
It Depends What You Study, Not Where - acbilimoria
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21646220-it-depends-what-you-study-not-where
======
_asummers
The big thing for me with top schools is the "baseline quality of the degree".
I didn't go to a top school, but spent my time studying everything math and CS
related I could, and managed to get an awesome education. At the same time, I
am fully cognizant of the fact that peers who were less driven likely were
more easily able to skate by, for the most part. So when a resume comes across
my desk from a guy from my alma mater, I don't exactly know how to evaluate it
-- there's no "well this guy went to CMU or MIT, so I can assume a modicum of
strengths". I wouldn't turn down a candidate for an interview because of their
school (or lack thereof), but coming from top schools generally frames you in
a different way, in my book. If anything, I tend to gauge the difficulty up
slightly more quickly in my questions.

~~~
nostrademons
In technical fields this is usually reliable (someone who went to CMU or MIT
and graduated probably put in a pretty high baseline level of work), but in
more liberal arts fields school quality correlates much less to a baseline
quality level. At my alma mater (Amherst), for example, the easiest course of
study would be to take 4 humanities classes / semester, spend 12 hours/week in
classes, write 3 papers/semester for each, and then you're done. 50% of the
student body does this. The hardest would be to double up on lab sciences
(physics + chem, for example, or physics + neuroscience), which entails about
20 hours/week of classes, 30-40 hours/week spent on problem sets, 2 midterms
and a final.

I've heard that Harvard is similar: the grade distribution at Harvard is
roughly 10% As, 80% Bs, and 10% Cs. Getting an A at Harvard implies that you
really did a lot of work, but getting a B could imply everything from "You
really did a lot of work but just missed the cutoff" to "You learned basically
nothing from your undergraduate education."

~~~
dilemma
No, the most common grade at Harvard is A or some variation thereof. See the
Carol Joyce Oates interview.

~~~
nostrademons
It's possibly gone up since I was college-aged; this was from when I was
living in Boston and hanging around a bunch of Harvard students in 06-07.

~~~
koluft
The median course grade at Harvard has been A- for over 20 years.

It's inflated, but then again, how much Harvard coursework mastery is actually
necessary for your job?

~~~
Spooky23
In the state school I went to in the 90s, they were acolytes of the bell
curve.

Mastery or not, if your score bumped you out of the curve, you were getting a
B.

Friends in Ivy League schools would get As or incompletes.

------
arjie
The figures described seem to argue the opposite of the headline. If you get a
12% return on the cost of your education regardless of where you go, then that
means that more expensive colleges are providing a commensurate increase in
returns.

The fact that they can maintain 12% return is fantastic, and you should be
spending every last cent you can afford on that. After all, if I offered you a
12 cents a year if you give me a dollar today, and someone else offered you
$12000 a year if you give them $100k this year, you'd probably take the
latter.

And this is not even counting the fixed cost of the time you spend going to
university. The cheap and the expensive both charge you the same in time. But
the latter gives you a phenomenally higher return on that time.

------
dpweb
These ROI calculations on degrees are more of a (flawed) basis for encouraging
(less often, discouraging) college. They are not useful. It may seem like a
good idea to develop an "ROI for college", but it distracts from what's
important.

First, much of the value of a degree is in getting your first job (networking
at elite schools must be helpful however). As your career progresses, the
importance of having a degree diminishes. Leaving aside Med, Law, etc.. where
you have to have it.

Second, your pay is not a pure output of your degree. What field you're in and
the salary prospects in that field, how hard you work, how much you negotiate
you salaries, how often you change jobs, what part of the country you live in,
(I would argue) simply how smart you are - some would say even your race and
gender.

Another metric could be, cost of tuition vs. one year avg. salary in your
field. If I went to college 20 yrs. ago for computing and the tuition was 5k a
year, and the average salary is $100k - and go to college now, the cost is
$20k - do the math on college value. Kind of a joke right now I can get the
Android dev job for $100k prob without the degree.

~~~
3gg1gg
The value of the degree varies widely by desired career.

If you want to be a splashy top executive, it's very helpful to have a top-
tier MBA, and experience in management consulting or investment banking. If
you want experience in IB or MC, it's very helpful to have an ivy league
undergrad degree, ideally in something like econ.

If you want to be a great engineer, it's very helpful to go someplace, hang
out with smart people, take hard classes, write code outside class, and make
sure you make the most of the experience, wherever you are.

If you want random assholes to think that you're a great engineer, it's very
helpful to go to MIT, Stanford, or CMU, and just make sure you don't do so
poorly that you don't graduate.

------
rishubhav
When will journalists finally learn that Payscale is absolutely useless for
this kind of analysis? The Payscale sample is solely graduates who never got a
grad degree.

All this data suggests is that STEM majors are more likely to get high-paying
jobs with only their undergrad degrees. It completely omits the many
humanities/arts majors who go on to graduate study and thence to perfectly
lucrative careers.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>It completely omits the many humanities/arts majors who go on to graduate
study and thence to perfectly lucrative careers.

Do you have any sources for this?

~~~
lstamour
Their website seems structured that way, and also seems to have very few
samples in Canada at least... It's better than nothing, but it wasn't all that
convincing for me personally.

------
rjsw
Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11627901](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11627901)

------
Q6T46nT668w6i3m
I don't know this survey. But I've read similar and recently published surveys
on the subject. Notably, if you stratified the sample to remove computer
science students the conclusion is reversed.

~~~
jeremynixon
I (and I'm sure, others) would absolutely love to see a link or resource for
this, could someone provide one?

~~~
lliiffee
It seems unlikely-- in order to be true, computer science majors would need to
actually have _higher_ income with degrees from less competitive schools.

~~~
lukeschlather
These data may only include people who get a bachelor's degree without going
on to get a master's/PhD, which could explain the discrepancy.

------
IkmoIkmo
ROI is kinda useless in this context.

i.e., they're essentially saying, if the uni is very selective (e.g. Harvard),
the ROI is similar to say a state college.

But they're disregarding that Harvard, whoever subsidises you, is a $100k
investment or w/e, and state colleges are $10k. Just making up ballpark
numbers here.

Now the ROI might be the same, i.e. they might both end up earning roughly
1.5x their investment in annual salary. But seen this way, everyone
appreciates there's a gigantic difference in where you study, even though
percent wise the ROI is exactly the same.

------
heebiejeebies
As if future income is the only "return on investment" in an education... smh

~~~
dpark
Future income is the primary reason people pursue higher education. We tell
people from the time they hit middle school that they need to be preparing for
college so they can get a good (i.e. high paying) job.

~~~
copperx
I heard this from my peers in undergrad all the time and it befuddled me. I
thought "so ... you have no curiosity about the world? about how stuff
works?."

I'm not claiming that I had hifalutin ideals; I knew that money was important,
but I had this (perhaps naive) idea that if I became an excellent practitioner
in whatever I did the money would follow.

I just wasn't prepared to hear "I'm just here to get a good job" from most of
my peers. Some, I would expect, but not most.

~~~
hibikir
It's really easy to think that a set of life decisions are good because they
worked well for you, but that's not how the world works: Across every road,
there are a lot of events we cannot control, decisions made with imperfect
information. We make mistakes, we fail, through no special fault of our own.
Every path is great if you are talented AND lucky. But it makes no sense to
evaluate a road by just looking at the top successes: If that were the case,
I'd tell my son to go into acting, because it went great for Tom Hanks and
Brad Pitt.

No matter how hard you work, or how talented you are, the very top is
something we cannot guarantee to anyone. So it's pretty rational to look at a
career path, a set of life decisions, by looking at average cases, not just
the very top.

Going out there because you are curious about the world, and ending up doing
something where only the very top percentiles do well is only a great story if
you win. I know a girl that went with those lofty ideals into psychology,
along with a high IQ. She now answers phones at a call center. Two PhDs in
biology: One is teaching English in Japan, because she couldn't bear a 20+
year post doc path, getting paid less than half of what I made in my first job
out of school. My brother, top of his class in biology too. Got a Phd with
honors. But he was born in the wrong country, and his best job offer is for a
position that asks him to do 10+ hour days, rotating into the night 1'3rd of
the time, all for 850 euros a month. Welcome to a country with over 20%
unemployment.

So it's really easy to think it's important to have curiosity as long as you
also pick a profitable course of study too, or are quite lucky. Otherwise,
it's the same mindset that can dig you into a hole.

Picking a career just because of the money, and not getting any love for it as
you go is a road to failure too: Many people drop out of programming for those
reasons, and few options are more profitable on average than programming. But
I can't blame people for keeping an eye out of the available options. I know I
did: There were many things I thought I would have enjoyed doing, and I picked
one that also looked profitable. I can't say I regret it.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
There is no "the world". There are only people making choices, often on the
basis of a default morality they've never thought about.

The kinds of failures you're describing are exactly what you get when the
default morality is "Make as much money as possible".

You can say it's currently maladapted to expect more, and that's possibly
true.

That doesn't mean it's an ideal situation, or a praise-worthy one. If the
talents of smart people are consistently underutilised, that's a social
problem and not just a series of unrelated individual failures.

~~~
dpark
> _If the talents of smart people are consistently underutilised, that 's a
> social problem and not just a series of unrelated individual failures._

I agree, but I think the social failure is that we tell people to "do what
they love" and "follow their dreams" instead of "do something important" or
"do something where you can make a difference".

The things that, say, English majors do are probably as objectively important
as the things I do at work, but the field is overcrowded to the point that the
value added by each additional entrant to the field is significantly reduced.
So it's hard to find work that pays well for English majors (at least if they
stay in their field).

Another thing is that "do something you love" misses is that you should find a
_career_ that you love. If you love your college experience but hate the jobs
available to you afterward, that degree may not be a net positive.

------
lisper
The data actually support the exact opposite conclusion from the headline: if
the IRR of a degree is constant, then the payoff is proportional to the cost
(i.e. the amount you invest). More selective schools tend to be more
expensive. So pay N times more for tuition, expect to earn N times more in the
long run.

~~~
dsjoerg
I was with you up until the very end. Pay N times more for tuition, expect to
earn N times more _on_your_degree_investment_ in the long run.

That doesn't mean your entire income will be N times higher.

For example if you spent $100k on your tuition in year 0, and the rate of
return from that degree is 10% per year, and assuming you spend the returns
rather than reinvest them, then your degree is adding $10k/year to your
income.

But you're not living on $10k/year, you're earning $80k/year, $10k of which is
attributable to your degree.

So to complete the exericse, if you had spent 2x on your education, you would
be making $90k/year. Not $160k.

~~~
lisper
I think we're both wrong, but I think you're wronger than I am.

Yes, it's true that N times spent on tuition does not equal N times more money
in an absolute sense because the baseline income for spending zero on tuition
is not zero.

However, the article said that the ROI on tuition was 12% annualized, which
means that you're not reinvesting the proceeds. If you reinvest the proceeds,
then that is additional return _on top_ of the 12%.

But the details are not really relevant. What matters is that the headline is
wrong. Where you do to school _does_ matter.

------
tdaltonc
Neither majors nor schools are randomly assigned to students, so I don't think
that there's actually much to take away from this.

~~~
jldugger
Actually, the chart shows a pretty damning story for selection bias: despite
all the selectivity of schools, there's no sign of improvement in returns for
more selective engineering schools. It makes a bit of intuitive sense: any
MIT/CMU/Stanford/etc premium on degrees would be capped by management salary
structure, since fresh grads don't typically earn more than their boss. It's
possible that a linear fit is not a great model, as the little data there is
on the far left chart is all above average, but the 10x engineer isn't
registering on the radar.

As for what people can do differently: if you have equal chances of succeeding
at the most selective arts and humanities college, or the least selective
engineering, choosing engineering will net you better 20 year salaries.
Especially relevant if you're considering humanities as a law degree path --
the LSAT has logical reasoning test, and if you can hack that, you can
probably do okay in engineering math / CS classes.

~~~
koluft
How many CS grads from Ohio state are getting $150k start in SV it NY? To get
nothing of the growth 10 years later

~~~
jldugger
I don't have linkedin pro. How many?

------
auggierose
It says "return on degree", so is the income measured relatively to what they
spent on the degree? If so, it obviously depends still very much on where you
study, as top schools cost much more.

~~~
dpark
That's my reading, too. If top schools have a great return on investment, then
the total returns must be significantly higher because of the size of the
investment.

~~~
Periodic
Exactly, that confused me too. It would be like saying all the schools cost
the same because the interest rate for student loans is the same regardless of
amount. There is a huge difference between paying 5% on $1,000 and 5% on
$100,000.

Its also interesting that they did the cost net of financial aid, so probably
looking at the average cost of the degree, creating a much larger variance
than the data set indicates.

------
madengr
There is another HN article that shows salary for STEM majors at mid career
was equivalent, irrespective if school. According to that article, at 44, I'm
making more than the average MIT grad of the same age, and I went to KU.

~~~
shawndumas
interesting; happen to have a link or a term that'll help me find it? thx

~~~
madengr
Sorry, no. I have been trying to find it myself. It was within the last 6
months.

~~~
s4chin
Was it this, by any chance?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11013997](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11013997)

~~~
madengr
Maybe. It's pay walled for me. It has a chart with compensation.

~~~
dgacmu
(Deleted old view-source suggestion)

Load the /amp version of the page: [http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/do-elite-
colleges-lead-to-hi...](http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/do-elite-colleges-
lead-to-higher-salaries-only-for-some-professions-1454295674)

open javascript console, and enter:

    
    
      document.querySelector(".login-section-container").style.display = 'none';
      document.querySelector("div[amp-access='access OR meterCount < meterLimit']").style.display = 'inline';
    

(The old /amp hack doesn't work because they added a selector for meter
limit.)

------
williamjsieben
Not true all the time. There is a state university in the Philippines called
Rizal Technological University, located in Boni Avenue, Mandaluyong City. In
that university, there's a college called CEIT or College of Engineering and
Industrial Technology. One of the courses offered by that college is Bachelor
of Science in Computer Engineering and in that course there is a subject
called Advanced Programming. Guess what is taught in the subject called
"Advanced Programming"? Ready?... they are teaching HTML. You read it right,
HTML or Hypertext Markup Language.

------
JOnAgain
Not how I think about it.

It's looking at ROI. And the cost of education typically correlates with
quality and long-term earnings. (Put your pitch forks down, not all schools,
just generally.) So, if I think about this on a 20 year horizon. I have a $50K
degree program at a state school vs a $200K degree from Harvard (numbers
rounded). Lets just use 10% as the ROI. At 10% over 20 years, the return on
the state school is ~$336,000. For Harvard, this yields ~$1,350,000. So, the
ROI might be the same, but you basically get an extra million over 20 years
for getting into Harvard.

~~~
tdaltonc
Because there is a big selection bias in university education, it's hard to
say that Harvard caused someones income to go up using your math. I prefer
this post from last year which tries to calculate value-added.

[http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/10/value-u...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/10/value-
university)

~~~
Chronic51
Why does selection bias even matter? If you go to Harvard, you will make more
than had you gone to a boring state school. Period. Is there selection bias?
Yes. Does it change the fact the Harvard kid is wildly successful? No.

~~~
aianus
Because if the effects are due to selection bias, and you've been accepted to
both Harvard and State School, you should pick State and earn an even higher
return.

If it's not selection bias, then you can conclude Harvard causes success and
you should go there.

------
RyanZAG
_> compare the career earnings of graduates with the present-day cost of a
degree at their alma maters, net of financial aid_

Woah, what? So a degree that cost $1 but raised your career earnings by $100
would be at 100%? 1000%? Not sure how they're doing the math, but it
completely dwarfs the rest. And shows how obviously flawed the measure itself
is.

One of the key things left out is the baseline cost of time. A few years of
your life is not free and probably makes for a pretty high baseline cost.

~~~
aab0
> One of the key things left out is the baseline cost of time. A few years of
> your life is not free and probably makes for a pretty high baseline cost.

Hm, wouldn't that already be accounted for in using 'lifetime earnings'? If
someone doesn't go to college and earns $1m, and another person goes to
college and earns $1.1m, then the extra 4 working years apparently didn't
compensate enough. Plus, college can be a lot more fun than working.

------
Unbeliever69
For most people I agree. However, as someone who has graduated from a top
school (U. of Michigan), I can't tell you how many times my credentials have
got me both interviews and jobs. Where you go to school CAN make a big
difference, but it depends on the school, the person, and the field of study.

~~~
Bahamut
I went to University of Illinois for math (grad school), and I haven't really
seen that effect, although it probably didn't hurt. I've mostly gotten
interviews because of my open source credentials & impressive accomplishments
for early in my career.

I'm of the opinion that while school calibur might be able to get you
interviews and jobs a lot of times, it's selecting for mediocrity since it
doesn't go for professional accomplishments...and thus avoids hiring high
performers, who generally want to work with other high performers.

~~~
akhilcacharya
I have friends at UIUC and the difference in recruiting is night and day. I
didn't get any response when I applied to Dropbox and Citadel over the last 2
years, but on the UIUC Computer Science Facebook page both companies post
internship opportunities with direct recruiter emails, sometimes saying
"anybody can interview" (for Dropbox). As someone who goes to a school of
decent, but lower caliber this is a significant difference.

~~~
Bahamut
I left grad school in a bit of a surprise move during the great recession, so
I missed all of the recruiting opportunities when I left - it took me 2 1/2
years to find a job, but afterwards I've made every effort to stand out on my
own merits.

------
lordnacho
It seems to say that where you studied matters if it's not a STEM degree.

For me, the explanation is that it's relatively harder to determine whether
someone has learned their stuff if it's Math or Science, but quite hard if
it's creative writing or history. There's an xkcd about this.

That's why something like an online coding test might work: someone clueless
will not be able to write that palindrome quiz. You can have a zero false
positive rate at the expense of a false negative rate (competent people can
freeze in exam situations). With essay subjects, it's pretty hard to separate
the BSers from the real deal. You'll always have some false positives.

~~~
theoh
This is probably the xkcd strip you mean:
[https://xkcd.com/451/](https://xkcd.com/451/)

------
ktRolster
Not that the headline is only true for CS/Math. For humanities degrees, there
is a clear trend correlated with where you study.

An interpretation is: for humanities, who you know matters more than what you
know (ie, the connections you make).

------
Futurebot
This is only about earnings (the study is from PayScale), and does not take
into account all the other advantages from elite schools, not all of which can
be measured easily. Like money/happiness metrics, eliding those advantages may
cause one to come away with a simplistic understanding of the relationship
between school and outcomes. America cares about elite schools for a reason:

[https://medium.com/@spencer_th0mas/why-america-cares-
about-e...](https://medium.com/@spencer_th0mas/why-america-cares-about-elite-
schools-411798386ba7#.cxq6ugexr)

------
SonicSoul
this is actually a little disappointing form the Economist which usually has
great high quality content. Do we really need to visualize statistics to prove
that comp sci pays more than a degree in library studies? how about if you get
your MBA from a community college vs NYU or Wharton? Once you compare apples
to apples you'll certainly see a statistical difference in ROI based on the
WHERE.

------
namelezz
We all listen to what we want to hear, don't we.

------
ebel
It's the connections you make at the top schools vs the lower tier. The
educations are similar, people you make friends with are not.

------
powera
If you want to get a job based on what you learn at college, you can do that
at a lot of places.

If you want to get a job because your roommate started a billion-dollar tech
company, or inherited a billion-dollar company, or has a parent who is the
President of a foreign country, you had best go to Harvard (or maybe a
Princeton/Stanford type).

~~~
Chronic51
You can learn how your roommates parents started a billion dollar company
(i.e. How to be successful) at Harvard. You can't at your state school --
because your roommates are playing video games or went downtown for the night.

------
richcollins
So best choice is to probably to invest in S&P while learning to program on
your own.

------
msellout
Note that at the most-selective universities there does appear to be a
relationship between selectivity and education ROI.

The trouble with linear methods is that they often fit to the bulk of the
population and have poor fit at the extremes.

------
kelukelugames
Isn't this a recent dupe?

------
dschiptsov
For intelligence. Society, on the contrary, is build upon status, papers and
titles - a hierarchy in general, so in the social aspect "where" matters the
most. Ask any British about Oxford.)

Btw, studying CS in MIT (a school which traditionally taught principles and
big ideas) and in, say, third-rate school that taught Java coding makes a huge
difference.

It is not a coincidence that it was MIT and Stanford from where the best
things in CS came from (and we should not forget the "parallel universe" of
Standard ML and eventually Haskell, which came from UK schools).

------
bkjelden
It would be interesting to see returns broken down by quartile instead of just
the average.

------
kazinator
What is this "it" which depends? Is the curious language in this headline
trying to say: "it _matters_ what you study, not where?"

Ironically, _where_ did this author learn grammar?

~~~
v3gas
You're using ironically wrong.

------
erikb
Where is medicine and law in these diagrams? Arts?

~~~
dredmorbius
These are presumably undergraduate programs. Medicine and law would be
professional degrees.

Pre-med is typically science (biology). Pre-law is typically political science
or psychology. Those strike me as more likely arts here, though you'd need to
look at the source study's classifications.

------
brador
Line of best fit is wrong and a terrible approximation here.

If they used a curve fit they'd have seen the line curves up as Admission rate
decreases.

~~~
minimaxir
Granted, "just use a curve fit" hits a different statistical problem.
(overfitting)

~~~
brador
True, but it gives a sense of trend granularity which a line doesn't come
close to, and is vital here to reject the Economists conclusion.

------
choosername
It depends grammar, not accidently

------
known
MBA depends on where you study

