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Comment by 6stringmerc | Hacker News Reader

The concept of studying in Higher Education for more opportunities, job stability, and income during one's lifetime is not to be dismissed.

That said, if the predominant value of education is in the pursuit of money, then I think using the Brookings Institute model (which The Economist references) that includes two-year and vocational education entities is a much more pragmatic and practical approach. That is, if money is the goal, only focus on money as the outcome. Conflating money with prestige is, to me, foolish. A University is a prestige degree, insofar as there's a pursuit of knowledge, in theory, to produce a well-rounded, educated person...in theory.

I say this as a graduate of two generally highly ranked Universities, who occasionally gets the feeling that I'd be making more money if I'd taken my education budget, got trained in HVAC service/repair/sales, and started my own company.

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Even if the predominant value of education is the pursuit of money, the Economist still has the more useful model. It allows you to differentiate between schools whose graduates make money because they are full of people who are going to try to make money, and schools that make money because the school brings something to the table that helps its graduates above other options.

Look at CalTech for example. It does well in the Brookings model because it attracts a lot of people who want to be engineers. It does poorly in The Economist's model because its engineers are not making as much in 10 years as would be expected given a variety of factors that they control for. (Now that said, CalTech may be hurt because they graduate a lot of people who take side tracks through grad school and presumably would make more 15-20 years out. But you have to work with the data you have, and all they had was 10 years.)

Now if I'm a student planning to go into engineering, the Brookings model merely confirms that I'm making an excellent choice. The Economist's model suggests that if I'm capable of going to CalTech, maybe that is not the best school for me.

After reading through your response, I believe you missed my point. What I was referring to is that for a large population of potential students - those who wish to simply make more than if they do not go to a higher education program - going to a two year or vocational path school is exceptionally smart. Leaving that out of consideration is...not smart...highly biased...as in, how many readers of The Economist would consider sending their kid to become a diesel mechanic?

From the research I've absorbed over the years, students that can afford to go to prestige universities often come from well-to-do, college educated families - these are high indicators of future success. For a much larger swath of the population that is trying to advance their stake in life, they are first-generation students, and often not well-served by taking on debt and attending a large University environment. Thus, many Universities are, practically speaking, very bad at ROI for a large contingent of students who simply want to make more money - vocational training? An excellent prospect.

What remains to be seen is how much more earning potential there is in professions that require vocational training to be licensed or successful (i.e. welding, machining, air traffic control, plumbing, electrical contracting) as the generation currently working retires / dies from the workforce, thereby spiking demand, and in fields where a "traditional" University degree are, well, useless.

Read the article again. The Economist controlled for a variety of factors. Family socioeconomic status was among them.

That said, one of the shortcomings of their metric is that they only had data on students who took out federal loans. How predictive this result is for others is open to question.

Well, then, it's even more glaringly bad-form to leave out two-year and vocational schools from their approach then, if socioeconomic status is a factor, now isn't it? My perspective is yes, it's bad. It seems we'll just keep talking around each other, but I'll stand by my thumbs up toward the Brookings version and give the hairy eye to The Economist's method.

As a former Caltech undergrad it's hard to really disagree with the conclusions. I wouldn't be surprised given what I've seen / read if this changes dramatically over the next decade based on changes already taken place.

Median is also possibly not what an incoming Caltech (or MIT, or Harvard) student should optimize for though given that many of them will have relatively safe downsides. Mean for Caltech might be quite high (I don't know for sure). But given that I overlapped with multiple people who have certainly made large sums of money since graduation (about 10 years ago), I'm thinking it might look favorable for Caltech with a small student body.

Worth noting based on a paper linked from the pypy 4.0 thread[0] that maybe the most fare would be a geometric mean of salaries instead of an arithmetic mean.

[0] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=5673

Interesting. According to Brookings, Amarillo College (2 year), West Texas A&M, and UT Austin rank roughly the same (mid 70s).

Yeah, and the UT San Antonio nursing school is gangbusters! That totally makes sense to me - cheap to attend / finance, extremely high earning potential in context.

very interesting that a few schools (Babson, Harvard, Rensselaer) score highly in both models.

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