
Is College Worth It? It Depends on Whether You Graduate - ryan_j_naughton
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/is-college-worth-it-it-depends-on-whether-you-graduate/
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socrates1998
I can't believe how even well educated and highly respected economists always
get this concept wrong.

Taking a sample of people who go to college (including those who don't
graduate) and comparing that sample to the general population is biased.

Why? Because the people who go to college tend to be motivated, have better
connections and are well educated.

It's not a fair comparison. It's a sample bias combined with a correlation
error.

The question shouldn't be "Are the people who go to college making more money
than the people who don't?" The question should be "Are highly motivated and
educated people better off if they go to college instead of doing something
else?"

And the answer to that is often "No, they aren't."

There are only a few categories of people who should go to college:

1) If it's free and you want to do it.

2) If your preferred field requires it (Doctor, Lawyer)

3) If it's cheap enough and you don't know what you want to do with your life,
so you take a class or two to get an idea of what is out there.

Other than those instances. I can't see why we cram college down almost every
18 year old out there.

It just drives me crazy how many economists make this even simple mistake.

~~~
Alupis
College helps teach critical thinking skills, which is very important.

A lot of people seem to have the notion that college is "job/career training",
well, it isn't (and if you are in college thinking that, you're in for an
unpleasant surprise). No CS student graduates and is capable of engineering
large-scale projects without at least several years as being a junior to
someone and learning "how to do it in the real world". Most CS students
graduate and don't even know what source control is.

No, but college is about learning to think critically, and independently. You
learn some cool topics along the way (and some not-so-cool topics), which
stretch your brain and challenge those critical thinking skills.

I think people view college wrong. Everyone should go to college. We want a
more educated, more critically and independently thinking society. And that's
what college provides.

~~~
oskarth
> college is about learning to think critically, and independently

Are you sure of that? I know that's the common narrative, but I'm not
convinced that's the case.

~~~
saalweachter
I actually went to an interesting talk on this subject.

The speaker was a classicist and the subject was the debate which happened in
the 1860's about what the focus of education should be: technical training (ag
& engineering) or the classical education, which was more focused on "well-
roundedness".

The technical training camp won. Most of the universities founded at the time
(including schools like the Midwest Big Ten, MIT, and Cornell) focused on
agriculture and engineering and still do to this day. The classical education
was tacked on the side.

I think there is a huge swath of the population which isn't represented on
Hacker News whom this technical education still serves quite well. The
gentleman farmer still benefits from learning about soil chemistry and how
crop rotation affects it, and the biology of the livestock he raises.
Engineers (real engineers, who use differential equations) and technicians
still learn the foundations of their craft needed to start the modern day
apprenticeship.

Programmers are weird outliers.

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Roboprog
Student costs certainly have gone up. Back in 1983-84 school year, tuition and
fees for CSU (California) system was just under $500 for the year. Now, I
think it is a bit under $7000. (UC system is now about twice that, but I don't
know what it was back in the 80s, as I opted not to leave town to go to
Berkeley)

By comparison, minimum wage has just a bit more than doubled. It's a lot
harder to put yourself through school.

~~~
jgg
Spot on.

I also feel like even if you were being charged the tuition of 30+ years ago,
you wouldn't be getting nearly as much for your money. I looked through the
introductory Russian textbook for my state university and was kind of blown
away by how verbose and obnoxious it was. This same school cut operating
systems and anything related to low-level programming (people complain that
they just want to learn Java or .NET so they can get a job, so I guess they
got their way), and rearranged _basic English_ to make it easier to pass. 100
years ago, learning Greek and/or Latin was standard - it seems like there's a
noticeable trend towards "dumbing down", or maybe I'm viewing a time period I
didn't live in with rose-colored glasses...

~~~
mapt
100 years ago, learning Greek and/or Latin was _a large part of all there was
to study_. Now we have multitudes of fields and subfields regularly generating
actual demonstrable progress in the capabilities of humanity, few of which
require knowing anything about Thermistocles.

Knowledge has gotten so complex and siloed that one of the most useful things
for the inter-disciplinary academic project I observed turned out to be a
facilitator with no subject-area expertise in any of the fields, who undertook
the task of building glossaries to translate jargon and storyboard concepts
people in different departments were trying to explain past each other.

The chain of conceptual courses necessary to reach a level where one
understands papers that have recently been published advancing a particular
subfield, has grown longer and longer in STEM. At some point, your program
decided to compromise on the things that weren't necessary to reach the
advanced levels, so that they had room to get people there at all during their
undergrad. There are fields and universities where this isn't the case, where
an undergrad _only_ qualifies you to take a master's degree. Some revision of
the standard unit of 'the four-year degree' is probably a reasonable thing to
examine at this point.

~~~
jgg
_100 years ago, learning Greek and /or Latin was a large part of all there was
to study. Now we have multitudes of fields and subfields regularly generating
actual demonstrable progress in the capabilities of humanity, few of which
require knowing anything about Thermistocles._

Learning Greek and/or Latin was done as a) a mental exercise and b) a way to
access an ancient body of knowledge that was basically considered something
any educated person should know. Your statement that there was nothing else to
learn is highly ignorant.

 _At some point, your program decided to compromise on the things that weren
't necessary to reach the advanced levels, so that they had room to get people
there at all during their undergrad._

Yeah, to reach advanced levels where the bulk of their graduates don't have to
understand the English language well, and the CS grads don't know what a
pointer is or how memory works.

I'm going to assume for my own mental health that you're a troll.

~~~
Roboprog
Well, it's possible that you're _both_ right, in different situations:

* Let's just get all these School of Business clowns in and out, OK?

* Now, science geeks, we're gonna see some serious shit! (at least if you go to the right school)

Anyway, that's a possible interpretation :-)

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sanxiyn
Concerning the relative importance of the diploma and what you learn in
college, following experiment design comes to mind.

Measure wage premium for (1) not enrolled to college (2) enrolled to college
for 1 year and dropped out (3) 2 years and dropped out (4) 3 years and dropped
out (5) graduated.

One hypothesis suggests linear improvement from 1 to 5, the other hypothesis
suggests discontinuity between 1~4 and 5. I don't have this data, but this
seems very doable, so it probably was already done. Can you help with
literature search?

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SloughFeg
These sorts of articles always conflate the most basic premise of success- the
quality of the people.

Sure, you can point to statistics about how people who graduate from college
earn more over a lifetime, but does that really tell you having a degree
accounts for their success?

If, tomorrow, we took away all diploma's from people who had graduated from
college and gave them to people who hadn't, do you really believe wages would
follow?

~~~
sanxiyn
A diploma's value comes from being a verifiable and reasonable proxy for the
quality. Your hypothetical would destroy that value, so no.

On the other hand, I do believe if you give a diploma to a person who doesn't
have it, it will have positive impacts on the wage. Do you disagree?

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cowpig
This article could be a case study in misinterpreting data.

Americans from "advantaged backgrounds" are enrolling way more in schools,
graduating more, and making more money afterwards. Is this evidence of college
being worth it? Maybe having parents who can invest six figures in your
college education for you, and put you in contact with potential employers is
a bit of a confounding variable here?

~~~
sanxiyn
Economists are not stupid. Studies do control for confounding variables. For
example, to control for influence of parents, there are twin studies. And you
would have known if you followed links.

~~~
cowpig
"Economists aren't stupid" is a "stupid" thing to say. The study makes clear
mistakes, and how stupid or smart the economist is is completely irrelevant.

Anyway, trying to control for variables like the influence of parents is a
fool's errand. The population that goes to college is self-selecting. There's
almost certainly a direct correlation between aiming to earn a lot of money
and going to college. It is a fact that colleges select what they consider to
be the best of the applicants they see. These people are clearly likely to
earn more money than the ones who are not accepted. etc. etc. etc.

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zacinbusiness
I don't think the question is whether or not college is worth it. Because
that's a generalization. I also don't think the question is whether or not
college is worth it to some people. Because that's exclusionary. The question
is, can college make a reasonably positive impact on a persons quality of
life, given all of their life choices. It's exactly the same as a gym
membership. Lots of recent research shows that you lose more weight through
diet than through exercise. But gyms have more benefits than just helping you
to lose weight. Also, you have to actually use the gym to get those benefits,
simply paying the fee and showing up once in a while will do nothing. It's the
same with college, it's a tool. And you can choose to use it or you can choose
to not use it. There is no right or wrong answer.

~~~
sanxiyn
You are wrong. The question whether college is worth it is asked in context of
informing public policy decision. Namely, if college is worth it but people
don't go to college, shouldn't we subsidize people to go to college, by tax?
You can choose to use college or not, but you can't choose to pay tax or not.

~~~
zacinbusiness
That's two different questions. Is college worth it to any specific individual
vs is college worth it to the nation as a whole. As far as the nation goes,
it's obvious that the answer is yes. Should we have entirely subsidized higher
education, of course. But even if it were free, not everyone would benefit
from going to college. Some people have no interest and some people learn
differently and some people are simply too lazy. So, college was a great
choice for me, but some of my friends came out with debt and no jobs so it
didn't do much for them.

~~~
sanxiyn
I hope you are aware not everybody would agree to "we should entirely
subsidize higher education". It is a topic of debate.

I also hope you are aware not everybody would agree to "not everyone would
benefit from going to college". Actually, isn't it precisely the thing being
discussed here?

~~~
zacinbusiness
Sure, subsidizing public higher education is a matter of debate. So: in my
opinion, we should entirely subsidize higher education.

I don't think that anyone should disagree with the statement that everyone
would benefit from going to college. Do not mistake my intention, I am 100%
pro-higher education. I wish everyone wanted to go to college, and I wish
everyone wanted to learn and expand their world-view and to experience the new
and wonderful things that college can expose you to. But, the problem is that
the majority of people are simply too afraid to learn new things, too worried
that they might find out that they were wrong about something, or that their
parents were wrong about something. And then you have kids coming to college
who think that simply because they spent the money they should be handed a
degree and a job. So, what I'm saying, is that there are a great many people,
and unfortunately a lot of them are policy makers, who have unrealistic
demands of public education. These people think that there should be a hard
ratio of dollars spent vs. dollars earned by graduates. And that's
unrealistic. These are often the people who talk about the uselessness of any
track other than STEM disciplines.

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danielweber
_Leonhardt argued that low graduation rates aren’t an argument against
college; they’re an argument for programs aimed at improving graduation rates_

I can fix that in 1 step: automatic graduation for everyone.

You might say this would make the college degree worthless. I might say that
is the point.

~~~
brazzy
I would say that you seem to have a bizarre misunderstanding of what college
(and education) is about. The point of college is to teach stuff, not to
separate people into "success" and "failure" bins. It is quite possible to
increase graduation rates without lowering academic standards, by helping
students stay motivated, removing distractions and ensuring that they only
enroll for subjects they are motivated and talented enough to finish.

~~~
danielweber
_The point of college is to teach stuff, not to separate people into "success"
and "failure" bins._

We don't actually know that. A _lot_ of college degree is the signalling
factor. How much is up for debate.

If it's really about learning stuff and not about signalling, though, here is
an experiment: hide educational status from employers, the same way we hide
family status or any of the other things employers are not supposed to
discriminate on. Would people still go to college for the education if the
signalling aspect was stripped out? (You could have third-party assessment
tests, of course.)

I'll also exempt doctors and lawyers for now.

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Alupis
This debate always gets me.

The sides are:

1) I should bother to better myself and learn more, show motivation and
ambition; I can always be better.

2) I shouldn't bother to better myself and learn more, show motivation nor
ambition; I'm good enough right now.

Cost of education is largely irrelevant if you pursue scholarships and grants,
or even low interest loans. Majority of a student's "school expenses" are not
tuition, but rather in large part are living expenses -- which the student
would incur even if not attending college.

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bryanlarsen
"they’re an argument for programs aimed at improving graduation rates."

which will end up making a college degree worth a lot less.

Most employers require a college degree not because they need the specific
training, but because a college degree is a piece of paper that says that the
holder has at least a bare minimum level of intelligence and self-discipline.

A grade 12 education used to say that, but efforts to improve graduation rates
have removed that filtering indication.

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brixon
It depends on:

\- Cost of school or Debt Load

\- Type of Degree

\- Reputation of School

\- If you finish

They all need to be weighed together.

~~~
k__
I'm so happy to live in Germany.

With my first job I paid the dept I got from my studies in one year.

~~~
parker94
We should be more like Germany, with trade schools being a viable option for
those that are not academically inclined

~~~
dobbsbob
Or Germany's apprentice programs, like the one they have for developers.

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quaffapint
This might get voted down, but is it me or does that picture look like a real
tiny girl in giant land?

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daemonk
It depends on if you are going to actively take advantage of the resources you
are paying for or if you are just going to passively get spoon fed information
and coast through the whole experience for a nominal piece of paper that said
you jumped through hoops for 4 years.

~~~
sanxiyn
How does this follow? Wage premium data support that it is a nominal piece of
paper that said you jumped through hoops for 4 years, not actively taking
advantage of the resources you are paying for, that benefits your wage. Do you
have data to the contrary?

~~~
daemonk
I wasn't referring to salaries. The practical rewards of higher education is
obviously important, but I also think learning and growing as a person is also
important. So in context of the "worth" of a college education, I was talking
about personal growth.

Whether we can attribute higher wages to the nominal piece of paper or
personal growth is a question I can't answer. Do employers only see potential
employees on paper? Or do this personal growth get reflected in the interview?
Do they even care. Not sure if there are any data to support either case.

I want to say that actively participating in your education can potentially
make you better equipped for the rest of your life, which can be more
important than that nominal piece of paper. However, I can only attest to that
with anecdotal evidence.

~~~
sanxiyn
Higher education is a large investment, so while personal growth is all good
and fine, economic concern is paramount.

As the article states, "most of the benefits of college come from graduating,
not enrolling". This data do seem to be in favor of the hypothesis that the
paper matters. More data on this would be very welcome.

It also intuitively makes sense to me, as the paper is easy to verify, but
personal growth is not. While I suspect measure of personal growth provides
better information to employers compared to the paper, the cost of acquiring
that information may make the paper more valuable in the net.

Also you seem to underestimate the value the paper provides to employers:
jumping through hoops correlates with conscientiousness personality trait,
which is a good predictor of workplace performance.

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SimpleXYZ
On my current loan repayment plan, I will be 76 years old when my student
loans are paid off. (I went to college right after high school.)

