young women went to school, and then the last decade of the '10's, if you didn't have a degree you were among the left behind. The economic downturn we are in now will mean "safe jobs" based on government spending will mostly go to the degreed, but any economic growth will come from people who are good enough at what they do to make things others want and build new firms, imo. The value is sort of polarized, where if your future is rural, trades oriented, or entrepreneurial, school is neither sufficient or necessary, but if you want to participate in the urban(e), managerial, and career oriented economy, there is not a single other qualification. If you are thinking about school, do it. If you didn't do it, maintain no illusions about your opportuntities, but if you didn't go and still think you're somehow equal or on a level field to people who did, know that they don't.

abeppu 3y ago

Ok, maybe college is typically "worth it" in the sense of typically paying for itself. But ... costs for American schools have gotten a bit out of control, and I think it's entirely appropriate to view them critically, ask what their purpose is, and how they can achieve that purpose more efficiently. - colleges and universities have seen a large increase in the number of administrators, over a period of decades - simultaneously, an increasing share of instruction is shifted to adjuncts - we're now at the point where a year of private school tuition is less than the salary of an adjunct professor in many cases So while students are paying more for education, they're getting less (or at least less instruction from actual faculty). If the point of colleges is education, I think we should begin tracking the fraction of schools' budgets which go to teaching costs (faculty who actually teach, facilities costs for instruction buildings) vs everything else, and only institutions that spend more than k% of their budget on teaching should be eligible for loans and grants. k can be brought down over time. As a very distant alternative, perhaps we're now at the point where we should offer a way to track, recognize and acknowledge work done with a private instructor. Suppose we normalized the practice of one to five students pooling funds to hire a different instructor every semester for intensive and personalized instruction with virtually no administration costs, or a small pool of instructors convening a short-lived "school" on a topic. If we were willing to recognize students demonstrating the same amount of proficiency in their chosen area gained outside of a "college", perhaps we could strip away the less useful parts of colleges as institutions.

rektide 3y ago

It feels really hard to pull apart that those who would get a degree are probably folks who'd push themselves higher up market anyways. Going to college is a self-selection towards achievement. Of course those who self select towards elite achievement will do better. I don't think we can, but if we could ask this question of are self selecters - college or no - making more money, I don't think college would be as clear a win. But it's near impossible to split up & categorize the non-college bound would be elite achievers from the rest of non-college bound. Also college is just so the default path...

glitchc 3y ago

The biggest value of college is exposure. Just as travel exposes you to different ways of living, college exposes you to different ways of thinking.

Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago

Doctors make a lot of money, therefore going to med school is worth the cost. So in order to increase economic prosperity we made more and more med schools until EVERYONE went to med school. Would doctors still make lots of money in this case? The general case for college is similar. Graduates only make more (and not all of them too by the way) because they are of limited number and companies use degrees as a metric of competence. It bothers me when I hear politicians and the like saying that everyone should go to collage and get a degree because then everyone will have a highly paid job. It doesn't work like that.