I guess it means what you mean by “succeed”. Going to college is and always has been a reliable way towards earning more money[0]. The issue isn’t that college doesn’t work, the issue is that it’s basically an asset bubble of sorts and the cost exceeded its value.
If huge chunks of future generations skip college because it’s unaffordable, that will be bad for us as a society. It would be much better to reduce the cost of college so that it’s more valuable for more people, rather than having younger generations opt out due to the high cost.
0 - Degree dependent, of course. Music degrees have been always poorly valued by the market.
If you look at some CS graduate making $200,000 a year and assume they'd have made $50,000 without the degree, college looks like an incredibly good investment.
On the other hand, if you look at someone paying $1000 per credit hour for online video lectures? I've seen online video at 1% that price being described as overpriced.
This is the problem with assessing how valuable college is: you don't know how well off the person would've been if they had chosen not to go to college. You can't just compare all the people who went to college with all the people who didn't. You end up with a selection bias. You need to compare people who went to college with people who could've gone to college, but didn't.
Also, there might be (is) a difference between what's good for the individual and what's good for society.
I think this is absolutely the key. If you just look at some of the figures given in [0], and do some simple math, you find out that someone with a bachelor's degree makes just a hair more than $26k per year more than someone with only a high school diploma. Over the course of, say, 40 years working, that comes out to a hair over $1M difference in favor of the college grad. So, it would seem that even if a 4 year degree cost $200k (which, sadly, is not an insane estimate these days [1]), it still seems like a no-brainer.
But, that's as far as statistics can take us, I think, because, as you mentioned, we don't see what happens to people who choose not to go to college, but who could have successfully gotten a bachelor's degree. There's no literal way for us to ethically conduct that experiment.
If I were to speculate a bit, I might wonder if the answer lies in looking at children of college graduates and comparing those children who went to college vs those who didn't. I have no idea if such a study is available or not, unfortunately.
The other idea I have is that, although it pays off in the long run, maybe acquiring a significant amount of debt at a young age makes it harder to get by in the initial, post-college years harder. Considering the cost of housing and health care, this seems like a reasonable hypothesis, but I'd also like to see if there's research on that.
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[0]: https://www.northeastern.edu/bachelors-completion/news/avera...
[1]: https://www.collegeavestudentloans.com/blog/estimating-the-t...
For men, [1] shows the median lifetime earnings for high school graduates is $882,300. The median lifetime earnings for men with a bachelor's degree is 1,517,200. The lowest field is Fine and Applied Arts at $843,900, which is lower than the median lifetime earnings for those with a high school education, up to the highest median field of engineering with earnings of $1,845,000.
For women, [1] shows median high school lifetime earnings of $458,900, median bachelor's earnings for all fields of $972,500, and lowest median bachelor's earnings of $652,100 (Fine and Applied Arts), and a highest of $1,169,100 (Business Administration). The interesting thing to note is for women there is only 1 of 18 field degree combinations (earnings are provided for bachelor's and associate's) where the woman's lifetime earnings decreases relative to a high school education alone (Fine and Applied Arts associates median earnings are $437,300). For men, 4 of 18 field degree combinations will result in lower lifetime earnings relative to high school education alone.
There is further analysis in [1] of the earnings percentiles by each field showing that men with a business degree earn the most at the 90 percentile. This holds for women with a business degree.
I don't see if this has been restricted to those whose highest education is a bachelor's degree or not, but there is also work that has shown increases in earnings by field for graduate or professional degrees [3]. It's possible that those earnings premiums have been captured in the reporting of [1], but [3] seems to come to the conclusion that most business, arts, and social sciences fields gain a large increase in salary for graduate or professional degrees.
Hopefully those familiar with similar analysis from the US could help to provide that information.
[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-626-x/11-626-x2014040...
[2] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/150911/dq150...
[3] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2018001/article...
They’re a litmus test to see if you’d likely be good for doing a job you don’t enjoy either. End of the day - work is work and they need history to show you can do more than the bare legal minimum of graduating high school.
If I get charged $100 to cross a toll bridge in my car to get to my job, I wouldn’t consider myself to have gotten a good deal, regardless of pay.
Even in markets that still pay well outside the valley like Boston, that level of compensation is still extremely limited and are < 1% of available positions most of which are quite senior.
A good education can now be had on YouTube... I have spent the last year learning construction there and the quality of content is excellent. Years ago, I learned to program quite well using online courses and I am sure those have improved even further. I tried to learn diesel mechanics from a textbook That was the top rated in the field, it is shocking how terrible learning from a textbook is.
I am going to have my kids do a combination of apprenticeships and online learning.
Where/what do you teach? When I was doing math & cs - they (especially math) were more than a full time job. Rigor was pretty high - lots of kids failing, dropping out, or transferring schools out. I see this still happening with people I know in school now - mind you not as severe since they’re not in math.
That last part about exceeding it's value contradicts the notion that it currently IS a reliable way toward earning more money. At least net more money.
IMHO a bunch of professors should be able to start their own "non-profit" college with minimal overhead. But I suppose a lot of them aren't really into teaching anyway. Maybe we need to separate education from funding their hobbies (research).
If you're comparing it to unskilled labor, retail, customer service, or stuff like that, it's absolutely no contest you're still better off with the degree.
And yeah your last bit there seems like the typical HN "let's reinvent this thing that already exist but 'from first principles!!1' but forgetting all the reasons it exists in the state it does now." Public colleges have too much overhead but some of it is justified and necessary to ensure licensing, credentialing, etc.
I question even this. I live in an area of the US without a strong union culture, and known a lot of people in the trades and it doesn’t seem uncommon to see job postings for X apprentice starting at $13-$15 and hour. I could get close to that at a shitty gas station clerk job.
I have a cousin he started as an electrician making $18 an hour as an apprentice. He started making six figures 4 years into the job. Granted he works quite a bit.
My father is/was an electrician and 2008 decimated the industry. He was de facto laid off and worked part time for the better part of three years after. Of course, today there's tons of work and no one to do it. Any young'uns who came in between like 2002-2008 didn't make it through the GFC and switched careers, and the old-timers who weathered the storm don't have enough juice left to work the insane hours.
HVAC Repair. It’s a pretty common trade out here. I have a number of family who’s done it at one point. There’s probably a pretty strong demand given how miserable I was when my AC died the other day. Annual median is $42,640
Insurance Claims Processors, which in the particular city I live in tends to be one of the big options for otherwise unskilled college graduates. Annual median: $43,570
Not that big of a difference, though I suppose you could argue the former has the slight advantage of not having as much educational debt burden, which probably exceeds that ~$1k difference.
However like the GP noted, a person in the latter position likely has better options late career.
We could even collectively own it through our state government.
To do that, would be very helpful if the government stopped giving zero interest loans. This is resulting in costs skyrocketing.
For fun, assume you can afford $1000/month in housing costs. With a 30yr mortgage and 20% interest rate. How expensive of a house can you afford? What if interst rates dropped to 10%? 5? 2.5?
Very strong correlation with home prices over the last 40 years.
You'd think so. But then again look at healthcare in the US.
> Yet the stakes are too high to ignore, she said. “If you care about our society, one, and, two, if you care about women, you have to care about the boys, too. If you have equally educated numbers of men and women that just makes a better society, and it makes it better for women.”
The possibility that it could be bad for men I guess is not a relevant consideration when evaluating the impact on society.
Now you can get a pretty decent education from watching lots of videos and an education that commensurate with one that you'd plunk down thousands of dollars for at a university or college.
Especially in the era of COVID where they would have you watch videos anyways during a period of lockdown.
So glad I'm not a student right now. I'd feel so ripped off.
At the same time, the "elites" do make sure their offspring does get a prestigious (signaling) college/university education. So baring big changes to how society is run, some things will be difficult to get to without a college education.
Has it be right since at least the 1990s though? There’s clear divergence between income and college costs in the USA, and it’s hard to see why, given everyone in the industry seems to be taking a part of the honey pot. Seriously, how did we arrive to “textbook for a semester are more expensive than tuition is in other counties”?
Academic corruption. They get kickbacks from the publishers for forcing these (always crap) textbooks on their students.
My wife had two of these every semester for her last two years of college.
I'm not denying that black sheep exist, I am denying a pervasive conspiracy of "big textbook" to the benefit of the professors.
Also, an easy solution to not everyone buying Kinko-printed spiral bound lecture notes easily comes to mind...
Sorry, it is. I've worked in higher education and I've seen it happen. What other explanation do you have for the sales of these ludicrous "textbooks"?
Some publishers may incentivize using their particular textbook, but there isn't some vast conspiracy to jack up prices. The fact is textbooks are a niche product with a steep demand curve that can be paid for with subsidized loans, of course they're going to be ridiculously overpriced.
And while calculus might have some public domain works that are acceptable, most fields have advanced pretty far since 1925, which might I remind you was before the discovery of DNA, penicillin, plate tectonics, molecular orbital theory, the neutron, the invention of digital electronics, Keynesian economics, Hemingway's first novel, etc.
> ridiculously overpriced
Well, you admit it yourself.
And the books aren't even any good!
300 kids taking a course in a 90 day semester, 10 copies in a library, each kid gets 3 days per semester with the class textbook. Would you pay 25000 for that semester of education? Maybe some students can go halvsies on a copy but the number of copies of the book that you need is roughly equivalent to the number of students. And before you say "well why doesn't the library just buy more copies" remember who pays for the library to buy those copies.
The professors don't make the changes to the textbooks, the publishers do. Professors don't like it either, they have to update all of their materials every year to keep up with the changes too.
No one is denying textbooks are expensive, I'm denying the conspiracy theory that professors and publishers are all colluding to manipulate the market.
It is really not that hard, these professors often write or collaborate on the textbooks themselves so they're writing them anyway. If the textbook is needed for learning and not just a way to get some extra money then this would be standard practice.
As a corollary, only very few professors actually have their own textbook and thus don't make any money whatsoever from choosing a specific textbook.
Finally, why would you deny someone money for work they did, typically in their spare time? Who else do you think should give away their work for free? Musicians? Doctors? Carpenters? Bakers? Do you accept money for the work you do?
The professor is giving a class, they're going to teach all of what is in the textbook, and for those who can't write it themselves and use ones written by other professors, they can give out that PDF, they don't have to write one.
I was simply responding to this:
> It's not like there is a cheap alternative that the professors can switch to. All new edition textbooks are expensive. They can't specify out of print editions because then you can't guarantee that your students can get access to them, and the textbook companies update the problems in the books just enough to make using a different edition from the one specified impractical.
in the parent comment. I'm pointing out that there is a cheap alternative. We have had digital documents for decades, there are ways to keep those documents up to date without rewriting the entire document, there is no excuse to have a publisher and distributor for educational companion text documents for students in classrooms. It is glaringly obvious that the status quo with textbooks is artificially maintained even though technologically there is absolutely no reason it has to be this way.
How is automatically deducting textbook cost from student tuition going to help with anything? If anything it will help maintain the status quo, because then it's even less transparent.
The alternative you propose is for professors who don't write their own books is to give other people's work (the original authors') away for free.
So your solution is that because it's easy to copy digital books, the 'problem is solved' by forcibly taking away the fruit of labor of some people at your convenience?
As I wrote elsewhere: if there were a cartel, college textbooks would vastly outprice textbooks for professionals (because they cannot be 'forced' to buy them) - that's not what I see in my field. Professional textbooks easily cost $200-$300. It's just a niche market.
When you see "buy one get one free" do you really believe the second one is free? Think before you toss what you think are gotchas out at people. Roll it into the cost of tuition. It's really not that hard to get, yet I'm saying it a second time.
It does solve lots of problems. Material cost, outlandish distribution, marketing and production cost, and it means the prices aren't externalized and the students know what they're paying for a course up front. Those are basically all the problems with the textbook market. It solves a couple of other problems too, digital documents can't be resold, doubly so if their cost is counted in tuition, so no need to stupidly re edit the document every year just to make sure last year's edition is worthless, only edit when there is an update in the field.
Speaking of which, the fact that they do that, edit books needlessly to prevent the previous year's book from being resellable at any value, is proof positive that textbooks are a racket. Professional textbooks are a different kind of hustle, it's like law dictionaries, they know the books are valuable to professionals so they charge large prices, this fact is not proof that the college textbook racket is not a racket run by a publishing cartel. Your reasoning is as weak as a limp dishrag on this one.
In the US, new faculty are judged by their research output and grant input and are still under the threat of losing their job if they don't make tenure after a few years. There is zero incentive to write a book on top of the 80hrs/wk that are put into the job already.
Also, in Germany, a university will absolutely buy textbooks in bulk for students to use, but that's a philosophical decision of how you want to run a society: if it's upheld as important that everyone can get (essentially) free access to top education, that's what you get. If education is treated like a business, you get something else.
Truth be told, in my field the intro level textbooks are essentially indistinguishable, down to graphics and specific examples, and every publisher has one. Even if I got free samples for all of them (I don't), there is zero difference for the student. You look at the classics, maybe check out a new book, but in the end pick the one you're already familiar with because you don't have any time to waste.
But yeah, you won't get rich, but you will get a full bookshelf, so you'll be rich in knowledge ;)
Personally, I prefer decade old textbooks, hardcover, beautifully typeset, clear diagrams and equations, black and white. Of course that doesn't exist for every field. But try to imagine the complaints you get from students for teaching from 'obsolete' textbooks that aren't even in four color print.
And to top that off, career "fit" has been marketed so hard to kids that no one wants to go into specialized trades, which will both almost definitely pay way better and be way more fulfilling than the random inside sales job that they land right out of school
There was this pervading "common sense" that if you didn't go to college, you weren't going to be able to attract the kind of spouse that you wanted, or that you would somehow be looked down on in the reproductive market. The smart ones figured out that this was actually a handy way to filter out superficial candidates.
Fast forward 25 years, and I see many middle-aged men who are dissatisfied with their corporate lives but haven't build any income potential in something other than corporate America, so they are stuck in jobs that are increasingly subject to the pressures of globalism, etc.
Not necessarily. Bad deals are generally taken due to deceptive marketing, something that drove a lot of the college applications over the last two generations. If deceptive marketing is still in play but one group, e.g. American men, is no longer being targeted...
The other part of this is kids and biological reality. Can't imagine doing a trade or physical job while pregnant. Even after birth it took my wife a solid year or more before she was physically back to "normal".
You don't need to go to college to be successful, but the data speaks for itself. College graduates have always, on average, earned more and enjoyed significantly lower unemployment. Even if that weren't the case, the fact that college-level jobs are easier on the body and people can generally do them well for 20+ years longer is a huge benefit.
I was raised by two blue collar people and my parents were big on college. My father worked as an electrician and even by the time I was 16, his body was starting to give out. He's basically unable to ply his trade at this point due to several complications related to his career, and works a near-minimum wage office job now. I'm sure he would gladly trade half a years salary when he was 18 to get an additional 20 high-earning working years.
I know classmates of mine (2008) who still have 20, 30, 40k in debt. Even some of the kids who came from a bit of family money still struggled for the better part of their 20's to pay everything back.
End of the day if the loan can't be written off, if the loan is just handed out to 18 year olds and has almost no limit then the organization that asks for the loan will inevitably balloon out of all proportion and no longer be reflective at all of the value you get back for almost all cases.
I say that as someone who managed to actually pay off their student loan, dread to think how people who are late 30s, still renting and still with 5 figures of college debt feel.
Hope this trend continues, why throw away the down payment of a mortgage to an institution that has spent the past decade telling you they don't want you. If in 10 years I'm seeing headlines about colleges unable to stay open from low admissions I'll be smiling.