I predict that in the future college will become so expensive that students of all abilities will rely more on online certificates to measure their ability and training. Employers will more slowly accept these credentials. If enough smart people don't go to college, the signaling ability of college will be broken and then the higher education market will collapse or radically reform itself.

I think we're already seeing that in tech. Not just the coding schools which are still pretty young but online training such as Lynda and Pluralsight.

It will take much longer - if ever - for something like that to happen in law, medicine, and engineering but it's feasible. Remember, licensing and accreditation are still relatively new concepts..

I consider myself smart and motivated, I was in sales for about 8 years by choice rather than going to college. I was good at it, but 2 years of college(a double major), and a few years in industry and I'm now making 5x what I did. It's an anecdote sure, but I haven't changed at all, my degree simply qualified me for a different industry.

"2 years of college..."

This bit right here might need some clarification. I believe the current U.S. average time in college is more than 4 years. I'm guessing you were motivated to get your degree as quickly as possible. I don't believe young adults in developed nations have the same motivation. 8 years in the real world will disabuse anyone of a desire to spend more time then necessary in school.

Or they got an associate's degree, which is a 2-year degree which typically requires some lower-division coursework.

5x? If you hustled, sales in many industries should have gotten you to six figures in 8 years.

Have you read Bell Curve?

It talks about completing college as potentially being an indicator or side effect of the things you cite, not the result. The author uses earlier versions of this study and its predecessors to analyze relationships: https://www.nlsinfo.org/content/cohorts/nlsy97

"I wish I could find a study of similarly smart and motivated people"

Skilled trades? Some oil field trades at least while there's not a bust going on?

It takes electricians more than four years to own their own company and have a couple guys working under them, but in all fairness many people take a lot longer than four years to get that art history degree and not all electricians want to own a small business and manage employees. Union payscale for 40 hrs no overtime is about twice median income where I live, I make about twice that programming, 2x median sounds bad compared to 4x median, but compared to joe6pack, twice median isn't that bad of a life, and there's something to be said for leaving work at work when you go home at the end of the day.

I have a cousin in law who's a stationary diesel mechanic with decades of experience and certifications, he's running about 8x median income, but that includes overtime and oncall and unlike fields like programming, diesel mechanic work is a profession that values decades of experience so a noob grad is not going to get that kind of pay. Pay might vary based on local values of supply and demand. Stationary diesels run your datacenter and hospital UPS, and corporations at least seem to have a blank checkbook for disaster recovery spending.

Something to think about WRT lifetime ROI is its widely understood that some fields like programming kick the vast majority of declared employees out by age 40 or so... (please no anecdotes about 2% being permitted to remain in the field, etc) That will confuse the results because a contractor / small business owner / manager / project coordinator will not show up in employee salary stats under "programmer", even if they like to call themselves a "programmer".

> I wish I could find a study of similarly smart and motivated people who decided themselves to go or not to college. As a choice.

I don't think that's actually the ideal study design you want. Any measure of intelligence/motivation is going to be imperfect, so any time you try to control for it but still allow a "free choice", that free choice will be correlated with variables that plausibly impact future success (e.g., maybe "cool, rational thought" is distinct from intelligence and motivation, and influences both the choice to go to college and long-term success).

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/04/02/co...

That said, if you're just asking whether anyone has studied the impact of attending college on lifetime earnings after controlling for several sensible variables that correlate with intelligence, the answer is "yes".

> Students who go to more selective colleges make more money later in life...This partially reflects students who go to more selective colleges being more able and ambitious, as opposed to attending a more selective college boosting one's income. How much does attending boost income? The famous paper Estimating the Return to College Selectivity Over the Career Using Administrative Earning Data (2011) by Dale and Krueger raises the possibility that on average, attending a more selective college doesn't raise earnings at all. Specifically, controlling for

> * Student high school GPA

> * Student SAT score

> * The average SAT score of the colleges that a student applied for

> * The number of applications that the student submitted

> * Various demographic factors (race, sex, parental education)

> they found that as a group, there was no statistically significant difference in income later in life between students who went to more selective colleges and students who went to less selective colleges. Their finding is somewhat robust: it's based on a large (~10k) sample size, it's true both of the class of 1976 and the class of 1989, it's true of the class of 1976 from age 25 through age 50 and it's true both of men and of women.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/k0w/how_much_does_where_you_go_to_co...

Some things to note:

(1) This sort of study is obviously the very first thing you would do if you were investigating this topic seriously, yet extremely few of the popular articles on this topic mention this study. So 99% of popular discussion on this topic is hopeless uninformed, and no one cares.

(2) In the absence of a controlled randomized trial, you can still hope for high-quality pseudo experiments using techniques like differences in differences, or the effect of arbitrary numerical cutoffs, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_in_differences

Thank you! This is very helpful. If /jackcosgrove in this thread is right about "the signaling ability of college will be broken", or at least challenged, maybe we'll be able to continue this with a study at scale between college vs non-college.

I think another way to study this would be to give free scholarships to half a group of random people and see if they earn more money than the other half of the random group.

We could call it....Scotland: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/f...

Disclosure: I am a beneficiary of Scotland's free university system, long ago.

It's not quite the same because the admission system is not random.

The grandparent commenter was concerned that 'people who go to college' may have better outcomes not because of college but because they are smarter or wealthier. In Scotland's case the admission is based on grades so it still leaves open the possibility that college graduates are just smarter than everyone else instead of better educated.