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Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

> Getting ahead in life by going to college is a dying notion

People with college degrees earn significantly more over their lifetimes. Also, they usually understand the world and critical thinking much better, have better communication skills, etc. These things are valuable in themselves and valuable for their roles as citizens, parents, community members, etc.

To read that claim from someone with a Ph.D., a degree from MIT, and will soon be on the faculty of "a very good school" is a bit rich. It reminds me of wealthy people who says money doesn't matter to them.

HN is a unique environment of generally highly-educated, high-achieving people. Most of the world cannot program computers; many cannot operate them. It would be interesting to hear from members of the large majority who lack college degrees.

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I don't have a fancy college degree, but even I can see that you might be mixing correlation and causation. College doesn't necessarily cause people to earn more money, better understand the world or communicate well. It's that intelligent people who are likely to succeed in life tend to go to college, mostly because they are expected to by society. Those people would have probably been just as successful without college, but that's hard to prove empirically without a large control group. Your argument seems different when applied to basketball instead of education. Was Michael Jordan great because he played for a top college basketball program, or was he playing for a top program because he was already great?

I think part of OP's point was that college itself isn't what makes people successful. There are a lot of great reasons to go to college, but advances in communication technology have fundamentally changed the landscape. It used to be that college libraries and professors were the only way to gain access to certain kinds of knowledge. That period in time is obviously over. College degrees will become less and less important in a world where anyone can communicate with everyone. A diploma used to be the only way to certain open doors. Now a facebook account and an impressive resume can do just as much or more.

> I can see that you might be mixing correlation and causation ... Those people would have probably been just as successful without college, but that's hard to prove empirically without a large control group.

There is a lot of research supporting my statement; it isn't something I came up with. I don't see research supporting yours, though it is trendy and often repeated around here.

> College doesn't necessarily cause people to earn more money, better understand the world or communicate well. It's that intelligent people who are likely to succeed in life tend to go to college

I think people who spend four years studying, guided by leading scholars, will improve their knowledge and skills. That seems like an uncontroversial statement. You claim these people are intelligent and motivated; that would seem to backup my claims.

> mostly because they are expected to by society

You may look at it that way, but is there a basis to saying how many others share your view?

On one hand, you can argue that almost everything people do is because they are expected to: Go to high school, listen to their parents, get a job, get married, etc.

On the other, I think most people I know went to college because they wanted to learn and grow.

> People with college degrees earn significantly more over their lifetimes.

While your statement is factually correct, the slogan has been adopted by the sleaziest of the institutions pitching the most useless degrees to drive potential applicants into thinking that a student loan + years of their time = automatic cash further down the road.

To quote The Economist http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21600131-too-man...

"But not all degrees are equally useful. And given how much they cost—a residential four-year degree can set you back as much as $60,000 a year—many students end up worse off than if they had started working at 18."

Not only that, a more accurate statement would have been "People who obtained college degrees forty five years ago earned significantly more than those who didn't."

I'm not at all convinced that will be true for the current generation. The job market used to have room for pretty much anyone with a degree. Even your degree in 17th century French literature was good enough to get you a sales or local government position at an employer who required a degree but wasn't picky about the major. These days there are so many graduates the sales manager can wait for someone with a degree in economics and the local government guy can wait for a candidate that's similarly (sort of) related.

Plus there was always law school. You can still get into law school; it's just that there's no job waiting for you when you get out.

What also goes unsaid: 45 years ago, many fewer people earned Bachelors degrees (edit a smaller percentage of workers had degrees). Using past performance as an indicator of future performance is often fraught with peril.

> Using past performance as an indicator of future performance is often fraught with peril

It's a useful turn of phrase, but not good reasoning. It would be unwise to ignore decades of history because of a lack of certainty. Arguably, college degrees and intellectual skills will become more valuable in the future, as more and more jobs demand it. Demand for unskilled labor is decreasing.

Also, my analysis is that people who spend four years in a guided program to acquire knowledge and skill among the resources of a university (experts, teachers, labs, etc) will be more knowledgeable and skilled. I don't think that's controversial.

What you have to watch out for is the debt to expected earnings ratio. A lot of the data from previous years was based on low (or zero) tuition rates.

Getting stuck with a six-digit loan while being underemployed would still support the "college graduates make more money" statement, as to get that barista job a college graduate probably ranked higher in the resume stack than people with high school degrees, but I doubt anyone is gloating.

By similar measure, getting a mortgage to buy a house and then pay it off was a decent deal for most of the century until people started overpaying by purely believing in the principle, but not running the actual numbers.

Do you have data to back up any of that? The data I've seen says that, right now, unemployment is much higher and income is lower for people who lack college degrees.

Do I have data to back up what's going to happen with this generation in the future? Sure, just let me hop into my police box.

People with college degrees, in the past, earned significantly more over their lifetimes than those without. But this may or may not continue, particularly for certain degrees where the person may have been better off learning marketable skill and applying it early.

I have a college degree and have never really used it. The jobs I have landed, the things I have done, none of them in any way shape or form are attributable to that degree. And, I graduated college nearly 20 years ago. College was a good place to drink beer and get laid, but really, I think I would have been better off going straight to work. The sad part is, I knew it at the time but my parents were insistant that without a degree I'd be mopping floors for a living. So I listened to them when I should have trusted my gut instincts. I'd trade the degree back in a heartbeat for tuition and interest and book costs alone...to say nothing of the 4 years (ok.. almost 5, I was having a good time but who is counting?) of opportunity cost.

Have to agree with OP. I believe college to be generally overpriced and over rated. Particularly in certain disciplines. I'm about as sad to see law schools going out of business as I would be to see mosquito breeding pools being drained. Maybe some of the potential attendees can do something socially useful with their lives now. (yes, I know...we need lawyers. we probably need mosquitos too. just not so many of them.)

You can make the subjective assertion that college was worthless to you personally, and who can challenge it? But a subjective assertion by one person is not data nor is it representative of any population (I learned that in college).

Also, education has many benefits beyond earning money. It's seems absurdly narrow-minded to evaluate college solely by the marginal income gain. Life is so much more and education benefits much of it. I could not write nearly as well, use mathematics, understand science, understand art, understand humanity, be as creative, etc. etc. without the years I spent studying those things.

I can't imagine doing what I do with my high school education. Can someone waste their time in college? Of course and I'm sorry for those that did, but don't impose it on everyone else. I remember most of my peers' intellectual curiosity and how much they learned. Someone could own a computer or raise kids and gain nothing from those things either, but that doesn't devalue my computer or family, or argue that they don't provide great benefits to humanity.

> But a subjective assertion by one person is not data nor is it representative of any population (I learned that in college).

The opposite is also often true: data about a large aggregate population (across all demographics and generations in this case) might not represent the reality on the ground for a precise sample. Circumstances vary significantly and with rapid technological change smashing straight into global economic instability, everything is up in the air.

> I can't imagine doing what I do with my high school education. Can someone waste their time in college? Of course and I'm sorry for those that did, but don't impose it on everyone else.

Based on my experience growing up in the United States, all effort is spent on imposing $30-50,000/year degrees (and debt) on students, instead of realistic alternatives that might be better suited to circumstances.

> Life is so much more and education benefits much of it. I could not write nearly as well, use mathematics, understand science, understand art, understand humanity, be as creative, etc. etc. without the years I spent studying those things.

You could study and understand all of those without going to college, given the right resources (like books and time). In my opinion, it is a person's intelligence and curiosity that matter, not four years in an institution or a degree (I say this from a the inside of the educational system, currently pursuing a PhD myself).

However, what's missing is access to a teacher who can guide you through the subject material, answer questions, show you the pitfalls, extrapolate on topics and give you a thorough understanding of what you are studying. A good teacher is an invaluable resource that you will not receive through independent study alone.

> what's missing is access to a teacher

And peers, and resources such as organization (clubs, teams, classes, etc.); labs, tools and machines, including IT; and the very many information resources that are not yet online.

That's an idealistic view of education. In today's "industrial education system", where each teacher/professor teaches classes of 30-100, I don't think each student gets the attention/discussion time they need. You still wind up doing most of the work yourself (at least I did).

Part of the reason I am throwing down $60k is to learn from other people, not books.

Plus I get an international exchange in Hong Kong and one year's paid industrial placement, it would certainly be challenging to secure those things by myself (though that would be an education in itself).

> In my opinion, it is a person's intelligence and curiosity that matter, not four years in an institution or a degree

People do not come out of the womb with their levels of intelligence and curiosity set in stone, and they're still quite flexible at 17/18 when they hit college. Even the most naturally intelligent and curious 18 year-olds do not have the free time, motivation, and access to experts that enrollment in a university provides.

My own practical experience (from looking both at myself and many others) is almost the opposite. I think one of the great fallacies of modern education is the idea that you can take an idiot (for lack of a more appropriate/PC word), put them through school and they'll come out a genius. IMHO, practice shows otherwise.

The problem is that there are lots and lots of people that comes to you and say "college is not worth it because of..." and you dismiss every one of them by saying "that's just one anecdote, there's no data to support it".

Well, the data is coming to your door, but you refuse to look into it unless it is neatly prepackaged by a figure of authority. I wonder if when you read the prepackaged version of the current trends, 30 years from now, you will say "oh, I was wrong after all... who would have though that back then!"

I'm not entirely confident how things will pan out, but here (Denmark) the value of degrees seems to be getting higher, if anything. Not in the sense that a degree is a ticket to a good job, as in the past, but in the sense that not having a degree will shut you out from a wide range of jobs, because it's just so expected now, that it's become like the new high-school diploma. Employers don't care about high school diplomas per se, but they treat not having graduated from high school as a significant red flag. For many jobs university diplomas seem to be filling that role now.

The monetary context is admittedly different because universities are essentially a continuation of the free public schooling system: zero tuition, and you get paid a stipend if you're a full-time student (about $1k/mo to cover living expenses). There's still an opportunity cost in lost earnings vs. getting a job straight from high school, but the delta is less.

The other thing that has been happening is that outcomes (employment/earnings/etc.) have been rapidly diverging between university graduates and vocational-school graduates. The two tracks used to both lead to good employment—in different sectors, but paying well and with job security in both cases. But in the past 20-30 years or so, the vocational schools' employment statistics are nose-diving compared to those of the universities.

>People with college degrees earn significantly more over their lifetimes.

This is almost certainly due to people with college degrees having more racial and economic privilege than people without college degrees. Controlling for this I'd doubt the difference was that large.

>Also, they usually understand the world and critical thinking much better, have better communication skills, etc

This is probably the just-world fallacy.

People who can waste money on higher education, especially during a sustained "recession"/depression, are people who already have money and connections.

It's never been about what you know, it's been about who you know. College is a good way to buy those connections.

If you start seeing rosy pictures of the world, you should notice that and correct for it. The world is not a rosy place. For any question that fits the template "Does X fulfill its direct stated purpose?" the answer is almost certainly no.

Notice that the sea change we're seeing doesn't actually amount to a paradigm shift. It's not like people from the economic class prevented from getting college degrees now can afford to fuck around on Udacity and "hustle" to get a job. Don't worry, there's no more equality now.

"People with college degrees earn significantly more over their lifetimes."

This statistic must be based on people who have completed their lifetimes earning. So effectively a lag of 45 years. Work doesn't seem to be paying as much for my generation as it did for the boomers.

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