Dan Ariely: At $61K a Year, College Is a Bargain | Hacker News Reader

Dan Ariely: At $61K a Year, College Is a Bargain

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Dan's arguments aren't very meaningful to me, precisely because I went to college and my experience was not the one he promotes college to be.

The vast majority of the classes I took were taught by GTFs (Graduate Teaching Fellows -- graduate students) rather than any kind of professor, adjunct professor, associate professor, or teacher. They followed a strict curriculum and "deep conversations" were a very rare occurrence. I was actually only taught by a full professor in 2 classes. The majority of the classes I took were required general education fulfillers, again taught by graduate students, and not subjects I was interested in (read: homework grind). There were tons and tons of facilities, athletics, teams, etc. I participated in a lot of teams and loved them, but I probably only took part in 1% of what the college as a whole offered. At the college I went, the average professor makes $91,000 a year. The average administrator salary was $286,000.

I agree with Dan that college provides enormous value, but It also comes with enormous waste. When people talk about the outrageous cost of higher education, it is because so little of the tuition money goes towards the actual education, and the few activities a student participates in, and a huge amount goes towards giant administrative fees, unnecessary facility fees, research employees who do not benefit undergraduate students, etc. Is college extremely valuable? Of course. Is the already high and increasing price justified? I don't think so at all. Are MOOCs the answer? Not with the experience and engagement level they currently have. I see college as not worth the cost due to problems of bureaucracy and financial models. MOOCs have a much better model of precision education -- you get to learn what you want to learn, and don't have to support the stuff you don't use. Though they are certainly grappling with huge problems of engagement, and the experience is terribly incomplete due to the lack of physical peers and extra-curricular activities.

"When people talk about the outrageous cost of higher education, it is because so little of the tuition money goes towards the actual education, and the few activities a student participates in, and a huge amount goes towards giant administrative fees, unnecessary facility fees, research employees who do not benefit undergraduate students, "

...Wondering if this is actually true or just something you can say because it seems right enough. Have you done any actual research into this?

Check out the numbers from the University of Virginia:

http://www.baconsrebellion.com/articles/2012/06/uva_bureaucr...

Instruction is less than 15% of the budget.

Tuition costs have skyrocketed but average salaries of professors have not. It doesn't take a math wiz to figure that equation out.

That doesn't make much sense? There are many things to account for that. Fewer professors per student. Increased spending on non-salary costs of instruction. I didn't say he needed to be a math whiz, I just asked if he (or you?) had actually looked at the facts.

It's definitely worth it for me because I went to a liberal arts collage. Our class size is from 15 to 30. No graduate students. Professors are always available in their office hours.

So true, graduating this year and our classes have no more than 20 students. Last year one of my fourth year courses had 4 students for the exam. Get tons of one on one time although we pay on average more than other universities in Canada

I'm tempted to make a joke about how your education must not have been worth it because you didn't learn how to spell.

I'm also temped to make a generic joke about the value of that liberal arts degree after college and how it's related to the kind of teaching you got.

originally i thought that your response was somewhat of a dick move. then i realized that he misspelled "college"...

His opinions in the interview are much more nuanced than the linkbait title suggests. A better title would be, "Dan Ariely says nice things about College, but in the end he's still doubling down on MOOCs."

http://danariely.com/tag/mooc

I'm not seeing the double down on MOOCs. Seems like he is still differentiating between the 4-year experience and the online experience.

I think the headline is a fair cop, especially because the first question right out of the gate is, is $61K for a year of Cornell too expensive? Ariely says "It's too cheap," and goes on from there about the value of in-person education vs online education. He conducted an experiment on his students and found that the more in-person one of his lectures was, the better their subjective experience was.

That said, he is in a very interesting position to explore both sides of the question. It's not too hard to project out into the future and believe university education could finally change in your lifetime. But the people who are in the trenches actually gathering data have the most to say right now.

Being a student is a essentially a full-time job which one is compensated a negative amount. A reasonable alternative opens up the possibility to get compensated in a positive amount. In terms of just programming, you get might get a job for 60k conservatively and suddenly the difference becomes 120k... every year... for at least 4 years. Teaching oneself the theoretical foundations online is still harder than with a professor but the former was never intended to be a direct alternative so the comparison seems as meaningless as it is obvious. Considering someone with 4 years industry experience almost certainly fares far better on an engineering team than most undergraduate CS majors with a summer internship, the economics of the "in-person experience" just doesn't add up. As someone who left school, the reason I only dabble in online education rather than take it as seriously as a student might is because I have more important shit to do.

$60k out of high school? Guess the recession is over. (Median household income in the U.S. is roughly $50k)

"Being a student is a essentially a full-time job which one is compensated a negative amount."

College for me was like getting a dream retirement in at the beginning of my career.

I and many of my friends had the best time of our lives, didn't do a damn thing that wasn't in our best interest, lived away from home with partial parental support, worked jobs in the vacations, met people from all over the world, had challenging experiences with a strong safety net, were exposed to extraordinary people who were paid and predisposed to give us their time, etc etc.

I got a lot more out of college than I could ever use on an engineering team. And a lot that I can.

For anyone else seeing the term for the first time, MOOC is "Massive Open Online Courses."

I was expecting something along the lines of this data: http://www.payscale.com/college-education-value-2013

College continues to provide good value to anyone who anyone who is careful selecting a school and major.

I'd like to see a list like that broken down by major. Using averages is such a bad metric, the standard deviation is almost certainly huge.

Median would be a lot more interesting.

You can view the data broken down my major per school once you click on the school.

Under methodology:

""" Return from Attending College: The main financial benefit of attending college is the gain in income received by a college graduate over a high school graduate. However, by choosing to attend college, one is giving up 4-6 years of income one could have received if one went straight to work after high school. Therefore, we calculate the gain in median pay over a high school graduate (Earnings Differential) as the difference between the 30 Year Median Pay for a 2012 Bachelor's Graduate and Weighted 34-36 Year Median Pay for a High School. """

Unfortunately, they fail to take into account that the people who go to college probably would have been more successful anyway.

    Unfortunately, they fail to take into account that the people who go to college probably would have been more successful anyway.

Eh... I don't know about that. We hammer the "you must go to college to be successful" mentality into every kid these days. A lot of people are going to college these days, and many of those people would be better served pursuing a career in skilled trade IMO.

If we could somehow take the top college graduates and strip them completely of their education, would they fall into high school graduate earnings range to match their new education level, or would those people remain high earners regardless?

I doubt it, but you're talking about outliers now when the parent was including all college attendees.

I thought I read that the correlation between your income and your parent's income was stronger than the correlation between your education and your income. I can't find a reference, though, so it's possible I'm making it up.

here we go:

http://mmss.wcas.northwestern.edu/thesis/articles/get/776/

"I find that family income remains an important positive predictor of eventual adult outcomes. The effects persist even when many characteristics that are related to income, such as parents’ education, home environment characteristics, parental involvement, school characteristics and student ability, are controlled in a regression framework. "

...

"Even conditional on a host of other characteristics such as grades, test scores, and parents’ education and level of involvement, a student from a family earning $50,000 a year can still expect to earn about 10% less in the future than an otherwise identical student from a family earning $150,000 a year. These relationships are all statistically significant at the 1% level."

The parent was responding to a quote about successful people, so there would be no reason to look at all college graduates. A significant number of them will not be successful (as measured by income).

As an aside, while trying to find income data by education that excludes outliers (sadly, I failed to find anything) as prompted by your comment, I noticed that college graduates with only a bachelors degree represent roughly 20% of every single income group, except for incomes below $30K, where they only represent ~10%.

I haven't had much time to digest the data, so I am quite possibly overlooking something obvious, but wouldn't you expect that number to rise with incomes if simply having a degree provides an income advantage?

You're ignoring the signaling aspect of college. If all the high achievers forwent college, the signaling aspect would be destroyed and those people would continue to earn more anyway. But for any given high achiever, it's not a good idea to assume that employers will take the time to figure out that you're a special snowflake without the signaling aspect.

It's like looking at Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein and asking if they wouldn't still have become successful bankers had they not gone to Harvard. It's most probable that they'd never even have gotten their foot in the door of the industry.

Given that we hammer it into every kid, who do you think these kids are who aren't going?

This. And not to mention, 4 year universities seriously under-sample students from poor, urban backgrounds.

1. The lazy/unmotivated/really stupid

2. The smart ones who realize that they may be better suited to other tasks and don't feel like starting their adult lives in massive debt.

3. People who, for perhaps social reasons, exhibit very poor academic performance early in life.

4. People with random reasons for not going.

Anecdotal, but I sure know a lot of dumb, incompetent people with degrees.

A very important benefit of college for me was not having to work a job for a few years. College was so much fun. I spent a little under 10% of my working years having a swell time with my main responsibility being learning stuff.

And they pay me more afterwards? Win-win!

"Of a million MOOC users, the study found that only an average of half of those registered for a course ever viewed an online lecture for that course. And only 4 percent ever completed the course."

I wish I could get 4% of all my visitors to convert!

That's not 4% of visitors, that's 4% of people who went through your signup process.

Many other HN users have raised this point about similar articles, but it bears repeating:

We can't put too much emphasis on completion rates as a metric for evaluating online courses. After all, the cost of entry (in terms of time and energy as well as money) is usually significantly lower than that of registering for an in-person college course.

For as long as this is the case, online courses will have a significantly lower completion rate. I'm not saying they don't have other serious problems — only that completion rates shouldn't be at the forefront of our criticism.

Exactly. It's comparing apples and oranges.

Investment in going to college: 12-14 years of school getting good grades along the way, SATs and then $20,000-$70,000 a year.

Investment in a MOOC: one button click.

The important question is not if the real live college experience is much more valuable than an online course (it is), or if a college graduate income over their lifetime is higher than a non-grad (it is).

Pretending that college-grad income levels compared to non-grads is a meaningful measurement (obviously a number of factors goes into ones income, most of them psychological) - over the last 20 years - what has happened to the ratio of college expense to increased income over a lifetime. That trend line is one important measure of opportunity. So in this regard the student of 20 years ago was better off.

The costs have skyrocketed in the US in a truly immoral way. Combine that with the current practice of mortgaging your entire future with ridiculous loan amounts, it is an absolute disgrace.

Dan's MOOC class was outstanding - better than most classes I took at Berkeley or Yale.

I do think that he tends to idealize and romanticize the "traditional" 4-year US college experience, which he did not himself have.

Private-university Professor Dan Ariely.

Downvoting because this comment adds zero. Read the article. He also teaches a MOOC and has a much more nuanced view than "college is worth it b/c it pays my bills."

Adds nothing? The article doesn't directly mention Ariely's academic appointments at high-tuition universities Duke and MIT! He's just "behavioral psychologist and good friend of Making Sense" and someone who's taught a MOOC.

That selective reporting could make a casual reader think his assessment is being offered against-financial-interest. "Pay for college, not the MOOCs like I've taught!"

But quite to the contrary, suggesting people spend $61K/year on a prestigious university is strongly aligned with Ariely's unmentioned (although easy to find and well-known) professional affiliations and paychecks.

I don't think this disqualifies his analysis – he's got obvious expertise as both as a MOOC teacher and part of the university system, and I've enjoyed his writing and research. But it's definitely relevant, when it's left out of the story/headline. When delivering a pro-high-tuition-college message, in addition to whatever other insight he brings, he's also a pitchman for the institutions that employ him.

Or for comparison, if someone reported, "popular author reports that Apple iOS devices are definitely worth the price premium", wouldn't the fact that the author also worked for Apple be a relevant thing to know?

Is this the same Duke and MIT that are vastly oversubscribed? And he has tenure? There is almost nothing he can say in this context that affects his compensation, his status at the university, or the demand for Duke degrees. That's what tenure is for, and that's a key benefit of elite universities. Faculty can speak very freely. However cynical your stance, there is a real difference between the Apple employee and tenured Duke professor.

If this were not the case, people like Noam Chomsky would not survive to contribute as they do.

Of course he's free to speak his mind, and indeed there are other professors who are skeptical about the cost/value proposition of universities, now and in the near future. I don't know if Ariely is tenured, but I'd lend his views a lot of weight in any situation.

Still, though, people are loyal to the institutions that sustain them... often unconsciously, and often via earlier filtering/selection.

There's no need to assume Ariely is under explicit workplace pressure to promote elite universities, or that he's hustling for the incremental gain to his status or income. It's enough to recognize that someone who's the son of a Columbia MBA, a graduate of Tel Aviv University and a holder of doctorates from both UNC and Duke, and a professor at MIT and Duke, has already been massively selected and rewarded for his deep-seated faith (and ability to thrive) in those sorts of institutions. His intimate familiarity with the system gives his testimony credibility, but his career involvement also makes it unlikely he'd say, "it's just not worth it".

So I'm not even particularly saying that he's wrong, just that his formally-titled, well-remunerated, large-sunk-cost and choice-supportive-bias position inside the high-tuition private-university system is relevant enough to warrant a mention, if he's giving cost/benefit advice to others.

Nice straw-man there, Dan Ariely.

I'm not seeing the strawman? Plenty of people are claiming the cost of university is more than its worth. Ariely is offering a counterpoint. Others argue that education is a right, but he isn't addressing that in this case.

We'll he's saying that the price is right for a '24-hour-a-day college experience' but seems to imply that that is the only alternative to community colleges.

I think the straw man is re-framing the "college is too expensive compared to what how it benefits your life later on and compared to how expensive it obviously could be (tuition prices outpacing inflation by extreme amounts over the last 25 years show this)" to be "college is too expensive compared to the cost of the services provided while you are there".

I don't know that I'd call it a strawman myself, but I like Ariely's writing so I'm biased. It's certainly not quite the same issue as the one being debated currently.

And hello, sockpuppet.

College is like white horses or expensive sports or boats. It's a positional good into which the wealthy will sink endless resources.

The essential cost of a college education is not very high. However, increasing the price of the degree can also increase the perceived value of it, since what people really want (they won't say it, it's not socially acceptable) is access to a higher social class.

If you read the article, he argues that the essential cost is high given the services provided: housing, healthcare, education, etc.

Imagine you're going on vacation for four years. How much would that cost? Right, if you compare that to college, you would say college really is quite cheap. Now, it's an educated vacation; you get lots of things, but the amount of stuff that you're getting is really quite incredible, so the experience is amazing. I don't think it's expensive for what you're getting.

But college shouldn't be going on vacation for four years. It should be lectures, essays, reading, and exams. All this is not too expensive to supply.

I'm sure you think the high prices on textbooks and medicine are well deserved too?

Most of my graduated friends have service jobs, or at best, low paying career related jobs.

Learning to weld is more valuable than college for many people.

The most valuable thing I did in college was work on my own projects and work an internship.

I had my degree delivered to my parents house. It's in a drawer somewhere for their sentimental value. It represents lost years of my life.

insanity...but I guess it is not without precedent. In decades past the elite used propaganda to convince young men to go to war and lay down their lives for nothing.

I guess it is easier to convince young people today to go into heavy debt for a degree that has little worth. At least it is easier than convincing them to die for nothing.

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