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Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

About two years I broke out the BLS data for US employment % vs level of education into a series of graphs.

Numbers for the non-HS degree went up to about 17% unemployment worst scenario. Grad degrees topped out at 4%.

The biggest differentiator was high school: that dropped outcomes by about 5%, iirc. Some college - not even completed college - dropped about 4% down in the outcome. People with BS+ degrees did quite well.

The big takeaway from that was, "education pays off". Anecdotally, people who are willing to move and be self-motivated could do well even with a Humanities degree.

Of course, I only know one CS guy who couldn't get work.

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What I've been always interested in is why people leave school at given intervals, statistically speaking.

If, for argument's sake, 90% of high school dropouts are dropouts because they were too lazy to go to school, it stands to reason that they will also do poorly in the workplace, being too lazy to go to work. That doesn't mean the remaining 10% who had to drop out due to unfortunate life circumstances will also have trouble finding and maintaing quality work the same way.

Because of that, it is really not clear what role education plays. Does the education and degree count for something, or does increasing levels of education just increasingly filter out those who lack the qualities that are appealing in the workplace, placing a bias towards those who have more education with respect to such interpretations?

The answer to that makes a huge difference in determining if education pays or not.

That's a really good question. I don't have a data-driven answer. I think that its a mix, to be honest - you have to have grit to get through education in the US, and success comes via grit quite often. But you can have grit and not an education.

> About two years I broke out the BLS data for US employment % vs level of education into a series of graphs.

I've posted it elsewhere, but CR also had that graph in his blog: http://cr4re.com/charts/chart-images/EducationUnemploymentSe...

I find it quite an oversight that pando quoted the CR unemployment duration, but not the UE by education. The second graph makes the pando article look silly IMO.

Agreed. Unemployment rate for those with at least a Bachelor's degree NEVER topped 5%, even during the depths of the recession in 2008-9.

Pretty amazing stat on its own. And this includes people who graduated with the minimum passing GPA (2.0?) from the worst college with the most useless major.

Maybe it was the people with the minimum GPA and the most useless major that are the 5% of college grads that are unemployed.

Also, you might be a 3.5 GPA Literature major employed at Starbucks. You wouldn't be part of the 5% unemployed, but that huge college debt didn't buy you anything, either. Or you gave up looking for employment, so you don't get in the numbers, either.

Or the sort of people who are more likely to get university degrees are also the sort of people more likely to have connections, money, opportunities, behaviour, etc. that lead to employment.

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