
Dan Ariely: At $61K a Year, College Is a Bargain - msg
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/12/dan-ariely-at-61k-a-year-college-is-a-bargain.html
======
Jormundir
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.

~~~
maxwin
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.

~~~
TwoBit
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.

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

------
akkartik
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](http://danariely.com/tag/mooc)

~~~
msg
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.

~~~
brandoncapecci
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.

~~~
robotresearcher
"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.

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

~~~
nimble
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_.

~~~
EpicEng

        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.

~~~
randomdata
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?

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

~~~
lsc
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/](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."

------
cgarvis
"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!

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

------
hawkharris
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.

~~~
Jormundir
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.

------
dpweb
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.

------
auctiontheory
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.

------
gojomo
_Private-university Professor_ Dan Ariely.

~~~
achompas
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."

~~~
gojomo
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?

~~~
robotresearcher
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.

~~~
gojomo
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.

------
adamnemecek
Nice straw-man there, Dan Ariely.

~~~
Kylekramer
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.

~~~
freshhawk
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.

------
omarkatzen
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.

~~~
klochner
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._

~~~
robobro
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?

------
stefan_kendall
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.

------
squirejons
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.

