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> Brushing over individual experience with aggregate statistics That's the only way to discuss such issues. There'll always be good and bad experiences so wee

> Brushing over individual experience with aggregate statistics That's the only way to discuss such issues. There'll always be good and bad experiences so wee need to look at aggregates, not individual data points. This is indeed utilitarian: yes tuition may be expensive and yes a student loan may be a significant amount as a consequence but this is an investment decision and if the return is indeed worthwhile so what? And if it's not then it's also one's decision. Or the complaint is on the political/ideological aspect of paying for education (this is The Guardian after all), not the practical, utilitarian aspect.

medvezhenok 3y ago
I think what GP is getting at is that you have to separate selection effects of university admissions from actual effects of the university. The people who don't attend university are not in aggregate equivalent to the people who do - I think I remember seeing a study once that people who were admitted to MIT but chose not to attend had similar career outcomes (and incomes) to people who did end up attending MIT (as one example). In that case the signal was the selection effect of being admitted to MIT, not anything that MIT specifically did to help people make more money over the long term. So attending University might look good on average and lead to higher career earnings, but it could just be a selection effect of people who would have made more money either way.
- robocat 3y ago
  Absolutely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36644126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36644126 You also need to be careful of averages when people like Gates and Zuckerberg drop out of Harvard - the opposite skew! https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-match-school-and-student-rank https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-match-school-and-studen... links to a study showing it might not be worth it: An oft-cited paper, Dale and Krueger, appears to find that, controlling for applicant characteristics, people who attend more selective college don’t earn more money later in life.

medvezhenok 3y ago

I think what GP is getting at is that you have to separate selection effects of university admissions from actual effects of the university. The people who don't attend university are not in aggregate equivalent to the people who do - I think I remember seeing a study once that people who were admitted to MIT but chose not to attend had similar career outcomes (and incomes) to people who did end up attending MIT (as one example). In that case the signal was the selection effect of being admitted to MIT, not anything that MIT specifically did to help people make more money over the long term. So attending University might look good on average and lead to higher career earnings, but it could just be a selection effect of people who would have made more money either way.

robocat 3y ago
Absolutely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36644126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36644126 You also need to be careful of averages when people like Gates and Zuckerberg drop out of Harvard - the opposite skew! https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-match-school-and-student-rank https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-match-school-and-studen... links to a study showing it might not be worth it: An oft-cited paper, Dale and Krueger, appears to find that, controlling for applicant characteristics, people who attend more selective college don’t earn more money later in life.