Bottom line, a college degree is worth the cost and then some
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
As far as I can tell, all the statements about benefits are:
> According to repeated analyses by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a four-year degree generates an annual return of 14 percent over a 40-year career.
> ...a weakening job market for new grads (true, but better than the market for non-grads)...
The first quote links to a much better analysis:
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2019/06/despit...
As someone who works with statistics, this is the oldest trick in the book: talk about the average when it tells the story you want to tell as opposed to the distribution. Given the massive variability in total cost to attend, the average loses meaning.
I think college is overrated. By all means, go to college if you’d like to learn at the highest level academically. But also consider not going to college and achieving great things without burning 4-5 years of opportunity cost.
A bunch of researchers have asked that question and tried to answer it the best they can, by using statistical methods to discount for things like high family income, race, family history of college attendance.
From what I’ve seen (and I’ll try to dig up links in a minute if I can) papers often conclude that the causality is definitely not 100% responsible for the income difference between grads and non-grads, but they also generally find the number is much higher than 0% too. It’s somewhere in the middle.
It’s not really a stretch to suggest that something happens during college, right? People do learn things when they spend their time learning, and we have plenty of data to show that people who get an elementary and secondary education are better off than people who get no education… or take it a step further and look at basic literacy. Why is it hard to believe there’s value in college when it’s not hard to believe that literacy and pre-college education has value?
> consider not going to college and achieving great things without burning 4-5 years of opportunity cost
While that can be true for a few naturally motivated and smart (or lucky) people, the aggregate stats don’t really support that view. Most people end up better off going to school, and opening the door to the many higher paying jobs that require a degree.
* edit: here’s an example: https://www.stlouisfed.org/-/media/project/frbstl/stlouisfed...
See “Section III: “The True (Causal) Return on a College Education: Evidence from the 2016 SCF”
The conclusion: “In order to examine the effect of these variables in accounting for some of the relationship between education, income and wealth, we utilized multiple regression. All variables, including age variables, own education, parents’ education, and financial acumen, were regressed onto income and wealth. This model was compared to the simple model of only lifecycle and own education. Results are in Tables 6 and 7. (See Tables B1-B6 for black, Hispanic and other race results).
“Clearly, parents’ education and financial acumen were important variables previously omitted in estimations of the college and post-graduate premiums (see Table 8). Together, these variables reduced the income premium by 32 percent for white terminal bachelor’s degree holders and by 29 percent for white postgraduate degree holders. The reductions of the wealth premium were even starker, with this premium being reduced by over half for graduates and postgraduates (54.4 percent and 60.4 percent, respectively).”
Any value-based research that neglects these is just junk science.
If the weed-out classes were having a statistical effect, then we’d see it in the outcomes. So either we are seeing it, and the success rate of a college degree would be even higher without the weed-out classes, or your contrived example in reality has little to no effect on the outcomes. Either way, your example might disenfranchise a few people who aren’t prepared or capable of handling college at all, but on the whole most people fare well with the education. Maybe the weeder classes don’t matter because people try again, or switch majors, or continue without transferring. Or maybe the number of people hitting such a weeder class is low, or maybe the 12% pass rate is very exaggerated and not at all representative of the average pass rate?
No it doesn't. You are wrong. There are a number of well understood ways where you would not see deviations like this in the statistical outcomes. Flawed, skewed, or under-representing metrics being just one, as I mentioned in another post. Garbage in Garbage out.
If you compare the success rate of US college against the EU, there are big differences but this is apples to oranges comparison with arguably the same outcomes, but there is no reasonable way to discount or map certain differences in implementation. EU has generally a higher pass rate for less investment.
I fared well with education in every class except the structured to fail classes. What does it say when you have a student who passes Calculus 3 and other math classes above with a high 90, and can't pass Mechanics that solely tests Math in 3 question, two test format with causality properties between the questions on each test. Where the accompanying required lab scores for the same person are top 90s, even scored top of all pooled lab classes for an egg drop design contest, but can't pass the test. The only egg drop among all classes at the college to survive 4 stories without a crack with paper, water, and a baggy (by design at my insistence). Far from a contrived example when you have the transcripts to back it up.
While not necessarily a good example because probabilities have poor results in relation to likelihood in reality, it still demonstrates the margin for error, the likelihood of a passing score assuming the material was taught is roughly .3^6 power for 2 exams. You need to get a 70 in the class to pass, so you could only get 1 question wrong for the entire class between both 2 tests, which means you could only get the final question wrong on either of those two tests if the test had causality properties. That doesn't seem so bad, but in reality each one of those questions would be 10-20 steps each to get the correct answer for one question. So that probability shrinks further to .3^(6*120). You have perfection, or you don't pass.
Honestly it just sounds like you are trying to make excuses and minimize my experience, like most people do because you want to believe that something is true (even when it isn't). In my 'experience', which spans 15+ years in education, alongside many others; that is not the case. It was a lie, a pipe-dream sold with lies that had nothing to do with actual merit.
Its a drain on financial resources with moving goal posts with no determinable way to pass for those classes that are structured to fail, and those courses are bottleneck courses needed for GE and transfer.
In learning system's theory, you learn about the specific requirements needed for determinism. There's only 3 or 4 fundamental ways you can structure exam questions where you can legitimately have 1 correct answer. Most of those test questions in those structured to fail classes, fail those specific requirements needed for a determinable answer. Worse they optimize for the least work, and max fail rate (for repeat customers)
If a question on an exam doesn't have a determinable answer... it is testing how well you guess which is to say its not testing anything at all. It is using an unsound test to keep your money and require you to take the course again. That's fraud.
Many of those exam's questions are simply cleverly disguised guesses; with 3 or more different possible correct answers.The point of testing is with the instruction from class, there is only one right answer.
Anything else is fraud; but they are state-funded institutions, and you have no due process because there is no obligation to act on legitimate complaints and those institutions are largely shielded legally. It suffers all the classic bureaucratic failures.
Median debt is $20k. Avg debt is $37k. The college wage premium is about 30k. A new car is $45k.
Citation needed. Numerically, what does "rare" and "Not many" mean?
That’s a little bit of FUD though; use of an average does not imply it’s being misused. All statistics can be misused when not cross-checked with other statistics, but just because it can be does not imply it is. And to be fair, citing emotional anecdotes and failing to look at the average or any other stats seems to be abused in reporting a lot more often than trying to be tricky with numbers.
The St. Louis Fed published a paper a few years ago [1] showing the distributions of earnings of college degree holders compared to non-degree-holders (called the “income premium”), and it backs up the story of the average here. The average graduate in the U.S. earns approximately double what people that stop at a high school education earn. I was very surprised by that stat, I had no idea the income premium was that big. Even though this Fed paper is arguing that the relative savings (“wealth premium”) is going down for college grads, it’s also pointing out that the income premium is not really going down, and on top of that they’re a little quiet about the absolute number of dollars people have in savings. When grads and non-grads have the same savings rate but one has twice the income, then that one also has twice the money at the end of the day, and the Fed paper argues that’s actually a break-even. (This is another old statistics trick…)
[1] https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/2019/10/...
I fail to see how this statistic can be calculated in a scientifically rigorous way.
The only method would be to pick a pool of people, randomly divide the pool in two, and then force half to go to college, while you force the other half not to.
Any other approach suffers from sampling bias - the smart motivated ones find a way to go to college, while the rest stay home and stack shelves at walmart for a lifetime.
And now you're saying that being smart and motivated earns you more... Well no surprise there!
Education is not my field but there are ways to identify causal effects outside of experiments.
So: you are wrong when you say “the only way to do this is…”
For example:
- Regression discontinuity (find a college that accepts people who score >=X on a test, then compare people who scored X vs people who scored X-epsilon)
- Instrumental variables (find something that would nudge people to go to college, like living close to a college)
- Natural experiments (find an event that 'forced' many people to suddenly sign up, like 'avoiding the Vietnam war draft').
[1] Section 4 of https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-economics...
University is now a business, and the product is degrees and "college experience", the customers are students. The product has suffered; degrees are no longer rigorous. Teaching faculty have suffered; tenure tracks has disappeared in favor of adjunct part time faculty. Students suffer under mountains of debt. The only winners are the legions of administrators. Some schools have as many as 1 administrator per 1 student. It's absurd.
I am both a graduate school and high school dropout. A motivated individual could replace university with a library and Internet connection. However, proving one's knowledge can be more difficult than acquiring it. A degree makes it easier to communicate and demonstrate skill.
the bigger sample bias is that wealthy people almost universally send their children to college and their children are always going to earn above average wages.
it is pretty obvious that people who graduate college are going to earn more because large numbers of high paying jobs require a college degree, but that is a bad thing.
jobs that require specific skills should have objective skills tests to qualify for the job. requiring a degree for a job should be prohibited by law because it is blatantly discriminatory.
MA Degree in Computer Science, Educational Technology, Education, or a closely related field; earned doctorate preferred but not required
Expertise in computer science educational pedagogies
Experience with outreach and community engagement
Demonstrated commitment to social justice, multimodal learning, anti-racist pedagogies, multilingualism, and culturally and linguistically responsive and sustaining pedagogy
Ability to collaborate in recruiting students for graduate programs
Demonstrated ability to effectively teach adults in college level education programs in various modalities including in person, hybrid, synchronous and asynchronous modalities
Experience with outreach and community engagement which are seen as important for developing the Computer Science Education Program at Hunter College.
Demonstrated knowledge of computer science K-12 learning standards and curricula
Experience integrating issues of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in teaching, scholarship, and service
Experience teaching in classrooms, educational settings and communities with culturally diverse populations including multilingual learners
Evidence of excellent written, oral, organizational, and interpersonal communication skills
> The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City. It is the largest urban university system in the United States
1: https://cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/distinguished-lecturer-curricu...
CUNY is a haven for low-wealth non-white people who appreciate being included in opportunities for advancement.
If parent wants to make the point I think they're trying to make: pull a collection of * Institutes of Technology's hiring policies.
Using Hunter College/CUNY is like pointing to Kentucky Fried Chicken as an example of how restaurants are serving too much fried food.
Maybe. But the mission is advertised -- if you choose to walk through that particular door, what you get shouldn't be a surprise.
And I am sympathetic to your point -- there's a lot of excesses and not-functionally-relevant requirements in academia these days.
But NYC has a lengthy and altruistic history of charity/nonprofit educational institutions for those who have been denied access at one time or another, and this just happened to be an example of that.
I would be fascinated to get a meta analysis of tech school faculty requirements, 1940 - 2023, though. Honestly can't guess if they've drifted or not.
They went from promoting equality for a hundred years to promoting fashionable anti-Asian racism and misandry.
I hope they find their way again.
“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” -Kendi
So yeah if being anti-woke means you don’t want to participate in a culture of hateful discrimination, then yeah anti-woke sounds normal here.
You can't add 0 to -5 enough times and get back to 0.
To get this professor job you are saying you are okay with being openly racist.
Until pretty recently this was considered a bad thing by most people, and many kind, sane, people are not going to be okay with that as a prerequisite for getting a job.
Not sure why, assuming you're also an engineering type, this would be a surprising statement. That's how change works.
Anything shy of that (e.g. egalitarianism) is simply freezing the status quo after it's already been massively tilted.
Affirmative action is not racism, even though yes it is intentionally a type of positive discrimination. It’s also out in the open and temporary and more fair, as opposed to cultural racism that it hidden and systemic and permanent and hurting people unfairly.
Getting stuck on the existence of discrimination is a way to lose sight of the goal. The goal is to battle systemic cultural racism & sexism that laws have been unable to fix for more than a hundred years, by trying to adjust outcomes temporarily in favor of the people who’ve been unfairly excluded, only until we have evidence that systemic discrimination is mostly gone. In the mean time, there is still a ton of evidence that the bad kind of discrimination is still pervasive and durable. If you don’t want affirmative actions of any kind because you can’t get past the discrimination, then how do you propose to fix racism? Note people have been trying for centuries and unable to do it without some kind of balancing offsetting positive discrimination to counter the known measurable negative discrimination. Do nothing has already failed. So what’s your solution?
The definition of racism is "discrimination based on race". Despite recent attempts to redefine racism as something that only white people are capable of, this is how most normal people understand the term.
By using the term any other way you are obviously intentionally ignoring the fact that the term meant "discrimination based on race" for decades.
"positive discrimination" is still just discrimination based on race, i.e. racism. Defining discrimination as "positive" is just a convenient way to tell yourself you are not being a bigot.
To put it another way: if you did not hire a candidate because they are white or asian, say, because you hate white/asian people, the action to not hire them is exactly the same as the "equity" case where you chose not to hire them because of their race but because you are doing so in the name of "equity".
In the end you are just arguing for equality of outcomes instead of equality of opportunity. We have already seen where society ends up if we allow open discrimination (whether or not you define it as "positive" or "negative"), it's not very good. Equality of opportunity does not freeze the status quo, look at the asian population for an example: asians 150 years ago were stuck building railroads, now they are richer by far than any other ethnic group. They got that way by working hard and making use of our myriad _equal-opportunity_ employment laws.
Hard disagree that all discrimination is the same, this is a short-sighted and antagonistic view that seems rather ignorant of history. I do not agree that affirmative action is racist by definition.
> Defining discrimination as “positive” is just a convenient way to tell yourself you’re not being a bigot.
Listen, brother, we appear to have the same goal. You’re attacking people who agree with you. This kind of escalatory language is unproductive for all of us. I didn’t define discrimination as positive, I said there are some kinds that are positive, and affirmative action is one of them, which is why it was named that way.
One major difference you’re ignoring is that racism is prejudiced against a specific group and discriminates against a specific group, where affirmative action discriminates in favor of a specific and underprivileged group. It’s partially a sort of dual or opposite, it does not discriminate negatively against any specific group. Any disadvantage or negative discrimination, if you want to call it that, applies to everyone except the group being boosted. And again, the idea is that it’s temporary and open-source, just until we can demonstrate equality of opportunity. Another difference you’re failing to consider is that affirmative action is different from racism because affirmative action targets advantages and help toward whichever group is currently underprivileged. That’s the opposite of, for example, systemically holding back black people or women, which is what has happened for hundreds of years. If white people in America became underprivileged all of a sudden, the affirmative action policy, unlike cultural racism, would switch benefits to the new target.
There are real differences between these different kinds of discrimination that you’re trying hard not to see. I’d recommend reading more about the history of affirmative action and understanding that many many very smart and very kind people of all races have thought very hard about this problem and haven’t come up with a better solution. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action
Suggesting that any attempt to fix the known problem is willfully racist is a non-starter, and you should be aware that it’s a talking point that originated from white supremacy groups.
edit: spelling mistakes
If it is just a weed out for teachers that don't care about their students success or understand the variety of challenges some of them face, I think they could have done that in a better way than suggesting "if you really care you'll do three full time jobs to help these young adults".
Academic staff 19,568
Administrative staff 33,099
Students 275,000
Experience in field... Can't teach something you don't know yourself]
Experience with educational pedagogies... Some background in education is good
Recruiting for graduate programs... sure, sounds like a thing a uni would want
Teaching diverse student body... this is an urban uni with a large non-white population (25% Black, 30% Hispanic) and massive number of first-generation college students (45%).
Experience teaching remote, hybrid, etc.... that's a requirement in 2023
If I think about university choice as 'hiring' a professor to teach my child, I would review their qualifications, and this isn't what I personally would want to see -- though as others have pointed out this is not a technical college so maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree.
Are the brains of people from different races really that different?
Completely ignoring the contents of the opinion article, what do you expect this guy to say?
We need both engineering and arts/culture in society. And it behooves us that those who produce arts and culture are educated to a higher level in their disciplines.
The Western capitalist system isn't set up to compensate arts/culture (at least outside of lowest-denominator, mass-market stuff).
Consequently, we explicitly create government transfer systems to fund these. Hard economic activity -> profit -> taxes -> funding for arts/culture
If we want to live in a capitalist society, that seems like a fair setup. There are alternative economic systems that fund arts/culture in different ways, which generally aren't as successful on the whole as capitalism.
Are there excesses and easy dead-horse majors to beat in arts/culture? Absolutely.
But part of progress is exploring ideas that seem silly, crazy, or anathema to people at one point. Individual rights and land ownership? Democracy? Universal sufferage?
Everything seems preordained, looking backwards through history. Looking forward, it often seems radical or stupid.
You don't learn how to make good art/literature in college, you learn it from doing. Most of history's greatest writers and artists didn't go to college.
Citation needed.
> arts majors living off government money
What does this have to do with anything? There are lots of scientists, engineers, lawyers, construction workers, and basically every job under the sun being paid by government money. If you’re talking about financial outcomes, a job is a job, and govt vs private is irrelevant, right?
That said, everyone should also read this post explaining why college costs so much. It’s probably not what you think: https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-uncharity-of-colle...
The general case for college is similar. Graduates only make more (and not all of them too by the way) because they are of limited number and companies use degrees as a metric of competence. It bothers me when I hear politicians and the like saying that everyone should go to collage and get a degree because then everyone will have a highly paid job. It doesn't work like that.
Wow that's a massive conflict of interest in this "opinion" piece.
Please, please, keep coming to my obscenely expensive institution, which pays my bloated salary!
Nobody is claiming you can't make good money running a small plumbing company or finding a niche trade.
The claim is "on average, those with college degrees out-earn those without college degrees." The existence of skilled tradesmen who earn good incomes doesn't discredit the analysis. They just contribute to average.
More specifically, the path to making good money in the trades can be long and arduous (relative to college and a desk job). Years as an electrician's apprentice earning low wages. A journeyman electrician makes reasonable money, but it's not until you either strike out on your own (with the risk that entails) OR specialize in something in high demand (time to acquire that skill) that the income really goes up into the range most of us would consider high/good.
Welding is one trade I see mentioned a lot. Skilled welders (food-grade, off-shore, underwater) can make excelling money. But, the job is still pretty crap compared to many desk jobs. The food-grade jobs are hot, long-hours, on-call, and wages are only good, not great. The off-shore stuff is dangerous and requires weeks/months away from home.
No it's not: instead it's the prescriptive advice that high school graduates should go to college. But if you follow up one of the references:
"However, when we look at wages for the 25th percentile of college graduates, the picture is not quite so rosy. In fact, there is almost no difference in the wages for this percentile ranking of college graduates and the median wage for high school graduates throughout the entire period. This means that the wages for a sizable share of college graduates below the 25th percentile are actually less than the wages earned by a typical worker with a high school diploma."
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2014/09/colleg...
Why do you think that? The claim in the article was clear: “According to repeated analyses by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a four-year degree generates an annual return of 14 percent over a 40-year career.”
There are many many other sources that back up this claim too. I linked to other Fed data above that shows an average ~2x income premium for grads. It’s actually true that college grads, statistically speaking, earn more than non-grads in the U.S.
> there is almost no difference in the wages for this [25th] percentile ranking of college graduates and the median wage for high school graduates throughout the entire period.
This quote ironically and hilariously supports the claim that college grads earn more. It’s comparing the 25th percentile of grads to the 50th percentile of non-grads. Hahaha!
The economic downturn we are in now will mean "safe jobs" based on government spending will mostly go to the degreed, but any economic growth will come from people who are good enough at what they do to make things others want and build new firms, imo. The value is sort of polarized, where if your future is rural, trades oriented, or entrepreneurial, school is neither sufficient or necessary, but if you want to participate in the urban(e), managerial, and career oriented economy, there is not a single other qualification.
If you are thinking about school, do it. If you didn't do it, maintain no illusions about your opportuntities, but if you didn't go and still think you're somehow equal or on a level field to people who did, know that they don't.
But ... costs for American schools have gotten a bit out of control, and I think it's entirely appropriate to view them critically, ask what their purpose is, and how they can achieve that purpose more efficiently.
- colleges and universities have seen a large increase in the number of administrators, over a period of decades
- simultaneously, an increasing share of instruction is shifted to adjuncts
- we're now at the point where a year of private school tuition is less than the salary of an adjunct professor in many cases
So while students are paying more for education, they're getting less (or at least less instruction from actual faculty). If the point of colleges is education, I think we should begin tracking the fraction of schools' budgets which go to teaching costs (faculty who actually teach, facilities costs for instruction buildings) vs everything else, and only institutions that spend more than k% of their budget on teaching should be eligible for loans and grants. k can be brought down over time.
As a very distant alternative, perhaps we're now at the point where we should offer a way to track, recognize and acknowledge work done with a private instructor. Suppose we normalized the practice of one to five students pooling funds to hire a different instructor every semester for intensive and personalized instruction with virtually no administration costs, or a small pool of instructors convening a short-lived "school" on a topic. If we were willing to recognize students demonstrating the same amount of proficiency in their chosen area gained outside of a "college", perhaps we could strip away the less useful parts of colleges as institutions.
Going to college is a self-selection towards achievement. Of course those who self select towards elite achievement will do better. I don't think we can, but if we could ask this question of are self selecters - college or no - making more money, I don't think college would be as clear a win. But it's near impossible to split up & categorize the non-college bound would be elite achievers from the rest of non-college bound.
Also college is just so the default path...
But unlike work from home I don't see a revolution coming where its ok to not have a degree. It would not benefit those that have already invested in getting one. Where work from home is beneficial to many.
Source: Im not the president of Princeton.
1.) thin air
2.) the government (??? No.)
3.) higher tuition -> hint: pick this option!
The better question is why Harvard and Princeton charge tuition at all! (The answer to that question is not that hard either.)
Wealth redistribution / market segmentation.
Princeton has quite large aid packages outlined here: https://admission.princeton.edu/cost-aid
Harvard has different but also quite amazingly large aid packages for lower and middle-income students: https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/why-harvard/affordabi...