3 ms·

> Red flag here, this seems like a super misleading and bogus comparison. I don't think so. It's still a 1 in 3 chance of earning less with a college degree th

> Red flag here, this seems like a super misleading and bogus comparison. I don't think so. It's still a 1 in 3 chance of earning less with a college degree than without. It's useful to show how much overlap there is. You could also argue that the bottom third of college graduates might also be the bottom earners without a degree, but at some point, you have to work with the real numbers that you do have, instead of hypotheticals. To improve the article, one could have plotted the income distributions, so that readers can draw their own conclusion about risks.

dahart 3y ago
It would be fine if they had summarized it as a minority 1/3 chance of earning less. It would be fine if they had compared the overall averages, where college grads earn more, and then compared the bottom third of college grads. But the story is trying to justify a summary point suggesting that college isn’t worth it, which justifies the title that Gen Z is giving up on college. The issue is that they didn’t point out that outcomes for college grads on average are quite a bit better, and that it’s only a minority of the time that things don’t work out as well for degree holders (and always has been only a minority of the time.) They didn’t explore the reasons behind the bottom third’s performance, and the comparison is more misleading than the parts I pointed out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37468176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37468176