
What Is College Worth? - pepys
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/07/college-calculus
======
hkmurakami
For any purchase I like to ask people, _" Is this an investment, or is it a
hobby?"_. It applies to anything from houses (usually a decent investment) to
cars (usually a poor investment but often needed as part of an investment in a
career to commute), and even a college education.

If you're independently wealthy [1] or your family will take care of you,
viewing college expenses as an enrichment experience (akin to a trip to
Europe) is just fine. If you see it as an investment with future earning
returns, then its cost efficacy must be examined rigorously.

[1] I know a HS dropout programmer (a BSD guy) who's now independently wealthy
and studying math in France as a hobby.

~~~
superuser2
>If you're independently wealthy [1] or your family will take care of you,
viewing college expenses as an enrichment experience (akin to a trip to
Europe) is just fine.

On of the goals of the vast public higher education infrastructure that boomed
in the 1960s was to bring that enrichment experience to everyone. And it was
successful at this - participation in liberal arts majors was quite high until
relatively recently.

Harpers [0] has an excellent piece on the topic.

[0] [http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/the-neoliberal-
arts/](http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/the-neoliberal-arts/)

~~~
hkmurakami
Wanted to message you but couldn't find a contact in your profile so I'll
write it here.

This was a wonderful read. Really appreciate you sharing it with us.

------
mod
> “In 2013, 90% of DeVry University associate and bachelor’s degree grads
> actively seeking employment had careers in their field within six months of
> graduation.” That sounds impressive—until you notice that the figure
> includes those graduates who had jobs in their field before graduation.

Quite frankly, I think it sounds impressive even with that stipulation.

For those who don't want to wade through the entire article, they answered
their question about halfway through:

> "Looking at the actual return on the costs of attending college, careful
> analyses suggest that the payoff from many college programs—as much as one
> in four—is actually negative. Incredibly, the schools seem to add nothing to
> the market value of the students."

------
sandworm101
College, what the rest of the world might call university, has value beyond
paychecks. I know it is popular to look down on higher education these days,
but there are real personal advantages. Anyone leaving a proper university at
least knows how to read and write. That cannot be said of today's highschool
students.

I truly enjoy being able to follow science even though is has nothing to do
with my field. The ability to pick up and journal on astronomy and understand
everything it has to say is something I could not have developed at a
vocational school. A couple months of in a hard-math stellar astronomy course
yields a lifetime of enjoyment.

~~~
dasil003
I highly value my college experience, but then again I was able to avoid
student loans by becoming a staff member and getting essentially a full
scholarship plus health care (since there was no bachelors degree applicable
for a web development job back then).

I can't help but notice that the way student loans are handed out like candy
to 18 year-olds who do not yet have the education and experience to understand
the implication of those loan burdens is a pretty slimy modus operandi. It
just doesn't jive with the high-minded ideals that university's tout publicly.

~~~
superuser2
>It just doesn't jive with the high-minded ideals that university's tout
publicly.

Good private schools have excellent financial aid for students whose parents
can't pay, and the high-minded ideals were brought to "the people" in the form
of heavily taxpayer-subsidized state universities for much of the twentieth
century. These institutions aren't going to abandon their values, though the
state subsidies that made it possible without debt are long-gone.

~~~
zaccus
The state subsidies are still there, what has changed is the cost of
attendance. Universities are willingly complicit in overselling the benefits
and downplaying the cost of higher education to teenagers for whom other
options might be more appropriate. That is dishonest to say the absolute
least, and juxtaposed with these institutions' "values" is quite hypocritical.

This applies to for-profit private schools, sure, but these days it applies to
our hallowed state schools as well.

------
JumpCrisscross
> _He cites a survey, carried out by PayScale for Businessweek in 2012, that
> showed that students who attend M.I.T., Caltech, and Harvey Mudd College
> enjoy an annual return of more than ten per cent on their “investment.” But
> the survey also found almost two hundred colleges where students, on
> average, never fully recouped the costs of their education._

I've never been a fan of the U.S. News _et al_ college ranking methodologies.
Publishing historical–as well as forecasted–ROIs would be a far superior
metric.

~~~
UmDieWelt
Forecasted ROIs are meaningless considering major is more important for ROI
than where you went to school. Harvey Mudd isn't a better university than
Harvard, Yale, or Princeton just because its graduates go almost exclusively
into what is currently a lucrative field. (MIT, Caltech, and Harvey Mudd are
good because of their rigor, which is unrelated.) As it stands, a forecasted
ROI ranking would almost certainly be topped by miscellaneous dev bootcamps
because of their cost structure.

------
littletimmy
It is foolish to ask this question. It presupposes that college value is
something that should be decided by the market.

Just make it free, like the civilized world.

~~~
benkuykendall
A person gains some $N in financial gains and personal fulfillment for going
to college. Regardless if tuition comes from the individual or the taxpayers,
the society as a whole is still paying some $M for a person to go to college.
Society gains some additional $R through the person going to college.

I posit that for some individuals, sending that individual to college is
beneficial to society (N + R > M), and for others, it is not (N + R <= M).

If the government decides everyone goes to college at its expense, then some
individuals for whom college would not be socially beneficial will go to
college. This will be a societal loss.

Alternatively, the government could try to figure our who would be beneficial
to send to college, and pay only for them. This would maximize societal gain
if done correctly. However, I for one would not trust the government to make
this decision impartially or correctly.

But when the market decides who goes to college, it is up to each individual
to decide whether or not college will be beneficial for them. Hopefully,
informed individuals can make that decision correctly. (Of course, when an
individual decides, they do not consider the societal benefit R, only the
personal benefit N. This could be solved by a government subsidy worth R,
either in a grant or in favorable interest rates on a loan.)

I do not see a reasonable way in which a controlled economy for higher
education could maximize societal gains.

~~~
littletimmy
No. You are still analyzing it in terms of the market. I don't agree with this
paradigm altogether when it comes to public good. Your sentence "a person
gains some $N in ..." has absolutely no meaning for me.

~~~
benkuykendall
How else can we evaluate good if not by it's value? I understand that not all
the benefits of college are monetary, but we need some unit of account to
describe the immaterial gains of a college education.

Would you rather a billion dollars or a college education? If you say the
former, than value of college is clearly less than a billion dollars.

~~~
littletimmy
Sure, we can evaluate it by value. But that value does not have to be
monetary. You're still thinking in the same paradigm, see? You're saying if it
more than a billion dollars or less... That's not the way to talk about
education. Just acknowledge it as a public good - and keep it in the public
domain. Stop monetizing it.

I think a good person to read on this would be John Stuart Mill, who said when
the economy reaches any reasonable level of wealth that made it unnecessary to
continue to grow, then the prime purpose of life becomes the development of
human faculties. Things like monetary gain stop having meaning.

------
dools
The best thing I got out of university was exposure to political discourse. I
also took some geography classes in addition to my engineering classes which
were eye opening and set me on a path to having a hobby level interest in
history. The focus is always on economic benefits to society of higher
education in the short term: jobs and skills and such. More important is that
people who are more educated will make better democratic participants, which
will benefit society generally (but perhaps not the same people who are aiming
to benefit from skilled workers ... )

~~~
twblalock
If everyone in a democratic society would benefit from this, it ought to be
part of the compulsory education that everyone receives as a teenager.

Plus, if we had better junior high and high school educations in this country,
we could cut out a lot of the general education requirements in colleges and
graduate in 3 years instead of 4. With today's tuition rates, a 3-year degree
could represent a substantial amount of money saved for the average student.

~~~
mjevans
As I recall from my time in public schooling institutions, the presence of
students that really didn't want to be there taught me mostly two things.

1) 'Respect my authoritah' (from (some) of those running the place, but enough
that it was learned)

2) What I imagine (and thankfully have never verified!) are the skills
necessary to survive in jail.

Everything else I learned by reading ahead in the books, or from science
programming before those television channels became infected with reality TV
nonsense.

------
bavcyc
BTW the Baking Science and Management degree is for large scale baking. One
option for BSaM degree requires the same math/physics as Engineering while I
believe both require Organic Chemistry. Easy to make fun of the degree if you
don't know the requirements and the goal.

The American Institute of Baking is close to K-State and it brings in bakers
from around the world to learn even more about large scale baking. This
includes knowing why the batch went wrong.

Very interesting stuff if you like applied chemistry.

