Quantifying The Value Of A College Degree (By Major)
kalzumeus.com
kalzumeus.com
Search tool: http://www.onlinedegrees.org/calculator/ Summary article: http://www.onlinedegrees.org/calculator/salary/engineering-d...
Short version: get an engineering degree.
The client has generously permitted me to talk about the business case for this project in broad strokes, and I think it is potentially very interesting for the average HNer startup. The general gist is that the government has terabytes of very interesting data and very limited resources for publicizing it. The NYT knows this and they totally kill it by turning CSV files of population statistics into compelling, actionable presentations that tell a story. You can do this, too.
With a little creativity, 1 GB of Bureau of Labor Statistics data becomes several hundred pages of rather interesting content for the client's niche. Google doesn't particularly love raw data in terms of rankings, though, so the graphs got beefed up a bit with content written by TextBroker writers, stock photos, and the like.
The business goal is that eventually most of these pages will rank for, e.g., [computer science degree average salary], and that some portion of searchers will request an application packet through the website. The CPA for that is between $10 and $100 (I'm not familiar with exactly how it is set).
This project took a few thousand dollars of outsourced work plus the equivalent of about three weeks of full time work from myself. The client and I anticipate that it will be very successful for them.
You can do something fairly similar for your startup -- I've never seen one that can't combine engineering expertise plus writing to generate fairly compelling content at scale, and the SEO gains for it are considerable. I recommend trying it.
For Americans http://www.soa.org/education/exam-req/
For the UK and much of the Commonwealth http://www.actuaries.org.uk/
Quick bug report: the textbox "Your Major" on http://www.onlinedegrees.org/calculator/ is case-sensitive. I would suggest making it insensitive. Then "computer science" would return a result. (I browsed with OSX 10.6.5, Safari 5).
I would guess it has more to do with expectations.
1. Anyone reading this post is not the target market for this. The real target market are the suckers that they can convince to take out $40,000 in unforgivable government student loans when they enroll at University of Phoenix. Your client is a vehicle for UofP to find these people. It's a very lucrative business for both companies BUT IT IS FOR MOST OF THEIR CLIENTS A SCAM. The people they need are low-income, not tech-savvy, and IRONICALLY, not savvy about the true value of the degree that Online Degrees is selling.
2. Please read the reviews (for instance for Ashford University) http://www.guidetoonlineschools.com/online-reviews/ashford-u... and note that, with rare exceptions, the only positive reviewers are sock puppets.
3. Yet one of the things I don't get is how there could be so many bad reviews and yet people keep signing up. Unfortunately it's probably because of content like this, where the "value" of the degree is shown as "millions of dollars" and not "a slightly higher than minimum wage job (that is not much better than the one i had before) with $40,000 of debt I can't escape even in bankruptcy". I'm NOT exaggerating - please watch the Frontline special on these schools - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/view/
4. I don't want to pick on you. It's a massive US Government federal student loan subsidy system - handing out essentially free money - that makes this system such a mess and makes the prospective students $30-50k "marks" for the "schools". I personally couldn't take direct part in it anymore but I don't begrudge anyone because it's a system that's broken, some small % of students find it valuable, and these adults are not being forced to go to these schools.
Putting emotion aside for a second and talking about the SEO:
1. The SEO technique you're describing - take public data, build it out with cheaply hired content, and stock photos, is great. That works well and everyone serious (particularly this space, because there is so much data) is doing similar stuff to stay at the top.
2. HNers doing SEO should note that you always have two target markets when you build content - SEO content for people who will backlink to and tweet about that content, and content for the actual users of the site. People looking for an online degree or buying insurance don't tweet and blog (with no-nofollowed links) about it - so you need to put content that SOMEONE ELSE will write about. That doesn't mean the people who link to that content may ever consider using the products your site is selling.
In technology often those two groups are the same; in almost every other area of the web, they're not. Tech guys often don't realize this because their only experience with online content is reading HN and TechCrunch and they see all the consumers of the site's main content tweeting about it. But when was the last time you tweeted about your car insurance?
3. In my SEO consulting, every project is surprisingly, 80% technology and about 20% content. Tech guys are building systems to make massive creation of "useful" content possible, writers are getting paid small amounts to crank out the articles. This trend is accelerating, which ironically makes it a great time for a tech person to be in SEO - the opportunities to crunch data are only growing.
With regards to the indictment of for-profit education: I half agree. The government giving buckets of free money gets lower class, lower income people who are unprepared for higher education into non-selective institutions, including for-profit institutions. That isn't a bug, it is a feature. They have sucky graduation rates -- in some cases, extremely sucky graduation rates. Free money also inflates the costs of "good" educations -- e.g. kids who get $100k of loans to go to UofI (or Harvard) and then get a degree in photography or religious studies aren't great off, either.
That said, it is a net gain for students if they're convinced to get a low-prestige degree like e.g. an Associates in Radiology rather than going for a Bachelors in English from UoP. (Or, ahem, a Bachelors in English from Harvard.)
"Families with incomes above $120,000 and below $180,000 with assets typical for these income levels are asked to contribute 10 percent of their incomes. For those families with incomes below $120,000, the parental contribution declines steadily from 10 percent, reaching zero for those with incomes at $60,000 and below."
Harvard isn't right for everyone. But remember that nonprofit universities love drawing diverse crowds, which includes the poor (admittedly, only those that make it through the selection process).
I wish I had a mentor of some sort as a teenager, who would have convinced me to attend a public institution or a junior college first, which would ultimately lower my student loan debt. I was suckered in by all my advisers and and the media that the only way to succeed is going to college.
I'm currently going to be somewhere in the ball park of $100,000 in debt after my 5 year BSIS degree at Drexel University in Philadelphia. I do not even live on campus; I commute from my childhood home. All I've had after 4 years there is horrible professors and teaching assistants from another planet. I wanted to learn how to program and create things, but all that I've learned is that I could have received a better education from my local public library.
Heh, I interpreted this as stevejohnson is looking for people who "write about the colleges they attend" and who "write well" (presumably the writing they do about the colleges they attend is the writing that is well written).
- How'd you like them apples? Sorry couldn't resist some good will punning.
Anyways, I've always said (even when I was in high-school) that I'd just get a bachelors degree from the most reputable University I can afford without going into debt. These days I'm still missing one year of a Financial Engineering degree, but I'm earning almost twice (and quite a bit more in some cases) what most of my high-school graduating classmates are making after getting their Bachelors and Masters, and I just took a new job paying 22% more with an awful lot of benefits as a Lead UX/Systems Developer (yeah I have a weird mix of responsibilities, but they're exactly the responsibilities I wanted to have, as I quite enjoy both sides of the equation) for a big software company in my country. Take in account that I went to a recognized private school, so you could say my classmates where predestined to at least make a modest living without having to resort to flipping burgers at McDonalds.
So there. I learnt everything I know by reading, programming, and designing on my own. I was able to secure my first job pretty easily (I was 19 at the time) since I was one of the three persons out of a pool of 85 people who passed a simple test for a job working for a company that made shopping cart and merchant software. They hired me because even though the other two had degrees, I had done significantly better than they had on the test and trust me, I wasn't/am not a genius or anything or that sort.
I guess my point is that a degree is a must have because it's a great thing to fall back on if you ever need it and it can help your formation and tune your thought process, but it is by no means a silver bullet for actually achieving a great education nor does it make it a given that you'll do better in the job market. Make sure you learn what you need to learn, regardless of where you learn it, and make sure that you really learn to sell yourself instead of letting a piece of paper dictate how you do in life.
Oh and by the way... bachelor degrees are so passe this days. If you want offers based on your degrees more then your proven experience, opt for a masters degree as fast as you can.
1. They stream early (10 years old) and savagely. Only those who go to grammar school (Gymnasium) are eligible to go to a classic university. That's less than 40% of the population.
2. They have an absolutely excellent apprenticeship system. All businesses pay taxes to their local Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and these coordinate training at a state and national level. Apprenticeships last 2-3 years, you spend a third to a half of your time at a trade school and the rest working for your employer.
Also, he is earning about 50% more than his other "applied" friends because his years of experience put him into middle management, rather than front line. Anyways, streaming early is good, especially if it is self directed.
Personally, I would have preferred to have been working between 13 and 18 - except for maths class, and possibly science and physics, technical drawing, French, art, could have skipped Irish, but would have replaced English with a more modern curriculum, ... okay... school was not as bad as I remember.
And printed a diploma, too.
http://i26.tinypic.com/8ywawn.png
(Data based upon surveying graduates 3.5 years after they left uni)
If that's the case then the data is not really actionable unless we also know the probability of getting a job with and without some degree.
For example, if computer science majors all tend to get job A, but having a computer science degree makes you no more likely than people without computer science degrees to get job A, then the value of the computer science degree is 0.
Of course having a degree does usually provide some advantage at getting a job, and in some fields it's impossible to get a job without a degree.
But still, for this data to be truly meaningful and actionable you must multiply the value of each degree by the amount that the degree aids you in getting a job, which is a hard value to determine.
Edit:
Here's an example of why this is important. Let's compare physical therapy and programming.
According to the data, a Doctorate in Physical Therapy has a value of about $1.2 million, while a Bachelors in Computer Science has a value of around $1.5 million.
You might conclude that the computer science degree is a better value, especially since it costs less than the doctorate.
However, you cannot be a physical therapist without the degree. So the value of the P.T. degree is $1.2m * 100%, or $1.2 million, because without the degree you have a 0% chance of getting the job (and assuming that having a P.T. degree guarantees you a job).
You can be a programmer without a computer science degree. So the value of the degree is going to be $1.5m times some percentage less than 100. In order for the C.S. degree to be more valuable than the P.T. degree you'd have to be 80% more likely to get a job than a programmer without a C.S. degree. (1.5 * .8 = 1.2)
It doesn't seem like people with C.S. degrees are 80% more likely to get jobs. Especially when you factor in the opportunity cost of going to school. That's a lot of time you could spend working on open-source projects, building websites and businesses, etc. which are all things that count more than a degree.
So the value of a C.S. degree could very easily be less than the value of a P.T. degree.
I think people have a general idea of which degrees are more valuable than others, a flawed and vague idea to be sure, but it's not obvious that this data is more accurate than that.
I wonder if you couldn't get very similar results by asking people on Mechanical Turk to rank degrees by what they thought was their value.
Regardless of how it fares against other advice, it still has flaws that can significantly affect its accuracy; and I'd want anyone I cared about to understand that before making decisions based on it.
Anyway, this particular flaw doesn't quite work itself out the way you describe. If you want to do out the numbers precisely, you'd multiply out the probability that a person enters a particular occupation given their degree by the lifetime earnings of that occupation, and then sum over all possible occupations.
So say (made up numbers) a CS major has an 80% chance of being a computer programmer ($1.5M), a 10% chance of being a quant ($5M), a 5% chance of being a successful entrepreneur ($20M), and a 5% chance of being a housewife ($0). The expected value of the degree would be .8 * 1.5M + .1 * 5M + .05 * 20M + 0.
Then to find the baseline you'd do the same for lifetime earnings and occupation probabilities of someone who didn't go to college. If they had a 10% chance of being a computer programmer, a 30% chance of being a barrista ($500k), a 40% chance of being a construction worker ($800k), and a 20% chance of being a househusband, that'd be .1 * 1.5M + .3 * 500 + .4 * 800 + 0. Multiply out and subtract to find the value of the degree.
Remember that statistics is about making statements about groups, not statements about any particular individual. That illustrates another pitfall of the data: the question a prospective student really wants answered is "how much will the degree be worth to me". There's at least one study out there that suggests the answer is "zero": all the difference in lifetime earnings is due to correlation and not causation. People succeed because of inborn traits like intelligence, perseverance, and the ability to delay gratitude, all of which also result in someone being able to get into an elite college and pick a challenging major. But controlling for that effect opens up a whole other can of worms, one that you could bill your client another few thousand for writing about. ;-)
So it's probably pretty hard to become a quant without a degree, so multiply that by some high number like 95%, but it's really easy to become an entrepreneur without a degree, so multiply that by some low number like 20%.
You're also right about the relevant question being "what is a degree worth to me?" That makes prediction even harder because the value of the degree is largely going to depend on the person's opportunity cost of going to school. Consider Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook was the opportunity cost of his getting a degree, which would make the degree's "value" be several billion dollars negative.
> Hard sciences such as Physics and Biology pay rather less well than I would have expected.
Interestingly, when I used the calculator to search for a BS in Physics, it says "No Statistics for that Degree".
I also find it a bit hard to believe that optometrists and lawyers make out better than doctors, or that the lifetime value of a Physician's Assistant masters is $300,000 more than the lifetime value of an MD.
Finally, having perused the Occupational Outlook Handbook more than a few times, this reeks of blatant plagiarism. The text appears to be heavily rewritten, but all the facts come from the OOH and even the outline of each article is identical to the OOH.
This exercise casts a dim light on SEO as a profession. Scams on top of scams.
There may well be rewriting of OOH facts on some of the pages. I likewise haven't read the several hundred pages in detail (I wrote the CMS but wasn't in charge of the freelancers who filled it out).
When looking at median salaries for physicists, on the BLS site (where this data is taken from: http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos052.htm), it is $103,000 which isn't all that bad (if you can get a job). But, the problem with the proxy that the author uses (given job, extrapolate major) is that it doesn't account for fields where relatively few people actually get jobs in that field, but tend to migrate to other fields--depending on what field they migrate to, then the salary may be much higher or lower. Take physics for example. The fraction of physics PhDs who actually get jobs as professors is rather small. The fraction who go on to national labs is small--even the numbers for industry (doing physics) is small and many people leave for other fields (programming, financial engineering, management consulting, etc.)--So to get accurate numbers, what you need to do is to survey people at companies and ask them what their degree is and what their salary is....
>For-profit colleges enroll 12 percent of U.S. undergraduates
Only 12%
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-29/plunge-of-for-profi...
The Australian Government, for example, gathers a very large pool of statistics from the publicly funded universities, down to the level of having students grade their professors and courses.
[1] http://www.goingtouni.gov.au/Main/Quickfind/PayingForYourStu...
1) Looking a Psychology (my major) the "life time value" comes out exactly same ($794,...) whether I choose "doctorate" "bachelor" or "associate" degree. And... the results page does not indicate for which degree its data apply.
2) What does change depending on the degree for which I request data... is the other fields presented for comparison.
3) Requesting data on "doctorate / psychology" compares results for degrees in Real Estate and Cosmetology. Are there really enough people with doctorates in those fields to compute reliable stats? [Note that searching for "doctorate / real estate" does show numbers (albeit low) for Real Estate.
If allowed by the hiring company, can you explain what's going on better than the results pages does?
This is simply false. Plenty of universities publish employment surveys with salaries by major. For an example, see the University of Pennsylvania's Career Services Web site. The fact that the author makes this statement lightly says a lot about how careful he is.
"The most important thing is to get a degree, I don't worry about what major I'm going to choose."
"I want to make the big money so I'm going to major in business and start out as the boss rather than the engineer." (I also heard something similar substituting communications for business.)
"They may not make as much as others, but elementary school teachers can always find work."
I was fortunate to have professors and older friends who were up front about the differing opportunities provided by different fields. Many of my classmates seemed to feel that the world owed them a six figure job in whatever field they chose.
College tuition has gone up so much and people are in so much debt now that 2nd generation college students will likely have better advice from their parents.
All I ever got my whole life was, "go to school." Luckily I majored in engineering, but I know too many people with half a mortgage in student loans making $12/hour now.
I think I'm going out on a limb a bit here, but it's plausible. I feel much less like I'm going out on a limb to say that if the economy is still sputtering along in 2012 that this is almost certain to happen. (To avoid this we must not merely tread water but see noticeable improvements in our economic outlook.) I'm also curious as to how the bubble pop in higher ed will manifest, because none of the historical precedents for bubbles like this have the college admission cycle to contend with, and most of them involved resellable goods, even if the value did tank. The housing market can collapse overnight because anybody can sell a house any time, college can't be sold and can only be entered at certain times. Still, fireworks will occur somewhere and sometime, for better and for worse.
No HS degree: > 10% unemployment
HS/some college: 7-9% unemployment
Associates: 5-7%
Bachelors+: 4%
Seasonal fluctuations drop dramatically as education levels go up.
I have heard anecdotally that Masters+ is 2%, but the BLS did not provide data there.
The BLS did not quantify the jobs (e.g., the MA in English working as a barista qualifies as employed).
My conclusion is this: the data recommends a degree for employment, statistically speaking.
Furthermore, you mention an economic turnaround, so you seem to be under the impression that a bad economy means less enrollments/applications. It is actually the inverse: http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/best-graduate-schoo... Wish I had the graph from my graduate economics course for this, it showed just how much an inverse the relationship is.
If word continues to get around that college degrees aren't generically valuable, and adding my personal assumption that many people either can not just become engineers, and/or will realize in advance they can't just become engineers, that trend will stop and reverse. I probably overestimate the abruptness, but it will happen. Increasing enrollment in college during downtimes isn't an immutable fact of the universe, it emerged from social conditions and beliefs, conditions and beliefs that are changing.
That's not so much proof that I'm wrong as the reason why I'm predicting this in the next year or two.
I'm curious though, if you can show some proof for your predictions, as I'm in a sort-of-unique situation; I'm applying this week to colleges for the first time (HS senior) and seeing the prohibitive costs is a bit disheartening, yet I'm not sure what others in my peer-group are thinking/doing either.
In other words, it seems that education is generally a pursuit for personal enrichment, unless you happen to love whatever field will make you money (I thank my lucky stars that I'm in computer science and my internships are quite well paid; my friends in other disciplines like journalism are not so lucky).
I have generally judged people who major in economics here but hate it (it's a big thing at Northwestern, since we don't have undergrad business). It always seemed like those people are saying "I want to get into a good business school and then stuff myself into a suit for the next 40 years"; it's a depressing analysis of one's own strengths. But then again, maybe those people are just smart and I'm just lucky.
I also wish we'd work with kids on finances before they pick a college. Here at Northwestern, student loans are capped at $20k. It's one of the most expensive schools in the US, but the financial aid office does try to keep its students from drowning in debt. Other schools, though, don't really care how much debt students rack up, and they're the ones with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to work on.
Personal enrichment is fine as long as you don't go into debt. Going to college to learn a valuable skill and taking on debt to do it is also okay, since you'll be able to retire your debt with your valuable skill.
But people have been screwing themselves by taking on heavy debt loads and then going the personal enrichment route. It's hard to believe they realize what they're giving up - many of these folks will still be paying off debts into their 40s.
Correlation ≠ Causality
The original post has some quotes that say that, e.g.: "A degree in English is just as valuable as a degree in Biology — it teaches you critical thinking!"
1. A causes B
2. B causes A
3. C causes both A and B
If we apply this where A is majoring in computer science and B is high earnings, which answers are true? #2 isn't, obviously. #1 is plausible, since perhaps employers are impressed by a computer science degree. But I think #3 is the most significant, where C is a strong desire to be a software professional. Very few people complete a degree in computer science unless they really want to work with software.
We all know English majors, psych majors, and history majors who became high-earning software engineers. Those are the people who had C (the desire to work with software) but not A (computer science degree). C is the thing that caused them to have B.
The key here, of course, is that we don't know what C is. It could be that high IQ causes high wealth, regardless of degree. High IQ could also be a prerequisite of completing a CS degree, so necessarily the two correlate.
My point is that you know what A is, and you know what B is, but without measurement, you can't know what C is.
Well there's your problem. Mechanical Turk is notoriously unreliable.
Situation 1 year after graduation: http://www2.almalaurea.it/cgi-php/universita/statistiche/fra...