Even though that older Fed article is warning that for some people the “wealth premium” of a college degree is waning, it does talk about the stability and causation of the “income premium” that people with degrees enjoy, and since some of the reasons identified for the income premium have to do with social signaling and employer selection bias (as in, many high paying jobs require a degree in the first place), I believe it lands much more closely to the causal eat healthy for a longer life correlation. The more recent Fed link I posted above agrees in the sense that they’ve concluded after many studies on this subject that taking loans in order to go to school is absolutely worth the cost, that the financial returns are very very likely to pay off. At least for now...
Re:Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will l...
by dahart on Tuesday June 15, 2021 @03:29PM
(#27520319)
Yeah, totally, it’s a reasonable question and not necessarily clear, especially when there are political voices in this arena distributing some degree of misinformation.
For me, the key question here is where does "lots more people should attend four-year university" fall on the spectrum between "people should eat healthy food, exercise more, and refrain from smoking because the data shows that people who do that are healthier and live longer" (IMO causal for health) and "people should fly first-class because the data shows that people who do that are wealthier"? I suspect that college is at least 75% in the latter category. If it's 75% in the former, we should push for it. If it's 75% in the latter, maybe we shouldn't.
(I also could be unduly influenced by the SWE field wherein the same intelligent, qualified person who did or didn't attend college would still have very similar [excellent] career prospects with or without a framed piece of paper. In medicine and law, it's more causal.)