Hacker News Reader

Comment by ubi | Hacker News Reader

Pretty shocked that ~50% of the bottom 20% has a college degree. Would have expected much lower

This surprised me as well, but given the negative ROI of many college degrees, I suppose it's not all that surprising. [1] Also, assuming that they are counting 2-year colleges in this calculation as well, though I could not find an answer to that.

[1] http://erikrood.com/Posts/college_roi_.html

May be sensitive to definition. Is an associates counted, for example.

A couple other possible confounds come to mind, such as highly-educated stay-at-home parents.

The bottom 20% includes a lot of under 25's. That would account for a higher proportion of college grads. It may also account for a good portion of the overspending among this group, since it would capture people in college living on student loans. By that measure, I was spending over 200% of my income every year between tuition and basic living expenses while in grad school.

I think there's a lot of negative economic exaggerations going on to promote political views on either side. Paint a bleak picture that only your team can solve.

Something something protectionism, something something basic income.

It all seems like junk to me.

Except both are valid economic strategies for increasing income. Protectionism reduces the labour pool, so demand is higher relative to supply, which increases wages. Basic income increases wages by redistributing wealth.

The downside to protectionism is it makes it harder for firms to find workers. The downside to basic income is that it's a massive expense to government, would require higher taxes, and may reduce incentives for people to work (which is why it's mostly being trotted out as a way for people to subsist when automation potentially wipes out labour).

I'm not saying there's no validity to either of them as strategies, just that they're big differences from the way we operate today and there's nothing to mandate their application except these politicized exaggerations.

I more mean the bleak pictures painted to gain these ideas favor are pretty much junk in my opinion.

> ~50% of the bottom 20% has a college degree

I don't see "has a college degree" in the data. I think you are projecting it on the data.

It's more aptly described as "any college courses" and it's likely self-reported. Remember that the vast majority of "college" is not postgraduate degrees at elite Ivy League universities, but rather started (but didn't finish) at a community college or for-profit diploma mill.

I can easily imagine {teachers, college students, temporarily unemployed/underemployed taking care of dependents, retired persons} falling in the "college" + "bottom 20%" category.

There's data in there about educational attainment. It makes a clear distinction between bachelors-or-higher and anything below that. Associate's degrees or just a few courses without completing a program fall into the latter grouping.

But yes, you're right. It's not clear exactly what data is being graphed.

That's probably a combination of:

1) Going into debt for college makes you poor, and

2) A lot of college degrees are just not worth the cost, if you're expecting them to lead to a good income.

> Going into debt for college makes you poor

But these data don't have anything to do with "being poor" -- it's entirely about income, which is still positively correlated with more education.

How many of those are retired?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com