9 ms·

Is College Worth It? It Depends on Whether You Graduate

brixon 12y ago
It depends on: - Cost of school or Debt Load - Type of Degree - Reputation of School - If you finish They all need to be weighed together.
- k__ 12y ago
  I'm so happy to live in Germany. With my first job I paid the dept I got from my studies in one year.
  - parker94 12y ago
    We should be more like Germany, with trade schools being a viable option for those that are not academically inclined
    - dobbsbob 12y ago
      Or Germany's apprentice programs, like the one they have for developers.
  - jgrowl 12y ago
    I live in the US and paid my loans off in one paycheck after graduating. The way I did it was by going to a cheap community college for the first two years to get my associates degree. I got government student aid which paid for the entire tuition/books with some extra to live on. Since I did well at community college, I was able to transfer to a larger university in-state and get some decent scholarships (A transfer scholarship offered by the University as well as a SMART grant offered by the government). Keep in mind I lived with family which might might not be possible for some. I also worked low paying jobs over some of the summers, but not throughout the academic year.
  - arethuza 12y ago
    I'm so happy I did a degree in the UK in the 1980s when the fees were paid by the taxpayers and as my parents weren't very well off I got a full grant as well. As far as investments go that investment in me by the UK taxpayers paid off pretty well....
daemonk 12y ago
It depends on if you are going to actively take advantage of the resources you are paying for or if you are just going to passively get spoon fed information and coast through the whole experience for a nominal piece of paper that said you jumped through hoops for 4 years.
- sanxiyn 12y ago
  How does this follow? Wage premium data support that it is a nominal piece of paper that said you jumped through hoops for 4 years, not actively taking advantage of the resources you are paying for, that benefits your wage. Do you have data to the contrary?
  - daemonk 12y ago
    I wasn't referring to salaries. The practical rewards of higher education is obviously important, but I also think learning and growing as a person is also important. So in context of the "worth" of a college education, I was talking about personal growth. Whether we can attribute higher wages to the nominal piece of paper or personal growth is a question I can't answer. Do employers only see potential employees on paper? Or do this personal growth get reflected in the interview? Do they even care. Not sure if there are any data to support either case. I want to say that actively participating in your education can potentially make you better equipped for the rest of your life, which can be more important than that nominal piece of paper. However, I can only attest to that with anecdotal evidence.
    - sanxiyn 12y ago
      Higher education is a large investment, so while personal growth is all good and fine, economic concern is paramount. As the article states, "most of the benefits of college come from graduating, not enrolling". This data do seem to be in favor of the hypothesis that the paper matters. More data on this would be very welcome. It also intuitively makes sense to me, as the paper is easy to verify, but personal growth is not. While I suspect measure of personal growth provides better information to employers compared to the paper, the cost of acquiring that information may make the paper more valuable in the net. Also you seem to underestimate the value the paper provides to employers: jumping through hoops correlates with conscientiousness personality trait, which is a good predictor of workplace performance.
Roboprog 12y ago
Student costs certainly have gone up. Back in 1983-84 school year, tuition and fees for CSU (California) system was just under $500 for the year. Now, I think it is a bit under $7000. (UC system is now about twice that, but I don't know what it was back in the 80s, as I opted not to leave town to go to Berkeley) By comparison, minimum wage has just a bit more than doubled. It's a lot harder to put yourself through school.
- RRRA 12y ago
  More reasons why a proper public system should always be in place and offer free tuition based on achievement.
- jgg 12y ago
  Spot on. I also feel like even if you were being charged the tuition of 30+ years ago, you wouldn't be getting nearly as much for your money. I looked through the introductory Russian textbook for my state university and was kind of blown away by how verbose and obnoxious it was. This same school cut operating systems and anything related to low-level programming (people complain that they just want to learn Java or .NET so they can get a job, so I guess they got their way), and rearranged basic English to make it easier to pass. 100 years ago, learning Greek and/or Latin was standard - it seems like there's a noticeable trend towards "dumbing down", or maybe I'm viewing a time period I didn't live in with rose-colored glasses...
  - mapt 12y ago
    100 years ago, learning Greek and/or Latin was a large part of all there was to study. Now we have multitudes of fields and subfields regularly generating actual demonstrable progress in the capabilities of humanity, few of which require knowing anything about Thermistocles. Knowledge has gotten so complex and siloed that one of the most useful things for the inter-disciplinary academic project I observed turned out to be a facilitator with no subject-area expertise in any of the fields, who undertook the task of building glossaries to translate jargon and storyboard concepts people in different departments were trying to explain past each other. The chain of conceptual courses necessary to reach a level where one understands papers that have recently been published advancing a particular subfield, has grown longer and longer in STEM. At some point, your program decided to compromise on the things that weren't necessary to reach the advanced levels, so that they had room to get people there at all during their undergrad. There are fields and universities where this isn't the case, where an undergrad only qualifies you to take a master's degree. Some revision of the standard unit of 'the four-year degree' is probably a reasonable thing to examine at this point.
SloughFeg 12y ago
These sorts of articles always conflate the most basic premise of success- the quality of the people. Sure, you can point to statistics about how people who graduate from college earn more over a lifetime, but does that really tell you having a degree accounts for their success? If, tomorrow, we took away all diploma's from people who had graduated from college and gave them to people who hadn't, do you really believe wages would follow?
- sanxiyn 12y ago
  A diploma's value comes from being a verifiable and reasonable proxy for the quality. Your hypothetical would destroy that value, so no. On the other hand, I do believe if you give a diploma to a person who doesn't have it, it will have positive impacts on the wage. Do you disagree?
- leoedin 12y ago
  Education definitely plays a role in creating high quality successful people. I agree that there's some fundamental aspects of people which will strongly influence their success in life, but it's disingenuous to suggest that quality people aren't created in part by their education (which is strongly influenced by their upbringing and their families economic situation.)
- cafard 12y ago
  Quality is ambiguous here--some portion of what you call quality I'd define as "born in the right zip code." I'd settle for "ability", providing we remember what goes into rendering one able to do this or that.
cowpig 12y ago
This article could be a case study in misinterpreting data. Americans from "advantaged backgrounds" are enrolling way more in schools, graduating more, and making more money afterwards. Is this evidence of college being worth it? Maybe having parents who can invest six figures in your college education for you, and put you in contact with potential employers is a bit of a confounding variable here?
- sanxiyn 12y ago
  Economists are not stupid. Studies do control for confounding variables. For example, to control for influence of parents, there are twin studies. And you would have known if you followed links.
  - cowpig 12y ago
    "Economists aren't stupid" is a "stupid" thing to say. The study makes clear mistakes, and how stupid or smart the economist is is completely irrelevant. Anyway, trying to control for variables like the influence of parents is a fool's errand. The population that goes to college is self-selecting. There's almost certainly a direct correlation between aiming to earn a lot of money and going to college. It is a fact that colleges select what they consider to be the best of the applicants they see. These people are clearly likely to earn more money than the ones who are not accepted. etc. etc. etc.
sanxiyn 12y ago
Concerning the relative importance of the diploma and what you learn in college, following experiment design comes to mind. Measure wage premium for (1) not enrolled to college (2) enrolled to college for 1 year and dropped out (3) 2 years and dropped out (4) 3 years and dropped out (5) graduated. One hypothesis suggests linear improvement from 1 to 5, the other hypothesis suggests discontinuity between 1~4 and 5. I don't have this data, but this seems very doable, so it probably was already done. Can you help with literature search?
socrates1998 12y ago
I can't believe how even well educated and highly respected economists always get this concept wrong. Taking a sample of people who go to college (including those who don't graduate) and comparing that sample to the general population is biased. Why? Because the people who go to college tend to be motivated, have better connections and are well educated. It's not a fair comparison. It's a sample bias combined with a correlation error. The question shouldn't be "Are the people who go to college making more money than the people who don't?" The question should be "Are highly motivated and educated people better off if they go to college instead of doing something else?" And the answer to that is often "No, they aren't." There are only a few categories of people who should go to college: 1) If it's free and you want to do it. 2) If your preferred field requires it (Doctor, Lawyer) 3) If it's cheap enough and you don't know what you want to do with your life, so you take a class or two to get an idea of what is out there. Other than those instances. I can't see why we cram college down almost every 18 year old out there. It just drives me crazy how many economists make this even simple mistake.
- lingoberry 12y ago
  Sometimes it's just an investment. Many $80-100k entry level jobs do require very specific education. I bet those high-paying entry level jobs are fairly impossible to get without the right degree.
- nrao123 12y ago
  And the answer to that is often "No, they aren't." Curious if you have an data/research to back this up. I presume trying to get defintion & then sample of "highly motivated" people & the opposite of them- would be quite a challenging task.
  - socrates1998 12y ago
    I am claiming that highly motivated people don't need college to be successful. I don't think I need data to accept that. The business world is full of such people. I am not an economist (thank god), but I don't need to prove the opposite, that college is bad. The threshold is on the people (economists) who make the claim that college is generally "a good investment". If I can find a fault in their study (which I did), then their hypothesis is invalid. Too many economists feel the need to publish papers that fit a simple narrative or correlation.
quaffapint 12y ago
This might get voted down, but is it me or does that picture look like a real tiny girl in giant land?
danielweber 12y ago
Leonhardt argued that low graduation rates aren’t an argument against college; they’re an argument for programs aimed at improving graduation rates I can fix that in 1 step: automatic graduation for everyone. You might say this would make the college degree worthless. I might say that is the point.
- brazzy 12y ago
  I would say that you seem to have a bizarre misunderstanding of what college (and education) is about. The point of college is to teach stuff, not to separate people into "success" and "failure" bins. It is quite possible to increase graduation rates without lowering academic standards, by helping students stay motivated, removing distractions and ensuring that they only enroll for subjects they are motivated and talented enough to finish.
  - danielweber 12y ago
    The point of college is to teach stuff, not to separate people into "success" and "failure" bins. We don't actually know that. A lot of college degree is the signalling factor. How much is up for debate. If it's really about learning stuff and not about signalling, though, here is an experiment: hide educational status from employers, the same way we hide family status or any of the other things employers are not supposed to discriminate on. Would people still go to college for the education if the signalling aspect was stripped out? (You could have third-party assessment tests, of course.) I'll also exempt doctors and lawyers for now.
zacinbusiness 12y ago
I don't think the question is whether or not college is worth it. Because that's a generalization. I also don't think the question is whether or not college is worth it to some people. Because that's exclusionary. The question is, can college make a reasonably positive impact on a persons quality of life, given all of their life choices. It's exactly the same as a gym membership. Lots of recent research shows that you lose more weight through diet than through exercise. But gyms have more benefits than just helping you to lose weight. Also, you have to actually use the gym to get those benefits, simply paying the fee and showing up once in a while will do nothing. It's the same with college, it's a tool. And you can choose to use it or you can choose to not use it. There is no right or wrong answer.
- sanxiyn 12y ago
  You are wrong. The question whether college is worth it is asked in context of informing public policy decision. Namely, if college is worth it but people don't go to college, shouldn't we subsidize people to go to college, by tax? You can choose to use college or not, but you can't choose to pay tax or not.
  - zacinbusiness 12y ago
    That's two different questions. Is college worth it to any specific individual vs is college worth it to the nation as a whole. As far as the nation goes, it's obvious that the answer is yes. Should we have entirely subsidized higher education, of course. But even if it were free, not everyone would benefit from going to college. Some people have no interest and some people learn differently and some people are simply too lazy. So, college was a great choice for me, but some of my friends came out with debt and no jobs so it didn't do much for them.
    - sanxiyn 12y ago
      I hope you are aware not everybody would agree to "we should entirely subsidize higher education". It is a topic of debate. I also hope you are aware not everybody would agree to "not everyone would benefit from going to college". Actually, isn't it precisely the thing being discussed here?
SimpleXYZ 12y ago
On my current loan repayment plan, I will be 76 years old when my student loans are paid off. (I went to college right after high school.)
bryanlarsen 12y ago
"they’re an argument for programs aimed at improving graduation rates." which will end up making a college degree worth a lot less. Most employers require a college degree not because they need the specific training, but because a college degree is a piece of paper that says that the holder has at least a bare minimum level of intelligence and self-discipline. A grade 12 education used to say that, but efforts to improve graduation rates have removed that filtering indication.
Alupis 12y ago
This debate always gets me. The sides are: 1) I should bother to better myself and learn more, show motivation and ambition; I can always be better. 2) I shouldn't bother to better myself and learn more, show motivation nor ambition; I'm good enough right now. Cost of education is largely irrelevant if you pursue scholarships and grants, or even low interest loans. Majority of a student's "school expenses" are not tuition, but rather in large part are living expenses -- which the student would incur even if not attending college.

It depends on: - Cost of school or Debt Load - Type of Degree - Reputation of School - If you finish They all need to be weighed together.

k__ 12y ago
I'm so happy to live in Germany. With my first job I paid the dept I got from my studies in one year.
- parker94 12y ago
  We should be more like Germany, with trade schools being a viable option for those that are not academically inclined
  - dobbsbob 12y ago
    Or Germany's apprentice programs, like the one they have for developers.
- jgrowl 12y ago
  I live in the US and paid my loans off in one paycheck after graduating. The way I did it was by going to a cheap community college for the first two years to get my associates degree. I got government student aid which paid for the entire tuition/books with some extra to live on. Since I did well at community college, I was able to transfer to a larger university in-state and get some decent scholarships (A transfer scholarship offered by the University as well as a SMART grant offered by the government). Keep in mind I lived with family which might might not be possible for some. I also worked low paying jobs over some of the summers, but not throughout the academic year.
- arethuza 12y ago
  I'm so happy I did a degree in the UK in the 1980s when the fees were paid by the taxpayers and as my parents weren't very well off I got a full grant as well. As far as investments go that investment in me by the UK taxpayers paid off pretty well....

daemonk 12y ago

It depends on if you are going to actively take advantage of the resources you are paying for or if you are just going to passively get spoon fed information and coast through the whole experience for a nominal piece of paper that said you jumped through hoops for 4 years.

sanxiyn 12y ago
How does this follow? Wage premium data support that it is a nominal piece of paper that said you jumped through hoops for 4 years, not actively taking advantage of the resources you are paying for, that benefits your wage. Do you have data to the contrary?
- daemonk 12y ago
  I wasn't referring to salaries. The practical rewards of higher education is obviously important, but I also think learning and growing as a person is also important. So in context of the "worth" of a college education, I was talking about personal growth. Whether we can attribute higher wages to the nominal piece of paper or personal growth is a question I can't answer. Do employers only see potential employees on paper? Or do this personal growth get reflected in the interview? Do they even care. Not sure if there are any data to support either case. I want to say that actively participating in your education can potentially make you better equipped for the rest of your life, which can be more important than that nominal piece of paper. However, I can only attest to that with anecdotal evidence.
  - sanxiyn 12y ago
    Higher education is a large investment, so while personal growth is all good and fine, economic concern is paramount. As the article states, "most of the benefits of college come from graduating, not enrolling". This data do seem to be in favor of the hypothesis that the paper matters. More data on this would be very welcome. It also intuitively makes sense to me, as the paper is easy to verify, but personal growth is not. While I suspect measure of personal growth provides better information to employers compared to the paper, the cost of acquiring that information may make the paper more valuable in the net. Also you seem to underestimate the value the paper provides to employers: jumping through hoops correlates with conscientiousness personality trait, which is a good predictor of workplace performance.

Roboprog 12y ago

Student costs certainly have gone up. Back in 1983-84 school year, tuition and fees for CSU (California) system was just under $500 for the year. Now, I think it is a bit under $7000. (UC system is now about twice that, but I don't know what it was back in the 80s, as I opted not to leave town to go to Berkeley) By comparison, minimum wage has just a bit more than doubled. It's a lot harder to put yourself through school.

RRRA 12y ago
More reasons why a proper public system should always be in place and offer free tuition based on achievement.
jgg 12y ago
Spot on. I also feel like even if you were being charged the tuition of 30+ years ago, you wouldn't be getting nearly as much for your money. I looked through the introductory Russian textbook for my state university and was kind of blown away by how verbose and obnoxious it was. This same school cut operating systems and anything related to low-level programming (people complain that they just want to learn Java or .NET so they can get a job, so I guess they got their way), and rearranged basic English to make it easier to pass. 100 years ago, learning Greek and/or Latin was standard - it seems like there's a noticeable trend towards "dumbing down", or maybe I'm viewing a time period I didn't live in with rose-colored glasses...
- mapt 12y ago
  100 years ago, learning Greek and/or Latin was a large part of all there was to study. Now we have multitudes of fields and subfields regularly generating actual demonstrable progress in the capabilities of humanity, few of which require knowing anything about Thermistocles. Knowledge has gotten so complex and siloed that one of the most useful things for the inter-disciplinary academic project I observed turned out to be a facilitator with no subject-area expertise in any of the fields, who undertook the task of building glossaries to translate jargon and storyboard concepts people in different departments were trying to explain past each other. The chain of conceptual courses necessary to reach a level where one understands papers that have recently been published advancing a particular subfield, has grown longer and longer in STEM. At some point, your program decided to compromise on the things that weren't necessary to reach the advanced levels, so that they had room to get people there at all during their undergrad. There are fields and universities where this isn't the case, where an undergrad only qualifies you to take a master's degree. Some revision of the standard unit of 'the four-year degree' is probably a reasonable thing to examine at this point.

SloughFeg 12y ago

These sorts of articles always conflate the most basic premise of success- the quality of the people. Sure, you can point to statistics about how people who graduate from college earn more over a lifetime, but does that really tell you having a degree accounts for their success? If, tomorrow, we took away all diploma's from people who had graduated from college and gave them to people who hadn't, do you really believe wages would follow?

sanxiyn 12y ago
A diploma's value comes from being a verifiable and reasonable proxy for the quality. Your hypothetical would destroy that value, so no. On the other hand, I do believe if you give a diploma to a person who doesn't have it, it will have positive impacts on the wage. Do you disagree?
leoedin 12y ago
Education definitely plays a role in creating high quality successful people. I agree that there's some fundamental aspects of people which will strongly influence their success in life, but it's disingenuous to suggest that quality people aren't created in part by their education (which is strongly influenced by their upbringing and their families economic situation.)
cafard 12y ago
Quality is ambiguous here--some portion of what you call quality I'd define as "born in the right zip code." I'd settle for "ability", providing we remember what goes into rendering one able to do this or that.

cowpig 12y ago

This article could be a case study in misinterpreting data. Americans from "advantaged backgrounds" are enrolling way more in schools, graduating more, and making more money afterwards. Is this evidence of college being worth it? Maybe having parents who can invest six figures in your college education for you, and put you in contact with potential employers is a bit of a confounding variable here?

sanxiyn 12y ago
Economists are not stupid. Studies do control for confounding variables. For example, to control for influence of parents, there are twin studies. And you would have known if you followed links.
- cowpig 12y ago
  "Economists aren't stupid" is a "stupid" thing to say. The study makes clear mistakes, and how stupid or smart the economist is is completely irrelevant. Anyway, trying to control for variables like the influence of parents is a fool's errand. The population that goes to college is self-selecting. There's almost certainly a direct correlation between aiming to earn a lot of money and going to college. It is a fact that colleges select what they consider to be the best of the applicants they see. These people are clearly likely to earn more money than the ones who are not accepted. etc. etc. etc.

sanxiyn 12y ago

Concerning the relative importance of the diploma and what you learn in college, following experiment design comes to mind. Measure wage premium for (1) not enrolled to college (2) enrolled to college for 1 year and dropped out (3) 2 years and dropped out (4) 3 years and dropped out (5) graduated. One hypothesis suggests linear improvement from 1 to 5, the other hypothesis suggests discontinuity between 1~4 and 5. I don't have this data, but this seems very doable, so it probably was already done. Can you help with literature search?

socrates1998 12y ago

I can't believe how even well educated and highly respected economists always get this concept wrong. Taking a sample of people who go to college (including those who don't graduate) and comparing that sample to the general population is biased. Why? Because the people who go to college tend to be motivated, have better connections and are well educated. It's not a fair comparison. It's a sample bias combined with a correlation error. The question shouldn't be "Are the people who go to college making more money than the people who don't?" The question should be "Are highly motivated and educated people better off if they go to college instead of doing something else?" And the answer to that is often "No, they aren't." There are only a few categories of people who should go to college: 1) If it's free and you want to do it. 2) If your preferred field requires it (Doctor, Lawyer) 3) If it's cheap enough and you don't know what you want to do with your life, so you take a class or two to get an idea of what is out there. Other than those instances. I can't see why we cram college down almost every 18 year old out there. It just drives me crazy how many economists make this even simple mistake.

lingoberry 12y ago
Sometimes it's just an investment. Many $80-100k entry level jobs do require very specific education. I bet those high-paying entry level jobs are fairly impossible to get without the right degree.
nrao123 12y ago
And the answer to that is often "No, they aren't." Curious if you have an data/research to back this up. I presume trying to get defintion & then sample of "highly motivated" people & the opposite of them- would be quite a challenging task.
- socrates1998 12y ago
  I am claiming that highly motivated people don't need college to be successful. I don't think I need data to accept that. The business world is full of such people. I am not an economist (thank god), but I don't need to prove the opposite, that college is bad. The threshold is on the people (economists) who make the claim that college is generally "a good investment". If I can find a fault in their study (which I did), then their hypothesis is invalid. Too many economists feel the need to publish papers that fit a simple narrative or correlation.

quaffapint 12y ago

This might get voted down, but is it me or does that picture look like a real tiny girl in giant land?

danielweber 12y ago

Leonhardt argued that low graduation rates aren’t an argument against college; they’re an argument for programs aimed at improving graduation rates I can fix that in 1 step: automatic graduation for everyone. You might say this would make the college degree worthless. I might say that is the point.

brazzy 12y ago
I would say that you seem to have a bizarre misunderstanding of what college (and education) is about. The point of college is to teach stuff, not to separate people into "success" and "failure" bins. It is quite possible to increase graduation rates without lowering academic standards, by helping students stay motivated, removing distractions and ensuring that they only enroll for subjects they are motivated and talented enough to finish.
- danielweber 12y ago
  The point of college is to teach stuff, not to separate people into "success" and "failure" bins. We don't actually know that. A lot of college degree is the signalling factor. How much is up for debate. If it's really about learning stuff and not about signalling, though, here is an experiment: hide educational status from employers, the same way we hide family status or any of the other things employers are not supposed to discriminate on. Would people still go to college for the education if the signalling aspect was stripped out? (You could have third-party assessment tests, of course.) I'll also exempt doctors and lawyers for now.

zacinbusiness 12y ago

I don't think the question is whether or not college is worth it. Because that's a generalization. I also don't think the question is whether or not college is worth it to some people. Because that's exclusionary. The question is, can college make a reasonably positive impact on a persons quality of life, given all of their life choices. It's exactly the same as a gym membership. Lots of recent research shows that you lose more weight through diet than through exercise. But gyms have more benefits than just helping you to lose weight. Also, you have to actually use the gym to get those benefits, simply paying the fee and showing up once in a while will do nothing. It's the same with college, it's a tool. And you can choose to use it or you can choose to not use it. There is no right or wrong answer.

sanxiyn 12y ago
You are wrong. The question whether college is worth it is asked in context of informing public policy decision. Namely, if college is worth it but people don't go to college, shouldn't we subsidize people to go to college, by tax? You can choose to use college or not, but you can't choose to pay tax or not.
- zacinbusiness 12y ago
  That's two different questions. Is college worth it to any specific individual vs is college worth it to the nation as a whole. As far as the nation goes, it's obvious that the answer is yes. Should we have entirely subsidized higher education, of course. But even if it were free, not everyone would benefit from going to college. Some people have no interest and some people learn differently and some people are simply too lazy. So, college was a great choice for me, but some of my friends came out with debt and no jobs so it didn't do much for them.
  - sanxiyn 12y ago
    I hope you are aware not everybody would agree to "we should entirely subsidize higher education". It is a topic of debate. I also hope you are aware not everybody would agree to "not everyone would benefit from going to college". Actually, isn't it precisely the thing being discussed here?

SimpleXYZ 12y ago

On my current loan repayment plan, I will be 76 years old when my student loans are paid off. (I went to college right after high school.)

bryanlarsen 12y ago

"they’re an argument for programs aimed at improving graduation rates." which will end up making a college degree worth a lot less. Most employers require a college degree not because they need the specific training, but because a college degree is a piece of paper that says that the holder has at least a bare minimum level of intelligence and self-discipline. A grade 12 education used to say that, but efforts to improve graduation rates have removed that filtering indication.

Alupis 12y ago

This debate always gets me. The sides are: 1) I should bother to better myself and learn more, show motivation and ambition; I can always be better. 2) I shouldn't bother to better myself and learn more, show motivation nor ambition; I'm good enough right now. Cost of education is largely irrelevant if you pursue scholarships and grants, or even low interest loans. Majority of a student's "school expenses" are not tuition, but rather in large part are living expenses -- which the student would incur even if not attending college.