Is College Worth It? Clearly, New Data Say | Hacker News Reader

Is College Worth It? Clearly, New Data Say

nytimes.com

71 pointskenjackson96 comments

"This calculation is necessarily imprecise, because it can’t control for any pre-existing differences between college graduates and nongraduates — differences that would exist regardless of schooling."

I think this is a key point that shouldn't be understated. We can't simply say you'll make 1.8x as much because you went to college. The people who go to college might have been the people who would have made more anyway. I'm not trying to say college isn't worth it and won't pay dividends, I'm just saying we can't put a number on a graph to quantify it like that.

Agreed - it just stands to reason. Say a college accepts the top 20% of applicants. Wouldn't these people always perform in the top 20% of the young people pool, just by definition? It seems almost stupidly negligent to not count this factor heavily in discussions of college effectiveness.

I've read at least 1 study that shows that the biggest determinant of student success in the workplace was what colleges the student applied to (not even accepted by, let alone attended).

> Say a college accepts the top 20% of applicants. Wouldn't these people always perform in the top 20% of the young people pool, just by definition?

You've got hold of a good idea here, but as you've phrased it the answer is "no, that would only hold if everyone in the country applied to the school". If the bottom half of everyone applies to your school, and you take the top 20%, expect performance in the 40th to 50th percentile for the country.

Exactly. I pretty much go "Am I paid as much as my coworkers with degrees?" The answer is generally yes, given the same level of experience.

I think what this graph shows is it is really, really hard to break into the jobs at entry level without a college degree. If you fail to break in after a couple years of trying, I suspect most people give up and permanently have their income lowered as a result.

I really, really wish these stats were based on 'same profession'. [e.g. Software Developers w/ Degrees vs. Software Developers w/o Degrees]

And I highly suspect that the reason that is never done is it will show that the value of the degree vs. a guy who took $15/hr contracting jobs for a couple years until he 'broke in' to being a Software Dev is close to 0. At which point, the self taught dev is ahead in both 'work experience' and financially.

But I could be wrong, no one has done that sort of study that I know of :/

EDIT: The closest I could find is: http://cew.georgetown.edu/collegepayoff https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/ctg48m85ftqm7q1vex8y

It shows ~$700k lifetime earnings gap for STEM [bachelors vs. highschool diploma]. So, over ~45 years, we are talking a loss of ~15.5k/year on average.

Its not quite as precise as what I was hoping for but such is life since I wanted Position to Position.

> I suspect most people give up and permanently have their income lowered as a result.

And as you age, it becomes even harder to break into an entry-level position. I know a few folks who didn't go to college, and ended up in low-end jobs and are hoping their experience will lift them out of it. But it's been a very very hard thing to do. Many of them aren't qualified for the upper-tier jobs their experience would normally have gotten them, so they're readjusting and shooting for entry level (which would still be a pay increase), but are finding the requirements issues even stiffer.

I'm curious what you are defining as 'low-end' jobs?

Are we talking people who make 60k a year? 30k?

Are we talking about people in their 30s? 40s? 50s?

30-40k. U.S. Major Metro Area. In their late 30s, early 40s. Getting on to 20 years of work experience.

Hmmm, I make north of 60k. So I'm not sure if I should be concerned...bah.

Are you saying they experienced an income drop or just a lack of income increase?

Lack of income increase. One guy I know would consider a 60+k job as almost a doubling of his income, which has been more or less fixed for the last 10 years. Which, with inflation, means it's a de facto slow pay reduction.

He also really struggles with putting out resumes, 8 solid years of rejections makes him think he's formatting his resume wrong, or not describing his job right. But the little feedback he's gotten is that he's simply not meeting the minimum job requirements.

But he's way overqualified on the work experience, just no education credentials. So a firm takes a chance if they hire him that he'll jump ship soon for a better paying gig more commensurate to his experience level, or they hope that his experience was complete enough to fill in the gaps that a solid education would provide...but why take the risk, there's dozens of candidates for every open position at every level, most of whom will fill the minimum requirements.

Hmmm, for the past 6 years I've basically seen my income go up faster than inflation. Honestly, for a software dev position, entry level is a comfortable level of living (50k+) as long as it keeps up with inflation for me which it has.

This makes me wonder if we are comparing apples to oranges, which is why I wish there would be studies which were position to position. Or, once software developers become too numerous, I'll be stuck in the same position.

I guess I really, really should consider a side business that I can transition into a full time living [that isn't contracting] at where a gatekeeper/employer isn't responsible for my income.

Thanks

It also depends where you live. In my neck of the woods $50k is probably an okay living for a single person. A couple will want to have more like $70-75k. Throw in some kids and you're pretty quickly north of $100k.

I'm not talking fancy living, just decent apartment in a nice area, regular sedan, eat out once in a while and have enough for a road-trip vacation out of state once a year kind of life.

People manage to do it on far less, but most of my friends dealing with this dream of renting an apartment at all without a cosigner (most rent out of somebody else's home), drive strings of used cars in bad shape, never take vacation, eat crap food at home 3 meals a day 7 days a week, and have major financial emergencies over any unexpected expense that's over $200. That's a $30k/yr life.

The ones in the $40k/yr range usually are true of all the above, but rent a small apartment, have a reliable used car, and have major financial emergencies when the unexpected expense hits $350-500.

It hurts that we're in pretty much the most highly educated part of the country statistically, surrounded by six of the ten richest counties in America. The competition here is pretty intense.

Maybe I am just hitting the lucky spot in terms of industry, occupation, and location then.

I just hope I can maintain it then :)

A more heinous position that I know some older folks are in is that they've received enough pay increases over their 20 years that switching to an entry level position is actually a pay cut. Often that pay cut would be enough that they couldn't pay their bills, so they're effectively stuck in the same job they've always had.

Career changing is very hard. Often if you want to switch, your skill level actually is at an entry level. But convincing somebody to hire a 40-60 year old at an entry level job, even if they're more than qualified, is pretty tough.

Ya, a career change wouldn't happen for me. I like making things enough that I'm just as happy now as I was when I was tinkering with stuff in high school.

I think career changes really require starting over because your experience isn't 100% translatable.

This view on higher education saddens me a bit.

Is the self taught dev in your example ahead in work experience and financially? For sure. For how long though? I've personally seen brilliant people stuck in positions they don't belong in just because people generally prefer to give an opportunity to the most educated fellow of the group. Anyway one of the reasons I enrolled in college because I wanted to learn stuff I would probably not have a chance to learn while working. College opens a lot of opportunities (living abroad, studying abroad, prestige internships) that self-taught people usually can't simply 'break-in'. As a simple example, research groups are usually closed to people with college degrees. Not to mention the friendships, freedom to learn new things, the environment in which you can fall and stand up again easily, that college provides.

On the other hand, there are some benefits you can't just dismiss. Try telling a Japanese immigration officer you want to apply for a skilled worker visa because you learned a bunch of stuff contracting and on the internet.

I'm not saying the world is right not taking self-educated people as seriously as college educated people, but as long as the world works like that, self-taught geniuses will be at a disadvantage the same way college-educated punks will have an advantage.

PS: I purposefully didn't start to mention that the upsides of getting a college degree are virtually the same in the US as in places where the ratio 'upside/price' might be much higher.

I'm curious about the income portion of it mainly because it is the reality I live in, regardless of other advantages. I'm well aware there are some limitations to the choices I've made in life, like any other set of choices. However, if I care purely about the financial benefits...without a study showing one way or the other how can anyone make an informed decision based on facts rather than anecdotal evidence? :/

That is the part I was trying to get at.

The effects of pre-existing ability are clearly huge, and any attempt to measure the value-added by college is pretty much worthless without accounting for it.

If college primarily functions as a hard-to-fake signal of pre-existing ability (a theory which is more compelling than it initially sounds), then there could be arbitrarily large pay gaps between graduates and non-graduates even if college was provably making graduates dumber. Economist Bryan Caplan has a very entertaining interview about this idea:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.htm...

The theory that colleges are primarily about signaling is something I think a lot of people believe but don't necessarily say. Though sometimes they do: http://www.abajournal.com/mobile/article/justice_scalia_tell... ("'By and large,' Scalia said during the April 24 law school appearance, 'I’m going to be picking from the law schools that basically are the hardest to get into. They admit the best and the brightest, and they may not teach very well, but you can’t make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse. If they come in the best and the brightest, they’re probably going to leave the best and the brightest, OK?'")

Obviously it depends on the field. The value-add of an education in say medicine or engineering, which have a strong lab/practice aspect, is probably greater. Personally, I think in general, people overestimate the actual value-added by education at all levels.

> The theory that colleges are primarily about signaling is something I think a lot of people believe but don't necessarily say. >...I think a lot of people believe but don't necessarily say.

If it's really true that a majority of people believe this but don't say it, then society is consciously making crazy decisions. One implications of the signaling theory is that it recommends ending essentially all public subsidies of higher education, and perhaps even penalizing it. In particular, the entire student loan debt (>$1 trillion, or 7% of US GDP) is a waste.

I didn't say everybody believes it, but I think a lot of people do but generally don't say anything because the idea that education is always a big value-add is a touchstone of public policy.

Interesting. While I had concerns similar to yours, it wasn't pre-existing ability on my mind but rather pre-existing "social class" (whatever that means). I teach at a college whose population is unusually high in first-generation college students, and that lack of family experience with the college process leads to some very well-recognized challenges. (Until I came to this school and started learning about our students, I had no idea just how many basic things about getting into college and succeeding there I learned from my parents' own experience.)

So that makes at least two big confounding factors that could be tough to disentangle from this sort of data. I assume that the authors of the study in question tried to account for it, but I haven't read the original so I can't even begin to judge how well they did.

Would you be willing to elaborate on what some of those lessons were?

Before I start chattering, here's a documentary that really had an impact on me: http://www.firstgenerationfilm.com/ It was heartbreaking to watch the four(?) kids they followed go through this process making what (to an experienced eye) looked like one dreadful misjudgement after another. (There were honestly points where I questioned the ethics of the filmmakers: a kid or family would just be wrong about something basic, and it was going to pretty much crush their plans and their future, and the cameras just kept silently rolling.) And so many of those mistakes were things that my family and I just knew, going in. I'm not sure if the trailer really captures the message, but if you can watch this film somewhere, it's worth it.

Setting aside that film, though, here's one example that sticks out for me: a whole lot of prospective first generation college students don't have anyone to tell them that they probably won't have to pay the "sticker price" tuition. At least at a lot of private colleges, internal grants and scholarships are very common (particularly for students from families with fewer resources): as an extreme case, Harvard charges $0 tuition to families with annual incomes under $65K. But a lot of families just look at the "standard" tuition number there and compare it to the $500 scholarship their kid got from the local Rotary Club, and decide not to bother applying anywhere but the state college down the road.

Or think of all the deadlines involved. When I was applying to colleges, my parents were very much partners in helping me keep track of the pesky bits. Sure, I knew I had to postmark a certain application by Feb. 1 (or whatever). But I had parents who recognized how important things like the FAFSA deadline were, too, and who made sure that both they and I got it done on time. For first generation students, a lot of times the only person they have on hand telling them that "no, really, this FAFSA thing is important" is a guidance councilor with 60 other seniors to keep track of at the same time. And that's just one example: there are plenty of other important things to keep track of, and someone who's been to college before will have a much easier time spotting them buried in other details.

Another issue that comes up is what happens when a student struggles in college. Parents who went to college themselves generally know some folks (or a lot of folks!) who struggled in their first year or two but pulled things together and graduated with a degree that led to a great career (maybe even a career in a field they didn't know existed when they started). First generation kids don't have that: when they struggle (or even just feel like they're struggling, because they're being challenged for the first time), it's not uncommon for their parents to (quite rationally) worry that college just isn't working out and say, "Maybe we should just save our money."

I could go on, but that's a taste of it. None of this is stuff that a student and their family couldn't in principle figure out for themselves, but it adds up to one heck of a barrier. (And it's not just anecdotes: I don't have the links, but there's a lot of research on this.)

This was interesting. Thank you.

It also seems Leonhardt's quoted analyses assume that the value of graduating from college is what should be used to decide whether to enroll.

But when looking at the 4.3 million students who enrolled in 2004, the Chronicle of Higher Education found that through 2010, the graduation status of 3 million of those students could not be determined!

http://collegecompletion.chronicle.com/

Looks like we're already urging college (& debt) on as many people as possible, but then deceptively reporting the benefits based only on those who thrive/graduate.

"When experts and journalists spend so much time talking about the limitations of education, they almost certainly are discouraging some teenagers from going to college and some adults from going back to earn degrees. (Those same experts and journalists are sending their own children to college and often obsessing over which one.)"

This particular totally misguided comment is a good example of the bias of this article: As a upper-middle class parent, if I can send my son to Berkeley, MIT, Urbana Champaign, etc. then of course I want him to go those colleges and of course they add value. That's not the point.

The point is about students from poor neighborhoods getting hammered about the value of college and this being presented as the only way they can get a better life. Then, they end up in brain-dead diploma mills with very debatable effect on their employability.

I had this debate many times with teachers in the Chicago South side high school that I mentor: Compare attending a place like Illinois Central College for four years OR spending that time learning about a craft, e.g. programming (yes, I'm biased) and then trying to attend, say, Hacker School or something similar. Granted, this is not an option for all students but things like this should be mentioned to students and put on the table as an option. Instead, when I mention this and similar options teachers and students look at me alike like I'm from Mars.

The reason is that high school counselors and teachers whose job it is to guide disadvantaged students do not have a clear understanding of these option for the simple reason that when they got educated these option did not exist.

You picked a poor example. ICC is not GWU

https://www.google.com/search?q=illinois+central+college+tui...

$7k/yr is a great price for a college education. And there is time in summer and after school to work or study additional trade work. The education might not be top-shelf, bit if the student doesn't know enough to skip the classes on the curriculum, they are quite valuable.

I'm from Eastern Canada, right now a pragmatic student can go out West and work for two years, return to a community college with free tuition while drawing unemployment for a two year diploma where they learn a trade, and then transfer into a four year university to finish up a relevant bachelor's degree in 2.5 years.

My friend lives with a dude who took that route who's now doing his doctorate in English. He still goes and works on the oil rigs in the summer, then spends the rest of the year studying 19th century english lit.

Of course, working oil rigs is inherently dangerous work. People die or get permanently disfigured doing that work. Not everyone of course, but enough that you should strongly consider if that's a risk worth taking.

You're right, that was not a great example. However, the real loss in going to a subpar college is not the money (unless it is quite expensive) but time. Unfortunately, when you're young you don't quite appreciate the opportunity cost of time. Four years is a lot of time, you can become expert in at least in one area in that time.

The reason they look at you that way is outside of programming, not having a degree is a barrier to white collar jobs. My father in law never finished his degree, but worked his way up to a director level position in IT. But when he had to find a new IT job, he had a really hard time getting a comparable position, because those positions required a degree.

People in the software world live in a bubble. There's is not an oversupply in that field like there is in nearly every other. That makes employers more willing to overlook paper qualifications to broaden the pool of candidates.

I'm not convinced a lack of 'oversupply' is true.

Many companies are trying to increase the H1B and other visas to generate the kind of oversupply you are talking about.

Software is also one of the handful of industries where physical location doesn't matter. So being a good Indian developer who is comfortable living off of 50% of the US salary is a huge competitive advantage.

If people who just counted beans had their way, I'm sure they'd outsource as much development as they could to countries like India [if only they could filter out the bad developers in those countries].

It's all relative, right? The supply situation in software is much more favorable for labor than in nearly any other white collar occupation save maybe for medicine.

Based on this random list from 2011: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/25-college-majors-with-lowest-un...

You appear to be correct.

However, moving forward in time to 2013: http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2013/01/18/careers-lowest-unemp... http://money.cnn.com/2013/01/04/news/economy/jobs-lowest-une...

That appears to be incorrect.

Keep in mind, however, that medicine has been in this position for ~4000 years. Or at least, I did classical studies, and doctors did very well for themselves in the ancient Greek city states, in the Roman Empire (East and West), in the middle ages, in the Renaissance, in the Industrial age, and today.

It will be 1950+ years before IT gets a track record half as good in the best possible case.

Eh?

I think you should read the links I posted before assuming I was talking about medicine.

There are a bunch of other fields [such as physicists] that have lower unemployment. I don't think there is much 'employer power' in a labor market where there is .3% unemployment. The . is intentional.

Maybe the moral of that story is to pick a field where there isn't an oversupply of labor, not to make yourself look good in a field where there is.

It always struck me as slightly ironic that the skills most useful in today's world - programming, statistics, linear algebra, economics, persuasiveness, and self-advocacy - are rarely taught in standard educational institutions, and often actively discouraged. Teaching 14-year-olds about supply & demand will help far more lives than teaching them to go to college.

> if I can send my son to Berkeley, MIT, Urbana Champaign, etc. then of course I want him to go

Why? Are you truly saying that for the amount of money you would be charged to send your son there, you cannot find him a better educational opportunity?

Also, we're kind of splitting things into "college" and "not college". There are infinite possibilities between the two. You can audit classes. You can be a part-time student. You can attend, but not work toward a degree, which may require you to take dozens of pointless pre-requisite classes. Those are just off the top of my head.

And finally, since when did an education's worth began to be measured solely by your earning power?

We used to educate people just for the sake of them being better people. There's a thought.

There are so many questions to be asked and the only one being focused on is ... are you going to earn more money when you're done?

You're talking about schools with average starting salaries in the 60 to 100k range, not to mention the intangible benefits of being surrounded by smart people. I think the impetus is on you to demonstrate that an alternative path is measurably superior for a significant percentage of the people who would go there.

> demonstrate that an alternative path is measurably superior for a significant percentage of the people

That's really kind of my point. There is no path that is measurably superior for a significant percentage of people. We're all different. Very different. Because of that, we should have unique paths, even for our education.

That's not really a demonstration - that's a statement of personal philosophy.

I think the main value of going to an elite college is the network you obtain.

You make an excellent point about education worth points that are harder to measure.

I think that's a myth. I got several jobs (well, interviews) because of my Stanford resume. Yet I keep up with zero people from my class. The name is the thing.

N=1

No, N > 1 because I got Several job interviews from different people.

Did you get internships? I did an internship every year at my school and their network helped me get them. Network doesn't just mean knowing people from the school after graduating, it also means leveraging it to get ahead while you're still in school.

Depending on the program, the quality of your instruction can be vastly different from college to college. While an elite college is not a guarantee of a good curriculum, or better teachers, those colleges are more likely to have better programs (but you can definitely find less prestigious colleges with great programs too if you know what to look for). I always double check a universities curriculum to get a general idea for quality, and I've seen them vary greatly.

I'm a little surprised that central IL/Peoria area colleges are a topic for discussion in Chicago high schools. Aren't there plenty of community colleges in the Chicago area?

ICC is a low-cost community college that primarily issues AS (2-year) degrees. AFAIK they don't have a BS (4-year) program. The people that I've know who've attended used it as a stepping stone to a 4-year degree from another area school such as Bradley because their high school experience didn't adequately prepare them to enter a Bachelor's program (or they lacked confidence or money). It's exactly the kind of place that someone who can't go to Berkeley, MIT, UIUC (or even ISU/WIU/EIU/SIU) should go.

Source: Lived in the area for eight years. Had friends who attended and knew instructors through various other activities.

To your broader point, I hear that the first year of college is used to compensate for poor high school education. If that's the case, is something like Hacker School really a option for the average high school graduate? Obviously exceptional students could take the self-study route but is that really a option for more than the top 2% or so?

It's worth keeping this[1] in mind while reading. Someone in the bottom quartile who goes to college has an 11.4% chance of finishing, vastly reducing the expected return of the decision to go to college--even ignoring the fact that people in the bottom quartile are probably attending much lower quality institutions.

The most plausible story about education is that graduating from any college used to be an effective signal of intelligence, conscientiousness, and ambition. But everyone realized this, the demand (and therefore the price and quantity purchased) for college educations increased dramatically, and the quality of the signal was significantly diluted--attending an "average" college in the US and getting a non-job-related degree now just shows that you're minimally capable. This is worse for everyone.

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/05/three_graphs_ab....

The article itself pointed out that their headline number doesn't really account for pre-college differences between the two groups. For example, someone who grows up in a stable high-income environment will likely go to college, but that is because they have the support structures that will assist them prevent them from falling too far behind and help them recover from any setbacks. A person who might want to go to college but is from a disrupted lower-income environment may not have the support structures that help them get through college and find a good job.

From the article:

    This calculation is necessarily imprecise, because it can’t control for any pre-existing differences between college graduates and nongraduates — differences that would exist regardless of schooling.

Completing college may simply be correlated with having a well-paying job because the skills required for both are very similar.

A second study, linked from the article, compared people with similar jobs and those with and without degrees, e.g. secretaries. They still found a gap, but again they did not control for for pre-college environment.

The biggest problem I have with this article is that it lumps every single major into "college" and makes the blanket statement that it is worth it.

Ok, so the average 'cost' of college is negative $500,000, how does that break down by major? What is the average 'cost' of an Art degree? An engineering degree?

"Is college worth it?" is the wrong question because there are so many variations that there isn't just one single answer. "Is my major at this specific college worth it?" is a more valuable discussion.

Better yet, is this major at this university given my personality and skills worth it?

Cars may be "worth it", but that doesn't mean everybody needs to be driving around in a Lamborghini.

There is a vast, vast difference between a person who has committed themselves to being a neurosurgeon no matter what the hardship and one who has no idea what they want in life or whether a college education would help them out or not. Lumping it all together doesn't help either of those two figure out what's best for them.

>is this major [worth it] at this university given my personality and skills

... and social background.

I know a lot of people who graduated in subject X and then happily went on to join or manage the completely-unrelated family business. They make good money, but they would have made exactly the same money had they joined the business four years earlier. For them, attending college had nothing to do with money, and they clearly skew this sort of statistics.

The ironic part is this "outlier" was originally the purpose of higher education... provide a lifetime of interesting things to think about for the kids of the local nobility.

Then it morphed into a proxy for social class, where a degree meant the odds are the applicant was of a higher social class.

Then it morphed into way to make employees desperate to pay their loan, much as managers are always glad to hear an employee got a house loan or a car loan, there's someone easier to take advantage of. (edited to add, also an indication of a strong conformity streak, which in some corporate environments is highly prized, at least at the line employee level)

In the era where blue collar jobs were being eliminated but white collar jobs hadn't yet been eliminated, it became a mere daycare / votech job training facility. Liberal arts, why would I want those, I want a job!

Later it turned into a financialization scheme where the government will socialize the loan losses while the banks will privatize the loan profits, and the institutions can charge any amount of money they feel like because .gov will just print some more.

Finally it becomes an unusual noteworthy outlier to consider going to higher ed to become ... educated.

If this cycle perpetuates, as seems likely, we can make testable falsifiable predictions about the future, such as the number of students collapsing and higher ed attendance becoming a proxy for social class. To some extent we already have this, with ivy's being "real degrees" for "real jobs" and everything else not mattering much, where a liberal arts degree from Yale means you might be employed in the field not just bartending or sales like grads from lesser schools, the point is everything else will be going away, not just not mattering as much.

As typical in the fast paced world of today you'll have some people preaching the gospel of step #7 when most of the world is on step #8 and some of the leaders are already operating in step #9, #10, or even #11. This linked article is pretty much like the old timer preaching the values of the past, as if they still matter today.

I would say higher ed attendance is an element of social class right now. Calling it a proxy gives it a level if indirectness that I don't think is really there, sort of like calling noble titles a "proxy" for social class. They are the thing itself! Socialization is one of the things college does, and is an extremely traditional function of schooling. Going to college is definitely an indicator for social class, and often shapes it.

But then you're getting too specific for any useful answer. I personally would be interested in seeing the pay difference between those who graduated college and those who did not in the same job. For instance, how much more does the average software developer with a CS degree make than an equivalent dev without a degree?

For something like software development this could be useful, but probably not for most technical majors. There aren't nuclear engineers or rocket scientists with only a high school education

John Carmack?

I think it is safe to assume that John Carmack is an exception and the vast majority of non college graduates shouldn't expect to recreate his results.

... who is in software development?

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com

Try again.

EDIT: To be fair, I'm not sure they're active anymore, but for like six-eight years they very much were.

Ah, right. id is the first thing I think of with Carmack. I'd forgotten about Armadillo.

It would be really interesting to see degree vs non-degree numbers across professions. Doctors, lawyers, architects, aerospace engineers, etc.

You can't be any of those things without lots of formal training and certifications starting with a college degree, except perhaps in states where you can "read the law" without going to law school (this may still require undergraduate work, I'm not sure).

Specific and correct beats generally wrong.

Parent's proposal is for cohorts of thousands of students per year, of you bundle objectively similar schools.

I'm not sure this would be very useful if you're only looking at people who successfully got a job in that field. Let's assume software devs make the comparable salaries regardless of education. It could still be true[0] that CS degree holders who look for tech jobs get one 80% of the time, whereas non-degree holders who apply for a tech job get one 20% of the time and end up in a much lower-paying job. The analysis you suggest would indicate a college degree has no effect on salary, but it actually had a huge effect if you consider everyone who was interested in tech but didn't make it.

[0] and in my opinion very likely, aside from these specific percents being made up and probably pretty far off.

That's true, I didn't think about success rate of landing jobs. This is what makes answering "Is college worth it?" so hard.

You can find salary medians and ranges for every different major. I don't think it's possible to calculate "is this major from this school worth it to me." If it were, someone would have figured it out by now.

It might not be possible to calculate "is it worth it for me", but it should be possible to calculate it on average.

I can look at the average income of a high school graduate ($29,950 according to http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=77) and then the average salary of a graduate from a particular university with a specific major and see what the difference is for the average person.

It's not a perfect comparison since I'm not perfectly average, but it gives a better guideline than comparing the average of a generic college graudate to a high school graduate.

It would be even more useful comparing salaries of specific jobs that don't require a college degree to specific salaries of jobs that do and the specific major required for those jobs.

Yes, thank you. I think that lumping all majors at all colleges together and encouraging people to "just go to college" is a huge problem. College is a weird mix of academic pursuit and vocational training. Sometimes those things overlap sometimes not and understanding that balance is important. Not all investments in higher education are the same and not understanding what sort of investment you can make given your current financial situation is causing a lot of people to pick up a lot of bad debt.

I'm surprised by how few comments mention one other thing that is important to consider: How does the lifetime value of a college education compare to someone who instead spent that money starting a business?

I went to a small private college and graduated in 2010 with about $40,000 in loans. My degree was in biology. So far, it hasn't really helped at all. If I were going to start over, I would skip college and start a business.

My student debt is higher than average, so let's be more conservative and use the $25,000 average debt stated in the article. For $25,000, you can create a pretty nice little business, especially in a small city. For example, I lived in Fargo for a few years where my living expenses were only $800 per month. Even if that business fails, you are no worse off than a college grad, except you also have years of experience for when you try another business.

I think the real question we should be asking is not "Is college worth it?", but rather, "How do we help young adults start businesses the way we help them get into college?". We spend so much time and money offering scholarships, which in turn is supposed to help them get good jobs. In other words, we are spending a lot of money to increase competition in the job market. If that money was spent helping those young bright minds start businesses, we would be simultaneously removing someone from the job market AND creating new jobs.

I'm curious how those numbers are calculated. Especially when it is broken down my majors. Feels like the same lie of "college = job" that we teach our kids, which fools them into thinking that they don't need a tangible vocational skill to get a job.

Also, how much of the growing gap is a result of existing college grads with jobs getting pay raises faster than those without a college degree? With the tech boom, are the outliers skewing the data? Not all college grads are created equal.

We need more vocational training. We need to rethink what jobs really need a college degree vs what jobs can be trained for in vocational schools. A fair number of programming jobs, for example, could be filled with students who could take the vocational route.

Not everyone should be or can be put into the 'college degree' box. This doesn't make them worth less as a person and it certainly doesn't mean they can't do certain jobs.

We seriously need to rethink how we perceive vocational training.

The gap in average earnings between those who complete college and those who don't is pretty terrifying, given that it is possible to have no degree but all of the associated debt. If accruing all this debt guaranteed a college degree then yes, college is worth it. But it doesn't.

So I think the article suffers from selection bias. It focuses on a subgroup, that people won't know they will be a part of when asking themselves the question, is college worth it?

In The Intelligent Investor, Ben Graham devotes dozens of pages to two simple yet important rules:

1. Never invest money that you can't afford to lose.

2. The value of an investment is always a function of what you paid for it.

The commonsense rules also apply to college. Students shouldn't choose colleges with lofty tuitions if their expected careers will have low ROIs. And the more they invest in college, the better their investments must perform.

Graduating from college might be worth it, but the total societal cost of college has to include those who attend, rack up debt, but do not graduate. You can't present college as a sure thing when actually graduating from it will never, ever be a sure thing.

And no matter how strong the case may be for college, in the end there's no glossing over costs. I just checked the total cost of attendance for our state school here, and it is 20K/year for residents. 80K-ish in debt is a big, serious, worth-thinking-over decision, full stop. Presenting this as a no-brainer will always be irresponsible until the costs go down.

And even if the debt pays off over the course of your multi-decade career, it's worth asking the question of whether paying down such debt already when you are so young is going to be how you want to kick off your adult life. Not claiming to have the answer to that one.

Ultimately I think it's flawed to claim a form of education that is so outrageously expensive should be just as crucial as high school. If you can't reasonably save for it, it should be a luxury.

This is too simple to be useful. Not only will the wildly successful outliers skew the data, but it doesn't take into account the risk of paying a huge amount now for the hope of earning more later.

In no other area would someone be taken seriously if they asked you for a few hundred thousand dollars now for the promise of paying double or triple that money back (on average!) by the time you die. That's a horrible rate of return, and all the risk is up front.

My mother paid her way through college working as a waitress part-time. You can't do that now without also accumulating a massive amount of debt. College for my mother was an easy decision in the 1970's, but put her thirty-five years into the future and it's not, and for many people like her isn't even an option.

That's the problem.

> My mother paid her way through college working as a waitress part-time. You can't do that now without also accumulating a massive amount of debt.

Yes you can. I had a friend who attended UCSC for three years (2004-07) on financial aid and wound up flunking out. According to him (I admit I haven't seen documents), the total debt he accumulated for those three years was in the low thousands of dollars. I'm pretty sure working part-time as a waitress for three years would cover it. I'm also pretty sure that, in the hypothetical case where your financial aid requires you to do well in school, flunking out doesn't meet that standard.

UCSC tuition & fees have more than doubled since 2004: http://www.collegecalc.org/colleges/california/university-of... (And they had already increased by 41% in 2004.)

I've noticed that myself, but doubling a debt under $5,000 leaves you with a debt under $10,000; not really a big problem to pay off.

> it doesn't take into account the risk of paying a huge amount now for the hope of earning more later.

The article says, "After adjusting for inflation and the time value of money, the net cost of college is negative $500,000, roughly double what it was three decades ago."

which states that they used a discount rate higher than simple inflation, but doesn't say what that discount rate is.

Are they comparing people with a college degree to people who dropped out of college? Because it seems to me the latter would be quite a specific sample and introduce a lot of bias.

Also, have they accounted for people with a college degree who don't have a job?

'Worth' is a slippery statement. For that matter, so is 'college graduate'.

I did a breakdown of unemployment vs level of education attained (using BLS data), and there was a strong visual difference between the people with college work and those without. If you had a college degree, you had a far better chance to have a job than someone who, e.g., dropped out of high school.

But this really only tells part of a story; it doesn't remark on the jobs available, or the personal determination, or the social savvy to grasp what more job-friendly life choices would be.

Etc.

And, of course, people who are less bright, work less hard, or have financial hardships (or who attend terrible primary or secondary schools) will find K-12 harder to complete, and make it to college less often. People who find school easier will have little to no reason not to attend college, especially with the large discounts that come with good grades and high test scores.

These articles never ask the questions that really matter, e.g.: Do colleges create high-income earners, or are they just good at selecting future high-income earners to bilk out of $100k? And do those graduates get high-paying jobs because they're better equipped to perform them, or are they simply benefitting from the myth that degrees make them more qualified?

On a related note, I coached Lebron James' basketball team when he was 7 years old, so I believe I deserve credit for all of his success.

Just kidding, but you get what I'm saying.

Will Saletan's comment on this article pinpoints its gaping flaw:

"Tell all the smart, disciplined people to go 4-year colleges. Then give college the credit for their success. #scam http://nyti.ms/1jqvoht" - @saletan (https://twitter.com/saletan/status/471329858295832576)

A degree is basically a license allowing you to get a job above the service and low-level manufacturing industry, so of course it's worth it. Having a writ of noble title was worth it in the middle ages / renaissance area. The real question is whether there's enough objective value beyond self-reinforcing certification requirements to justify the expense.

Education is an active pursuit. You can't learn until you know what problems one is looking to solve. Colleges have made education a passive process. You go to classes. You do your homework and you take exams. It doesn't work like that.

> Not going to college will cost you about half a million dollars.

I don't understand this sentence at all. Doesn't he actually mean that by not going to college you won't earn, on average, $500,000 more that you will if you do go to college?

He's including opportunity costs.

It might still be worth it, but can't possibly be worth it forever. If you have a baby today, you might need to save $500,000 for a 4 year degree.

It's hard to imagine an economic climate where that will be worth it.

how can there be too few college graduates if we are fighting over the slots currently availble?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/us/led-by-stanfords-5-top-...

the original title was "Led by Stanford’s 5%, Top Colleges’ Acceptance Rates Hit New Lows" -- with potential double entendre

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7556074

I'd like to see some better segmenting of this data by school and degree. Most of my issues with college are the idea that a degree in anything from anywhere at any cost is a good idea.

The real question should be: is high school worth it, or people should just skip it and go straight to college?

Is College Worth It? "Totally," says a bunch of people who went to college.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com