8 ms·

Is College Worth It? Clearly, New Data Say

71 points by kenjackson 12y ago

jonathanjaeger 12y ago
"This calculation is necessarily imprecise, because it can’t control for any pre-existing differences between college graduates and nongraduates — differences that would exist regardless of schooling." I think this is a key point that shouldn't be understated. We can't simply say you'll make 1.8x as much because you went to college. The people who go to college might have been the people who would have made more anyway. I'm not trying to say college isn't worth it and won't pay dividends, I'm just saying we can't put a number on a graph to quantify it like that.
- cm2012 12y ago
  Agreed - it just stands to reason. Say a college accepts the top 20% of applicants. Wouldn't these people always perform in the top 20% of the young people pool, just by definition? It seems almost stupidly negligent to not count this factor heavily in discussions of college effectiveness. I've read at least 1 study that shows that the biggest determinant of student success in the workplace was what colleges the student applied to (not even accepted by, let alone attended).
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    > Say a college accepts the top 20% of applicants. Wouldn't these people always perform in the top 20% of the young people pool, just by definition? You've got hold of a good idea here, but as you've phrased it the answer is "no, that would only hold if everyone in the country applied to the school". If the bottom half of everyone applies to your school, and you take the top 20%, expect performance in the 40th to 50th percentile for the country.
- opendais 12y ago
  Exactly. I pretty much go "Am I paid as much as my coworkers with degrees?" The answer is generally yes, given the same level of experience. I think what this graph shows is it is really, really hard to break into the jobs at entry level without a college degree. If you fail to break in after a couple years of trying, I suspect most people give up and permanently have their income lowered as a result. I really, really wish these stats were based on 'same profession'. [e.g. Software Developers w/ Degrees vs. Software Developers w/o Degrees] And I highly suspect that the reason that is never done is it will show that the value of the degree vs. a guy who took $15/hr contracting jobs for a couple years until he 'broke in' to being a Software Dev is close to 0. At which point, the self taught dev is ahead in both 'work experience' and financially. But I could be wrong, no one has done that sort of study that I know of :/ EDIT: The closest I could find is: http://cew.georgetown.edu/collegepayoff http://cew.georgetown.edu/collegepayoff https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/ctg48m85ftqm7q1vex8y https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/ctg48m85ftqm7q1vex8y It shows ~$700k lifetime earnings gap for STEM [bachelors vs. highschool diploma]. So, over ~45 years, we are talking a loss of ~15.5k/year on average. Its not quite as precise as what I was hoping for but such is life since I wanted Position to Position.
  - bane 12y ago
    > I suspect most people give up and permanently have their income lowered as a result. And as you age, it becomes even harder to break into an entry-level position. I know a few folks who didn't go to college, and ended up in low-end jobs and are hoping their experience will lift them out of it. But it's been a very very hard thing to do. Many of them aren't qualified for the upper-tier jobs their experience would normally have gotten them, so they're readjusting and shooting for entry level (which would still be a pay increase), but are finding the requirements issues even stiffer.
    - opendais 12y ago
      I'm curious what you are defining as 'low-end' jobs? Are we talking people who make 60k a year? 30k? Are we talking about people in their 30s? 40s? 50s?
      - bane 12y ago
        30-40k. U.S. Major Metro Area. In their late 30s, early 40s. Getting on to 20 years of work experience.
        opendais 12y ago
        Hmmm, I make north of 60k. So I'm not sure if I should be concerned...bah. Are you saying they experienced an income drop or just a lack of income increase?
        bane 12y ago
        Lack of income increase. One guy I know would consider a 60+k job as almost a doubling of his income, which has been more or less fixed for the last 10 years. Which, with inflation, means it's a de facto slow pay reduction. He also really struggles with putting out resumes, 8 solid years of rejections makes him think he's formatting his resume wrong, or not describing his job right. But the little feedback he's gotten is that he's simply not meeting the minimum job requirements. But he's way overqualified on the work experience, just no education credentials. So a firm takes a chance if they hire him that he'll jump ship soon for a better paying gig more commensurate to his experience level, or they hope that his experience was complete enough to fill in the gaps that a solid education would provide...but why take the risk, there's dozens of candidates for every open position at every level, most of whom will fill the minimum requirements.
- jessriedel 12y ago
  The effects of pre-existing ability are clearly huge, and any attempt to measure the value-added by college is pretty much worthless without accounting for it. If college primarily functions as a hard-to-fake signal of pre-existing ability (a theory which is more compelling than it initially sounds), then there could be arbitrarily large pay gaps between graduates and non-graduates even if college was provably making graduates dumber. Economist Bryan Caplan has a very entertaining interview about this idea: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.htm...
  - rayiner 12y ago
    The theory that colleges are primarily about signaling is something I think a lot of people believe but don't necessarily say. Though sometimes they do: http://www.abajournal.com/mobile/article/justice_scalia_tells_law_student_why_she_wont_be_his_law_clerk http://www.abajournal.com/mobile/article/justice_scalia_tell... ("'By and large,' Scalia said during the April 24 law school appearance, 'I’m going to be picking from the law schools that basically are the hardest to get into. They admit the best and the brightest, and they may not teach very well, but you can’t make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse. If they come in the best and the brightest, they’re probably going to leave the best and the brightest, OK?'") Obviously it depends on the field. The value-add of an education in say medicine or engineering, which have a strong lab/practice aspect, is probably greater. Personally, I think in general, people overestimate the actual value-added by education at all levels.
    - jessriedel 12y ago
      > The theory that colleges are primarily about signaling is something I think a lot of people believe but don't necessarily say. >...I think a lot of people believe but don't necessarily say. If it's really true that a majority of people believe this but don't say it, then society is consciously making crazy decisions. One implications of the signaling theory is that it recommends ending essentially all public subsidies of higher education, and perhaps even penalizing it. In particular, the entire student loan debt (>$1 trillion, or 7% of US GDP) is a waste.
- gojomo 12y ago
  It also seems Leonhardt's quoted analyses assume that the value of graduating from college is what should be used to decide whether to enroll. But when looking at the 4.3 million students who enrolled in 2004, the Chronicle of Higher Education found that through 2010, the graduation status of 3 million of those students could not be determined! http://collegecompletion.chronicle.com/ http://collegecompletion.chronicle.com/ Looks like we're already urging college (& debt) on as many people as possible, but then deceptively reporting the benefits based only on those who thrive/graduate.
jinushaun 12y ago
I'm curious how those numbers are calculated. Especially when it is broken down my majors. Feels like the same lie of "college = job" that we teach our kids, which fools them into thinking that they don't need a tangible vocational skill to get a job. Also, how much of the growing gap is a result of existing college grads with jobs getting pay raises faster than those without a college degree? With the tech boom, are the outliers skewing the data? Not all college grads are created equal.
mrcactu5 12y ago
how can there be too few college graduates if we are fighting over the slots currently availble? http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/us/led-by-stanfords-5-top-colleges-acceptance-rates-hit-new-lows.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/us/led-by-stanfords-5-top-... the original title was "Led by Stanford’s 5%, Top Colleges’ Acceptance Rates Hit New Lows" -- with potential double entendre https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7556074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7556074
mrcactu5 12y ago
how can there be too few college graduates if we are fighting over the slots currently availble? http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/us/led-by-stanfords-5-top-colleges-acceptance-rates-hit-new-lows.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/us/led-by-stanfords-5-top-...
Jun8 12y ago
"When experts and journalists spend so much time talking about the limitations of education, they almost certainly are discouraging some teenagers from going to college and some adults from going back to earn degrees. (Those same experts and journalists are sending their own children to college and often obsessing over which one.)" This particular totally misguided comment is a good example of the bias of this article: As a upper-middle class parent, if I can send my son to Berkeley, MIT, Urbana Champaign, etc. then of course I want him to go those colleges and of course they add value. That's not the point. The point is about students from poor neighborhoods getting hammered about the value of college and this being presented as the only way they can get a better life. Then, they end up in brain-dead diploma mills with very debatable effect on their employability. I had this debate many times with teachers in the Chicago South side high school that I mentor: Compare attending a place like Illinois Central College for four years OR spending that time learning about a craft, e.g. programming (yes, I'm biased) and then trying to attend, say, Hacker School or something similar. Granted, this is not an option for all students but things like this should be mentioned to students and put on the table as an option. Instead, when I mention this and similar options teachers and students look at me alike like I'm from Mars. The reason is that high school counselors and teachers whose job it is to guide disadvantaged students do not have a clear understanding of these option for the simple reason that when they got educated these option did not exist.
- judk 12y ago
  You picked a poor example. ICC is not GWU https://www.google.com/search?q=illinois+central+college+tuitione https://www.google.com/search?q=illinois+central+college+tui... $7k/yr is a great price for a college education. And there is time in summer and after school to work or study additional trade work. The education might not be top-shelf, bit if the student doesn't know enough to skip the classes on the curriculum, they are quite valuable.
  - shabadoop 12y ago
    I'm from Eastern Canada, right now a pragmatic student can go out West and work for two years, return to a community college with free tuition while drawing unemployment for a two year diploma where they learn a trade, and then transfer into a four year university to finish up a relevant bachelor's degree in 2.5 years. My friend lives with a dude who took that route who's now doing his doctorate in English. He still goes and works on the oil rigs in the summer, then spends the rest of the year studying 19th century english lit.
pnathan 12y ago
'Worth' is a slippery statement. For that matter, so is 'college graduate'. I did a breakdown of unemployment vs level of education attained (using BLS data), and there was a strong visual difference between the people with college work and those without. If you had a college degree, you had a far better chance to have a job than someone who, e.g., dropped out of high school. But this really only tells part of a story; it doesn't remark on the jobs available, or the personal determination, or the social savvy to grasp what more job-friendly life choices would be. Etc.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  And, of course, people who are less bright, work less hard, or have financial hardships (or who attend terrible primary or secondary schools) will find K-12 harder to complete, and make it to college less often. People who find school easier will have little to no reason not to attend college, especially with the large discounts that come with good grades and high test scores.
xiphias 12y ago
The real question should be: is high school worth it, or people should just skip it and go straight to college?
facepalm 12y ago
Are they comparing people with a college degree to people who dropped out of college? Because it seems to me the latter would be quite a specific sample and introduce a lot of bias. Also, have they accounted for people with a college degree who don't have a job?
the_watcher 12y ago
I'd like to see some better segmenting of this data by school and degree. Most of my issues with college are the idea that a degree in anything from anywhere at any cost is a good idea.
nsxwolf 12y ago
It might still be worth it, but can't possibly be worth it forever. If you have a baby today, you might need to save $500,000 for a 4 year degree. It's hard to imagine an economic climate where that will be worth it.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
enoch_r 12y ago
It's worth keeping this[1] in mind while reading. Someone in the bottom quartile who goes to college has an 11.4% chance of finishing, vastly reducing the expected return of the decision to go to college--even ignoring the fact that people in the bottom quartile are probably attending much lower quality institutions. The most plausible story about education is that graduating from any college used to be an effective signal of intelligence, conscientiousness, and ambition. But everyone realized this, the demand (and therefore the price and quantity purchased) for college educations increased dramatically, and the quality of the signal was significantly diluted--attending an "average" college in the US and getting a non-job-related degree now just shows that you're minimally capable. This is worse for everyone. http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/05/three_graphs_ab.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/05/three_graphs_ab....
- Periodic 12y ago
  The article itself pointed out that their headline number doesn't really account for pre-college differences between the two groups. For example, someone who grows up in a stable high-income environment will likely go to college, but that is because they have the support structures that will assist them prevent them from falling too far behind and help them recover from any setbacks. A person who might want to go to college but is from a disrupted lower-income environment may not have the support structures that help them get through college and find a good job. From the article: This calculation is necessarily imprecise, because it can’t control for any pre-existing differences between college graduates and nongraduates — differences that would exist regardless of schooling. Completing college may simply be correlated with having a well-paying job because the skills required for both are very similar. A second study, linked from the article, compared people with similar jobs and those with and without degrees, e.g. secretaries. They still found a gap, but again they did not control for for pre-college environment.
ToastyMallows 12y ago
> Not going to college will cost you about half a million dollars. I don't understand this sentence at all. Doesn't he actually mean that by not going to college you won't earn, on average, $500,000 more that you will if you do go to college?
- Nicholas_C 12y ago
  He's including opportunity costs.
DontBeADick 12y ago
These articles never ask the questions that really matter, e.g.: Do colleges create high-income earners, or are they just good at selecting future high-income earners to bilk out of $100k? And do those graduates get high-paying jobs because they're better equipped to perform them, or are they simply benefitting from the myth that degrees make them more qualified? On a related note, I coached Lebron James' basketball team when he was 7 years old, so I believe I deserve credit for all of his success. Just kidding, but you get what I'm saying.
hawkharris 12y ago
In The Intelligent Investor, Ben Graham devotes dozens of pages to two simple yet important rules: 1. Never invest money that you can't afford to lose. 2. The value of an investment is always a function of what you paid for it. The commonsense rules also apply to college. Students shouldn't choose colleges with lofty tuitions if their expected careers will have low ROIs. And the more they invest in college, the better their investments must perform.
drblast 12y ago
This is too simple to be useful. Not only will the wildly successful outliers skew the data, but it doesn't take into account the risk of paying a huge amount now for the hope of earning more later. In no other area would someone be taken seriously if they asked you for a few hundred thousand dollars now for the promise of paying double or triple that money back (on average!) by the time you die. That's a horrible rate of return, and all the risk is up front. My mother paid her way through college working as a waitress part-time. You can't do that now without also accumulating a massive amount of debt. College for my mother was an easy decision in the 1970's, but put her thirty-five years into the future and it's not, and for many people like her isn't even an option. That's the problem.
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  > My mother paid her way through college working as a waitress part-time. You can't do that now without also accumulating a massive amount of debt. Yes you can. I had a friend who attended UCSC for three years (2004-07) on financial aid and wound up flunking out. According to him (I admit I haven't seen documents), the total debt he accumulated for those three years was in the low thousands of dollars. I'm pretty sure working part-time as a waitress for three years would cover it. I'm also pretty sure that, in the hypothetical case where your financial aid requires you to do well in school, flunking out doesn't meet that standard.
  - akgerber 12y ago
    UCSC tuition & fees have more than doubled since 2004: http://www.collegecalc.org/colleges/california/university-of-california-santa-cruz/#.U4URxlhdXPY http://www.collegecalc.org/colleges/california/university-of... (And they had already increased by 41% in 2004.)
    - thaumasiotes 12y ago
      I've noticed that myself, but doubling a debt under $5,000 leaves you with a debt under $10,000; not really a big problem to pay off.
- 12y ago
ryanpardieck 12y ago
Graduating from college might be worth it, but the total societal cost of college has to include those who attend, rack up debt, but do not graduate. You can't present college as a sure thing when actually graduating from it will never, ever be a sure thing. And no matter how strong the case may be for college, in the end there's no glossing over costs. I just checked the total cost of attendance for our state school here, and it is 20K/year for residents. 80K-ish in debt is a big, serious, worth-thinking-over decision, full stop. Presenting this as a no-brainer will always be irresponsible until the costs go down. And even if the debt pays off over the course of your multi-decade career, it's worth asking the question of whether paying down such debt already when you are so young is going to be how you want to kick off your adult life. Not claiming to have the answer to that one. Ultimately I think it's flawed to claim a form of education that is so outrageously expensive should be just as crucial as high school. If you can't reasonably save for it, it should be a luxury.
aaron987 12y ago
I'm surprised by how few comments mention one other thing that is important to consider: How does the lifetime value of a college education compare to someone who instead spent that money starting a business? I went to a small private college and graduated in 2010 with about $40,000 in loans. My degree was in biology. So far, it hasn't really helped at all. If I were going to start over, I would skip college and start a business. My student debt is higher than average, so let's be more conservative and use the $25,000 average debt stated in the article. For $25,000, you can create a pretty nice little business, especially in a small city. For example, I lived in Fargo for a few years where my living expenses were only $800 per month. Even if that business fails, you are no worse off than a college grad, except you also have years of experience for when you try another business. I think the real question we should be asking is not "Is college worth it?", but rather, "How do we help young adults start businesses the way we help them get into college?". We spend so much time and money offering scholarships, which in turn is supposed to help them get good jobs. In other words, we are spending a lot of money to increase competition in the job market. If that money was spent helping those young bright minds start businesses, we would be simultaneously removing someone from the job market AND creating new jobs.
jsmcgd 12y ago
The gap in average earnings between those who complete college and those who don't is pretty terrifying, given that it is possible to have no degree but all of the associated debt. If accruing all this debt guaranteed a college degree then yes, college is worth it. But it doesn't. So I think the article suffers from selection bias. It focuses on a subgroup, that people won't know they will be a part of when asking themselves the question, is college worth it?
JustSomeNobody 12y ago
We need more vocational training. We need to rethink what jobs really need a college degree vs what jobs can be trained for in vocational schools. A fair number of programming jobs, for example, could be filled with students who could take the vocational route. Not everyone should be or can be put into the 'college degree' box. This doesn't make them worth less as a person and it certainly doesn't mean they can't do certain jobs. We seriously need to rethink how we perceive vocational training.
gojomo 12y ago
Will Saletan's comment on this article pinpoints its gaping flaw: "Tell all the smart, disciplined people to go 4-year colleges. Then give college the credit for their success. #scam http://nyti.ms/1jqvoht" http://nyti.ms/1jqvoht" - @saletan (https://twitter.com/saletan/status/471329858295832576 https://twitter.com/saletan/status/471329858295832576)
davidcbc 12y ago
The biggest problem I have with this article is that it lumps every single major into "college" and makes the blanket statement that it is worth it. Ok, so the average 'cost' of college is negative $500,000, how does that break down by major? What is the average 'cost' of an Art degree? An engineering degree? "Is college worth it?" is the wrong question because there are so many variations that there isn't just one single answer. "Is my major at this specific college worth it?" is a more valuable discussion.
- DanielBMarkham 12y ago
  Better yet, is this major at this university given my personality and skills worth it? Cars may be "worth it", but that doesn't mean everybody needs to be driving around in a Lamborghini. There is a vast, vast difference between a person who has committed themselves to being a neurosurgeon no matter what the hardship and one who has no idea what they want in life or whether a college education would help them out or not. Lumping it all together doesn't help either of those two figure out what's best for them.
  - toyg 12y ago
    >is this major [worth it] at this university given my personality and skills ... and social background. I know a lot of people who graduated in subject X and then happily went on to join or manage the completely-unrelated family business. They make good money, but they would have made exactly the same money had they joined the business four years earlier. For them, attending college had nothing to do with money, and they clearly skew this sort of statistics.
    - VLM 12y ago
      The ironic part is this "outlier" was originally the purpose of higher education... provide a lifetime of interesting things to think about for the kids of the local nobility. Then it morphed into a proxy for social class, where a degree meant the odds are the applicant was of a higher social class. Then it morphed into way to make employees desperate to pay their loan, much as managers are always glad to hear an employee got a house loan or a car loan, there's someone easier to take advantage of. (edited to add, also an indication of a strong conformity streak, which in some corporate environments is highly prized, at least at the line employee level) In the era where blue collar jobs were being eliminated but white collar jobs hadn't yet been eliminated, it became a mere daycare / votech job training facility. Liberal arts, why would I want those, I want a job! Later it turned into a financialization scheme where the government will socialize the loan losses while the banks will privatize the loan profits, and the institutions can charge any amount of money they feel like because .gov will just print some more. Finally it becomes an unusual noteworthy outlier to consider going to higher ed to become ... educated. If this cycle perpetuates, as seems likely, we can make testable falsifiable predictions about the future, such as the number of students collapsing and higher ed attendance becoming a proxy for social class. To some extent we already have this, with ivy's being "real degrees" for "real jobs" and everything else not mattering much, where a liberal arts degree from Yale means you might be employed in the field not just bartending or sales like grads from lesser schools, the point is everything else will be going away, not just not mattering as much. As typical in the fast paced world of today you'll have some people preaching the gospel of step #7 when most of the world is on step #8 and some of the leaders are already operating in step #9, #10, or even #11. This linked article is pretty much like the old timer preaching the values of the past, as if they still matter today.
api 12y ago
A degree is basically a license allowing you to get a job above the service and low-level manufacturing industry, so of course it's worth it. Having a writ of noble title was worth it in the middle ages / renaissance area. The real question is whether there's enough objective value beyond self-reinforcing certification requirements to justify the expense.
krazydad 12y ago
Is College Worth It? "Totally," says a bunch of people who went to college.
donniezazen 12y ago
Education is an active pursuit. You can't learn until you know what problems one is looking to solve. Colleges have made education a passive process. You go to classes. You do your homework and you take exams. It doesn't work like that.

71 points by kenjackson 12y ago

"This calculation is necessarily imprecise, because it can’t control for any pre-existing differences between college graduates and nongraduates — differences that would exist regardless of schooling." I think this is a key point that shouldn't be understated. We can't simply say you'll make 1.8x as much because you went to college. The people who go to college might have been the people who would have made more anyway. I'm not trying to say college isn't worth it and won't pay dividends, I'm just saying we can't put a number on a graph to quantify it like that.

cm2012 12y ago
Agreed - it just stands to reason. Say a college accepts the top 20% of applicants. Wouldn't these people always perform in the top 20% of the young people pool, just by definition? It seems almost stupidly negligent to not count this factor heavily in discussions of college effectiveness. I've read at least 1 study that shows that the biggest determinant of student success in the workplace was what colleges the student applied to (not even accepted by, let alone attended).
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  > Say a college accepts the top 20% of applicants. Wouldn't these people always perform in the top 20% of the young people pool, just by definition? You've got hold of a good idea here, but as you've phrased it the answer is "no, that would only hold if everyone in the country applied to the school". If the bottom half of everyone applies to your school, and you take the top 20%, expect performance in the 40th to 50th percentile for the country.
opendais 12y ago
Exactly. I pretty much go "Am I paid as much as my coworkers with degrees?" The answer is generally yes, given the same level of experience. I think what this graph shows is it is really, really hard to break into the jobs at entry level without a college degree. If you fail to break in after a couple years of trying, I suspect most people give up and permanently have their income lowered as a result. I really, really wish these stats were based on 'same profession'. [e.g. Software Developers w/ Degrees vs. Software Developers w/o Degrees] And I highly suspect that the reason that is never done is it will show that the value of the degree vs. a guy who took $15/hr contracting jobs for a couple years until he 'broke in' to being a Software Dev is close to 0. At which point, the self taught dev is ahead in both 'work experience' and financially. But I could be wrong, no one has done that sort of study that I know of :/ EDIT: The closest I could find is: http://cew.georgetown.edu/collegepayoff http://cew.georgetown.edu/collegepayoff https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/ctg48m85ftqm7q1vex8y https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/ctg48m85ftqm7q1vex8y It shows ~$700k lifetime earnings gap for STEM [bachelors vs. highschool diploma]. So, over ~45 years, we are talking a loss of ~15.5k/year on average. Its not quite as precise as what I was hoping for but such is life since I wanted Position to Position.
- bane 12y ago
  > I suspect most people give up and permanently have their income lowered as a result. And as you age, it becomes even harder to break into an entry-level position. I know a few folks who didn't go to college, and ended up in low-end jobs and are hoping their experience will lift them out of it. But it's been a very very hard thing to do. Many of them aren't qualified for the upper-tier jobs their experience would normally have gotten them, so they're readjusting and shooting for entry level (which would still be a pay increase), but are finding the requirements issues even stiffer.
  - opendais 12y ago
    I'm curious what you are defining as 'low-end' jobs? Are we talking people who make 60k a year? 30k? Are we talking about people in their 30s? 40s? 50s?
    - bane 12y ago
      30-40k. U.S. Major Metro Area. In their late 30s, early 40s. Getting on to 20 years of work experience.
      - opendais 12y ago
        Hmmm, I make north of 60k. So I'm not sure if I should be concerned...bah. Are you saying they experienced an income drop or just a lack of income increase?
        bane 12y ago
        Lack of income increase. One guy I know would consider a 60+k job as almost a doubling of his income, which has been more or less fixed for the last 10 years. Which, with inflation, means it's a de facto slow pay reduction. He also really struggles with putting out resumes, 8 solid years of rejections makes him think he's formatting his resume wrong, or not describing his job right. But the little feedback he's gotten is that he's simply not meeting the minimum job requirements. But he's way overqualified on the work experience, just no education credentials. So a firm takes a chance if they hire him that he'll jump ship soon for a better paying gig more commensurate to his experience level, or they hope that his experience was complete enough to fill in the gaps that a solid education would provide...but why take the risk, there's dozens of candidates for every open position at every level, most of whom will fill the minimum requirements.
jessriedel 12y ago
The effects of pre-existing ability are clearly huge, and any attempt to measure the value-added by college is pretty much worthless without accounting for it. If college primarily functions as a hard-to-fake signal of pre-existing ability (a theory which is more compelling than it initially sounds), then there could be arbitrarily large pay gaps between graduates and non-graduates even if college was provably making graduates dumber. Economist Bryan Caplan has a very entertaining interview about this idea: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.htm...
- rayiner 12y ago
  The theory that colleges are primarily about signaling is something I think a lot of people believe but don't necessarily say. Though sometimes they do: http://www.abajournal.com/mobile/article/justice_scalia_tells_law_student_why_she_wont_be_his_law_clerk http://www.abajournal.com/mobile/article/justice_scalia_tell... ("'By and large,' Scalia said during the April 24 law school appearance, 'I’m going to be picking from the law schools that basically are the hardest to get into. They admit the best and the brightest, and they may not teach very well, but you can’t make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse. If they come in the best and the brightest, they’re probably going to leave the best and the brightest, OK?'") Obviously it depends on the field. The value-add of an education in say medicine or engineering, which have a strong lab/practice aspect, is probably greater. Personally, I think in general, people overestimate the actual value-added by education at all levels.
  - jessriedel 12y ago
    > The theory that colleges are primarily about signaling is something I think a lot of people believe but don't necessarily say. >...I think a lot of people believe but don't necessarily say. If it's really true that a majority of people believe this but don't say it, then society is consciously making crazy decisions. One implications of the signaling theory is that it recommends ending essentially all public subsidies of higher education, and perhaps even penalizing it. In particular, the entire student loan debt (>$1 trillion, or 7% of US GDP) is a waste.
gojomo 12y ago
It also seems Leonhardt's quoted analyses assume that the value of graduating from college is what should be used to decide whether to enroll. But when looking at the 4.3 million students who enrolled in 2004, the Chronicle of Higher Education found that through 2010, the graduation status of 3 million of those students could not be determined! http://collegecompletion.chronicle.com/ http://collegecompletion.chronicle.com/ Looks like we're already urging college (& debt) on as many people as possible, but then deceptively reporting the benefits based only on those who thrive/graduate.

jinushaun 12y ago

I'm curious how those numbers are calculated. Especially when it is broken down my majors. Feels like the same lie of "college = job" that we teach our kids, which fools them into thinking that they don't need a tangible vocational skill to get a job. Also, how much of the growing gap is a result of existing college grads with jobs getting pay raises faster than those without a college degree? With the tech boom, are the outliers skewing the data? Not all college grads are created equal.

mrcactu5 12y ago

how can there be too few college graduates if we are fighting over the slots currently availble? http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/us/led-by-stanfords-5-top-colleges-acceptance-rates-hit-new-lows.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/us/led-by-stanfords-5-top-... the original title was "Led by Stanford’s 5%, Top Colleges’ Acceptance Rates Hit New Lows" -- with potential double entendre https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7556074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7556074

mrcactu5 12y ago

Jun8 12y ago

"When experts and journalists spend so much time talking about the limitations of education, they almost certainly are discouraging some teenagers from going to college and some adults from going back to earn degrees. (Those same experts and journalists are sending their own children to college and often obsessing over which one.)" This particular totally misguided comment is a good example of the bias of this article: As a upper-middle class parent, if I can send my son to Berkeley, MIT, Urbana Champaign, etc. then of course I want him to go those colleges and of course they add value. That's not the point. The point is about students from poor neighborhoods getting hammered about the value of college and this being presented as the only way they can get a better life. Then, they end up in brain-dead diploma mills with very debatable effect on their employability. I had this debate many times with teachers in the Chicago South side high school that I mentor: Compare attending a place like Illinois Central College for four years OR spending that time learning about a craft, e.g. programming (yes, I'm biased) and then trying to attend, say, Hacker School or something similar. Granted, this is not an option for all students but things like this should be mentioned to students and put on the table as an option. Instead, when I mention this and similar options teachers and students look at me alike like I'm from Mars. The reason is that high school counselors and teachers whose job it is to guide disadvantaged students do not have a clear understanding of these option for the simple reason that when they got educated these option did not exist.

judk 12y ago
You picked a poor example. ICC is not GWU https://www.google.com/search?q=illinois+central+college+tuitione https://www.google.com/search?q=illinois+central+college+tui... $7k/yr is a great price for a college education. And there is time in summer and after school to work or study additional trade work. The education might not be top-shelf, bit if the student doesn't know enough to skip the classes on the curriculum, they are quite valuable.
- shabadoop 12y ago
  I'm from Eastern Canada, right now a pragmatic student can go out West and work for two years, return to a community college with free tuition while drawing unemployment for a two year diploma where they learn a trade, and then transfer into a four year university to finish up a relevant bachelor's degree in 2.5 years. My friend lives with a dude who took that route who's now doing his doctorate in English. He still goes and works on the oil rigs in the summer, then spends the rest of the year studying 19th century english lit.

pnathan 12y ago

'Worth' is a slippery statement. For that matter, so is 'college graduate'. I did a breakdown of unemployment vs level of education attained (using BLS data), and there was a strong visual difference between the people with college work and those without. If you had a college degree, you had a far better chance to have a job than someone who, e.g., dropped out of high school. But this really only tells part of a story; it doesn't remark on the jobs available, or the personal determination, or the social savvy to grasp what more job-friendly life choices would be. Etc.

pessimizer 12y ago
And, of course, people who are less bright, work less hard, or have financial hardships (or who attend terrible primary or secondary schools) will find K-12 harder to complete, and make it to college less often. People who find school easier will have little to no reason not to attend college, especially with the large discounts that come with good grades and high test scores.

xiphias 12y ago

The real question should be: is high school worth it, or people should just skip it and go straight to college?

facepalm 12y ago

Are they comparing people with a college degree to people who dropped out of college? Because it seems to me the latter would be quite a specific sample and introduce a lot of bias. Also, have they accounted for people with a college degree who don't have a job?

the_watcher 12y ago

I'd like to see some better segmenting of this data by school and degree. Most of my issues with college are the idea that a degree in anything from anywhere at any cost is a good idea.

nsxwolf 12y ago

It might still be worth it, but can't possibly be worth it forever. If you have a baby today, you might need to save $500,000 for a 4 year degree. It's hard to imagine an economic climate where that will be worth it.

deleted 12y ago

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enoch_r 12y ago

It's worth keeping this[1] in mind while reading. Someone in the bottom quartile who goes to college has an 11.4% chance of finishing, vastly reducing the expected return of the decision to go to college--even ignoring the fact that people in the bottom quartile are probably attending much lower quality institutions. The most plausible story about education is that graduating from any college used to be an effective signal of intelligence, conscientiousness, and ambition. But everyone realized this, the demand (and therefore the price and quantity purchased) for college educations increased dramatically, and the quality of the signal was significantly diluted--attending an "average" college in the US and getting a non-job-related degree now just shows that you're minimally capable. This is worse for everyone. http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/05/three_graphs_ab.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/05/three_graphs_ab....

Periodic 12y ago
The article itself pointed out that their headline number doesn't really account for pre-college differences between the two groups. For example, someone who grows up in a stable high-income environment will likely go to college, but that is because they have the support structures that will assist them prevent them from falling too far behind and help them recover from any setbacks. A person who might want to go to college but is from a disrupted lower-income environment may not have the support structures that help them get through college and find a good job. From the article: This calculation is necessarily imprecise, because it can’t control for any pre-existing differences between college graduates and nongraduates — differences that would exist regardless of schooling. Completing college may simply be correlated with having a well-paying job because the skills required for both are very similar. A second study, linked from the article, compared people with similar jobs and those with and without degrees, e.g. secretaries. They still found a gap, but again they did not control for for pre-college environment.

ToastyMallows 12y ago

> Not going to college will cost you about half a million dollars. I don't understand this sentence at all. Doesn't he actually mean that by not going to college you won't earn, on average, $500,000 more that you will if you do go to college?

Nicholas_C 12y ago
He's including opportunity costs.

DontBeADick 12y ago

These articles never ask the questions that really matter, e.g.: Do colleges create high-income earners, or are they just good at selecting future high-income earners to bilk out of $100k? And do those graduates get high-paying jobs because they're better equipped to perform them, or are they simply benefitting from the myth that degrees make them more qualified? On a related note, I coached Lebron James' basketball team when he was 7 years old, so I believe I deserve credit for all of his success. Just kidding, but you get what I'm saying.

hawkharris 12y ago

In The Intelligent Investor, Ben Graham devotes dozens of pages to two simple yet important rules: 1. Never invest money that you can't afford to lose. 2. The value of an investment is always a function of what you paid for it. The commonsense rules also apply to college. Students shouldn't choose colleges with lofty tuitions if their expected careers will have low ROIs. And the more they invest in college, the better their investments must perform.

drblast 12y ago

This is too simple to be useful. Not only will the wildly successful outliers skew the data, but it doesn't take into account the risk of paying a huge amount now for the hope of earning more later. In no other area would someone be taken seriously if they asked you for a few hundred thousand dollars now for the promise of paying double or triple that money back (on average!) by the time you die. That's a horrible rate of return, and all the risk is up front. My mother paid her way through college working as a waitress part-time. You can't do that now without also accumulating a massive amount of debt. College for my mother was an easy decision in the 1970's, but put her thirty-five years into the future and it's not, and for many people like her isn't even an option. That's the problem.

thaumasiotes 12y ago
> My mother paid her way through college working as a waitress part-time. You can't do that now without also accumulating a massive amount of debt. Yes you can. I had a friend who attended UCSC for three years (2004-07) on financial aid and wound up flunking out. According to him (I admit I haven't seen documents), the total debt he accumulated for those three years was in the low thousands of dollars. I'm pretty sure working part-time as a waitress for three years would cover it. I'm also pretty sure that, in the hypothetical case where your financial aid requires you to do well in school, flunking out doesn't meet that standard.
- akgerber 12y ago
  UCSC tuition & fees have more than doubled since 2004: http://www.collegecalc.org/colleges/california/university-of-california-santa-cruz/#.U4URxlhdXPY http://www.collegecalc.org/colleges/california/university-of... (And they had already increased by 41% in 2004.)
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    I've noticed that myself, but doubling a debt under $5,000 leaves you with a debt under $10,000; not really a big problem to pay off.
12y ago

ryanpardieck 12y ago

Graduating from college might be worth it, but the total societal cost of college has to include those who attend, rack up debt, but do not graduate. You can't present college as a sure thing when actually graduating from it will never, ever be a sure thing. And no matter how strong the case may be for college, in the end there's no glossing over costs. I just checked the total cost of attendance for our state school here, and it is 20K/year for residents. 80K-ish in debt is a big, serious, worth-thinking-over decision, full stop. Presenting this as a no-brainer will always be irresponsible until the costs go down. And even if the debt pays off over the course of your multi-decade career, it's worth asking the question of whether paying down such debt already when you are so young is going to be how you want to kick off your adult life. Not claiming to have the answer to that one. Ultimately I think it's flawed to claim a form of education that is so outrageously expensive should be just as crucial as high school. If you can't reasonably save for it, it should be a luxury.

aaron987 12y ago

I'm surprised by how few comments mention one other thing that is important to consider: How does the lifetime value of a college education compare to someone who instead spent that money starting a business? I went to a small private college and graduated in 2010 with about $40,000 in loans. My degree was in biology. So far, it hasn't really helped at all. If I were going to start over, I would skip college and start a business. My student debt is higher than average, so let's be more conservative and use the $25,000 average debt stated in the article. For $25,000, you can create a pretty nice little business, especially in a small city. For example, I lived in Fargo for a few years where my living expenses were only $800 per month. Even if that business fails, you are no worse off than a college grad, except you also have years of experience for when you try another business. I think the real question we should be asking is not "Is college worth it?", but rather, "How do we help young adults start businesses the way we help them get into college?". We spend so much time and money offering scholarships, which in turn is supposed to help them get good jobs. In other words, we are spending a lot of money to increase competition in the job market. If that money was spent helping those young bright minds start businesses, we would be simultaneously removing someone from the job market AND creating new jobs.

jsmcgd 12y ago

The gap in average earnings between those who complete college and those who don't is pretty terrifying, given that it is possible to have no degree but all of the associated debt. If accruing all this debt guaranteed a college degree then yes, college is worth it. But it doesn't. So I think the article suffers from selection bias. It focuses on a subgroup, that people won't know they will be a part of when asking themselves the question, is college worth it?

JustSomeNobody 12y ago

We need more vocational training. We need to rethink what jobs really need a college degree vs what jobs can be trained for in vocational schools. A fair number of programming jobs, for example, could be filled with students who could take the vocational route. Not everyone should be or can be put into the 'college degree' box. This doesn't make them worth less as a person and it certainly doesn't mean they can't do certain jobs. We seriously need to rethink how we perceive vocational training.

gojomo 12y ago

Will Saletan's comment on this article pinpoints its gaping flaw: "Tell all the smart, disciplined people to go 4-year colleges. Then give college the credit for their success. #scam http://nyti.ms/1jqvoht" http://nyti.ms/1jqvoht" - @saletan (https://twitter.com/saletan/status/471329858295832576 https://twitter.com/saletan/status/471329858295832576)

davidcbc 12y ago

The biggest problem I have with this article is that it lumps every single major into "college" and makes the blanket statement that it is worth it. Ok, so the average 'cost' of college is negative $500,000, how does that break down by major? What is the average 'cost' of an Art degree? An engineering degree? "Is college worth it?" is the wrong question because there are so many variations that there isn't just one single answer. "Is my major at this specific college worth it?" is a more valuable discussion.

DanielBMarkham 12y ago
Better yet, is this major at this university given my personality and skills worth it? Cars may be "worth it", but that doesn't mean everybody needs to be driving around in a Lamborghini. There is a vast, vast difference between a person who has committed themselves to being a neurosurgeon no matter what the hardship and one who has no idea what they want in life or whether a college education would help them out or not. Lumping it all together doesn't help either of those two figure out what's best for them.
- toyg 12y ago
  >is this major [worth it] at this university given my personality and skills ... and social background. I know a lot of people who graduated in subject X and then happily went on to join or manage the completely-unrelated family business. They make good money, but they would have made exactly the same money had they joined the business four years earlier. For them, attending college had nothing to do with money, and they clearly skew this sort of statistics.
  - VLM 12y ago
    The ironic part is this "outlier" was originally the purpose of higher education... provide a lifetime of interesting things to think about for the kids of the local nobility. Then it morphed into a proxy for social class, where a degree meant the odds are the applicant was of a higher social class. Then it morphed into way to make employees desperate to pay their loan, much as managers are always glad to hear an employee got a house loan or a car loan, there's someone easier to take advantage of. (edited to add, also an indication of a strong conformity streak, which in some corporate environments is highly prized, at least at the line employee level) In the era where blue collar jobs were being eliminated but white collar jobs hadn't yet been eliminated, it became a mere daycare / votech job training facility. Liberal arts, why would I want those, I want a job! Later it turned into a financialization scheme where the government will socialize the loan losses while the banks will privatize the loan profits, and the institutions can charge any amount of money they feel like because .gov will just print some more. Finally it becomes an unusual noteworthy outlier to consider going to higher ed to become ... educated. If this cycle perpetuates, as seems likely, we can make testable falsifiable predictions about the future, such as the number of students collapsing and higher ed attendance becoming a proxy for social class. To some extent we already have this, with ivy's being "real degrees" for "real jobs" and everything else not mattering much, where a liberal arts degree from Yale means you might be employed in the field not just bartending or sales like grads from lesser schools, the point is everything else will be going away, not just not mattering as much. As typical in the fast paced world of today you'll have some people preaching the gospel of step #7 when most of the world is on step #8 and some of the leaders are already operating in step #9, #10, or even #11. This linked article is pretty much like the old timer preaching the values of the past, as if they still matter today.

api 12y ago

A degree is basically a license allowing you to get a job above the service and low-level manufacturing industry, so of course it's worth it. Having a writ of noble title was worth it in the middle ages / renaissance area. The real question is whether there's enough objective value beyond self-reinforcing certification requirements to justify the expense.

krazydad 12y ago

Is College Worth It? "Totally," says a bunch of people who went to college.

donniezazen 12y ago

Education is an active pursuit. You can't learn until you know what problems one is looking to solve. Colleges have made education a passive process. You go to classes. You do your homework and you take exams. It doesn't work like that.