
A college degree is worth less if you are raised poor - chewymouse
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/social-mobility-memos/posts/2016/02/19-college-degree-worth-less-raised-poor-hershbein#.Vsd1KuymcRs.twitter
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skewart
"People with more education have higher earnings. Boosting college education
is therefore seen by many—including me—as a way to lift people out of poverty,
combat growing income inequality, and increase upward social mobility."

Consider instead:

People with yachts have higher earnings. Boosting yacht ownership is therefore
seen by many—including me—as a way to lift people out of poverty, combat
growing income inequality, and increase upward social mobility.

I'm genuinely curious as to why people think going to college causes a person
to earn more money. Is it about the actual knowledge and skills you can
acquire? Or is it more that, given how many well-paying jobs require a college
degree, not having gone to college reduces your options for getting into a
more lucrative career?

The idea that college itself makes you richer, as opposed to historically
having been correlated with wealth, is hard to fathom.

I can see the argument for universal college education in terms of career
mobility. But even then it seems like a somewhat problematic goal. College
tends to be expensive, and as things are now, asking everyone to go to college
is effectively a large tax on life. You're not paying for something rare and
precious, you're paying just to get in the game.

People are always going to look for proxies for filtering people by ambition,
talent, and world view. Encouraging these filters to be things that are more
easily changeable seems good for social mobility - it's a lot easier for
someone to, say, learn how to play golf than get a four year college degree.

Still, it seems like the ideal would be for almost no one to go to college, so
it's not a big deal if you didn't. And going to college is something nice, but
far from essential for the job. Make K-12 more intense, or make it go to 14th
grade, if we're worried about quantity of learning material.

A lot of presumably smart people advocate for universal college education as a
means to reduce poverty. To me that doesn't really make sense. I really am
open to changing my mind on it though. I'd love to learn more about the
argument in favor of it.

