The benefits of a college degree in one graph
voices.washingtonpost.com
voices.washingtonpost.com
Who cares? Notice that they didn't mention Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Kay, Richard Branson, Michael Dell, Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Frank Lloyd Wright - who arguably have all contributed more to this country than our established political leaders recently. Clearly this is the washington post - but the myopic view of looking at the political arena, if anything - shows what is wrong with associating college with "smart, capable, and adding value to our country." I'm just saying that many people in the US are not proud of legislators - and saying that they all went to college hardly proves a good point.
Hard work, natural curiosity, caring about your community, a desire to learn and being in the right place at the right time has more to do with being successful and adding value to our society than becoming part of the "College club" that is Washington.
Bill Gates was successful and dropped out of college. He was also hard working and curious. Does that mean that everybody else who's hard working and curious will be as successful without a diploma? I wouldn't bet on it.
Also, having a desire to be in the right place at the right time doesn't guarantee that you'll do just that.
I agree that having a diploma is not what is going to make you successful. But at least, it gives you better odds to beat economic troubles, which is the point of the article.
Most likely they're in the negative space though, the part of the 'employed'.
For every Bill Gates there are millions of people cleaning toilets and working at McDonald's.
You can stick labels fairly easily on the various degrees, they may not mean much in terms of practical knowledge but they do put up a lower boundary that they had to cross. For auto-didacts you run the gamut all the way from incompetent bumbler to ace, and there is no foolproof way to separate those when looking at large groups but it will make a huge difference to the outcome of the study.
Especially in the IT sector there is a lot of "I am an 'x'" where X is anything from the set of recent buzzwords.
So I don't think you can make even that comparison in an easy and reliable way, what people call themselves may not be what they actually are.
Moreover, among those senators and babble-recyclers in the media, let me assure you, none of them are Bill Gates.
The author is saying that nobody anywhere close to Washington power centers has any perspective on this.
If we could all be that lucky, then sure, college would be worthless. But there's a hundred million people for each one of those who want to have something instead of all or nothing.
And some of us went to college because we had to prove to HR people that we know what we know with very expensive pieces of paper. I stopped going to college after I didn't attend classes or buy books for a semester, and got substantially the same grades. I didn't attend classes or buy books because I wasn't extracting value congruent to the time and money it cost to attend class. I ultimately made the decision to not go at all because the amount of money I was making running my business exceeded the amount I could make with a degree working for someone else.
Computer science is probably one of the easiest fields to learn without formal instruction because deliberate practice is so easy and information is so accessible. The absolute most I learned in a college course was in a digital logic course. After the first class, the professor, whom I had before, took me to his office, told me I wouldn't learn anything in the class, gave me an FPGA development board (similar to http://www.altera.com/products/devkits/altera/kit-cyc2-2C20N..., fpga, ethernet, usb, flash card reader), told me to read about Verilog, build something interesting, and to not attend class, he'd just give me a grade on whatever I built. I implemented a basic computer that would read and execute instructions off the memory card. Almost everything in computer science came together once I implemented jump instructions. I got almost nothing out of most classes, but an incredible amount out of that one. College is tedious if you already know a lot about a subject.
If I could go back and was really interested in learning, I would have moved close to a college, and paid professors for short duration one-on-one instruction and guidance, probably just an hour or two a week, with independent study. It would have been substantially less expensive and more effective. You can't get a degree that way, but you can learn. I find the pacing of college courses to be too slow, if I am interested in learning about a new subject now, I'll get course videos and speed them up a bit, and skip ahead liberally. I can usually get through a semesters worth of lectures in a day.
Sadly these type of abstract advantages cannot be quantified and hence are always forgotten. If I took a degree for the money and not the interest then I would have chosen Economics or Management, not Physics! And what about those who chose foreign languages? Or literature? Etc...
Hopefully there's more than monetary advantages in going to uni.
One of the weird things about college or university is that it gives one social license to spend four years, or more, learning something as an adult.
If you were not enrolled in a university, but instead diligently reading books, solving problems, writing essays etc. for four years without being otherwise employed, people would find you eccentric at the very least. But once officially enrolled at an educational institution, society thinks it is not only perfectly fine to do the same things, but to take on large amounts of debt for the privilege of doing so.
I did Electronic Engineering and about 60% of my year group are now all pure management. Some of the rest are "consultants". I'd say around 15% went into engineering.
I went to learn something & to have a damned good time doing it. A lot of people I met were there because they had nothing else to do and at least could get a job at the end.
http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html
and that college-educated people can look at a cross-sectional chart like the one jacquesm kindly submitted here and believe that it shows a longitudinal causation relationship is a demonstration of how badly colleges fail at teaching statistics.
No guarantees there though, on an individual level.
Now, what would be more surprising is to show that an increase in education level would show a decreased chance of being employed. So in that sense this graph should really not surprise anybody.
Extend the graph to the PhD level.
Same data, same conclusions?
The overall unemployment level in the U.S. is a little under 10%, but the employment level is somewhere around 65-70% (iirc). So 20-25% of the population is still unaccounted for in this figure. A chart breaking that down by education might be interesting, too.
Ah ok, I wasn't aware of that distinction (I figured they'd been taken out). Still, the larger point stands, the difference looks huge when you look at this graph, but it is 'upside down', we're talking about the tops here, not about a base 0 reaching to 15%, but a base 0 reaching to 100% where this is the remnant between the tops and the maximum.
What you're saying is that the maximum should have been 80% or 75% instead of 100%.
College degrees are handed out like candy to anyone who pays enough money and jumps through enough hoops. Relying on education level as a signal of ability is ridiculous, and the existence of this graph shows why: we emphasize education for the sake of financial gain.
People who truly crave knowledge and training are lumped in with people who thrive on doing what they're told and avoiding independent thought. There is more to a person than their education level, and when it comes down to being truly valuable in a business, some of the motivations for education are probably a detriment.
Why shouldn't we just presume that people who have access to college also have better access to employment?
This is a graph of the inequality with which college graduates treat non-graduates.
Tell that to the guy who recently graduated with a bachelor's in business and accounting who was waiting our table last night.
I am not saying that he is correct (I don't know, I don't have the stats). But your point is not valid evidence for this discussion.
I know plenty of people that graduated, some of them can't find jobs but they're mostly in the 'soft' sciences.
Another thing the graph doesn't take in consideration is that as a non-diplomaed, you can afford to be jobless or work pretty much anything; however, as a college graduate with loans, you probably can't.
I think this is a larger topic/problem is to be just shortened in one graph.
I'm also curious what the graph would look like if you included people who have Masters and PhDs.
With a family member having a masters degree in education, and recently being laid off with about 700 other graduate degree holding teachers in an entire school district, I'm not buying this.
I suspect the crowd at HN would be one exception... a large crowd of self-employed individuals without degrees.
The graph to me indicates that there is some correlation between education and unemployment (especially given the fact that the graph is showing a continuous trend) but does nothing to explain that correlation in a way that you could conclude 'if you get a degree your chances of being unemployed are smaller'. That might be true, but is not a valid conclusion.
Another thing that the graph does not tell you (but general statistics does) is that you can't say anything about individuals, only about populations.
But it's an interesting graph nonetheless and I think that it would be good to take it in to account while researching this sort of thing further.
A background in statistics is useful, even if you only get the basics, but I think that even that is not a requirement to understand what the graph says and which caveats you should be aware of.
If you're trying to decide to go to college, you're already very likely to be employable. Telling a 50 year unemployed old blue collar worker that he should have gone to college is a "let them eat cake" response.
Agreed, but there very well might be, and there probably is, the question I think is not 'if' but 'how much'.
> What's very likely is that the kind of people who will prioritise getting a degree is also the kind of people who can and will adjust and pivot to a new type of employment environment.
Yes, there is a certain flexibility involved there, it's hard to re-train someone whose industry has just been outsourced from under them, all their domain specific knowledge has just turned worthless.
Knowledge workers have it a bit easier in that sense, they still have the problem but they might be able to adapt quicker than 'skill' based workers.
> If you're trying to decide to go to college, you're already very likely to be employable.
Yes, most likely.
> Telling a 50 year unemployed old blue collar worker that he should have gone to college is a "let them eat cake" response.
Telling someone what they should have done in the past is totally dumb, it didn't happen that way so it's completely pointless.
But for the people you outlined above, the ones trying to decide to go to college or not might do well to realize that one day they too will be 50, and if they're in the possession of a college degree then it might be to their advantage.
Notice that's a might, the article does not do much to explain the background of the graph, and I think that it has some truth to it but that is not evident from the presentation.
Second, stop using the word pivot when it doesn't apply. Not only is it a stupid buzzword, people aren't even using it correctly!
I'm guessing I'm missing something - anyone care to correct me?