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Comment by bachmeier | Hacker News Reader

Would that be the evidence that college educated workers make more money than those without[1,2], or the evidence that the unemployment rate is lower for those with a college degree than for those without[3,4]?

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252918500A

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252917300Q

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU04027662

[4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14027660

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Does something have to have no value to be a scam or just a value less than what is being advertised?

I do feel lumping all higher education together is a bit unfair and a breakdown would be far more telling where scams are and aren't.

> Does something have to have no value to be a scam or just a value less than what is being advertised?

Shouldn't you present evidence if you're saying an unbiased look at the evidence shows something is a scam?

In a scientific paper, yes. Elsewhere, it depends but generally that isn't needed unless we are doubting a person's claims. For example, the claim that many people were told that a degree was a valid path to success but weren't informed their degree (and the prestige of the degree) would matter or that it was possible for it to be less of a boost than the costs incurred. Also some claims shouldn't need backing as they are common knowledge, such as the existence of diploma mills.

Also, claim that people with degrees are more likely to be employed or make more money doesn't mean the degree is worth both the debt and time investment. It also talks about degrees as a whole, which people generally don't intend to target despite often using overly general speech that could give such an impression.

Unfortunately there’s little reason to believe that’s due to treatment rather than selection. Smart people both get more education and make more money, but the impact of education on income is mostly mediated by intelligence, not education. Otherwise the long project to get more and more people into university would have had more drastic effects on incomes rather than diminishing the usefulness of a university education as a signal of a certain minimum level of intelligence.

> Herrnstein's Syllogism: Genetic and Shared Environmental Influences on IQ, Education, and Income.

> Environmental influences due to a common shared environmental factor were 0.23 for IQ, 0.18 for education, and 0.08 for income. The model predicted a correlation of 0.63 between IQ and education and 0.34 between IQ and income. Sixty-eight percent of the former and 59% of the latter was genetically mediated; the remainder was mediated by common shared environment.

That certainly confirms degrees as an obstacle to getting a raise!

There is a very obvious correlation vs. causation counterargument that you need to address.

The point of providing those links is that a basic look at the data provides no support for the hypothesis that higher education is a scam. I was responding to someone who, without evidence, claimed that an unbiased look at the evidence would show the opposite. There's a massive academic literature on the topic that finds the same thing.

The problem with showing graphs that college degrees being correlated with higher income is that it's still what you'd expect if higher education was a scam.

A useful graph would show data that is different than what you'd expect if higher education was a scam.

I think it's generally understood that "top" schools merely select the best students, they don't create the best graduates.

Nobody gives a toss about unemployment rates when you're working at Starbucks despite holding an advanced degree.

You're in luck. Compare links [1] and [2] in the post you replied to.

If you don't control for IQ, the observation is useless.

IQ is a vanity measure at best. Look at a site as brainstats this would imply if you control for IQ it would rule out people from whole continents.

https://brainstats.com/average-iq-by-country.html

That's not how controlling for a variable works. You don't "rule out people" - the question you need to answer is whether a college education makes people more successful than would be predicted by IQ alone, and if so, by how much?

Is your contention also that SAT/ACT are vanity measures? The correlation between IQ and ACT is very strong, or in other words they are both strongly g-loaded and are good measures for general intelligence.

http://iapsych.com/iqmr/koening2008.pdf

We also have ample evidence that general intelligence correlates with economic success:

http://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.intell.2006.09.004

Vanity measure, my foot.

Given that institutions of higher education aggressively select for high-scoring SAT/ACT individuals, and thus high IQ individuals, the burden of proof is on them to show that a degree results in significant socioeconomic success that cannot be explained by the preexisting psychometric attributes of the college bound population.

It's possible for a group to have more smart people despite lower mean IQ; I learned that in college (hint; it's about the variance). Anyway, college is basically a badly formulated IQ test and DEFINITELY a vanity measure. I mean it costs a hell of a lot more.

Are you really quoting a sketchy website based on the risible work of Vanhanen and Lynn?

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