I don't have a degree and am constantly told in rejections by potential employers, and my own employer when applying for advancement, that they are looking for degree holders. Many job listings also flat out state a 4-year degree is a minimum.
A degree would absolutely, positively, beyond any shadow of a doubt improve my chances of increasing my income. At my current job only about 7%.
But the tens of thousands of dollars of debt I'd have to take on to get that degree at 4.5-7% interest (or higher)... yeah thanks but no thanks.
So, anecdotally at least, I can agree that there are pretty diminishing returns to getting a degree. While I'd be all but guaranteed to increase my income, I'd be paying out more though:
a 20k 10-year loan at 6.8% (finaid.org suggested this %) interest means I'm paying 27,619.31
a 40k 10-year loan at 6.8% interest means I'm paying 55,238.63
At my current income the 20k loan, bumping up one position and considering our raises inside a position are limited to less than 3.5% annually based on a rather arbitrary 'merit review'. It would be 7-10 years of my increased pay just to cover the loan, assuming no taxes were taken on the increase but also factoring in insurance increases. That means in 14 years I could start keeping more money from that 4 year degree if I could manage a 20k$ degree.
Aren't you contradicting yourself somewhat here? The alternate universe version of you wouldn't have the same job - as you say in paragraph 1 you'd work somewhere else.
People on here earn top percentile salaries which warp the calculus, myself included, but $50K is approximately one year of the UK median income (I imagine the US figure is similar).
I'd be worried about making back hundreds of thousands in a low paid field. But a 50K degree in a well paid field is a no brainer to me.
Earnings increases are cumulative. I'm almost certainly 200% over what I'd have without my undergrad, and not just due to the piece of paper.
UK median income in 2018 was GBP 28,400 which is at today's rate about USD 36,600. I don't see why you made the comparison though? The person deciding to start a 4 year degree can't assume they personally have an opportunity cost of 4*annual median earnings.
My claim is roughly that making back ~1 median wage is not a high bar to meet. Over a working career I'd consider it below the error margin; it's 2-3% of lifetime earnings if you only earn median.
Like, flubbing a single negotiation on any job could have a higher impact than that over the rest of your career.
Would you be willing to name names? Outside of government and defense contractors I personally have not run into any blocks from not having a degree, but I am in the SV bubble where up is down so I have a heavy bias.
> Would you be willing to name names? Outside of government and defense contractors I personally have not run into any blocks from not having a degree,
There are _so_ many places where a degree is a must that it's better to ask which institution will happily accept you without a degree without complications (besides the obvious Google and Tesla).
But to give you an answer: lots of hospitals, lots of defense contractors. Me, I was hired by a hospital as a researcher, but there were a great many complications about the pay (my boss said he wanted to pay me more but couldn't).
And, suppose you wanted to emigrate somewhere, say Belgium. It turns out it's just easier to do it if you have a degree than not. You encounter these issues in places you'd least expect them. Just for convenience sake I'm considering getting one.
Not OP, I applied to a Wells Fargo job in Charlotte that wouldn't even let me continue the application after entering that I did not have a degree. This was about maybe 3 or so years ago. I had talked to several recruiters about jobs at various companies (from consulting firms to small businesses) which cut communication after learning I dont have a degree. Most recently was a few months back when I talked to a recruiter about a job I was "perfect for" in Atlanta, he called me back later that day to say he couldnt submit me because "the position required a degree". I work at a fortune 500 company, and one of my coworkers straight up admitted the company wouldnt have hired me a few years ago.
These are just the example I could remember at the moment, I'm sure there have been more.
> that wouldn't even let me continue the application after entering that I did not have a degree.
I've had gobs and gobs of jobs found via indeed do this to me as part of the 'pre-qualification'. They want to know where you got your degree, sometimes your GPA etc.
Most major, publicly-traded, corporations want a degree beyond entry-level positions. Some companies won't even touch you without a degree (including many startups): for example, Flexport turned me down for the job I'd already done for over a decade, longer than they've been a company, for not having a 4-year degree, this is a direct copy-paste from the rejection email when I applied:
>You obviously have many of the skills we're looking for. However, for the Customs Brokerage role we require a BA/BS degree as well as previous experience in a broker role doing entries and customs classifications.
At the time of that email rejection I'd been doing the job for 12 years and 1 month at my current employer.
Even postings at places like YC have degree requirements for stuff that shouldn't (like assistants).
I saw a developer position recently that required at least a four-year degree and it genuinely surprised me because of how infrequent that requirement appears on developer job postings. The vast majority of posts I see are "four years degree or equivalent experience"
I've worked in software shops before where less than half of the staff had a 4-year degree completed—but it is noteworthy y that everyone had at least some college.
>and my own employer when applying for advancement
That I have seen before, but in higher-ed, where it is kind of a given as it is sort of an eating-your-own-dog-food requirement. If your top employees don't have a degree, and you sell degrees, it can tarnish your appearance.
my gf just finished her nurse practitioner degree and while she increased her salary from 60k to 90k, her student loan payments, with some loans being 10% !, eat up all of her increased income. She's happier, but after all the bills, she has the same left over. So from an economic standpoint, she got an advanced degree that benefitted her school and the bank.
That is only true if student loan payments are for a lifetime, but mine were only ten year loans if I paid the bare minimum. You're also ignoring her future pay, salary increases are cumulative.
A dirty secret of higher education is that few people actually pay the sticker price. A lot of people get some degree of funding via pseudo-automatic scholarships.
The government is heavily involved in the student loan industry. Consequently, the entire market is heavily distorted. One of the largest programs is the Direct/Stafford loan program [0]. Essentially the student (and only the student; no cosigners allowed) directly borrows money from the federal government at a fairly cheap interest rate (in the last decade [1], it has ranged from 3.4% to 5.05%). In some cases, the student is not liable for interest accrued while they're in school (see the following paragraph for details if you're interested). The loan limit is $31k for dependent students and $57.5k for independent students.
There's two variants to direct loans: subsidized (where the government pays for the interest while the student is in school) and unsubsidized (no qualification necessary). Anyone can take out unsubsidized loans, limited to the COA (cost of attendance: the amount a college declares it would cost to attend; inclusive of tuition, fees, books, room & board, etc.). Anyone who's EFC (expected family contribution: the amount the government expects the student/their parents to pay annually based upon their income and assets) is less than COA can take out up to the shortfall in subsidized loans (but no more than the specified limit which varies by dependent-status and year in school).
Their familial controls don't make much sense to me.
An actuary's kid will have an easier time becoming an actuary. Same for lawyers and doctors. That doesn't mean that college is a non causal factor in those students lifetime earnings... Quite the opposite. You're not becoming any of those things without college.
The student went to college precisely because they understand viscerally and precisely how college sets them up for a life of higher than average earnings. And what they need to do at college to tap into that potential.
Similarly, I'm not sure I believe the claim that there's no obvious causal link between education and financial acumen.
The big difference seems to be "do you know WHY you are at college?" And in cases where the answer is yes, it's still a good choice.
> Their familial controls don't make much sense to me.
There's a lot of recent evidence that, all else being equal (controlling for educational attainment, test scores, and grades) parental income/social class has a huge impact on income.
That is, if you come from a lower social class, you can expect a lower income increase from college than someone coming from a higher social class.
There's significant policy implications here-- our long-standing goal of getting lower income kids to take college loans and go to college may not have a positive expected return for them.
no, that’s completely wrong. You are confusing averages and conditional probabilities. On average, those from higher classes may do better - that doesn’t mean that a kid from s lower social class should take that as guidance. It means we should try to erase or lessen differences of opportunities between classes.
Some of these differences are probably innate. A brain surgeon is likely smart and his kids are probably also smart. Some, but most are due to informational deficiencies and networking effects.
> no, that’s completely wrong. You are confusing averages and conditional probabilities. On average, those from higher classes may do better - that doesn’t mean that a kid from s lower social class should take that as guidance.
??? You're saying that someone should not consider the outcome distribution of people similarly situated to themselves when making a choice? Isn't that completely rejecting empiricism?
If, from a public policy standpoint, our effort has been to get to the poor to college to end poverty; and the educated poor do do better with education, but not nearly as well as their middle-class cohort; and the present-value of education is smaller than the present-value of their lifetime wage increases-- one has to question whether the policy is well informed.
If you're asserting that the picture is unduly distorted by those at the very highest spread of the income distribution-- you're right. But the effect is still when we look at median outcomes.
> Some of these differences are probably innate. A brain surgeon is likely smart and his kids are probably also smart.
Presumably we'd be able to measure this and control for this.
> Some, but most are due to informational deficiencies and networking effects.
Yes, and various kinds of cultural cues about class of upbringing that persist after education and act to limit opportunity.
“??? You're saying that someone should not consider the outcome distribution of people similarly situated to themselves when making a choice? Isn't that completely rejecting empiricism?“
No, what I’m saying is presence of a statistical pattern in a whole population is not evidence that we shouldn’t make policy to change it. Statistically, those who live in Miami are more tan than those who live in Wisconsin, on average. But if you expose a Wisconsin resident to the same amount of sun, on average they will be just as tan.
??? We're comparing the income difference (and ratio) between (poor background + college education) and (poor background + no college education) to the income difference between (non-poor background + college education) and (non-poor background + no college education).
In your example, you'd expect the Wisconsin guy to increase in tan more when you put him in the Bahamas and give him a dose of sun than the guy who started out in Miami and was given an equivalent further dose of sun.
But we've measured the opposite-- the guy in Wisconsin (poor background) does get more tan, but doesn't increase in tan (increase in income) nearly as much as the guy who started in Miami (non-poor backgrounds).
No, because we haven’t done nearly enough for the poor guy. It’s not the case that we’ve done everything possible for the poor and they still didn’t improve much. That’s false.
We're measuring the effect of one thing-- getting a poor person to college-- composed with all the other interventions that are spread through the population.
We measure the value of this-- getting to college-- as very small and even possibly negative.
We also measure interventions and their values / impacts on earnings much higher.
Going "la la la but college would be much better and itself a win if we did 50 other supportive things" is all great, but it's fundamentally handwaving in the absence of evidence.
No, we don’t measure this. The study in question tries to make college wage premium go away using questionable control variables. Sure, some skilled trades can make more money than liberal arts grads. But very few people want to be plumbers or work on an oil rig and for good reason.
I can't find the citation now but the biggest argument against college I've seen is that once you control for family income, life success is way more correlated to SAT scores/the college's you apply for than the ones you actually attend. This would imply that college success stats merely indicate that they are selective in who they choose to enroll.
EDIT: Its not the one I'm looking for, but I found a good one. http://conference.iza.org/conference_files/CoNoCoSk2011/gens... shows that if you control for IQ, the average person makes $100k more over the course of their whole working life by getting a bachelor's.
- This doesn't even account for the four years of work you lose by going to college instead of working.
- Its based on data from people who mostly graduated before the year 2000, and by all accounts the value of college is becoming less, not more. It's also based on a calculation when college was much cheaper.
Those studies say something more like "UW Madison/U Washington/UIUC really do give you as good an education as the ivies" and quite a bit less like "college doesn't matter/is just a signal".
I have read that study, but I'm actually digging for a separate study now. I remember it split SAT score, educational attainment, and average salary into separate variables. For people with high SAT scores, average salary 10 years post graduation was basically the same regardless of level of education.
Ivy League matters if you want to be in finance or white shoe consulting.
Everything else, you just work hard at your first job and nobody gives a shit. I went to a big SUNY school and was a mediocre student. We all made out fine.
I don't think your first dash is correct. It looks like they just integrate the curve in figure 4, multiplied by a 5% discount. This includes both tuition cost and missed work during college. Also, it's not really fair to represent this as a difference in lifetime income because of the discount rate: the college attendee makes significantly more than $100k more over their life, but the gains accrue later in life while the cost accrues earlier, so the discount rate makes the benefit smaller.
IQ correllates somewhat with income and even more with school performance, so by “controlling for IQ”, the authors are intentionally flattening and hiding some of the income variation. They’re effectively discounting for the probability of going to college in the first place. That will, of course, hide differences in income due to going to college.
The actual data shown in that reference seems to tell a different story, it shows people with college degrees earning 20-50k per year, on average, after taxes. That will sum to more than $100k over a lifetime.
They account for that plus a lot of other factors in the 100k number. Basically the conclusion is, for people born from 1920 to 1980, college was net value add accounting for everything else, but not a huge one.
Yes, I know they account for that. Why does that make sense to account for IQ? That is explicitly discounting for college!
The 100k number is a fictional number, it’s trying to answer the question of assuming the same person didn’t go to college, is it possible to calculate the true value of college.
We could argue whether they actually calculated that number correctly, but what is absolutely true -- my point -- is that the actual people who had actual degrees actually earned a lot more than 100k extra over their lives, on average. The differences in wealth, illustrated by the data in that paper (see figure 1), are 2x-3x in annual income and accumulated savings much higher than 100k.
Yeah, but those people could have earned that much without going to college. If you just take the correlation between college and income, all it tells you is that colleges skim the top percent of society, which we knew already. The question we're trying to answer is that if you have the choice to go to college or not, should you?
I believe I understand the question & goal, and maybe this is the right way to go about it, but I’m not sure. It somewhat strikes me as the wrong question -- people don’t choose college equally at all income & IQ levels, and some of the factors that (statistically) lead people into to choosing to go are already accumulating before they’re even born. As a result, the hypothetical solution that hides the factors that lead to that choice in the first place in the data might not be fairly or adequately answering the question of whether someone should invest in college, given the choice, right?
Under this model, you could have someone with a higher IQ and a degree earning more money than a non-degree holder, but have a ‘negative’ return. Does that accurately reflect the situation, should the advice be to skip college, even though the absolute financial returns might be positive?
And what does this answer tell someone who has a low IQ or a low socioeconomic status? How should they try to evaluate this choice? Does discounting high IQ and high family education give an accurate picture of the benefits of post-secondary education to poorer families?
Controlling for IQ here is difficult because the higher your IQ is, the more you would be attracted to learning for learning’s sake in the first place.
The 100k is a net present value calculation, which includes a 5% per year discount, which is quite steep. 1/1.0515<0.5, 0.9530<0.25. The undiscounted difference in lifetime earnings looks, just eyeballing the figure, to be around 300-500k.
Yes, precisely. It seems like a good idea to keep an eyeball on the absolute, unadjusted numbers, even if controlling for IQ and other factor is a valid way to look at it, since the experience of being someone in the disadvantaged bracket is not a minuscule difference. Flattening the perceived income difference by controlling for IQ hides the absolute magnitude of income differences. Plus there’s always the chance that the model is wrong, and/or not accounting for everything.
I have a degree from a no-name university in New Zealand. I'd do it again for a few pragmatic reasons.
1: Lots of companies will reject you on sight without a degree. I don't think it's a good thing, but it is reality.
2: With a degree your ability to move overseas dramatically improves. I moved to America after graduating. I flat out couldn't have done that without a degree. Points based systems immigration systems like New Zealand have dramatic bonuses for people with degrees.
3: You don't have to jump through the hoops and explain why you don't have a degree all the time. Stupid reason I know, but it's something I've seen friends without degrees have to do constantly - and not just in career situations. As I mentioned, I went to a no-name university. If you live in NZ, you'll know it. If you're an American, chances are, you've never heard of it. But because I have a degree, it doesn't ever really come up.
4: The cost isn't that bad, when you spread it out over a career. My degree & living costs cost about $60k NZD (~$40k USD). That's $1k USD / year, or $.50 per hour. Considering how my income has multiplied in the few years since I've graduated (SF wages help tremendously here), the actual cost is barely anything, even when you control for the opportunity cost of studying.
Where I think College returns make a lot less sense
• Paying out of state tuition for lifestyle reasons, when you're going into a relatively low paid field afterwards (e.g. teaching).
• Paying private school tuition at a school without a strong reputation
Moving overseas is the top benefit of having a relevant (not just any) degree IMO. I'm grateful that American cities are still the best places in the world to work as a software engineer, but that could always change. I'm hoping a non-STEM degree combined with 6+ years of experience will still let me move around easily.
Few people pursuing PhDs are doing so to maximize earning potential.
Disregarding the mental toll of a PhD (one problem being that too many people want to be paid to think than there are available positions), I totally disagree with the parent poster's claim that graduate school is a rip-off. Just being in an an academic environment, being able to take classes, & studying around really smart people and doing research at the highest academic level is a really great experience & makes the stress worth it.
The argument you put forward doesn't make sense. It's not a ripoff to make close to minimum wage for a number of years (and possibly take on high levels of student loan debt), all to work in a field where there is an oversupply of labour that depresses wages?
My experience is the work in academia is more interesting and intellectually stimulating than my high paying tech jobs. That would be one motivation to go the academia route instead of the tech route.
If you come out the other end of a PhD, then you have the opportunity for best of both worlds: high paying job to work on the problems you find intellectually stimulating.
Also, it is cliche, but doing a PhD does train a person in a way to think that you don't necessarily pick up in a normal job.
Yeah fair points. I was sick of studying by the time I graduated - I enjoyed my experience at University, but I wanted to get into the private sector (probably worth mentioning that I studied business at the undergrad level, so I think a lot of that 'postgrad research' in marketing for example is suspect at best).
Having a PhD is a bar raiser, it automatically disqualifies you from a lot of jobs that don’t have intellectually stimulating problems to work on. This is all fine and dandy if your area overlaps with a hot field, but not if it doesn’t (or is then but isn’t now). Right now, 95% of the CS industry jobs for PhDs are in AI.
The thinking advantage of a PhD is really valuable, its like an extended apprenticeship with your advisor. Also, it gives you time to look at things you find interesting (well, it should, sometimes not).
> Just being in an an academic environment, being able to take classes, & studying around really smart people and doing research at the highest academic level is a really great experience & makes the stress worth it.
I guess your mileage may vary.
The best description I've heard about grad school is that it's a self induced neurosis. That was certainly my experience at the time I did it.
Even though the college premiums might be declining, I don’t think your logic is supported by this article at all. The stats in this article show postgraduate degree holders earning 3x what non-graduates earn, and accumulating 5-10x the wealth.
I did my Ph.D. to get access to the interesting work that I wanted to do. This work was / is actually less well paid than a standard CS career (in the UK this is IT contracting in the City of London/Finance sector - rapidly £600 a day, often much more). But, if I had done that I think I would probably have had to quit after 10 years, and I would probably have ended up doing something like teaching. This would arguably have been a social good (depending on how good a teacher I might have been) but in terms of pay back I think that the fact that I've managed more than 20 years and am still going is clearly a good bet financially. The seniority that I have in the industry now means that I am able to command good remuneration and the work is as interesting as ever, but more stressful!
You didn't go to uni in the USA and the paper is by the St Louis Fed on USA grads.
You took your degree in a country with far lower inequality and better inward education investment, and then jumped over to work in a country that doesn't tax people enough to support USA students.
I went to university in a country with a Gini coefficient of .35, and now live in a country with a Gini coefficient of .39 (See OECD link below)
The funny thing is, my student loan is one of the highest out of my American friend group† (although very normal amongst my NZ peers). Unlike the US, there was a lot less much in the way of financial aid/scholarships available, so sticker price was what people actually paid.
There's fairly decent financial aid available to cover your living costs if you're from a low income family, but that cuts off pretty quickly, and unlike the US, there isn't really a culture of paying for your children's education, so there's a lot of kids (like me) who grew up upper-middle class but didn't get much help through university.
Overall, I'd equate the USD = NZD as realtively equivalent, even though there is a currency difference. The average American is graduating into a job paying $51k USD, whereas NZ grads are often starting at $50-55k NZD.
Oh yeah, it's a great deal for me. What I meant was Americans who studied and then work in America end up paying roughly the same (when you take into account average earnings) as Kiwis who study and then stay in NZ.
$29k is not that much is it? That is about what I ended up with for my degree in Sweden where higher education is free but you borrow for living expenses. I repay it with about $100 per month for 25 years.
Perhaps the biggest difference is the interest rate which is government backed and around maybe 1-2%. According to first result on Google the interest rates on US student loans seems to be around 6-8%.
$29k is a decent chunk of change of you don't have a high paying job. It'll take you many years to pay off because of all your other expenses (housing, transportation, healthcare, food, clothing, etc.).
Yes, but think of it as someone else lent you money to be housed, fed, and clothed for four years while you earned no income. That’s going to cost money anywhere in the world, before a single book is purchased or lecture paid for.
You are incorrect about your assessment of US education expenditure. Governments in the US spend a similar percentage of GDP on tertiary education as New Zealand: https://jobmarketmonitor.com/2016/09/23/tertiary-education-c.... Both spend in the 4-5% range of GDP in terms of public money. (We spend a higher percentage of GDP, again just public money, than countries with “free” education like Germany.) Additionally, because US GDP per capita is 65% higher than New Zealand adjusted for cost of living, we spend far more than New Zealand per person in absolute terms.
Grad school is often much better for immigration scoring than a bachelors. Especially if you can manage to do the graduate degree in the country you want to immigrate to.
Agree with most of this comment (couldn't read article due to blocking or something). Can confirm the blacklist on no degree. I had one that had like 10 years experience in and perfect fit. When HR found out that he did not finish his degree it was over with no recourse.
Also Masters (MBA is different) is useless in most fields unless used to get a visa or something. Usually you are foregoing wages with few additional benefits. Might be slightly easier to get first job.
Not sure source of degree matters as long as accredited. Certainly there can be upside like same alma mater but I rarely care but will admit to negative bias to Univ of Phoenix but interview and work history trump everything.
Having said that BS or BE have merit if the student actually takes it seriously. I learned a whole lot that I'm not sure I would have learned through self study alone (a least around that time).
You can look at it as a positive too. Having no degree as a programmer means that overly bureaucratic workplaces are filtered out and your chances of ending up at a workplace that has a minimum of BS are increased.
Only works for programmers though. Everybody else should obviously get degrees.
What you are portraing is your exploitation of your countries education system for your own benefit. The NZ tax payer invested in yours for your future ROI into NZ and you put this ROI in your sack.
> Using a new administrative dataset combining the universe of permanent migrant departures from the Philippines with the universe of institution-level post-secondary enrollment and graduation, we show that enrollment and graduation in nursing programs increased in response to demand from abroad for nurses. The supply of nursing programs increased to accommodate this. The increase in nursing enrollment and graduation during the period was much larger than the increase in nurse migration and contributed to a brain gain
For knowledge workers who could have begun a similar career without college, the cost of the degree should also include the money they would have made by working 4 additional years at the end of their career (probably one of the highest points?)
The Opportunity Cost would have been incurred while they were in college, not 30+ years after. There are too many variables in play when projecting that far out in the future, but you can make good estimates as to what would have happened in the past as an alternative to the 4 years spent in college.
I've done the math on the opportunity cost of how much I would have made if I hadn't gone to university. It was about $120k over 4 years, and raised the opportunity cost to about $160k (I borrowed $60k, but some of that money was for living expenses, that would have been covered by working full time). I was earning about $16/$17 per hour at the time. It increased the jump I needed to make from $.50 per hour to $2 per hour.
Alright. I probably would have taken a similar job to the one I actually took 3 years earlier and followed a similar career path the whole time. That is, I wouldn't add 3 additional years of entry level IC work, I would add 3 additional years of senior IC work or better. Right now I'm working for half of prevailing wages for senior ICs in exchange for living in a civilized country, so half of prevailing wages * 3 years - taxes is around $400,000. If I ever move back to the US or get promoted it will be pretty easy to get to an opportunity cost of seven figures of post-tax money for 3 years of math degree.
I'd say this is spot on, particularly the part about going to college for lifestyle reasons, combined with a field that is low-paying, and a choice of uni that isn't particularly cheap, is a bad combination.
I'm not sure I agree on grad school, perhaps you could elaborate? It's true that it's very much hit or miss. But my experience is that there's plenty of grad schools which offer 1 - 1.5 year Masters' and tuition fees that aren't abnormal. Here too your second point rings true, either you pay a lot of money for a good rep (e.g. if you go into BigLaw, assuming you don't burn out, it gives a high return rate), or you pay little for a no-name university, and then I feel grad school absolutely does come at a premium. Compared to a 3-4 year Bachelor's degree, it's usually a relatively quick program with potentially bigger upside, especially if paid for by your employer.
I think what most students underestimate is just how many of them fail to finish the standard path. Almost half of students don't finish their bachelor's within six years due to delays and changing paths, and a lot of them quit entirely. I think college makes sense if you know what you're looking to study, why, are dedicated to completing it, and able to.
A lot of students go into fields of study as a teenager, literally never having had a 5 minute conversation with a person actually working in the field, having spent no time looking at the income tables, or indeed not actually considering the field at all, but just wanting to become a college student. It's these students who probably drag down the stats quite a lot. I've seen fairly unimpressive people go into a business course, work their ass off, do various internships, and land high-paying jobs. And I've seen smart kids start the same business course, muck around, graduate after 6-7 years and land a mediocre job that doesn't really require any particular degree. At the end of the day the student is still the most important factor here, and by the time they head to college, it's often already 'too late' for institutions to turn an B student into an A student, without the intrinsic motivation. There's lots more room in primary/secondary school for that, that's really where it's at. What college you head to after is less important in my opinion.
Rolling deep into anecdotal avenue, but my thoughts on grad school
• Lucrative fields like medicine & dentistry saddle you with enormous debts (often in the mid six figures) that take multiple years to pay off. The ROI is probably worth it if you work to 65, but you're locked in for easily twenty years, and such high debt levels make taking risks very difficult.
• Lucrative, but more populated fields like law & business also often saddle you with enormous debt, and for these degrees you need a school with a strong brand name to get a look in anywhere (if you do an MBA and you aren't at Harvard/Stanford/Wharton, and a very few others, what's the point?).
• In a lot of fields (liberal arts/social sciences) what's the point of getting a masters? Do you get an earning premium? Is the earning premium worth the opportunity cost? I'd be surprised if the answer is often yes. I have a friend who was a teacher and is now studying to be a families therapist. Lovely person, but absolutely terrible choice. Years of additional study and debt, and no hope of a future earning substantially more money to show for it all.
I agree completely with your points about teenagers not doing enough due diligence before they study.
>4: The cost isn't that bad, when you spread it out over a career. My degree & living costs cost about $60k NZD (~$40k USD). That's $1k USD / year, or $.50 per hour. Considering how my income has multiplied in the few years since I've graduated (SF wages help tremendously here), the actual cost is barely anything, even when you control for the opportunity cost of studying.
You also need to take into account the opportunity cost. You could have been working at the time, earning $XXk/year.
Yep, I was giving up about $30k a year ($120k / 4 years). I was working in a supermarket. $2 more an hour needed over the course of my career to make the juice worth the squeeze. Nothing to write home about.
One of the costs that is often excluded, if you go the "not college" route, is the toll of physical labor on one's body. Medical expenses can be substantial and you didn't earn as much as an office job may have paid.
> One of the costs that is often excluded, if you go the "not college" route, is the toll of physical labor on one's body
That's why, for people interested in technology, software development is an incredible blessing. If you're clever about it, and plan ahead in HS, you can easily skip college and come out making $100,000/yr within 3-4 years, even in small markets.
I've never taken a single computer science class, make well over $100,000 in a highly-challenging software development job, and no one has ever asked me about a college degree (with the exception of one job that I regretted accepted and which I quit in 8 months).
There are other similar routes available to people without college degrees. Several wealthy people my parents know started out in construction, but rapidly moved into flipping houses and real estate, and made a fortune. Their physical labor was over by their late 20s.
There are many paths that skip college and don't end up working physical labor after a decade or two. But you have to be clever and proactive (if you're on HN, I'm going to assume you're at least the former).
Look, I'm studying undergraduate philosophy with no intention other than why not. Would I say I could learn the material on my own w/o college? Absolutely but I like the organized structure of college w/ professors, peers, etc. Am I getting into debt? A fair bit. Is it worth the trade off? I certainly think so. Will I say that five years from now? Most likely. Because here's the thing: education as a means to an end is not what it's all about, and so many of us subscribe to this fiction―to this warm stupor of society's fictions―that we forget what it is truly about. College will always be worth it such that you have an endless curiosity or enjoy erring in the direction of learning which is deeply rooted into failing, or rather, not understanding, over and over again.
> Look, I'm studying undergrad philosophy...Am I getting into debt? A fair bit.. Is it worth the trade off? I certainly think so. Will I say that five years after I graduate? Not sure but most likely.
Spoiler. Been there, done that. Unless you're at an Ivy, if you're majoring in philosophy, you'll not think it was worth it in five years. My sin was Classics, but similar outcome.
Assuming you're on HN because you're teaching yourself programming, the sting will be somewhat lessened (that's the route I took), since you'll at least be able to get a job.
But it'll still sting to make those massive loan payments knowing that nothing you learned is helping you with your professional life, and that things like philosophy, mathematics, and languages (and computer science!) can be learned just as easily with discipline, YouTube, and a few good textbooks.
It's very easy to delay the pain of loan payments when you're in school, but they'll be there waiting for you, inevitably, through sickness and health, marriage and divorce.
If you have endless curiosity, college is even less worth it. Instead, being loan-free gives you the freedom to work in areas that truly intrigue you, and to work in very low-paying internships while you're learning.
But I know I won't convince you. Likely no one could have convinced me at the time (although only one person tried, once).
Edit: if this were the 1970s or earlier, when you could pay for college classes from waiting tables or a $10,000 loan (inflation adjusted!), I'd absolutely say go for it. But taking out even $50,000 in debt at age 18 for anything less than a guaranteed job with a good income (physician assistant, nursing, accounting) is mortgaging your future. Taking out $200,000, which is the going rate for most [edit: should read "many, private", and is probably closer to $100,000] liberal arts 4-year-degrees, is insanity, but between culture BS about degrees and "academic counselors", I know it may not seem that way to you right now.
Thank you for the input. It's interesting, and hey, it might be the case down the road. But my main philosophy behind my seemingly naive post is this: I don't mind what happens. I'm of the opinion that it doesn't matter what is but how you think about what is that matters.
Edit: I saw your edit, and again, thank you for your input. I would just like to note that I'll be graduating with ~12k in debt - I went to a community college first while living with my parents and transferred to a UC, and California's higher education system supports low-income, first generation households fairly well - to which I owe great gratitude to.
I'm about to finish paying off about $65,000 dollars that I took out for my CS degree. I graduated 4 years ago and have a good paying job. So, I'm lucky to have to be paying it off early. However, even with my 6 figure income, paying off this large sum off money has been a huge burden and has majorly affected other choices in my life like investments, career (I.e. I had to take the high paying jobs), buying a house, etc etc. If I could go back and do it again I would avoid any student loans like the plague they are.
Edit: just saw your edit reply to above edit :) that is much more reasonable than the situation that I put myself into. Still, I would recommend doing everything you can to avoid the debt. Paying back 1000's of dollars is a large burden.
~12,000 isn't too bad. You also did the smart thing by going to community college first.
So it's sounds like you're OK, or at least not financially ruined. Payments on $12,000 will be manageable.
I'm mostly talking about the folks taking out $50-200,000 in loans for an undergrad degree with some random major (with the upper end of that scale obviously being much worse than the lower end).
"I'm of the opinion that it doesn't matter what is but how you think about what is that matters."
That's a false dichotomy that will be difficult to fully adhere to when you spend your next decades as an adult. Yes, perspective matters; a LOT. But "what is" and "what was" can matter a lot too. Imagining that you can just think your way out of hard spots can lead to complacency about the choices that you make. Keeping a positive perspective can involve an enormous amount of mental effort that may have been mitigated by better choices.
I majored in one of the STEM fields that doesn't pay any money (chemistry), and now I do the computer stuff for a living and to make money. Given how I did the whole "do STEM and you'll never be wrong route" and it was wrong... Well, I wish I had spent those 4 years at college reading philosophy works and studying the classics. I'd probably still be in the same place I am now, but at least I wouldn't have spent 1000+ hours in a lab to get here.
My point wasn't about STEM vs liberal arts. I actually agree with you. Unless you're going to an elite school where you'll network with highly influential people, taking out massive loans for anything less than a totally professionally-focused degree (physician assistant, accounting, nursing) or a software-industry favored degree (computer science, math or physics) is a huge mistake.
Also, my only remaining loans are from me going back and doing a "professional" degree that proved to be fairly useless. I had thought I did my research but failed to crunch the numbers carefully enough or account for future family decisions (most employment opportunities in the field required extended foreign residence/travel). So I sympathize with taking out loans for a "responsible" degree and still coming out financially screwed.
"Average student loan balance" is not what I said. Average student loan balance includes:
1) Tons of scholarships, and
2) Non-liberal arts colleges (technical schools, professional schools, the scam schools advertised on TV, etc).
I also was thinking (although failed to specify) private liberal arts colleges. I stand by that figure. If you're taking out loans for a private liberal arts degree, it'll be over $100,000 and many will exceed $200,000.
Edit: Just read that it's supposedly $32,000 in loans for private 4-year degrees. I'm very skeptical of that Federal Reserve figure, since average tuition only for private 4-year degrees is somewhere around $35,000 per year. The Fed also has incentives to find ways to underplay this figure, just like they undercount unemployment. So I'm highly skeptical.
College Board estimates $14,610 per year is what students actually pay for tuition only. If you don't have wealthy or upper-middle-class parents, then you'll need to tack on living expenses and books. If you're not wealthy or upper-middle class, you'll take most of that out in loans, which will be well over $100,000 by graduation.
I know numerous students who have recently graduated with over $100,000 in loans from private 4-year colleges (no, not me, I graduated over 10 years ago, and all of my remaining loans are from a professional master's degree). I know several underemployed lawyers who have well over $200,000 in school loans that they'll likely never pay off.
31% of students graduate with zero debt, that does not mean their tuition was free. Those balances also exclude loans taken out by parents to pay for collage.
Thinking it’s a good idea is why so many people regret doing exactly what you’re doing.
The simple reality is collage class are incredibly shallow introductions to the subject matter and hardly worth the price of admission. That’s somewhat offset by credentials, but your comparison is high school which says more about how bad high school is than how great collage is.
No joke, at one point I tutoring my friends in some classes I had not taken. Your professors may have a deep understanding of the subject, but they need to dumb the material down so people can pick it up over ~15 weeks.
Do you think your opinion will change at all as time goes by and you’re left with a large debt to pay off, and a degree that you know will likely not have any impact on your earning potential? It’s great that you’re satisfying your intellectual needs. But a lot of people in your exact position eventually end up wanting other people to foot the bill.
Thank you for question! And no, I don't think so. I think the important thing here to note is that studying philosophy―particularly phenomenology, existentialism, and theology―feels all-encompassing true and real compared to that of anything else, at least for me personally, at the moment. And anyways, as I noted on another comment on this thread: I don't mind what happens. I don't mind working a blue collar job to repay my loans or in order to make a living. Even despite stemming from a first-gen, low-income household and sometimes having this strong, finger-aching yearning to take care of my parents financially, I don't mind what happens because things, I hold, work out in their own imperfect perfection. Again, as naive as this all may sound.
I think you are taking an excellent route, but don't think you can't have both: a philosophy degree (spectacular!) and a decent living.
Analytic philosophy is very STEMish. Majoring in the logically rigorous courses sets you up for many monied disciplines (besides programming). Even better if you can minor in something like coding, accounting, or even a trade.
Doing ROTC can get you a scholarship, guaranteed job out of college, many opportunities beyond, and serving in the military is in itself a worthwhile endeavor.
A person in our family is a specialized nurse. Two years of school, then some more training. $60hr any hour they "wish" to work. Saturdays/Sundays are $90hr, so is any hour after 8 hours. The demand is so high he just rejects work. If he wants to work in American Samoa or Miami: hired. I hired a person to install a garage door. $900 for an hour of work. My plumber wont show up for a 30 minute $300 job. I will call again, tomorrow fingers crossed. Get your brakes replaced - look at that bill. Try outsourcing that.
Everyone I meet that works at starbucks has a masters AND 90k in student debt. Bankruptcy doesn't make student loans go away.
I think things are about to start swinging in the "non-college" direction.
But it can be dramatically diluted through lenient immigration policies (and that's exactly what happened).
Bottom line, you have to be clever stay on your toes to make it in today's economy, and even then you need lots of luck and excellent health. UBI would result in a much more just society.
UBI would just feed directly into rents because that's how prices are set.
UBI would require land value tax to ensure the public value is capture for public spending. UBI alone is a land speculator wet dream and Yang is totally wrong to be pushing it without LVT. Yes in the middle of nowhere it can help, but most people are in cities and rents will rise there to current rent + UBI amount.
I agree that a significant LVT would be extremely welcome. Perhaps even more so than UBI.
I'm open to suggestions, but we've passed the point we were in from 1950 to 2000 where any mediocre person could work hard and be guaranteed a middle-class life. And that's wrong, not to mention very threatening to our democracy.
I'm sure that by some economic measurement, any mediocre person today could still work hard and earn enough to afford the same standard of living as the middle class of 1950. The main problem is that this isn't actually possible to pull off, since it costs 10x as much for things like housing and medicine that aren't necessarily 10x better. There just isn't the option to buy the crappy version from 70 years ago.
Medicine from 70 years ago can be superior to modern medicine. Which would you prefer if you couldn't breathe on your own, an iron lung or a tube jammed down your throat?
By what authority and rationale do you feel so strongly about intubation, I wonder? Could it be that the entire medical profession is wrong and you are right?
There are obvious reasons that have nothing to do with quality of care.
Iron lungs are physically large and heavy. They are expensive and difficult to move. Health insurance doesn't want to pay extra for your comfort.
With an iron lung you can talk and eat. There is minimal difficulty; simply time your sentences or swallows to match the action of the iron lung. There is also no danger of tubes damaging your vocal cords.
The choice of technology is obvious, depending on how much patient comfort is valued. It is clear that the modern system doesn't give a damn if patients are miserable.
>from 1950 to 2000 where any mediocre person could work hard and be guaranteed a middle-class life.
This is a fantasy.
I personally know a lot of mediocre hard working people, mostly baby boomers. None had or have a "guaranteed" middle class lifestyle, and many don't have a middle class lifestyle at all, even now. One moved to a retirement community to "retire" and had to get a job. Another is currently without heat.
I totally agree UBI would just be a way to transfer money to landlords. Heck you could consider SV wages as UBI; salaries are high but that income is often spent on rent or mortgages. Stock money is spent on real estate.
The rent thing is a bad argument against UBI, because you can make the same argument about any program that benefits the poor - even if all the UBI money goes back into rent, UBI would equalise housing spend along the way, from rich to poor and from worker to non-worker, vastly reducing poverty.
Even for people not in poverty it would help even out their income over their life cycle - more money when they have kids, find themselves temporarily unemployed, or in retirement.
Certainly land rents are totally unjust and a huge problem, and land value tax/public housing/public land ownership would be great, but the case for UBI is compelling even without any of that.
> even if all the UBI money goes back into rent, UBI would equalise housing spend along the way, from rich to poor and from worker to non-worker, vastly reducing poverty
How would that be? If your rent goes up $1000 regardless of what you're paying now, someone who earns $0 and can't afford a $600 apartment now collects $1000 and can't afford a $1600 apartment while the guy who could afford the $600 apartment by earning $1500 now has a monthly income of $2500 and a $1600 apartment.
Yang is willing to adjust policy positions if the data supports it. If property prices are being raised due to UBI, then I'm sure he'd support something like LVT.
That's the difference with Yang. He's the most data-driven politician I've ever seen.
Other politicians seem mostly ideological, and I don't think they'd adjust their policies even in the face of overwhelming data it's not working. Like if Warren used Antitrust law to break up Amazon and it didn't change any relevant metrics, I think she would still call the policy a success. Ideological politicians like that are way more dangerous than someone who wants to try new ideas and is willing to adjust if they don't work.
I can't know how Warren would adapt her beliefs in the face of contradictory data in the future, but she's done that in the past [0]. She believed in a self-correcting and fair market that would be harmed by many regulations, but then she did a study of bankruptcy claims. The results contradicted what she expected to find, and she changed her beliefs instead of her interpretation of the data.
Holding onto UBI at this point is ideological for him. There is no evidence that $10k/year is near enough to alleviate people from having to take terrible jobs. $10k/year is about the equivalent of making $5/hr full time, which is below minimum wage and way into poverty.
At this point his proposal is just a really expensive handout for people that already have jobs. And what critical social services are going to be cut to foot that bill?
I always wondered about that. I used to rent in a city with a relatively tight supply of rentals and thought that a UBI would fall right through to the landlords. Any good links to read about the land value tax component?
I think UBI is a step too far. What we really need (in my opinion, obviously) is dramatic restructuring of the healthcare system. There is absolutely no reason that the single largest expense in my life should be insuring against the possibility that my family catches some terrible illness.
You need some better contractors. I have multiple plumbers with same day service for $95 service calls. My garage door was installed for $400 and it took an afternoon.
Obviously prices vary.
I can make a living with a trade skill, but data shows I’m more likely to make a lot more with a college degree. You have billionaire dropouts and baristas with phds. But on average, degree nets you a lot of lifetime income.
Zuckerberg and Gates would have been elite if they’d never worked a day in their lives. Lots of people who come from money do something that doesn’t pay that well, like working in acting or the arts. Others don’t, and work as executives or found their own businesses even though there’s no danger of running out of money.
Zuckerberg and Gates would have been elite if they’d never worked a day in their lives.
Perhaps it's just me, but in the Zuckerberg case specifically, I'd think quite a bit of luck and timing had to do with it. If Zuckerberg had been born 10 years later after the obvious social network ideas were already created? Or if he had gone to a no-name college (or none whatsoever) and Facebook had never taken off the way it did at Harvard?
Or maybe you meant they were born elite, in which case, I don't know anything about that.
They seems obvious to you now but they weren't at that time. Not that I am a Zuck fan at all but he deserve credit for that and that probably demonstrate some creativity and vision from him. No ?
MySpace existed. Facebook didn’t really add much beyond that to think that others wouldn’t have come up with the same idea in Zuck’s absence. In fact, the lawsuits from the Winklevos twins would seem to imply just that.
I think the main value add - looking back on how I perceived FB when it came out and why a lot
of us started using it - was branding and a cleaner, fresh design. And the newsfeed was a new concept...
The point is that Zuck and Gates had capacity to take on risk. There’s no guarantee that their risk would have paid off, but the other side of the coin wasn’t starvation and destitution. They basically had a heads I win tails I don’t lose type of situation.
This is the big idea here - being born in the right situation gives you the ability to bear risk where a lower middle class kid can’t bear that risk because if things don’t work out, that kid is going to be homeless. When you can take a lot of risk with little downside, it almost always pays off in the long run.
> Zuckerberg and Gates would have been elite if they’d never worked a day in their lives.
What do you mean by that? Zuckerberg and Gates are indisputably elite because they're two of the richest people in the world.
But I wouldn't call them elite beforehand, and definitely not if they didn't work a day in their lives. Their parents' money seems to come from being a lawyer, a dentist, and a psychiatrist. That's not "elite", that's something any family can achieve in two generations.
I didn't call them "Middle Class". I said they weren't elite. While elite people are in banking and elite people go to Phillips Exeter, it doesn't follow that everyone who does those things is elite.
You could argue a much lower threshold for elite, which is fine, but then it's quite a bait and switch to lead with Zuckerberg and Gates for that category.
I would argue averaging across all degrees is makes no sense. STEM degrees do pay off. Liberal arts degrees can pay if you want to boost a specific skill and have a solid plan for using it. E.g. getting an English degree to become a more persuasive speaker while promoting your otherwise sound and solidly executed startup.
Aside from those 2 examples there are plenty of colleges with a business model of selling overpriced useless degrees to people who can't be bothered to do some due diligence before getting a loan. Those degrees won't pay off and despite sharing the "college" name, I wouldn't average between the 2 groups.
Does STEM actually pay off, or does engineering/technology pay off?
I've got a few friends who work in science, and it seems to be a pretty poorly paying field, with a real lack of job prospects, unless you secure a job at a government research department.
I have friends with stem phds who aren’t making tons of money. But, I think in general, stem degrees pay well.
I try to use reliable data sets [0] to help understand because anecdotes are hard for me to make decisions. The data are almost always a few years old so they aren’t perfect and could miss a new trend. But it’s the best I know how to use.
Fair enough. When it comes to career advice, I prefer anecdotes to large data sets, because there are far too many variables, and it's too easy to torture numbers.
More seriously, anecdotes are terrible when giving advice to fresh high school seniors on their way to graduation. When people think of degrees in certain fields, they gravitate to the successful people (“I’ll study acting and make millions like the famous actors I know”, etc). They don’t think of and aren’t even aware of how many people get those degrees and fail hard.
That’s why they need to see the placement and salary stats to understand what their up against. Once they understand a French Comparative Literature degree has approximately no economic value, then they can make that decision knowingly. Papering over that by pointing out the one leader that happens to have that degree does more harm than good.
If that friend is himself an actor, or someone else who can influence hiring decisions, then I would say go for it!
At the end of the day, people hire you. Not data. After all, who says that a teenager can tell apart badly interpreted data any better than poor anecdotes?
At the end of the day, data reflects what all those people hiring people do. Anecdotes are randomly useful for predicting because maybe you luck out and find the right person, but probably you won’t.
Teenagers should be able to understand data by the time they pick a college or career.
Correct - I didn't study a STEM subject, but I've done ok for myself despite that.
I think there's a world of difference between "I want to study acting and I'll end up successful like Brad Pitt" and "Hmm, my cousin is in marketing, and seems to have created a great career there, I should talk to them about that."
Anecdotes about people you don't know, and career stories you don't fully understand aren't helpful, but frankly I don't think massive data sets on how much the average graduate earns within two years of graduation (for example) are all that helpful either, except as a broad way to compare yourself. It's such a large number of people, you don't really anything particularly useful at an individual level (even though there are plenty of good uses for data like that).
Even in the engineering field, pay is massively different for different types of engineers. Civil and mechanical engineers generally aren't making anywhere near what software engineers make in top markets, for example. Similar story with chemists working in biotech vs. physicists doing fundamental research.
30 years ago, I was trying to decide what to study. I wanted to go to medical school and my parents said that I should study electrical engineering. The reason, if I decided not to go to medical school a biology BS degree was almost useless and it was just as easy to get into medical school with an engineering degree as a biology degree.
I ended up getting a microbiology degree and an EE, went to medical school (MD PhD) but dropped out. I was able to get a great job doing programming, so Im relatively sure they were right.
With my kids Im using the same approach.
With regards to grad school, my parents' philosophy was if you could not get grad school funded by an RA or TA, then you had no business going.
It's really just the engineering degrees that pay off.
The sciences degrees are only obviously worth it if you then go on to become a doctor, but that's more schooling and the undergrad degree isn't a strict requirement anyway.
Most of my friends with degrees in math, physics, etc., just ended up being software engineers anyway. So the degree "paid off" for them in the same way a CS degree would, but they would've been better served just going CS.
Former government research scientist here. It also does not pay well.
In fact, funding for scientific research was cut by the Obama administration, leading to the closure of all but two of our branches and displacing dozen of workers amidst a recession.
When I transferred to academia, I took on an underpaying role, and found that the same shenanigans were afoot there. Now, we are approaching the end of the 2000s population boom, and in five years, universities will have many fewer prospective applicants for the following decade at least. The ripples of the contraction caused by the gambling of a few spoiled bankers will be felt again in another 20 years with a much smaller and resource-constrained workforce, still reeling from the burdens of loan debt and overpriced housing.
Unless Sanders gets his way, that is.
It's probably best I plan my exit in advance this go-round.
I think large demographic averages are still useful, but certainly you can look at more specific lifetime earnings for specific degrees. I’m just aware of general “all bachelor” data that’s from reputable sources like the US SSA [0].
I’m talking about averages as there are certainly schools that suck. I would take my statement to mean that every single college is a net benefit. But as a general guidance, no other information available, a degree will net me more money over my lifetime.
If I were giving advice to someone thinking about schools, I would have them review the particular school, keep costs low, and study with a particular career in mind, stem/medicine a good target.
A service call is either something simple. For example, to unclog a toilet is just the fee. If it goes over an hour it costs extra. I had to have a 80 foot line snaked out and a camera run to see what the problem was and that was $180.
Right! I need actual work done. I understand it is $95 - to flush a toilet. But like, actual work, with tools, actually doing a job for 30 minutes. It is very expensive.
> My plumber wont show up for a 30 minute $300 job.
You brought up a 30 minute job. So I shared what it costs for me for a 30 minute (or more) job. And that it’s easy to get someone to come quickly for such a job.
I’m saying that if the problem can be solved in an hour, it’s $95. This is called a “service call.” Basically coming out and fixing what can be fixed without buying parts.
Any extra labor would cost more. This is a much better situation than yours since you can’t even get a plumber to help you flush a toilet for $300. That’s unfortunate.
Thus my suggestion from me that you could get better contractors. I think it’s reasonable that you should be able to pay $100 for a 30 minute job and be satisfied. Rather than be willing to pay $300 and being unsatisfied.
You are right. I can't get home depot to throw something off the truck for less than $200 broken. (And deny it showed up). So, where you are, where you live, I envy it. I imagine a world of nice plumbers and helper people. Canada????
I’m in one of the top 10 metro areas. But I guess I’m just lucky. I do avoid the marketplace services (I think Home Depot’s used to be called RedBeacon) and go for independent operators as I think they have more experience and more money goes in their pocket.
Don't use services with a "name" and multiple trucks that have a bunch of employees doing work under their umbrella along with a staffed office. Search for independent contractors who do their own work. And don't do what other people in this thread are doing by assuming that plumbers and other tradesmen are making big bucks because your bill is large. The umbrella companies charge a fortune and the actual workers make jack. The workers do it so they don't have to be bothered with the business end of things. I use independent contractors who know what they're doing, don't do more work than what is needed, and charge reasonable fees. I live in an average small town in the US. And yes: our main contractor is a nice young guy who actually loves helping old people who've been shafted by those big companies.
The plumber is not making $95 an hour even if he owns the business. I worked for a contracting company and we charged $118 an hour for most service calls, our technicians ranged from $20 to $35 per hour. That looks like robbery but you factor in taxes, management, logistics, vehicle maintenance and management, rent, benefits, office staff to take calls, and you get up to that $118 very quickly. Unfortunately that’s just the nature of business in the trades.
The Guys doing the work make a fraction of the hourly rate, anywhere from 15 to 35 percent (not counting benefits). The rest goes to the house.
Pride I'd guess. Or possibly coming from a background where they don't realize that skilled labor is an option. Many people seem to think that doing physical labor is "below" them. Nevermind the fact that being a barista / waiting tables / etc. is no walk in the park either.
$60 or even $90/hour isn’t that great if its all 1099 income. It isn’t bad either, but the extra payroll taxes and the need to buy an individual plan (if your partner doesn’t get you into a group plan) make it pretty normal.
Not sure you understand. 1099 income means they aren’t an employee. That’s not the arrangement for people making $15-20. Those folks are regular employees so they receive that income after benefits, payroll taxes, etc.
As a 1099 employee you need to be clearing at least double the equivalent employee hourly wage because there is so much overhead. Remember, a contractor doesn’t get a single day of paid vacation.
benefits only run about 30%. So a contractor wage should be about 130% of a salaried employees wage.
This does not count when a salaried employee works more than 40 hours.
My plumber charges 150/hour.
Contractors around here bill by the job. I had bids for $5000 for a 1 day job for 2 people when incorporated into a GC bid. The GC was getting 25% on top of the 5000.
I’m sure I’ve missed a few things, but 30% doesn’t begin to cover the costs that are normally borne by a larger company and factor into the “house” premium.
You have to factor in not only benefits, but also:
* federal-level taxes (there’s no employer to pay the other half, so the contractor bears the whole portion)
* tools (you buy your own tools, stock your own spares, do your own maintenance on your dime — non-billable)
* learning and mandated certifications (same as above — non-billable)
* liability insurance (non-billable)
* vehicle maintenance, taxes, tolls, and fees (non-billable)
* transit time to and from not only contracted job sites, but also estimates that may ultimately result in no revenue (non-billable)
* marketing/lead generation (Angie’s List and HomeAdvisor are free to you, not to contractors — non-billable)
* material storage (you have the keep the customer’s plywood dry if the weather changes, or if the customer has a family emergency and needs to reschedule)
No, I understand perfectly fine and I’ve been in both situations. I’m just saying, it sucks to be a contractor with overhead and make a decent amount without accounting for the additional expense, but it REALLY sucks to be at the bottom of the income totem pole and make peanuts (in an expensive American city).
In this specific case, hospitals do tend to offer good health care plans.
Further I don't believe it is possible for a hospital with all its specialized equipment to 1099 its nurses (doesn't pass the IRS '20 questions' test on contracting).
Look up agency nurses [0]. When they're paid hourly being begged for work (as OP mentioned), it's usually for a nurse who has specialized skills that can hop between hospitals/ER/offices. Essentially, they're contractors of the agency, and the hospital pays the agency. Can't recall if they're W2 or 1099 though
I think as we advance in the information age, maybe degrees are less about helping you actually get the job done, and more about serving as a mean for companies (and countries) to roughly filter high surplus of candidates. Add the fact its easier today to apply for job posts, its very hard for recruiters to filter intelligently at reasonable time.
My guess is if everyone would have first degree, the recruiters will require a second degree.
This has less weight on jobs short in candidates (i.e specialized nurse, plumber, welder, proven AI expert, or whatever is hot right now).
There is a reason there is a shortage of nurses. Not everyone finds excitement in dealing with sick people all day. Also, most highly paid nurses do have a B.S. in Nursing.
>I hired a person to install a garage door. $900 for an hour of work. My plumber wont show up for a 30 minute $300 job.
For those prices just do it yourself. Is this hyperbole or did you really pay $900 for an hour job? How complicated could it have been if it only took an hour?
Personally I feel like, one one of the variables that isn’t considered in the returns conversation is time. Lots of employers have reimbursement programs that can be used while working up even of you currently work in big retail or corporate food.
It will likely take much longer but will leave you in a more controllable financial situation in the interim.
There is a line of thinking that college tuition should rise until the ROI on higher education drops to zero, using some twisted Pareto logic. I would consider such an outcome to be neither optimal nor efficient.
Hopefully the US can take a page from the Germans and institute vocational schools. We look down on plumbers, electricians, etc. We constantly couch our praise of them with phrases like, "Wait until your knee gives". I have a MSCS from GA Tech. I've got about 18 years official experience. I get paid $95/hr. Plumbers? $120/hr. Electricians are about the same. We need them. Let's teach them. Maybe with apprenticeships.
Are plumbers actually working 40 billable hours a week? And how much are they working that is not billable (driving from site to site)? I would be surprised if they made more in a year than educated STEM professionals. The attention-getting per-hour rate might not be a great metric.
What all these studies always fail to factor is that a college degree will give you an advantage over someone that does not have one in just about any situation. Just the fact that you have one will signal to the potential employer that you can accomplish goals, meet a deadline and the many things you need to deal with to get a degree over those that don't have one.
The real question is, "Does an ivy league degree, and those that are very expensive worth it?" I suspect that in most cases it's not. An art degree from Harvard will most likely not pay for itself. But an engineering one from a respected state school will likely have a good return on investment.
Bottom line a degree is worth it. But you have to make sure you pick a major that pays off in the end.
I also find the analysis strange because it depends heavily on whether you're profit focused.
If you are, then the average outcome probably doesn't matter to you, because you're going to select for profitability in your degree choice, you're going to move around for work, continuously study and train in adult life, and generally you're gonna be fine financially (if perhaps not emotionally, oho).
If you're not profit focused - if you're doing the degree primarily and substantially because you love X and want to do X - then what do you care if it doesn't pay back? You got to be an X! The question is almost irrelevant.
I think a lot of analysis suffers from this averaging effect whereby actually that average person doesn't exist.
There is no realistic path that would have lead to me making the average income for my cohort, for example, because I'm just not that sort of person - I'd rather just go relatively all out, or else work for a non-profit or scrappy startup or whatever, so I either bin high or low.
Harvard (and similar schools) give very generous aid, not to mention that one can easily transition to consulting or similar no matter their major if they came from Harvard. The considerations for Ivy+ schools are not the same as the considerations that are being discussed in this article/thread. The people that are actually ending up screwed with debt went to mid tier (or worse) private schools for the most part, or possibly mediocre out of state public options.
For digital publishing, sure. In academic publishing, for print, or if the same file is used for both digital and print copies, colour pages are often clustered together to reduce the production cost. If you have 20 pages of mostly black and white text each with a small colour figure, you have to print 20 colour pages. If you cluster them together, you can print 18 black and white pages and 2 colour pages instead.
This practice will go away as all publishing moves to digital formats. But as long as there is a print version for purchase as well, it will be more cost-efficient to organize papers like this.
Coming from a small town in Indonesia, went to Singapore to study. Will end up with about 30k SGD (~22k USD) in student loan. Fresh graduate pay for software engineering in Singapore ranges mostly from 60-100k.
I think the decision worth it* because it opens up horizon, opportunities to working overseas (not just Singapore) and much better living standard.
I didn't even know what a CS degree will do after graduation and just randomly chose it because I like Math back in HS. I guess the real benefit of a degree is the pointers and community you get. Surely this can be replaced with a good mentorship, but that requires a good network beforehand.
*the quality of education in Singapore University IMHO is far from the quality of the content I found in the publicly shared course content in US universities.
College isn't worth it, but that's the whole point. It's becoming what economists call a Giffen Good, that is, something people consume even more of the more expensive it becomes.
The biggest value factor of all is Metcalfe's Law of network effects, where the almost universal availability of higher education means that not pursuing it places your starting position in life on the outer long tail of the success curve. Not going to college is like being a business that decided to just never bother getting on the internet, or a person who doesn't know how to drive. Unless you move to some isolated backwater that isn't subject to the network or are some kind of extreme outlier, you are at a huge disadvantage.
Notable that these articles about the doubtful value of a university degree are written exclusively by people who have one.
The wider availability of education (via cheap debt) and downward mobility means a degree (all things equal) is no longer as distinguishing and does not have the same impact on life outcomes as it once might have. Even previously, the people who went to college had such a huge social head start anyway, it would be difficult to control for education as the determining factor in success.
Outside of STEM, I'd argue modern colleges offer students very little more than a tribal affiliation, which is the elephant in the room for articles like these. If you told kids why they need to go to college, it would devalue the degree even further as they re-tribalized around other rites of passage. This doesn't mean don't go to college, it means do absolutely everything in your power to graduate college, because the arbitrary biases and disadvantages of the alternative defy all reason and make anyone with an IQ above 90 insane.
When you look at college as a Giffen Good, which people need for participation in a radical monopoly over the labour market, created by a network effect from its debt fueled availability, of course it seems like a college education is not worth it - but it's only ever not worth it to people who already have one.
I'd like a mainstream platform to write that view and put these "is college worth it?" navel gazer articles to rest. If only there were an institution to affiliate with...
The classic example of a Giffen good is a staple food like bread:
As Mr. Giffen has pointed out, a rise in the price of bread makes so large a drain on the resources of the poorer labouring families and raises the marginal utility of money to them so much that they are forced to curtail their consumption of meat and the more expensive farinaceous foods: and, bread being still the cheapest food which they can get and will take, they consume more, and not less of it.
If I remember F&D correctly, Veblen was more of a back fitted narrative construct around luxury goods, where Giffen was the "impossible," artifact of inverting the price elasticity of demand. They are related, but Veblen didn't write that a wave of debt would cause leisure consumption, whereas the wave of debt fueled demand is just the distortion that would make Giffen goods possible.
"The rate of underemployment—working in a job that does not require a college degree—was 42.5 percent among recent graduates."
Wow. That, plus debt, is a huge hit.
The big item that analysis doesn't consider is the commonality of college education. "Between 2000 and 2018, the percentage of people 25 years and older who had completed a bachelor's degree or higher increased by 9 percentage points, from 25.6 percent to 35.0 percent." - Census Bureau[1]. That's for the entire population, so it lags changes for young people.
I have a degree from a state school in chemistry, it's been worth it for me. In part because the GI Bill paid for it, but it also landed me several jobs writing software where domain knowledge is required and not so easy to come by without formal education.
just want to add something that seems missing from much of the discussion of higher education; consider the question rephrased as, "is it worth learning to learn?" higher ed is not just job training. its exposure to ideas, opinions, people, and energy in an environment explicitly not tied to a profit motive. it should be cheaper, and more accessible, but..
> Combined with a continuing surge in the number of new college graduates entering the labor market, this resulted in stagnating wages in those jobs along with a “cascade” of college graduates into lower-skill jobs. These underemployed college graduates, in turn, pushed some low-skilled workers out of the job market altogether.
Right ... yet, believe this paper when it says that those pushed-out-of-the-job-market low-skilled workers with no college degrees are not any worse off.
college provides such access to knowledge not available anywhere else (not legally to my knowledge). any progress is most likely to come from academia first due to that concentration of knowledge.
so if we are truly heading towards a collegeless future, i am hoping that anyone who can contribute to research can get access to that knowledge. money is a major concern, but if we can't make progress then we have a bigger issue.
One thing I don't see talked about a lot is the risk involved in going to college.
All the frequently-cited studies about college look at the incomes of college graduates versus the incomes of non-college graduates, and then compare that to the cost of education, and that generally looks fairly positive.
But of students who enroll in 4-year programs, only 60% graduate within 6 years[1]. For these students, college has actively harmed them: they're saddled with crippling debt, but don't get the benefits of a college degree. Also consider that they aren't working as many hours, if any, during college, so they lose even more in wages they could have earned.
The EV if starting and finishing college is coming into question, but the EV of starting college is clearly negative if you have only a 60% chance of finishing.
If we're talking anecdotal experience, I'm one of the people who you're talking about, and if I could go back in time, I'd a) not have done any internships and b) not have quit college. But let's not discuss anecdotes, because that's not how policy should be determined. Let's keep the focus on data.
What you're describing happens, but it's enough of an outlier that it doesn't tip the median outcomes to the positive. People with some college but no degree still have above-median unemployment and below-median earnings. In fact an associates degree only gets you below-median unemployment: it still doesn't allow you to reach median earnings.
Yes, this is one of the problems: many schools are letting in students who are unlikely to succeed without extra help, and not providing that help.
Many students who enter college lack the prerequisite knowledge to complete even introductory college classes, and are placed in remedial classes. These classes don't count for college credit, but cost the same as college classes there's a limited pool of financial aid available to a student, and typically this pool is smaller for remedial students, who are less likely to qualify for merit-based aid. The results are devastating: only 9.5% of remedial students graduate from two year programs within three years, and only 35.1% of remedial students graduate from four year programs within six years.
> we find that controlling for the education of one’s parents reduces our estimates of college and postgraduate income and wealth premiums by 8 to 18 percent. Controlling also for measures of a respondent’s financial acumen—which may be partly innate—, our estimates of the value added by college and a postgraduate degree fall by 30 to 60 percent. Taken together, our results suggest that college and post-graduate education may be failing some recent graduates as a financial investment
There is no doubt in my mind that someone’s parents’ status and education, and someone’s financial acumen, are both leading to higher incomes and wealth.
Why does it make sense to “control” for these things? Doesn’t this lead to a distorted view, where large real differences in income between two people are factored away?
Sure, financial acumen might be partly innate, or correlated with IQ or family status, but some people surely gain financial acumen precisely by going to college? Sure, parent’s education is a great predictor or ‘own education’, but does that really imply the alternative- that when the professor’s kid is a high school dropout that the kid is better off than other dropouts? Is that supported by the data? Maybe yes, because daddy prof has more money to support his kid, but what happens with the dropout’s kids and future generations?
I’m not arguing that the premium isn’t going down, it’s true that tuition is out of control, but I’m not sure I understand how the methodology here isn’t painting a starker picture than reality. Discounting 50% for ‘acumen’ is a huge influence on the numbers, and when you don’t discount for parents and acumen, the reality is that people with college degrees are earning a lot more actual money.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] threadA degree would absolutely, positively, beyond any shadow of a doubt improve my chances of increasing my income. At my current job only about 7%.
But the tens of thousands of dollars of debt I'd have to take on to get that degree at 4.5-7% interest (or higher)... yeah thanks but no thanks.
So, anecdotally at least, I can agree that there are pretty diminishing returns to getting a degree. While I'd be all but guaranteed to increase my income, I'd be paying out more though:
a 20k 10-year loan at 6.8% (finaid.org suggested this %) interest means I'm paying 27,619.31
a 40k 10-year loan at 6.8% interest means I'm paying 55,238.63
At my current income the 20k loan, bumping up one position and considering our raises inside a position are limited to less than 3.5% annually based on a rather arbitrary 'merit review'. It would be 7-10 years of my increased pay just to cover the loan, assuming no taxes were taken on the increase but also factoring in insurance increases. That means in 14 years I could start keeping more money from that 4 year degree if I could manage a 20k$ degree.
Ha!
People on here earn top percentile salaries which warp the calculus, myself included, but $50K is approximately one year of the UK median income (I imagine the US figure is similar).
I'd be worried about making back hundreds of thousands in a low paid field. But a 50K degree in a well paid field is a no brainer to me.
Earnings increases are cumulative. I'm almost certainly 200% over what I'd have without my undergrad, and not just due to the piece of paper.
Like, flubbing a single negotiation on any job could have a higher impact than that over the rest of your career.
There are _so_ many places where a degree is a must that it's better to ask which institution will happily accept you without a degree without complications (besides the obvious Google and Tesla).
But to give you an answer: lots of hospitals, lots of defense contractors. Me, I was hired by a hospital as a researcher, but there were a great many complications about the pay (my boss said he wanted to pay me more but couldn't).
And, suppose you wanted to emigrate somewhere, say Belgium. It turns out it's just easier to do it if you have a degree than not. You encounter these issues in places you'd least expect them. Just for convenience sake I'm considering getting one.
These are just the example I could remember at the moment, I'm sure there have been more.
I've had gobs and gobs of jobs found via indeed do this to me as part of the 'pre-qualification'. They want to know where you got your degree, sometimes your GPA etc.
Most major, publicly-traded, corporations want a degree beyond entry-level positions. Some companies won't even touch you without a degree (including many startups): for example, Flexport turned me down for the job I'd already done for over a decade, longer than they've been a company, for not having a 4-year degree, this is a direct copy-paste from the rejection email when I applied:
>You obviously have many of the skills we're looking for. However, for the Customs Brokerage role we require a BA/BS degree as well as previous experience in a broker role doing entries and customs classifications.
At the time of that email rejection I'd been doing the job for 12 years and 1 month at my current employer.
Even postings at places like YC have degree requirements for stuff that shouldn't (like assistants).
I saw a developer position recently that required at least a four-year degree and it genuinely surprised me because of how infrequent that requirement appears on developer job postings. The vast majority of posts I see are "four years degree or equivalent experience"
I've worked in software shops before where less than half of the staff had a 4-year degree completed—but it is noteworthy y that everyone had at least some college.
>and my own employer when applying for advancement
That I have seen before, but in higher-ed, where it is kind of a given as it is sort of an eating-your-own-dog-food requirement. If your top employees don't have a degree, and you sell degrees, it can tarnish your appearance.
The government is heavily involved in the student loan industry. Consequently, the entire market is heavily distorted. One of the largest programs is the Direct/Stafford loan program [0]. Essentially the student (and only the student; no cosigners allowed) directly borrows money from the federal government at a fairly cheap interest rate (in the last decade [1], it has ranged from 3.4% to 5.05%). In some cases, the student is not liable for interest accrued while they're in school (see the following paragraph for details if you're interested). The loan limit is $31k for dependent students and $57.5k for independent students.
There's two variants to direct loans: subsidized (where the government pays for the interest while the student is in school) and unsubsidized (no qualification necessary). Anyone can take out unsubsidized loans, limited to the COA (cost of attendance: the amount a college declares it would cost to attend; inclusive of tuition, fees, books, room & board, etc.). Anyone who's EFC (expected family contribution: the amount the government expects the student/their parents to pay annually based upon their income and assets) is less than COA can take out up to the shortfall in subsidized loans (but no more than the specified limit which varies by dependent-status and year in school).
[0]: https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/subsidized...
[1]: https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/interest-r...
An actuary's kid will have an easier time becoming an actuary. Same for lawyers and doctors. That doesn't mean that college is a non causal factor in those students lifetime earnings... Quite the opposite. You're not becoming any of those things without college.
The student went to college precisely because they understand viscerally and precisely how college sets them up for a life of higher than average earnings. And what they need to do at college to tap into that potential.
Similarly, I'm not sure I believe the claim that there's no obvious causal link between education and financial acumen.
The big difference seems to be "do you know WHY you are at college?" And in cases where the answer is yes, it's still a good choice.
There's a lot of recent evidence that, all else being equal (controlling for educational attainment, test scores, and grades) parental income/social class has a huge impact on income.
That is, if you come from a lower social class, you can expect a lower income increase from college than someone coming from a higher social class.
There's significant policy implications here-- our long-standing goal of getting lower income kids to take college loans and go to college may not have a positive expected return for them.
??? You're saying that someone should not consider the outcome distribution of people similarly situated to themselves when making a choice? Isn't that completely rejecting empiricism?
If, from a public policy standpoint, our effort has been to get to the poor to college to end poverty; and the educated poor do do better with education, but not nearly as well as their middle-class cohort; and the present-value of education is smaller than the present-value of their lifetime wage increases-- one has to question whether the policy is well informed.
If you're asserting that the picture is unduly distorted by those at the very highest spread of the income distribution-- you're right. But the effect is still when we look at median outcomes.
> Some of these differences are probably innate. A brain surgeon is likely smart and his kids are probably also smart.
Presumably we'd be able to measure this and control for this.
> Some, but most are due to informational deficiencies and networking effects.
Yes, and various kinds of cultural cues about class of upbringing that persist after education and act to limit opportunity.
No, what I’m saying is presence of a statistical pattern in a whole population is not evidence that we shouldn’t make policy to change it. Statistically, those who live in Miami are more tan than those who live in Wisconsin, on average. But if you expose a Wisconsin resident to the same amount of sun, on average they will be just as tan.
In your example, you'd expect the Wisconsin guy to increase in tan more when you put him in the Bahamas and give him a dose of sun than the guy who started out in Miami and was given an equivalent further dose of sun.
But we've measured the opposite-- the guy in Wisconsin (poor background) does get more tan, but doesn't increase in tan (increase in income) nearly as much as the guy who started in Miami (non-poor backgrounds).
We measure the value of this-- getting to college-- as very small and even possibly negative.
We also measure interventions and their values / impacts on earnings much higher.
Going "la la la but college would be much better and itself a win if we did 50 other supportive things" is all great, but it's fundamentally handwaving in the absence of evidence.
EDIT: Its not the one I'm looking for, but I found a good one. http://conference.iza.org/conference_files/CoNoCoSk2011/gens... shows that if you control for IQ, the average person makes $100k more over the course of their whole working life by getting a bachelor's.
- This doesn't even account for the four years of work you lose by going to college instead of working.
- Its based on data from people who mostly graduated before the year 2000, and by all accounts the value of college is becoming less, not more. It's also based on a calculation when college was much cheaper.
Everything else, you just work hard at your first job and nobody gives a shit. I went to a big SUNY school and was a mediocre student. We all made out fine.
Sure he learned a lot more and had to do a thesis for his undergrad, but we have the same job now.
He has no more leverage than me when it comes to that.
Steve Ballmer was Bill Gates’ roommate. You are getting free networking lottery tickets with high achievers at an Ivy.
The actual data shown in that reference seems to tell a different story, it shows people with college degrees earning 20-50k per year, on average, after taxes. That will sum to more than $100k over a lifetime.
The 100k number is a fictional number, it’s trying to answer the question of assuming the same person didn’t go to college, is it possible to calculate the true value of college.
We could argue whether they actually calculated that number correctly, but what is absolutely true -- my point -- is that the actual people who had actual degrees actually earned a lot more than 100k extra over their lives, on average. The differences in wealth, illustrated by the data in that paper (see figure 1), are 2x-3x in annual income and accumulated savings much higher than 100k.
Under this model, you could have someone with a higher IQ and a degree earning more money than a non-degree holder, but have a ‘negative’ return. Does that accurately reflect the situation, should the advice be to skip college, even though the absolute financial returns might be positive?
And what does this answer tell someone who has a low IQ or a low socioeconomic status? How should they try to evaluate this choice? Does discounting high IQ and high family education give an accurate picture of the benefits of post-secondary education to poorer families?
They point out that much of your lifetime earnings are predicted by your parents' level of education.
1: Lots of companies will reject you on sight without a degree. I don't think it's a good thing, but it is reality.
2: With a degree your ability to move overseas dramatically improves. I moved to America after graduating. I flat out couldn't have done that without a degree. Points based systems immigration systems like New Zealand have dramatic bonuses for people with degrees.
3: You don't have to jump through the hoops and explain why you don't have a degree all the time. Stupid reason I know, but it's something I've seen friends without degrees have to do constantly - and not just in career situations. As I mentioned, I went to a no-name university. If you live in NZ, you'll know it. If you're an American, chances are, you've never heard of it. But because I have a degree, it doesn't ever really come up.
4: The cost isn't that bad, when you spread it out over a career. My degree & living costs cost about $60k NZD (~$40k USD). That's $1k USD / year, or $.50 per hour. Considering how my income has multiplied in the few years since I've graduated (SF wages help tremendously here), the actual cost is barely anything, even when you control for the opportunity cost of studying.
Where I think College returns make a lot less sense
• Paying out of state tuition for lifestyle reasons, when you're going into a relatively low paid field afterwards (e.g. teaching).
• Paying private school tuition at a school without a strong reputation
• Grad school, in general, seems to be a rip off
Disregarding the mental toll of a PhD (one problem being that too many people want to be paid to think than there are available positions), I totally disagree with the parent poster's claim that graduate school is a rip-off. Just being in an an academic environment, being able to take classes, & studying around really smart people and doing research at the highest academic level is a really great experience & makes the stress worth it.
Ok...
If you come out the other end of a PhD, then you have the opportunity for best of both worlds: high paying job to work on the problems you find intellectually stimulating.
Also, it is cliche, but doing a PhD does train a person in a way to think that you don't necessarily pick up in a normal job.
The thinking advantage of a PhD is really valuable, its like an extended apprenticeship with your advisor. Also, it gives you time to look at things you find interesting (well, it should, sometimes not).
I guess your mileage may vary. The best description I've heard about grad school is that it's a self induced neurosis. That was certainly my experience at the time I did it.
You took your degree in a country with far lower inequality and better inward education investment, and then jumped over to work in a country that doesn't tax people enough to support USA students.
I'd imagine that is pretty good value.
The US really benefits from immigrants that were trained by poorer countries. I too moved here, my chronically ill relative is still at home.
The funny thing is, my student loan is one of the highest out of my American friend group† (although very normal amongst my NZ peers). Unlike the US, there was a lot less much in the way of financial aid/scholarships available, so sticker price was what people actually paid.
https://data.oecd.org/inequality/income-inequality.htm
† For people with undergraduate degrees
The friend bit is anecdata.
Looks like NZ avg debt is $28k NZD [1]
USA is $29 USD [2]
So USA is 50% more expensive, on avg (NZDUSD 1.5). IMHO both are a disgrace, but that's another thing.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loans_in_New_Zealand#S...
2: https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/
There's fairly decent financial aid available to cover your living costs if you're from a low income family, but that cuts off pretty quickly, and unlike the US, there isn't really a culture of paying for your children's education, so there's a lot of kids (like me) who grew up upper-middle class but didn't get much help through university.
Overall, I'd equate the USD = NZD as realtively equivalent, even though there is a currency difference. The average American is graduating into a job paying $51k USD, whereas NZ grads are often starting at $50-55k NZD.
[1] https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/compensatio...
Perhaps the biggest difference is the interest rate which is government backed and around maybe 1-2%. According to first result on Google the interest rates on US student loans seems to be around 6-8%.
Grad school is often much better for immigration scoring than a bachelors. Especially if you can manage to do the graduate degree in the country you want to immigrate to.
Also Masters (MBA is different) is useless in most fields unless used to get a visa or something. Usually you are foregoing wages with few additional benefits. Might be slightly easier to get first job.
Not sure source of degree matters as long as accredited. Certainly there can be upside like same alma mater but I rarely care but will admit to negative bias to Univ of Phoenix but interview and work history trump everything.
Having said that BS or BE have merit if the student actually takes it seriously. I learned a whole lot that I'm not sure I would have learned through self study alone (a least around that time).
Only works for programmers though. Everybody else should obviously get degrees.
Local undergrad is way more sensible. If you want to be elite, kill it locally then do a masters at Oxbridge or whatever.
https://appam.confex.com/appam/2018/webprogram/Paper27374.ht...
> Using a new administrative dataset combining the universe of permanent migrant departures from the Philippines with the universe of institution-level post-secondary enrollment and graduation, we show that enrollment and graduation in nursing programs increased in response to demand from abroad for nurses. The supply of nursing programs increased to accommodate this. The increase in nursing enrollment and graduation during the period was much larger than the increase in nurse migration and contributed to a brain gain
Their economy runs on remittances, and the population is mostly under 18, so the government wants graduates to emigrate and send money home.
They even have the OFW department to monitor treatment of their emigrant workers, and provide a parallel immigration office.
Possibly the worst citation ever. :)
You probably mean "knowledge workers" :)
I'm not sure I agree on grad school, perhaps you could elaborate? It's true that it's very much hit or miss. But my experience is that there's plenty of grad schools which offer 1 - 1.5 year Masters' and tuition fees that aren't abnormal. Here too your second point rings true, either you pay a lot of money for a good rep (e.g. if you go into BigLaw, assuming you don't burn out, it gives a high return rate), or you pay little for a no-name university, and then I feel grad school absolutely does come at a premium. Compared to a 3-4 year Bachelor's degree, it's usually a relatively quick program with potentially bigger upside, especially if paid for by your employer.
I think what most students underestimate is just how many of them fail to finish the standard path. Almost half of students don't finish their bachelor's within six years due to delays and changing paths, and a lot of them quit entirely. I think college makes sense if you know what you're looking to study, why, are dedicated to completing it, and able to.
A lot of students go into fields of study as a teenager, literally never having had a 5 minute conversation with a person actually working in the field, having spent no time looking at the income tables, or indeed not actually considering the field at all, but just wanting to become a college student. It's these students who probably drag down the stats quite a lot. I've seen fairly unimpressive people go into a business course, work their ass off, do various internships, and land high-paying jobs. And I've seen smart kids start the same business course, muck around, graduate after 6-7 years and land a mediocre job that doesn't really require any particular degree. At the end of the day the student is still the most important factor here, and by the time they head to college, it's often already 'too late' for institutions to turn an B student into an A student, without the intrinsic motivation. There's lots more room in primary/secondary school for that, that's really where it's at. What college you head to after is less important in my opinion.
• Lucrative fields like medicine & dentistry saddle you with enormous debts (often in the mid six figures) that take multiple years to pay off. The ROI is probably worth it if you work to 65, but you're locked in for easily twenty years, and such high debt levels make taking risks very difficult.
• Lucrative, but more populated fields like law & business also often saddle you with enormous debt, and for these degrees you need a school with a strong brand name to get a look in anywhere (if you do an MBA and you aren't at Harvard/Stanford/Wharton, and a very few others, what's the point?).
• In a lot of fields (liberal arts/social sciences) what's the point of getting a masters? Do you get an earning premium? Is the earning premium worth the opportunity cost? I'd be surprised if the answer is often yes. I have a friend who was a teacher and is now studying to be a families therapist. Lovely person, but absolutely terrible choice. Years of additional study and debt, and no hope of a future earning substantially more money to show for it all.
I agree completely with your points about teenagers not doing enough due diligence before they study.
You also need to take into account the opportunity cost. You could have been working at the time, earning $XXk/year.
In usa they are used as a path to immigration. 90% of grad students are foreigners.
Nowhere near that in total over all fields and even in STEM where the percentage is the highest it is about 80%.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/education/edlife/american...
That's why, for people interested in technology, software development is an incredible blessing. If you're clever about it, and plan ahead in HS, you can easily skip college and come out making $100,000/yr within 3-4 years, even in small markets.
I've never taken a single computer science class, make well over $100,000 in a highly-challenging software development job, and no one has ever asked me about a college degree (with the exception of one job that I regretted accepted and which I quit in 8 months).
There are other similar routes available to people without college degrees. Several wealthy people my parents know started out in construction, but rapidly moved into flipping houses and real estate, and made a fortune. Their physical labor was over by their late 20s.
There are many paths that skip college and don't end up working physical labor after a decade or two. But you have to be clever and proactive (if you're on HN, I'm going to assume you're at least the former).
Spoiler. Been there, done that. Unless you're at an Ivy, if you're majoring in philosophy, you'll not think it was worth it in five years. My sin was Classics, but similar outcome.
Assuming you're on HN because you're teaching yourself programming, the sting will be somewhat lessened (that's the route I took), since you'll at least be able to get a job.
But it'll still sting to make those massive loan payments knowing that nothing you learned is helping you with your professional life, and that things like philosophy, mathematics, and languages (and computer science!) can be learned just as easily with discipline, YouTube, and a few good textbooks.
It's very easy to delay the pain of loan payments when you're in school, but they'll be there waiting for you, inevitably, through sickness and health, marriage and divorce.
If you have endless curiosity, college is even less worth it. Instead, being loan-free gives you the freedom to work in areas that truly intrigue you, and to work in very low-paying internships while you're learning.
But I know I won't convince you. Likely no one could have convinced me at the time (although only one person tried, once).
Edit: if this were the 1970s or earlier, when you could pay for college classes from waiting tables or a $10,000 loan (inflation adjusted!), I'd absolutely say go for it. But taking out even $50,000 in debt at age 18 for anything less than a guaranteed job with a good income (physician assistant, nursing, accounting) is mortgaging your future. Taking out $200,000, which is the going rate for most [edit: should read "many, private", and is probably closer to $100,000] liberal arts 4-year-degrees, is insanity, but between culture BS about degrees and "academic counselors", I know it may not seem that way to you right now.
Edit: I saw your edit, and again, thank you for your input. I would just like to note that I'll be graduating with ~12k in debt - I went to a community college first while living with my parents and transferred to a UC, and California's higher education system supports low-income, first generation households fairly well - to which I owe great gratitude to.
Edit: just saw your edit reply to above edit :) that is much more reasonable than the situation that I put myself into. Still, I would recommend doing everything you can to avoid the debt. Paying back 1000's of dollars is a large burden.
I had the option of an income based repayment plan too, so if I wanted to take a low paying jobs my monthly payment would have just dropped.
The only reason it would have been a burden was if I felt like I had to pay it off in 4 years.
So it's sounds like you're OK, or at least not financially ruined. Payments on $12,000 will be manageable.
I'm mostly talking about the folks taking out $50-200,000 in loans for an undergrad degree with some random major (with the upper end of that scale obviously being much worse than the lower end).
That's a false dichotomy that will be difficult to fully adhere to when you spend your next decades as an adult. Yes, perspective matters; a LOT. But "what is" and "what was" can matter a lot too. Imagining that you can just think your way out of hard spots can lead to complacency about the choices that you make. Keeping a positive perspective can involve an enormous amount of mental effort that may have been mitigated by better choices.
Also, my only remaining loans are from me going back and doing a "professional" degree that proved to be fairly useless. I had thought I did my research but failed to crunch the numbers carefully enough or account for future family decisions (most employment opportunities in the field required extended foreign residence/travel). So I sympathize with taking out loans for a "responsible" degree and still coming out financially screwed.
>Taking out $200,000, which is the going rate for most liberal arts 4-year-degrees
The average student loan balance is $29,800 upon graduation. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/20/how-much-the-average-student...
1) Tons of scholarships, and
2) Non-liberal arts colleges (technical schools, professional schools, the scam schools advertised on TV, etc).
I also was thinking (although failed to specify) private liberal arts colleges. I stand by that figure. If you're taking out loans for a private liberal arts degree, it'll be over $100,000 and many will exceed $200,000.
Edit: Just read that it's supposedly $32,000 in loans for private 4-year degrees. I'm very skeptical of that Federal Reserve figure, since average tuition only for private 4-year degrees is somewhere around $35,000 per year. The Fed also has incentives to find ways to underplay this figure, just like they undercount unemployment. So I'm highly skeptical.
College Board estimates $14,610 per year is what students actually pay for tuition only. If you don't have wealthy or upper-middle-class parents, then you'll need to tack on living expenses and books. If you're not wealthy or upper-middle class, you'll take most of that out in loans, which will be well over $100,000 by graduation.
I know numerous students who have recently graduated with over $100,000 in loans from private 4-year colleges (no, not me, I graduated over 10 years ago, and all of my remaining loans are from a professional master's degree). I know several underemployed lawyers who have well over $200,000 in school loans that they'll likely never pay off.
31% of students graduate with zero debt, that does not mean their tuition was free. Those balances also exclude loans taken out by parents to pay for collage.
The simple reality is collage class are incredibly shallow introductions to the subject matter and hardly worth the price of admission. That’s somewhat offset by credentials, but your comparison is high school which says more about how bad high school is than how great collage is.
No joke, at one point I tutoring my friends in some classes I had not taken. Your professors may have a deep understanding of the subject, but they need to dumb the material down so people can pick it up over ~15 weeks.
Analytic philosophy is very STEMish. Majoring in the logically rigorous courses sets you up for many monied disciplines (besides programming). Even better if you can minor in something like coding, accounting, or even a trade.
Doing ROTC can get you a scholarship, guaranteed job out of college, many opportunities beyond, and serving in the military is in itself a worthwhile endeavor.
Everyone I meet that works at starbucks has a masters AND 90k in student debt. Bankruptcy doesn't make student loans go away.
I think things are about to start swinging in the "non-college" direction.
But it can be dramatically diluted through lenient immigration policies (and that's exactly what happened).
Bottom line, you have to be clever stay on your toes to make it in today's economy, and even then you need lots of luck and excellent health. UBI would result in a much more just society.
UBI would require land value tax to ensure the public value is capture for public spending. UBI alone is a land speculator wet dream and Yang is totally wrong to be pushing it without LVT. Yes in the middle of nowhere it can help, but most people are in cities and rents will rise there to current rent + UBI amount.
I'm open to suggestions, but we've passed the point we were in from 1950 to 2000 where any mediocre person could work hard and be guaranteed a middle-class life. And that's wrong, not to mention very threatening to our democracy.
Iron lungs are physically large and heavy. They are expensive and difficult to move. Health insurance doesn't want to pay extra for your comfort.
With an iron lung you can talk and eat. There is minimal difficulty; simply time your sentences or swallows to match the action of the iron lung. There is also no danger of tubes damaging your vocal cords.
The choice of technology is obvious, depending on how much patient comfort is valued. It is clear that the modern system doesn't give a damn if patients are miserable.
This is a fantasy.
I personally know a lot of mediocre hard working people, mostly baby boomers. None had or have a "guaranteed" middle class lifestyle, and many don't have a middle class lifestyle at all, even now. One moved to a retirement community to "retire" and had to get a job. Another is currently without heat.
Even for people not in poverty it would help even out their income over their life cycle - more money when they have kids, find themselves temporarily unemployed, or in retirement.
Certainly land rents are totally unjust and a huge problem, and land value tax/public housing/public land ownership would be great, but the case for UBI is compelling even without any of that.
How would that be? If your rent goes up $1000 regardless of what you're paying now, someone who earns $0 and can't afford a $600 apartment now collects $1000 and can't afford a $1600 apartment while the guy who could afford the $600 apartment by earning $1500 now has a monthly income of $2500 and a $1600 apartment.
For the person on the margin of affordability they can now afford an apartment.
Those on the highest incomes don't gain in a raw sense because they pay in more than they get, but still benefit from income smoothing.
Yes, I think many things go straight back into land.
The UK has 'housing benefit'. It's 'landlord benefit', because it subsidises unpayable rents.
That's the difference with Yang. He's the most data-driven politician I've ever seen.
Other politicians seem mostly ideological, and I don't think they'd adjust their policies even in the face of overwhelming data it's not working. Like if Warren used Antitrust law to break up Amazon and it didn't change any relevant metrics, I think she would still call the policy a success. Ideological politicians like that are way more dangerous than someone who wants to try new ideas and is willing to adjust if they don't work.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2019/12/10/786314251/elizabeth-warrens-j...
At this point his proposal is just a really expensive handout for people that already have jobs. And what critical social services are going to be cut to foot that bill?
Have a look at this 10 minute video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD_dZvPwAj0
In the US ? Where you can’t immigrate legally as a skilled manual worker ?
Obviously prices vary.
I can make a living with a trade skill, but data shows I’m more likely to make a lot more with a college degree. You have billionaire dropouts and baristas with phds. But on average, degree nets you a lot of lifetime income.
Maybe that will change.
Perhaps it's just me, but in the Zuckerberg case specifically, I'd think quite a bit of luck and timing had to do with it. If Zuckerberg had been born 10 years later after the obvious social network ideas were already created? Or if he had gone to a no-name college (or none whatsoever) and Facebook had never taken off the way it did at Harvard?
Or maybe you meant they were born elite, in which case, I don't know anything about that.
I think the main value add - looking back on how I perceived FB when it came out and why a lot of us started using it - was branding and a cleaner, fresh design. And the newsfeed was a new concept...
This is the big idea here - being born in the right situation gives you the ability to bear risk where a lower middle class kid can’t bear that risk because if things don’t work out, that kid is going to be homeless. When you can take a lot of risk with little downside, it almost always pays off in the long run.
What do you mean by that? Zuckerberg and Gates are indisputably elite because they're two of the richest people in the world.
But I wouldn't call them elite beforehand, and definitely not if they didn't work a day in their lives. Their parents' money seems to come from being a lawyer, a dentist, and a psychiatrist. That's not "elite", that's something any family can achieve in two generations.
You could argue a much lower threshold for elite, which is fine, but then it's quite a bait and switch to lead with Zuckerberg and Gates for that category.
https://philip.greenspun.com/bg/
Aside from those 2 examples there are plenty of colleges with a business model of selling overpriced useless degrees to people who can't be bothered to do some due diligence before getting a loan. Those degrees won't pay off and despite sharing the "college" name, I wouldn't average between the 2 groups.
I've got a few friends who work in science, and it seems to be a pretty poorly paying field, with a real lack of job prospects, unless you secure a job at a government research department.
I try to use reliable data sets [0] to help understand because anecdotes are hard for me to make decisions. The data are almost always a few years old so they aren’t perfect and could miss a new trend. But it’s the best I know how to use.
[0] figure 4 shows stem 3rd highest after health and management https://www2.ed.gov/policy/highered/reg/hearulemaking/2011/c...
More seriously, anecdotes are terrible when giving advice to fresh high school seniors on their way to graduation. When people think of degrees in certain fields, they gravitate to the successful people (“I’ll study acting and make millions like the famous actors I know”, etc). They don’t think of and aren’t even aware of how many people get those degrees and fail hard.
That’s why they need to see the placement and salary stats to understand what their up against. Once they understand a French Comparative Literature degree has approximately no economic value, then they can make that decision knowingly. Papering over that by pointing out the one leader that happens to have that degree does more harm than good.
At the end of the day, people hire you. Not data. After all, who says that a teenager can tell apart badly interpreted data any better than poor anecdotes?
Teenagers should be able to understand data by the time they pick a college or career.
I think there's a world of difference between "I want to study acting and I'll end up successful like Brad Pitt" and "Hmm, my cousin is in marketing, and seems to have created a great career there, I should talk to them about that."
Anecdotes about people you don't know, and career stories you don't fully understand aren't helpful, but frankly I don't think massive data sets on how much the average graduate earns within two years of graduation (for example) are all that helpful either, except as a broad way to compare yourself. It's such a large number of people, you don't really anything particularly useful at an individual level (even though there are plenty of good uses for data like that).
http://www.cs-tcse.org/
https://engineers.texas.gov/downloads/eb17.htm
I ended up getting a microbiology degree and an EE, went to medical school (MD PhD) but dropped out. I was able to get a great job doing programming, so Im relatively sure they were right.
With my kids Im using the same approach.
With regards to grad school, my parents' philosophy was if you could not get grad school funded by an RA or TA, then you had no business going.
The sciences degrees are only obviously worth it if you then go on to become a doctor, but that's more schooling and the undergrad degree isn't a strict requirement anyway.
Most of my friends with degrees in math, physics, etc., just ended up being software engineers anyway. So the degree "paid off" for them in the same way a CS degree would, but they would've been better served just going CS.
In fact, funding for scientific research was cut by the Obama administration, leading to the closure of all but two of our branches and displacing dozen of workers amidst a recession.
When I transferred to academia, I took on an underpaying role, and found that the same shenanigans were afoot there. Now, we are approaching the end of the 2000s population boom, and in five years, universities will have many fewer prospective applicants for the following decade at least. The ripples of the contraction caused by the gambling of a few spoiled bankers will be felt again in another 20 years with a much smaller and resource-constrained workforce, still reeling from the burdens of loan debt and overpriced housing.
Unless Sanders gets his way, that is.
It's probably best I plan my exit in advance this go-round.
I’m talking about averages as there are certainly schools that suck. I would take my statement to mean that every single college is a net benefit. But as a general guidance, no other information available, a degree will net me more money over my lifetime.
If I were giving advice to someone thinking about schools, I would have them review the particular school, keep costs low, and study with a particular career in mind, stem/medicine a good target.
[0] https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/research-summaries/education...
That means they show up for $95. No work right? When they actually do something there is another charge right? Where you are? So confused.
You brought up a 30 minute job. So I shared what it costs for me for a 30 minute (or more) job. And that it’s easy to get someone to come quickly for such a job.
I’m saying that if the problem can be solved in an hour, it’s $95. This is called a “service call.” Basically coming out and fixing what can be fixed without buying parts.
Any extra labor would cost more. This is a much better situation than yours since you can’t even get a plumber to help you flush a toilet for $300. That’s unfortunate.
Thus my suggestion from me that you could get better contractors. I think it’s reasonable that you should be able to pay $100 for a 30 minute job and be satisfied. Rather than be willing to pay $300 and being unsatisfied.
The Guys doing the work make a fraction of the hourly rate, anywhere from 15 to 35 percent (not counting benefits). The rest goes to the house.
As a 1099 employee you need to be clearing at least double the equivalent employee hourly wage because there is so much overhead. Remember, a contractor doesn’t get a single day of paid vacation.
This does not count when a salaried employee works more than 40 hours.
My plumber charges 150/hour.
Contractors around here bill by the job. I had bids for $5000 for a 1 day job for 2 people when incorporated into a GC bid. The GC was getting 25% on top of the 5000.
You have to factor in not only benefits, but also:
* federal-level taxes (there’s no employer to pay the other half, so the contractor bears the whole portion)
* tools (you buy your own tools, stock your own spares, do your own maintenance on your dime — non-billable)
* learning and mandated certifications (same as above — non-billable)
* liability insurance (non-billable)
* vehicle maintenance, taxes, tolls, and fees (non-billable)
* transit time to and from not only contracted job sites, but also estimates that may ultimately result in no revenue (non-billable)
* marketing/lead generation (Angie’s List and HomeAdvisor are free to you, not to contractors — non-billable)
* material storage (you have the keep the customer’s plywood dry if the weather changes, or if the customer has a family emergency and needs to reschedule)
Further I don't believe it is possible for a hospital with all its specialized equipment to 1099 its nurses (doesn't pass the IRS '20 questions' test on contracting).
[0] https://allnurses.com/what-quot-agency-nursing-quot-t441525/
I think as we advance in the information age, maybe degrees are less about helping you actually get the job done, and more about serving as a mean for companies (and countries) to roughly filter high surplus of candidates. Add the fact its easier today to apply for job posts, its very hard for recruiters to filter intelligently at reasonable time. My guess is if everyone would have first degree, the recruiters will require a second degree.
This has less weight on jobs short in candidates (i.e specialized nurse, plumber, welder, proven AI expert, or whatever is hot right now).
For those prices just do it yourself. Is this hyperbole or did you really pay $900 for an hour job? How complicated could it have been if it only took an hour?
It will likely take much longer but will leave you in a more controllable financial situation in the interim.
It's a logical mechanism of near unlimited credit creation to absorb all productivity gains for capture by rentiers.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/mobile/p...
The thing is that it makes sense if the degree leads to a dramatically higher income and you actually use the chance.
If I'd stayed in my hometown instead of moving to London, it'd still be worth it, but probably to the tune of 100-200K.
All of these numbers are probably lower than the benefit I'm likely to derive over my working life but 18 year old me would have risk adjusted.
Across the population of course, the balance changes dramatically, because huge numbers of people are terminally skint, working unskilled jobs, etc.
Most people probably shouldn't get a degree.
Who actually wants to be 'most people' when they're an 18 year old?
The real question is, "Does an ivy league degree, and those that are very expensive worth it?" I suspect that in most cases it's not. An art degree from Harvard will most likely not pay for itself. But an engineering one from a respected state school will likely have a good return on investment.
Bottom line a degree is worth it. But you have to make sure you pick a major that pays off in the end.
If you are, then the average outcome probably doesn't matter to you, because you're going to select for profitability in your degree choice, you're going to move around for work, continuously study and train in adult life, and generally you're gonna be fine financially (if perhaps not emotionally, oho).
If you're not profit focused - if you're doing the degree primarily and substantially because you love X and want to do X - then what do you care if it doesn't pay back? You got to be an X! The question is almost irrelevant.
I think a lot of analysis suffers from this averaging effect whereby actually that average person doesn't exist.
There is no realistic path that would have lead to me making the average income for my cohort, for example, because I'm just not that sort of person - I'd rather just go relatively all out, or else work for a non-profit or scrappy startup or whatever, so I either bin high or low.
What a dismal reading experience, skimming from pages of text to the end to see what the cited figure(s) actually show, then back to the text again.
Who sanctions this sort of thing?
This practice will go away as all publishing moves to digital formats. But as long as there is a print version for purchase as well, it will be more cost-efficient to organize papers like this.
I think the decision worth it* because it opens up horizon, opportunities to working overseas (not just Singapore) and much better living standard.
I didn't even know what a CS degree will do after graduation and just randomly chose it because I like Math back in HS. I guess the real benefit of a degree is the pointers and community you get. Surely this can be replaced with a good mentorship, but that requires a good network beforehand.
*the quality of education in Singapore University IMHO is far from the quality of the content I found in the publicly shared course content in US universities.
The biggest value factor of all is Metcalfe's Law of network effects, where the almost universal availability of higher education means that not pursuing it places your starting position in life on the outer long tail of the success curve. Not going to college is like being a business that decided to just never bother getting on the internet, or a person who doesn't know how to drive. Unless you move to some isolated backwater that isn't subject to the network or are some kind of extreme outlier, you are at a huge disadvantage.
Notable that these articles about the doubtful value of a university degree are written exclusively by people who have one.
The wider availability of education (via cheap debt) and downward mobility means a degree (all things equal) is no longer as distinguishing and does not have the same impact on life outcomes as it once might have. Even previously, the people who went to college had such a huge social head start anyway, it would be difficult to control for education as the determining factor in success.
University is starting to resemble a "radical monopoly," (Ivan Illich, summarized here: https://twitter.com/fietsprofessor/status/112207372586260070...) where there is nothing discretionary about it.
Outside of STEM, I'd argue modern colleges offer students very little more than a tribal affiliation, which is the elephant in the room for articles like these. If you told kids why they need to go to college, it would devalue the degree even further as they re-tribalized around other rites of passage. This doesn't mean don't go to college, it means do absolutely everything in your power to graduate college, because the arbitrary biases and disadvantages of the alternative defy all reason and make anyone with an IQ above 90 insane.
When you look at college as a Giffen Good, which people need for participation in a radical monopoly over the labour market, created by a network effect from its debt fueled availability, of course it seems like a college education is not worth it - but it's only ever not worth it to people who already have one.
I'd like a mainstream platform to write that view and put these "is college worth it?" navel gazer articles to rest. If only there were an institution to affiliate with...
As Mr. Giffen has pointed out, a rise in the price of bread makes so large a drain on the resources of the poorer labouring families and raises the marginal utility of money to them so much that they are forced to curtail their consumption of meat and the more expensive farinaceous foods: and, bread being still the cheapest food which they can get and will take, they consume more, and not less of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good
Why is it notable?
Wow. That, plus debt, is a huge hit.
The big item that analysis doesn't consider is the commonality of college education. "Between 2000 and 2018, the percentage of people 25 years and older who had completed a bachelor's degree or higher increased by 9 percentage points, from 25.6 percent to 35.0 percent." - Census Bureau[1]. That's for the entire population, so it lags changes for young people.
How did the St. Louis Fed miss that?
[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/02/number-of-peo...
Right ... yet, believe this paper when it says that those pushed-out-of-the-job-market low-skilled workers with no college degrees are not any worse off.
so if we are truly heading towards a collegeless future, i am hoping that anyone who can contribute to research can get access to that knowledge. money is a major concern, but if we can't make progress then we have a bigger issue.
This is very important as students tend to want to learn what's interesting over what's fundamental and important.
In my mind, university is ALWAYS better then no university, the actual thing that puts this in question is... is the cost worth it?
All the frequently-cited studies about college look at the incomes of college graduates versus the incomes of non-college graduates, and then compare that to the cost of education, and that generally looks fairly positive.
But of students who enroll in 4-year programs, only 60% graduate within 6 years[1]. For these students, college has actively harmed them: they're saddled with crippling debt, but don't get the benefits of a college degree. Also consider that they aren't working as many hours, if any, during college, so they lose even more in wages they could have earned.
The EV if starting and finishing college is coming into question, but the EV of starting college is clearly negative if you have only a 60% chance of finishing.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40
What you're describing happens, but it's enough of an outlier that it doesn't tip the median outcomes to the positive. People with some college but no degree still have above-median unemployment and below-median earnings. In fact an associates degree only gets you below-median unemployment: it still doesn't allow you to reach median earnings.
> Graduating within 6 years after start, males and female
> 2011 starting cohort: 60.4%
> Open admissions: 30.7%
> >=90% accepted: 42.3%
> 75-89.9% accepted: 57.8%
> 50-74.9% accepted: 62.0%
> 25-49.9% accepted: 70.3%
> <25% accepted: 86.9%
[0]: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_326.10.a...
Many students who enter college lack the prerequisite knowledge to complete even introductory college classes, and are placed in remedial classes. These classes don't count for college credit, but cost the same as college classes there's a limited pool of financial aid available to a student, and typically this pool is smaller for remedial students, who are less likely to qualify for merit-based aid. The results are devastating: only 9.5% of remedial students graduate from two year programs within three years, and only 35.1% of remedial students graduate from four year programs within six years.
[1] https://postsecondary.gatesfoundation.org/remedial/
There is no doubt in my mind that someone’s parents’ status and education, and someone’s financial acumen, are both leading to higher incomes and wealth.
Why does it make sense to “control” for these things? Doesn’t this lead to a distorted view, where large real differences in income between two people are factored away?
Sure, financial acumen might be partly innate, or correlated with IQ or family status, but some people surely gain financial acumen precisely by going to college? Sure, parent’s education is a great predictor or ‘own education’, but does that really imply the alternative- that when the professor’s kid is a high school dropout that the kid is better off than other dropouts? Is that supported by the data? Maybe yes, because daddy prof has more money to support his kid, but what happens with the dropout’s kids and future generations?
I’m not arguing that the premium isn’t going down, it’s true that tuition is out of control, but I’m not sure I understand how the methodology here isn’t painting a starker picture than reality. Discounting 50% for ‘acumen’ is a huge influence on the numbers, and when you don’t discount for parents and acumen, the reality is that people with college degrees are earning a lot more actual money.