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Comment by RussianCow | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

Specific and correct beats generally wrong.

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

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).

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