It’s one thing to take four years of your life deepening your thinking ability and stretching your mind without a good roi if you come out the other end without crushing debt and prospects for employment that can sustain you, even if those prospects have nothing to do with your college experience. This is what college was like until the last four decades or so.
It’s entirely another to come out the other side in crippling debt and no prospects for any kind of sustaining job.
In some sense, twice the cost for twice the benefit might be worth it to those who can afford it, because the time-wise investment (4 years or so of your life) remain constant.
A "better" ROI doesn't necessarily mean a positive ROI.
Getting negative 10% return on a $1,000 investment doesn't matter as much as getting a negative 10% return on a $100,000 investment.
Return on Investment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_on_investment
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_(mathematics_and_physic... :
> A Euclidean vector is thus an equivalence class of directed segments with the same magnitude (e.g., the length of the line segment (A, B)) and same direction (e.g., the direction from A to B).[3] In physics, Euclidean vectors are used to represent physical quantities that have both magnitude and direction, but are not located at a specific place, in contrast to scalars, which have no direction.[4] For example, velocity, forces and acceleration are represented by vectors
Quantitatively and Qualitatively quantify the direct and external benefits of {college, other alternatives} with criteria in additional to real monetary ROI?
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_economics
> Welfare economics also provides the theoretical foundations for particular instruments of public economics, including cost–benefit analysis,
So sure! If all we are looking at is ROI then you are right! By definition! As long as you restrict your refutation ("by that metric") in a way that ignores the additional metric I had been trying to add to the conversation. I was trying to point out that there are other metrics that matter.
Is the unique loss you identify not accounted for in the traditional ROI expression?
>> Why would people make an investment with insufficient ROI (Return on Investment)?
> Insufficient information.
> College Scorecard [1] is a database with a web interface for finding and comparing schools according to a number of objective criteria. CollegeScorecard launched in 2015. It lists "Average Annual Cost", "Graduation Rate", and "Salary After Attending" on the search results pages. When you review a detail page for an institution, there are many additional statistics; things like: "Typical Total Debt After Graduation" and "Typical Monthly Loan Payment".
> The raw data behind CollegeScorecard can be downloaded from [2]. The "data_dictionary" tab of the "Data Dictionary" spreadsheet describes the data schema.
> [1] https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/
> [2] https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/
> Khan Academy > "College, careers, and more" [3] may be a helpful supplement for funding a full-time college admissions counselor in a secondary education institution
> [3] https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more
https://www.khanacademy.org/college-careers-more/college-adm... :
- [ ] Video & exercise / Jupyter notebook under Exploring college options for Return on Investment (according to e.g. CollegeScorecard data)
But I'm actually really interested in reading a historical perspective of education, so if you've got some sources I'd appreciate your sharing them.
To put it another way, education for the sake of education is higher on the Maslow Hierarchy than being able to make a decent ROI on college. Self-actualization is great and all, but when you're telling people to pursue it at the expense of whether or not they're going to eat something it's not noble and honorable, it's tone-deaf at best and can be downright evil when huge propaganda machines are deployed to convince people to do it, because the people selling self-actualization benefit.
Debt skews the understanding by moving the time that the payments come due around but they're still due. It doesn't change the fundamental calculation.
"the collegiate cast was largely poor"
But were they going into massive, life-changing debt? Poor people going to a generally cheap (by modern standards!) college is no big deal. But now we're sending poor people to expensive college, so they can self-actualize at the expense of a good chunk of the rest of their life. This isn't noble.
But anyway, what's the point of looking that far back and cross-content, why don't we compare it to American universities just a few decades ago?
It was common for family lineages fo hundreds of people to support promising students to do the Imperial examinations and they didn't do it out of the goodness of their hearts. Equally people don't pay for their sons to study law for their intelectual development. Only the relatively wealthy could afford to send a son to college. Just being able to afford them not working for 3-5 years marks them as wealthy even if they fely poor in comparison with others of their social class.
I'd like to say _at the same time_, college can provide a good ROI and good citizens, life experiences, etc.
But besides college, what are some other choices, programs, whatever that could provide some of college's added features? Public service (in the U.S., military, Americorps, Peace Corps)? What's available in other countries?
The thing is that finishing an apprenticeship enables you to do an applied Bacelor in the field. After a Bachelors, you can continue on in academia if you like. And you can go back to school at 30 to finish your (Fach-)Abitur, if you failed it before. The state will even pay you to attend. There's very clear paths to jobs, but also a lot of ways to change your direction.
Going back to apprenticeships, they are plentiful and often well-payed. For example, most of the Sys-admins I know did an apprenticeship, which consists of 3 years of school while working half-time at a company. This combination of school and work is the best of both worlds for experience, and it enables young people to get a career path without too much though.
I don't disagree, the thing is that well-rounded citizenry is a necessary prerequisite for a democratic society. That means, as a society we need to make the ROI for an individual worth it by paying for it as a society or offer meaningful alternatives.
This is one of the things that capitalism is terrible at, and thus it must be supplemented through public spending.
It starts with who is let in the doors, and to some extent, it’s garbage in garbage out. Putting ROI solely on the institution is not right. Maybe you can say it should be the institution’s job to only bring in motivated students, but there are only so many of those to go around.
Before college can be creating well-rounded citizenry or provide "excellent life experiences" or any of the other things people want of it, it must first provide a good ROI. This is a necessary foundation. If it is not doing that, then all the other fancy things are merely digging the debt trap in deeper because you're paying for all these things while failing to obtain a method of paying them back.
As a culture, in decades past we were used to college generally being so cheap that providing a good ROI wasn't that big a deal. It's much easier to get a good ROI out of something cheap. So we focused on the higher layers and were able to neglect the fact that the higher layers were always built on a foundation of the fact that college in general was a good ROI. Consequently we have come to misinterpret those higher level things as the purpose of college.
But it is necessary that these aspirational benefits be setting on a good foundation of good ROI to not be abusive to the customer.
It is not and must not be considered some sort of betrayal to be worried about ROI for college. It must simply be seen as an understanding of the fact that as the costs have changed, the way we must analyze college has also changed. It was always true, it's just now it has manifested in a larger way.