ROI on a college degree depends what you study, not where
economist.com
economist.com
Also, for anyone in the position of deciding which to do, I'd add the observation that it is way easier to go to college and get a formal education in science, math, or engineering, and pursue an ongoing adhoc self-directed education in the arts and humanities in your remaining decades of life, than the other way around. Locally to HN's interests, this calculation is a bit distorted by the way that programming can actually be learned via adhoc self-directed education, but as science, math, and engineering goes, I'd suggest it's on the short list of exceptions, not the rule.
It would have also helped if the article said what degree/how long it takes (BA, MA) and what the investment cost for the degree actually is (provide median or something). A typical BA takes 2 years and is in the ballpark of 50k$ on the lowish end (I heard that as a low end average for in-state public schools). Had I invested that fictional amount at 7.8% since universities are "free" here I'd have about 225k...yay
Do you mean 4 years? It's extremely rare for someone to get their Bachelor's in fewer than 4 years.
Unless otherwise specified, US publications tend to assume "college" = 4 year bachelor's degree.
[1] http://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-table...
Of course, all of these numbers are complicated by "salary of graduates" versus "salary of graduates employed in field".
I'd also point out that if for the sake of argument that was your primary goal at college, college is a very cost-ineffective choice. There's plenty of non-college ways of doing that, for way less money, since it's something that business people have to do routinely. Even if it means taking languages courses from the local community college on the side... I'm not aware of much evidence that major colleges teach the courses all that much better or indeed even differently for languages.
You would be surprised how much you could learn on your own!
My case it was german. I was so fascinated with the german language, and germany as a whole, in part I must sadly admit because I was such an avid fan of WW2 history. I actually tried to go the traditional route, and I hated it. I noticed one time some germans playing counterstrike and other MMORPG's I was playing. I got to know them better, in part because of their extreme delight in my ability to say a few things in german. Then it turned into ventrilo/teamspeak sessions, which then turned into me wanting to read actual german books, then it went on to learning about Otto Von Bismarck, German Reunification, the East/West cultural divide, watching foreign german films such as Der Unterfall, Das Leben der Anderen, Good Bye, Lenin!, effects German engineering such as Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler and von Braun, which led me down the path of looking into german businesses, especially the ones that are here in my own home state (which are many), it was so much fun!
edit: I realize you qualified it with 'business' people, implying they won't see the value of learning the other things, but since business people is a large group (of which I myself can be considered a part of) I imagine there are others like me.
I've been learning some Korean in my spare time and I feel pretty confident in my assessment that being in a college course would both be easier and see me make more progress more quickly.
My good friend has a PhD in Chinese, (yes that is actually a thing), and he attests to the fact that he didn't grok the language until his travels and studies there, being immersed.
Now typing this I realize we may be debating across each other, because even if you believe you can learn on your own better, or having structured courses is better, the real answer is none of it sticks unless you fully immerse yourself in it, self-taught or not.
You might be able to reach similar levels of language proficiency without the courses but the biggest problems are 1) finding hours and hours a day to drill writing characters and other mundane aspects of learning 2) guidance from an instructor who can tell you whether things that look/sound right are. And also I think a university course also gives you a survey of the literature and culture of that language and insight into it that would be hard to acquire on your own.
Also how long have you been studying languages? I ask because I am curious if you think that the web, and later, apps, like Duolingo for example, can make a huge difference versus the pre-web era of language learning. Pre-web, I would agree with anyone that yes it would be extremely difficult to learn a language on your own unless you had traditional schooling. But today there is nothing a traditional course in German could give me that I couldn't get from Deutsche Welle, for example (but I also realize there isn't a 'Deutsche Welle' for every language).
Sorry if this is going further than you wanted, I am just trying to get different perspectives and it seems like you have a good grasp.
I started studying in middle school. I haven't tried the online stuff you're talking about. I'm not sure that they would be just as good.
If while you are there, and are aware of any similar websites like that for any other language I would love to know!
Also, I think people are fundamentally missing the comparitive here. My claim is not that learning humanities is "easy". Nothing worth doing is easy. My contention is that it is easier to learn math, engineering, and science in school and study humanities on your own that to learn humanities in school and then try to break into math, engineering, and science on your own.
And as I watch the conversation flow here, bear in mind I do mean "math, engineering, and science" here and not just "programming". Which is easier to do on your own, learn Japanese from scratch enough to get a relevant job, or learn biochemistry from scratch enough to get a relevant job? (Note we're also discussing "learning Japanese" as an extreme in the humanities but I consider "biochemistry" an average sort of what I'm talking about.) And part of my "easier" also encompasses the fact that life is a lot easier when you have a job and a paycheck. Someone who actually has leisure time due to not working two-and-a-half jobs and who is much more relaxed about paying off their loans will find it easier to spend their leisure time learning things.
In the real world that's a completely wrong way to look at the purpose of life and education, but in the small minded narrow constraints of the article its actually "correct".
A side issue is outside bubble areas, every low paid service industry worker has a liberal arts degree and they guarantee the ROI of self taught foreign languages or liberal arts will be zero. A guy looking for employment who merely is a lifelong expert on Japanese will never get hired if the competition is ten baristas, bartenders, and real estate agents all with bachelors or masters or PHDs in Japanese Literature.
However, to argue that a young person of modest means should study the humanities is just cruel. If your family and connections aren't going to set you up as a company vice president or send you to the legislature, your job prospects are dismal.
However, if you have two interests then gathering credentials in the one which can make more money is probably a better investment.
Nonetheless, I have achieved a level of fluency and especially literacy in Mandarin that puts my Japanese of that time to shame and I have no formal credential backing it up.
You don't need formal classes to become fluent in a language. If you'd like to learn how some very successful language learners have done it, check out http://lingsprout.com/experts
Yeah, not really. There is a huge difference between reading a book by yourself, and reading a book then discussing it with a room full of other intelligent people + a knowledgable teacher.
I think this is the same for other "liberal arts" subjects too. Take linguistics -- from what I know about some of the linguistics concepts that pioneer translation software, speech synthesis, natural language processing, etc., linguistics is hardly "fluff" and requires some years of deep study to be an expert at.
The Economist's monetary chart is solely based on supply vs. demand.
In many subjects, I think extremely gifted autodidacts are pretty rare. No matter whether its the STEM subjects or the arts or anything else, I think most people benefit from an environment where like minded peers can bounce ideas off of each other.
When I look at Wikipedia's list of autodidacts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autodidacts
I know this is just a sample, but at first glance, the list of autodidact scientists and engineers certainly seem to be of comparable size with artists / musicians / etc.
EDIT: I will add that I agree with other above posts, that one of the biggest barriers for the modern autodidact scientist / engineer is that it is really hard to home-tinker with certain concepts. You can program at home very easily. You can make circuits and robotics at home. You can even "group buy" small order electronic bare boards from contract manufacturers with all the difficult-to-hand-solder parts already taken care of.
It is nearly impossible, however, for a home tinkerer to get access to $100K scopes, electron microscopes, GCMS / NMR machines, or any other "big equipment" of this nature that you can think of. Heck, depending on what you are doing, you probably even risk a run in with "the law" these days from tinkering in certain sectors of hobbies like home chemistry or home biology.
To me, that's pretty much the barrier for non-college STEM in a nutshell.
A better example might be that philosophy/law require broad and deep contextual knowledge of prior thinkers and extremely strong logical skills. Even having trained in formal logic as a software developer, I sometimes struggle to parse philosophical arguments, even when laid out plainly. Yet, even that is still a comparison on the same plane as STEM when ultimately these fields come with different sorts of complexities. Apples and oranges.
It's not that the subjects are lightweight fluff, it's that the students are disproportionately so. STEM is fairly objective, so it's comparatively hard to hide your lack of depth.
But if you just want to go to college as a social signal, and a ticket to 4 years of parties, then arts and humanities will offer you a place of comfort. Not every professor for every class at every university; but at pretty much any university you can find some kind of lazy path through the arts/humanities departments.
There are a few reasons for this:
* Many professors / TAs use classes as a political platform first, and an education platform second. If you just tell them what they want to hear (a slightly avant garde kind of progressive liberalism will do the trick pretty much anywhere), you get an A or B.
* Based on the title of the course, huge mobs of lazy students will sign up assuming that it's easy (this is never a serious STEM class). The professor then adapts the grades so that a lot of them pass, because otherwise there will be a revolt.
* Universities like to provide "a path to success" for pretty much all of their students who are willing to put in even small amounts of effort. If they can't tell the difference between a concerto and a sonata, then the counselors can take them out of music theory, and put them in "post-modern ethno musical studies".
And humanities disciplines are quite dissimilar as are STEM disciplines. Philosophy is generally fairly rigorous and difficult, communication is often not except when it encompasses fields like journalism, etc.
I think the bar for mediocrity is much lower in the humanities, but the bar for top-notch excellence is much higher. When two students complete an exam correctly, they are both great students who wrote down the correct answers as instructed. When two students write papers, you can actually tell that one of them is genuinely brilliant.
Oh well. I guess colleges want money, and they will find a way to make their customers happy.
From my experiences, the rest of the STEM field doesn't take the social science parts (psychology, athropology, economics, political science) very seriously or even consider them STEM on a colloquial level (even if "officially" they are).
As a teenager in India, most people took Arts, Humanities and commerce(No economics, but accounting) because it was widely believed to 'light fluff', course work easy to get through. And you could get a 'Bachelors' title next your name without much work.
Among science people these subjects was what we believed losers took, because they couldn't study anything better. Which was to some extent true. I studied Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics and Biology. I would typically get to sleep 5 hours a day. Apart from the main exams, we had to study hard for engineering entrance exams. Compare this to some one who studied history or accounting. You can't exactly compete with someone working 3 times more harder than you, in a area which is vastly more economically valuable.
This whole "self-learning is just as good!" is ridiculous. If it was, it would already rule the world. People trust accreditation for a reason.
You have a PHD in drama? Good for you. I'd rather watch a high school drop out like Leonardo DiCaprio.
You have a PHD in computer graphics? That's nice, but once again a dropout beat you to it. He currently leads Oculus Rift.
Marketers? Salespeople? Businesspeople? Authors? Seriously... try to name even one at the very top of the game who became that way through formal schooling. It's not easy.
Sure, maybe the top 1% is self-taught (probably not, though, you're just selecting for your point). How about the next 15%?
The examples I gave should make it incredibly clear that people can and do learn enough to get to the top of their fields without going through a formal process. It doesn't mean that you will. It doesn't mean that there are no fields with rigid credential requirements. It does mean that no formal body controls education, only schooling and credentials.
>"Sure, maybe the top 1% is self-taught (probably not, though, you're just selecting for your point)."
Another thing to think about is that with or without credentials in their past, at the very top everybody is self-taught. No business school on earth can teach Zuckerberg exactly how to set Facebook's strategy. He's got to make his own curriculum.
I can google questions, I can read discussions that take place between other people, I can chime in, I can be replied to.
I would probably find it more useful to be able to read all the TOP QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS from all the Roman History 101 discussions around the world, than just whatever came up in my class. Being able to sort by global best as opposed to local loudest sounds very useful.
>it's on the short list of exceptions, not the rule.
As an example, I've fiddled around with circuit design. I'm not good at it, but I can make some basic stuff.
It feels a lot like fiddling around with linux early in my career, and I'm not seeing any obvious point where it suddenly becomes more difficult to learn the skill.
It's just a bit harder to get into, and a bit harder to get on-the-job training/mentorship.
In terms of pure theory, I can see what you're saying but a lot of STEM curriculum includes lab work that's hard to replicate for an auto-didactic.
For applied sciences like biology, electrical engineering, applied physics (not theoretical physics), the universities will have expensive equipment that students can use in their lab assignments. Biology students examine specimens in $20k microscopes, physics students schedule time on multi-million dollar particle accelerators, and engineering students working on high speeed GHz digital circuits can use $100k Agilent scopes. Some universities also have specialized and very expensive labs with robotics and virtual reality rooms.
The humanities graduate wanting to "reinvent" himself/herself as a "electrical engineer" can buy the same college books and watch hours of youtube videos about circuits but the lab work is really hard to replicate. That's not to say that there aren't a lot of self-taught electronics engineers out there... there are ... but most I've seen learned it first as children and added to their hobby and knowledge over a decade. That's a very different learning trajectory than a 30-something trying to self-study physics without a particle accelerator in his garage.
Also, the STEM students have access to professors and their professional networks into businesses. Their recommendations opens doors for internships. This is another form of "real-world" lab work to strengthen the acquired knowledge.
Computer programming is unique in that it's a STEM that self-learners can get very deep and practical in -- without expensive lab equipment.
Something interesting to think about is as a hobbyist I'll be buying that $100K scope at a hamfest or off ebay in about 10 or 20 years for basically the cost of shipping. Then at home purely as a hobby I can entertain myself cheaply and endlessly doing stuff that was cutting edge in 2016, which is still going to be an enormous market in 20 years.
There are two problems. One is that companies like to think they're cutting edge. So gaining expert level skills on, say, late 70s high speed TTL is not interesting to hiring managers. The second problem is companies that like to think they're cutting edge, almost always are not, unless they're household names. Everyone knows google uses go and python but "the rest of the real world" runs on perl and cobol, like it or not. Oddly enough the hiring managers often don't know how far behind the times they are, so you get the equivalent of an interviewer bragging about the EE equivalent of planning to implement CVS someday soon, or trying that newfangled agile design methodology someday, not knowing their plans for the future are already obsolete in the market. Half of companies are below median, after all.
TLDR is there's a lot of posing in stem, and at least some of the people doing the loudest posing are actually doing stuff right out of 1975, if not earlier. Usually because if something makes money there's no need to fix it solely to strike a stunning pose. In public of course the image will always be that theres no way we couldda dunnit without that $500K budget, partially to intimidate competitors, partially to appear more powerful, mostly just traditional neophilia.
Seems like you answered your own question.
Part of my point is that there really isn't a sharp dividing line between "college" and "self-education". If you're going to college and not also using it to do a lot of "self-education" you're really wasting your time, for instance. But programming seems to have a fairly solid track for moving from casual hobbyist to full-on professional that I don't witness in very many other disciplines.
Why not carefully pick which things you're going to use the "college" on, bearing in mind that there's also no magical "YOU SHALL STOP LEARNING NOW" barrier that gets thrown up on college graduation day?
I really don't know how I would have learned to use radiation detectors or export-controlled nuclear reactor modeling software without institutional access to those things.
Whereas, my understanding of the S&P is that you don't have to work 40 hours per week for it to give you returns ;). So, if you had your college money as cash you could put all that in the S&P, then work full time without a degree to then, most likely, have an even higher ROI. Of course, most don't have the significant cash for college lying around.
Unfortunately people aren't generally in the habit of handing out low-interest loans to recent high school graduates with no assets so they can invest in the S&P.
I mean this seriously. One of the bigger advantages of college as an investment is that you can get favorable interest rates on purchasing it. Though perhaps this advantage is minimized by the relatively poor tax treatment of college returns (ordinary income vs. capital gains).
This isn't really true. You can't really have any kind of art career, for example, if you don't go to art school. Meanwhile, tons of companies will happily hire whatever chumps code bootcamps are churning out.
This can't possibly be true.
I wish I could find a study of similarly smart and motivated people who decided themselves to go or not to college. As a choice. And see what the difference in earnings over life would be. That would measure the added value of college education.
Anybody knows any such study?
I would think a smart, motivated person skipping college, having no such costs, plus 4 extra years of income and (hopefully) savings, would have a good ROI compared to college-educated peers. And even if they would start at a lower level initially, they would accumulate work experience earlier, moving up the ladder sooner.
Differently said, after 4 years, in addition to having a much healthier bank account, could this person be the person hiring the new college graduate?
This bit right here might need some clarification. I believe the current U.S. average time in college is more than 4 years. I'm guessing you were motivated to get your degree as quickly as possible. I don't believe young adults in developed nations have the same motivation. 8 years in the real world will disabuse anyone of a desire to spend more time then necessary in school.
It will take much longer - if ever - for something like that to happen in law, medicine, and engineering but it's feasible. Remember, licensing and accreditation are still relatively new concepts..
Disclosure: I am a beneficiary of Scotland's free university system, long ago.
The grandparent commenter was concerned that 'people who go to college' may have better outcomes not because of college but because they are smarter or wealthier. In Scotland's case the admission is based on grades so it still leaves open the possibility that college graduates are just smarter than everyone else instead of better educated.
I don't think that's actually the ideal study design you want. Any measure of intelligence/motivation is going to be imperfect, so any time you try to control for it but still allow a "free choice", that free choice will be correlated with variables that plausibly impact future success (e.g., maybe "cool, rational thought" is distinct from intelligence and motivation, and influences both the choice to go to college and long-term success).
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/04/02/co...
That said, if you're just asking whether anyone has studied the impact of attending college on lifetime earnings after controlling for several sensible variables that correlate with intelligence, the answer is "yes".
> Students who go to more selective colleges make more money later in life...This partially reflects students who go to more selective colleges being more able and ambitious, as opposed to attending a more selective college boosting one's income. How much does attending boost income? The famous paper Estimating the Return to College Selectivity Over the Career Using Administrative Earning Data (2011) by Dale and Krueger raises the possibility that on average, attending a more selective college doesn't raise earnings at all. Specifically, controlling for
> * Student high school GPA
> * Student SAT score
> * The average SAT score of the colleges that a student applied for
> * The number of applications that the student submitted
> * Various demographic factors (race, sex, parental education)
> they found that as a group, there was no statistically significant difference in income later in life between students who went to more selective colleges and students who went to less selective colleges. Their finding is somewhat robust: it's based on a large (~10k) sample size, it's true both of the class of 1976 and the class of 1989, it's true of the class of 1976 from age 25 through age 50 and it's true both of men and of women.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/k0w/how_much_does_where_you_go_to_co...
Some things to note:
(1) This sort of study is obviously the very first thing you would do if you were investigating this topic seriously, yet extremely few of the popular articles on this topic mention this study. So 99% of popular discussion on this topic is hopeless uninformed, and no one cares.
(2) In the absence of a controlled randomized trial, you can still hope for high-quality pseudo experiments using techniques like differences in differences, or the effect of arbitrary numerical cutoffs, etc.
It talks about completing college as potentially being an indicator or side effect of the things you cite, not the result. The author uses earlier versions of this study and its predecessors to analyze relationships: https://www.nlsinfo.org/content/cohorts/nlsy97
Skilled trades? Some oil field trades at least while there's not a bust going on?
It takes electricians more than four years to own their own company and have a couple guys working under them, but in all fairness many people take a lot longer than four years to get that art history degree and not all electricians want to own a small business and manage employees. Union payscale for 40 hrs no overtime is about twice median income where I live, I make about twice that programming, 2x median sounds bad compared to 4x median, but compared to joe6pack, twice median isn't that bad of a life, and there's something to be said for leaving work at work when you go home at the end of the day.
I have a cousin in law who's a stationary diesel mechanic with decades of experience and certifications, he's running about 8x median income, but that includes overtime and oncall and unlike fields like programming, diesel mechanic work is a profession that values decades of experience so a noob grad is not going to get that kind of pay. Pay might vary based on local values of supply and demand. Stationary diesels run your datacenter and hospital UPS, and corporations at least seem to have a blank checkbook for disaster recovery spending.
Something to think about WRT lifetime ROI is its widely understood that some fields like programming kick the vast majority of declared employees out by age 40 or so... (please no anecdotes about 2% being permitted to remain in the field, etc) That will confuse the results because a contractor / small business owner / manager / project coordinator will not show up in employee salary stats under "programmer", even if they like to call themselves a "programmer".
[1] http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-col...
these are complicated issues, and pretending one's free and the other's an outrageous ripoff is a ridiculous simplification.
The U.S. is an outlier.
[1] Source: http://www.oecd.org/edu/EAG2014-Indicator%20B1%20(eng).pdf
http://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/student-finance/...
An investment in education should pay off in ways other than a financial return.
Edit for downvoters: In France, this was the high-school leaving exam (literary track) in history for 2015. Four hours to write an essay on each of the following two topics:
1. "South and East Asia: The challenges of population and growth."
2. "The paths of power: The United States and the world at the end of the 1960s."
(Source: [1])
And this is graded much harder than, say, the A.P. world history exam, which a small minority of students in the U.S. take. Subjects are taught by people who got the highest scores on extremely competitive exams covering their subject areas, often after a Master's degree in the subject.
History school-leaving exam in the U.S.: whatever easy, probably multiple-choice final your bored and undereducated teacher decided to give you in an hour-long class period.
[1]: http://www.lemonde.fr/bac-lycee/article/2015/06/18/bacs-s-es...
That doesn't mean my high school classes were anywhere near the depth or intensity of my college classes. While high school provided me with a solid foundation in all the disciplines, it's not set up to go in depth on specific areas.
As a computer science major in college, I have had the opportunity to do in-depth, semester-long investigations of the Armenian genocide, the evolution of interactive media, laughter in theater, the 2008 financial crisis, Arab history in China, the philosophy of consciousness and dozens of other interesting subjects. These are not at all equivalent to what's offered at even the best high schools in the world and I wouldn't give it up to have a slightly cheaper or more efficient college career.
I'm not sure how generalizable my experience is though. My AP classes were at a normal public high school while my IB classes were at an elite boarding school. I will say that the exams are definitely much better for the IB (they're much more detailed and require actual understanding rather than rote memorization).
Also, I did IB too (got a 7/7 in HL History ;) ), and anecdotally I think it's dramatically easier than the French high school diploma. The History exam, at least, may not be multiple choice but it usually asks about very concrete things.
"1. With reference to one war before 1945 and one war after 1945, assess the significance of either air power or naval power in deciding its outcome."
This is basically a step up from regurgitating facts. I agree it is not as deep as what you will have to learn in a university course.
The questions I gave in my example were much more open-ended and require a lot of independent analysis and synthesis to approach, as well as knowing a lot of facts.
I went to New York University.
> Also, I did IB too, and anecdotally I think it's dramatically easier than the French high school diploma.
French exams are notorious for their grading. That doesn't mean the education actually includes greater depth. Anecdotally, my friends who went through the French education system have a keen appreciation for difficult exams but aren't any more knowledgeable than me.
I don't think you could convincingly argue that an IB-level of education isn't a "functioning" education system though.
After all, even in France you do in fact have higher education beyond high school.
That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about broad "liberal arts" curricula that touch on a variety of subjects. In France, it would be very unusual for a math student in university to take classes on philosophy, literature, etc. (ok, maybe some easy English classes for practical reasons, but that's it)
Yes I of course agree that high school doesn't teach you everything you need to know about your topic of specialization. But a good high school education in advanced European countries is basically comparable to undergrad liberal arts/distribution requirements at average American universities.
BTW, NYU is not typical; it's an elite school. You can't compare your experience there to typical colleges in the US.
I know. There's a reason that I chose to attend college at a US university rather than in Europe.
The point of the liberal arts curriculum isn't, in my view, necessarily to give you a basic grounding in different areas. As you point out, a good high school education is typically sufficient to gain such a grounding (for example, any chemistry I know is from high school). Instead, what a good liberal arts education allows you to do is to explore specific disciplines outside your core specialization. These explorations are not necessarily to give you a general understanding of the field, but instead expose you to interesting ideas in alternative fields far beyond what you'd learn in high school. For example, I still don't know much about theater—but my class on comedies has given me some interesting ideas for how to incorporate humor into a bot I'm developing.
Distribution requirements are not comparable to a "good high school education" in Europe. That's grossly overvaluing the quality of European education and undervaluing American universities.
> BTW, NYU is not typical; it's an elite school. You can't compare your experience there to typical colleges in the US.
I'm aware. But the typical college experience in the US doesn't really include the liberal arts.
And I took a few AP classes that you dismiss as being simple multiple choice tests, which wasn't the case.
The parent was talking about intense focus on stem in college being something he's worried about for his kid, not high school.
Do STEM degrees yield more ROI? Perhaps, but if the article is attempting to help an individual student frame their thinking about what to major in, it is very bad advice.
People should follow their aptitudes. Study what compels them and what they're talented in, regardless of statistical ROI's that apply NOT to individuals but to a population of people.
I've seen it a lot, good students who force themselves into degree programs for subjects they have no interest in: going to pre-law or pre-med or finance or engineering, not because they love the subject matter but for status and for the hope of a "well-paid" career (often propelled by parents wishes).
We may very well need more STEM folks, but what we DON'T need is more STEM folks who are passionless, untalented duds who are in it for the money/status.
This is posed in too absolute terms. People should, among their aptitudes, pick some activity that has the prospect of a fulfilling professional life. Aptitude and personal preference represent one aspect of such fulfillment. Market fit is, however, most definitely relevant towards professional success.
The fact is people do just fine majoring in things such as studio arts and literature. It could very well mean that they don't end up working professionally in those fields, but that is OK. Some of these people end up working in the same companies as their peers, some end up in menial jobs after college, some become your boss (and some do all or none of these).
And I am not even mentioning the fact that at age 18, many many students have yet to find themselves and settle on a major, let alone a career path.
I can be the best plate-spinner in the world, but I still need to provide for the people that depend on me. People should start with the set of jobs that can support them and their (future! sometimes unexpected!) family and then pick the things they have aptitude at.
Only to an extent. I am, for example, a better skier than I am programmer. Yet it would be financial folly for me to follow that aptitude. Pretty good skier make on avg. $0 a year while pretty good programmers make a very comfortable living.
Consider climate change. I believe climate change is happening and needs to be addressed. But I don't really understand the mechanics. Neither do the people who think it doesn't exist. Rather, I've been socialized to trust experts and scientists when they speak on their area of expertise and they have not.
People who dislike Trump don't do so because they know facts he doesn't. They dislike him because they have different values than he holds (or purports to hold).
Right. I believe in the Golden Rule and Trump thinks it's not a big deal.
I suspect that the majority of believers in all cargo cults don't independently come up with the same idea, someone will think of it and the rest will follow them. The followers were in a clientelist relationship with the leader and want that to continue and keep providing them with the cargo in future.
Maybe we need to look at the education of the kind of people who end up as our leaders.
That all depends on how you measure better off.
Knowledge, understanding, wisdom are goods unto themselves. No doubt, we need to eat, but I'd rather know Latin, Norse mythology, Anselm's ontological proof, the Platonic solids, and the major players in the Glorious Revolution than not. And I'm better off for simply knowing them.
You can get the first two for free on a library.
You are making a mistake when you compare the knowledge, understanding and wisdom you would get in College against nothing and then decide that College is better than nothing. You should compare it against all the other things people could be doing with that time and money. The opportunity cost.
With respect to the original article, yes absolutely.
I was responding to the parent comment who described people 'no better off' for knowing versus not knowing.
Maybe they will acquire work experience, life experience, pragmatical knowledge about how real world works, that kind of thing. Why is knowledge about covalent bonds intrinsically more important than that?
Sure.
But expecting some body to pay you just because you know all of that is tad bit too much to ask.
The right question to ask here is after all that, how employable are you?
Because you need skills to be employed. The ridiculousness of the situation is such a plumber is probably spending their time more valuably than say who studied Norse Mythology. Note I'm talking more in economic terms only. Sure the person who studied Norse Mythology knows more than a plumber, but you need a plumber more often than you need some one who knows Norse Mythology.
>>Why can't you say just the same thing about, say, teaching people to read?
That sets the basic platform for other stuff. You build on top of it.
>>Fifth-grade literacy is probably enough to do many jobs, so maybe we should toss out high school too.
If I was spending $X00,000 on a degree and expect a job in return which some one with fifth-grade literacy can do. I'd be seriously worried about my choices and decision making skills in life.
The fact that I've had the opportunity to learn about a broad range of domains in addition to my technical focus has allowed me to not only have a better understanding, appreciation, and direction in my interactions with the broader world, it lets me draw parallels between similar scenarios in distinct fields, learn from the experiences of others, see novel solutions to entirely distinct problems, and all in all have a more holistic view of <insert hand waving> Life.
I would not be the engineer I am today if I did not spend a portion of my time learning about "what native Americans lived in Virginia" (Would heavily recommend Ken Burns's "The West", speaking of similar topics, that man is a hero to the presentation of american history), and as such I'm a strong advocate for giving _everyone_ the opportunity to learn about things that may not have any direct benefit, not only because you don't know until you've tried (and benefits as I said can be very transitive) but also because learning in and of itself I see as very central to the human experience.
If you could cut a full year off the work needed for a professional degree by losing "which native Americans lived in Virginia", and thus spare millions of students the expense of a full year in college, you would be materially helping not only current college students but also people who are forced to debate whether or not to attend because of the expense.
I agree wholeheartedly that the opportunity cost of that learning should be taken into account, but my earlier point was made with the implicit assumption that there are methods that don't come with such an overhead. (e.g. choosing to take Latin during my CS degree would not have meaningfully changed my costs had I cut it out, and the benefits have become increasingly clear over the years. Most of this learning, however, I'd say has taken place outside of any institution that incurs a monetary cost, and the minor time-cost is largely what I was defending)
It's not gone, obviously, and some places are better than others, but it seems to be getting scarcer. If your degree no longer offers a shot at the sublime beauty of understanding, I suppose it's time to start counting dollars.
It's not like university admissions offices are filled with people saying "Are you sure you want to come here? Don't do it for any hope of having a job in the future, this is a $n year exercise in pure reason and research."
What I find truly disheartening is that if you judge colleges by their actions, they think of themselves as tax-advantaged businesses trying to extract the most dollars possible from financially naive kids, donors, and sports fans.
I started to wonder if maybe there's another distinction that is hidden in the data. I think we can all agree that there is a difference between earning 150k a year as a senior software engineer and as a director of the American Musical Heritage foundation. Some people could reasonably see those as very different outcomes, one job far more desirable than the other.
Here's the thing - do those distinctions actually exist within computer science as well? There's a big difference within tech. Think about being a data scientist who writes a lot of code, but has a tremendous amount of autonomy and freedom, who gets to initiate projects, direct his or her own work, make presentations, speak at conferences, and so forth. Now imagine being a senior crud bug fixer who checks JIRA every morning and works (under constant pressure to provide updates about whether we'll still meet the "deadline") to figure out why some payroll calculations are sometimes included twice in the pdf report but not the excel report. Say both jobs pay 150k.
There's a big difference between that first job and the second one. Is it possible that elite schools make it more likely that you'll get that first job? I'm not saying this is the case, just that a hidden distinction similar to the humanities/engineering divide may exist here...
As for me, I got a degree in Fine Arts from a small liberal arts school, then become a coder. I have almost zero regret about that choice, 20+ years down the line. Actually, if I had to do it again, I am more likely to skip the coder part, not the college part. (20+ years behind a desk... I could probably find a better path.)
With federal loans ranging between 6-8.5% (last I looked) it means that for the first 10-20 years, the government is the one capturing the gains from many people's college educations. There may well still be a positive ROI for some degrees but the loan picture means it comes on a much longer timeline, doesn't it?
http://www.payscale.com/college-roi
Average loan amount is factored into the ROI calculation.
The concern is definitely still there for folks who take above average loan amounts.
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/graduate-earnings-what-y...
I have to disagree, manners are not a linear scale from bad to good, certain behaviours will ingratiate you to certain groups while ostracising you from others. If you (as some people do) consciously decide to mimic the behaviours of richer groups then yes, this may help your ROI.
I'm in Britain, and the class system here is probably a lot more linear than most. One of the issues with just behaving better is that there's a huge amount of snobbishness (from everyone, at every level), and many of the defining behaviours of the upper classes require having a great deal of money to even participate.
There are other factors:
* One thing is simply understanding the opportunities available to you. The idea that "People like me don't (go to university | start companies | go for promotion beyond a certain level)" is quite harmful.
* It is not uncommon that people go into the same field as one of their parents, simply because of how big an influence they are on your life as a child. If one is a doctor, and the other a barrister, then if you follow one of them, you'll make more money than if they are both in minimum-wage jobs.
* If you do follow your parents in their careers, you will have had early exposure to some of the concepts. You may therefore perform better at university intake interviews, and the relevant prerequisites. They will also know about how to progress through the career in the best way.
* Regardless of nepotism, your parents' friends are another source of examples to follow in a similar way, and may be able to dispense similar advice.
* Even if you don't follow your parents in their careers. Having a parent who graduated from a competitive course at a prestigious university (which might be indicated in their lifetime earnings) means that you still have an example to follow, and their experience to draw on. One of the reasons for poor state school intake at Oxford is that most youths don't actually know how to apply. Also, if you know what to expect from such a place, you can make more of it, particularly in terms of the extra curricular offering - e.g. networking, bursaries and careers service.
* A youth with wealthy parents may be able take better advantage of low-paid and unpaid internships. If your parents can't support you through university and early career, then you may have to make more short term decisions - e.g. taking a low-paid summer job at a bar, instead of a lower or even unpaid job at a law firm, or working evenings and weekends instead of studying.
* At the extreme end, a child in poverty is likely to have fewer books and poorer nutrition when those things matter most.
I did my undergrad at a "tumbleweed state" school and grad school at a top-10. The difference in the average student at each school was privilege, not ability.
Turns out, best and brightest from Idaho to Ohio and Minnesota to Mississippi are just as smart and just as hardworking as the best and brightest from California and Massachusetts.
It is the the other way.
Why do you think a guy who can produce a good algorithm from Tumbleweed State be paid less than a person who studied hunting habits of native americans in Stanford?
You are not going to college to buy aristocracy, that you will get lifelong rights to a nice pay regardless of your skills.
That's deeply unsettling...
If a more exclusive college (x-axis) is proportionally more expensive, then this graph suggests that everyone, regardless of field, is better off going to a more expensive college. Getting a 12% annualized return on a $100k private bachelors is better than getting the same return on a $30k public university education.
[1] https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/curre...
I'm curious about how many people go to the standard (STEM) fields of education because of the cost, and ROI vs they are interested in them.
If people had 0 debt maybe more people might choose alternative fields of education/careers that can impact the world in other ways.
That's a substantive advantage (to those that can afford it) given that 12% return opportunities are scarce.
As long as college is financed with debt, there needs to be a return that will outpace the debt interest or we end up with a generation of debtors who have no freedom to make use of the enlightenment they gained from their liberal arts degrees because they're forced to scramble and kowtow to the people who majored in business if they want to eat.
I know some people on the other end of six figure student loans (I'm not, thankfully, but I'm still going to be paying mine off for four or five years still). These people are not doing what they'd like to do, what they studied to do (because they can't find a job in it) and are praying for a windfall. In some cases, hoping their family members die and leave an inheritance just so they can pay off a chunk of the loans.
This is going to have profound effects on the economy and society for a long time.
So yes, idealists should know what they're volunteering themselves for and how one simple decisions can make life really difficult for them for the next 20-30 years.
This isn't the era where you could pay for a year of college with a part-time summer job anymore, like the baby boomers had.
No story there. But then they draw almost flat lines, indicating the selectivity of the university (as a proxy for all kinds of things, prestige, quality of education/network etc) plays no role. But I find it misleading.
It makes sense I think to consider that they're not looking at earning potential, but at ROI. That means a selective school that costs $100k a year, and nets you a $100k annual salary, yields the same ROI as going to a 10k a year state school that gets you a 10k salary. You'd get a flat line on selectivity/ROI, as if it doesn't matter where you study.
You can be the judge of whether you think those are equal or not, and whether you'd be indifferent because they have the same ROI, particularly when you can afford the investment or get the investment subsidised.