

How Much Your Time in College is Worth - jayshahtx
http://jayshah.me/blog/how-much-your-time-in-college-is-worth-literally

======
argonaut
If you're a coder (CS major), _do not go to college just to earn more money.
You need to have better reasons than that_.

Why? There is no doubt in my mind that if you're the type of student who can
get into MIT/Stanford/CMU/Berkeley/etc (at least Berkeley Engineering), you
_will_ earn more by not going to college (at least in tech hubs like SV and
NY). Assuming you have a marketable skill (iPhone, Android, front-end, Django,
Rails, etc), entry level (including internships) starts at $80k. If you don't
have such a skill, you can teach yourself over a summer. In four years, you
could be making $110k+ (very conservative). A CS grad straight out of a top
college will probably make $93k (EDIT: revised to $95k, which is average for a
Stanford/CMU/Cal CS grad) [1], depending on the market climate.

You factor in the anywhere between $0-250k tuition you're spending on college
(financial aid depending), and the ~$380k you'd earn in 4 years, and, at least
on the financial side, you come out _way_ ahead if you don't go to college,
anywhere between $380k to $630k ahead, just from those 4 years alone†.

In fact, this probably applies to most colleges, not just top-tier ones, but
in which case the salary numbers are more variable.

You also won't be behind in terms of knowledge as long as you're proactive -
the resources for self-teaching theoretical CS have never been more numerous
than they are today.

Now, that being said, the reasons I'm attending college instead of dropping
out (I did take a year off to work at a YC startup): I value the unique social
experience of college, my parents are paying for everything ( _huge_
mitigating factor - if I had to pay for everything I would not be going), and
I see the value in pushing myself out of my social, academic, and
extracurricular comfort zones - hanging out with business students, doing
debate, taking classes in literature, etc.

[1] <https://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/cdc/jobs/salary-grads>,
[http://www.cmu.edu/career/salaries-and-
destinations/2012-sur...](http://www.cmu.edu/career/salaries-and-
destinations/2012-survey/pdfs-one-pagers/2012_SCS.pdf),
<https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/CompSci.stm>

†Tax not included (subtract ~22%). The effect of having a higher salary due to
work experience not included. Number varies depending on your housing costs.
Number varies depending on student loan interest. Number varies depending on
yearly tuition increases. The $250k figure for college tuition usually
includes housing, your employment take-home money will depend on where you
want to live in Silicon Valley (SF = big hit; East Bay = fairly affordable).

~~~
Darmani
Your argument is quite sensitive to the numbers, and your estimates of the
numbers are questionable. Maybe someone from CMU CS is starting with $90k, but
everyone I've talked to has offers significantly higher. Two of my closest
friends have starting offers over $150k. Instead of spending their time
sharpening how quickly they can map the shape of a button to the appropriate
API call, they acquired deep knowledge of computing, and thus can do things in
an hour most people couldn't in a month.

~~~
mfn
Just out of curiosity, and if you don't mind answering, are these offers $150k
base? Or is that the value of the whole compensation package, including
signing bonuses and stock options?

~~~
Darmani
One offer is $150k salary, plus stock (somehow, the company still has its own
stock, despite having already been acquired for $300 million). This person is
finishing a 5th-year Master's though.

The other offer is $110k salary, plus $40k annually in stock. Since the
company is Google, it's pretty fair to treat that as $150k.

------
reader5000
If I shake hands with the top 10% of SAT scorers in the country, then 10 years
down the road determine that their average earnings are greater than that for
their age cohort, does that mean my handshake is worth $200,000?

This is precisely what universities do and argue that buying into the massive
education bubble is still a "good investment" since you earn more.

I have no doubt there is value to classroom lecturing and the "soft" features
like interaction with a wide range of your peers (assuming you choose to leave
your dorm room), but the value of college can't be estimated by earnings
differentials between college graduates and non-college graduates.

------
droithomme
These comparisons compare salaries of largely illiterate and innumerate people
who dropped out of high school to people who have graduated with an
engineering degree. They articles always then declare the difference in
salaries to be the value of any college degree. These comparisons are absurd
and statistically invalid.

People who drop out of high school are more likely to be mentally incapable of
doing high paid engineering work than those who are also able to graduate from
an engineering program. The people capable of graduating from an engineering
program were capable before graduating. Those who are high school drop outs
are more likely to be incapable.

There's a cool study (can't find the cite) where they looked at lifetime wages
of people who were ACCEPTED to a given university and then compared those who
actually went to college and graduated to those who decided not to go to
college after being accepted. The lifetime wages were the same, showing that
it was the selection process of getting admitted to college that was simply
choosing for talent and not anything that college does to anyone. Those who
benefit from burdening the next generation with massive education debt don't
discuss this though and claim that it is not selecting for talent. To show
that is the case, take people who are in that illiterate high school dropout
category, send them to college, and then compare their lifetime salaries to
the ones who were not illiterate. This study has not been done. Yes, I am
aware there are hundreds of studies proving that college graduates make more
than non-graduates, I am not contesting that there are such studies or that
they are the majority of studies on this topic.

In any case regardless of whether you believe in the existence of the unnamed
study I regret I can't name, I hope it is obvious that the set of people who
are high school drop outs and the set of people who have graduated with an
engineering degree are not randomly selected people differing only in if a
machine called college molded them into a higher earning resource asset. Since
they are not randomly selected people differing only if a engineering
education has been applied to them as a black box function, it is not correct
to assume that salary differences between the two are solely attributable to
whether or not they have been run through this black box.

~~~
argonaut
There was the Krueger study:
[http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/dalekru...](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/dalekrueger_More_Selective_College.pdf),
but it compared grads who applied to top universities (like Ivy League) and
got rejected vs. those who applied and got in, and found no difference in
lifetime earnings, when you adjusted for class rank.

------
rwhitnah
Some of the shortcuts taken by these quick studies are always really
interesting to me.

First, I wouldn't assume the same career duration for both GEDs and College
Grads - generally, a dropout will start working earlier.

A general "GED average" also pretty highly weights the comparison for other
reasons - poverty, area (areas with higher education and wealth levels have
higher average earnings, even among those with GEDs), career type. It's an
okay generalization to make in this case, but it does bias the results
somewhat. People with similar levels of education/wealth tend to group
together, which means a lower salary in a poorer area may have similar buying
power to what seems like a higher salary in a more expensive area.

Unfortunately what might be the most telling metric is much harder to define:
how much would person X make in her lifetime if she went to college, and how
much would she make without? Even simplifying to the same field (their
strengths would be similar in both cases), it's extremely difficult to plot
her career trajectory.

Of course, this may all be due to my personal bias - college dropout, doing
fine, and making well above the average starting salary for a CompSci grad by
age 25. Decent savings, no debt - it was a much harder road, but I'm not sure
I'd make the tradeoff knowing what I do now.

Personally, though, I can't discount the value I've felt in not having the
average $27,000 in student debt hanging over my head [1]. It's enabled me to
take risks, try new things, change career twice, and follow my passions.

[1] [http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/18/pf/college/student-loan-
debt...](http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/18/pf/college/student-loan-
debt/index.html)

------
ctbeiser
If you took statistics in college, you might recall that correlation does not
imply causation. There's a hidden third set of factors here; your
intelligence, wealth, etc. That people who go to college make more does not
mean that college means you make more. The way I see it, those with higher
future earning potential more frequently decide to go to college.

~~~
gz5
+1

Also think we are shooting a bit behind the bird to try to make current/future
value conclusions on any present data as the value of a degree relative to
other options is changing so rapidly.

------
minopret
By trekking through a great deal of intellectual territory in college, way
more than you will in an equivalent span of working years, you're mitigating a
big risk. That's the risk that you will find it difficult to span gaps in your
understanding as your occupation and your career go through earthshaking
changes. As a software developer it is pretty well certain that you will be
affected by these kinds of changes. With college behind you, you will have a
greater range of topics in your repertoire and the confidence of knowing that
you have faced plenty of difficult topics before. It's not as though a bright
developer who bypasses college cannot dealt with change. But college helps.

------
nilkn
This thread reminds me of one of my minor pet peeves with HN: a lot of people
here repeatedly speak of SF and NYC salaries as if they were universal across
the country and nobody would ever want to work anywhere else.

It's not a big deal because most of the arguments here are relative and not
dependent on specific numbers but rather differences. I also understand HN
began as a place to discuss Silicon Valley startups. But still I think it
would be nice if HN were generally more cognizant of salary variations across
location.

------
crucifiction
You have 40+ years of working for the man, why start so early? Getting a CS
degree is fun if you like CS and are good at it. Drinking beer and hanging out
with friends at all hours for 4 years are much better than working as a code
monkey straight out of high school. Your average comp over your lifetime might
be the same, or maybe a little more if you avoid debt and get 4 years of extra
coding experience, but I bet the college grad never regrets going to college.

------
ryguytilidie
I feel like people are looking at this the wrong way. Of course you could make
an extra 80k/yr by going to college than not, but I imagine if you're an
amazing developer and you go to Stanford, you're basically set for life with
the combination of prior coding skills, network and things you learned at
Stanford, thinking about working an 80k/yr job would be laughable, right?

~~~
argonaut
Well, in 4 years you would be making a lot more than 80k, and you would
probably have 10x the number of connections if you've even made any marginal
effort to network (going to meetups, inviting people to have coffee/lunch,
etc.)

------
rayiner
Discount rate is too high, salary growth rate is too low.

