> There’s a bit of misconception here. IQ tests don’t require higher education, nor book reading.

From the article:

> [Article] These environmental factors could include changes in the education system and media environment, nutrition, reading less and being online more, Rogeberg said.

> [Article] The earlier rise in IQ scores follows the “Flynn effect,” a term for the long-term increase in intelligence levels that occurred during the 20th century, arguably the result of better access to education, according to Stuart Ritchie, a postdoctoral fellow in cognitive ageing at the University of Edinburgh whose research explores IQ scores and intelligence and who was not involved in the new study.

> [Article] Access to education is currently the most conclusive factor explaining disparities in intelligence, according to Ritchie. In a separate study that has not been released, he and his colleagues looked at existing research in an effort to demonstrate that staying in school longer directly equates to higher IQ scores.

> While I realize you’re talking about social investment here, the idea that TV and media are better investments of your time than earning a degree seems problematic at best. TV & media will, generally speaking, not help you get a better career, right?

I'm saying that higher education has never been a worse investment. Not that it's a bad investment. It's just higher risk and higher cost than ever.

> The Fed has published very recent stats in the US that people with a 4 year degree on average earn 2x the income of people without a degree.

That's really tiny considering that it costs 4 years of income + potentially a huge amount of debt with serious compounding interest.

> That seems like a pretty good investment, doesn’t it?

It seems like it can be a fine investment for some people. If you're rich and won't take on debt it's a great investment.

The debt part of the equation also needs to be considered for the investment. ROI is a huge factor. If it takes you 15 years to break even, the person who never saddled themselves with debt is now 15 years ahead of you income-wise and it will take you another 10 years to catch up to them as far as cumulative income goes. So what is being offered as a "great investment" is not quite as obvious to me.

That cuts pretty hard the other direction though. Going into debt on a house with half the income of other people around you is a huge reason why foreclosures happen.

Worrying about 15 years is short-sighted too, that’s not very long. If you pay it off in 15 years, and then you have 2x the income of someone who didn’t go to school, you’re 35 making great money and in a job with better prospects and mobility than if you didn’t have debt but took a job that didn’t require a degree. This is, of course, statistically speaking. Some people do manage to do very well without a degree, but it’s pretty important to understand that it’s not even close to the average outcome.

My personal experience with student debt was that it got me a job out of college that paid well enough that I paid off my student loans much faster than I’d anticipated. I thought it was going to be 10 years, but it was more like 3. (To be fair I didn’t borrow that much, and cost of college has been rising faster than inflation ever since I graduated.)

I agree that it's a very nuanced situation that probably requires a lot of analysis on a situation by situation basis. But it's not as obvious or plain that higher education is a worthwhile investment as you painted before. I wanted to push on that a bit.

There is no guarantee of success for any given individual, that’s always true. However, if someone you know is 18 and deciding whether to go to college, what would you recommend instead? What steps would you advise taking to be successful without more education, knowing that most high paying jobs require a degree just to get in the door for an interview? It just happens to also be compelling to me to know that, causal or not, degree holders on average have 2x higher salary and hold most of the patents and managerial spots are held by degree holders. The Fed data isn’t just a sampling of a few people, it’s accounting for everyone in the US. Don’t take my word for it, do a little searching and see how many research results conclude that there is enough causal relationship between degrees and income that the investment potential appears to be a pretty clear win.

I don’t see a lot of reason not to invest in education. The fear that it might not pay off doesn’t (for me anyway) push back that much on the strength of the nationwide correlation between degrees and high income.

I’m a little sad about reducing it just to money too, education is an investment in other ways too. When done well, it can be time spent gaining knowledge, investigating history, helping people understand more of the context of what’s happening here and now. Education provides freedom to explore, both now while you’re studying, and in the future with your career. I don’t have a lot of belief in the idea that the opportunity cost is too high.

I think a major part of the problem in America (I can't speak for other parts of the world) is that it's become solely a monetary equation. Tuition is, quite simply, a non-starter for a larger portion of American families, these days. While military spending goes unchecked, America shows its priorities by not spending that money in establishing 4 year community colleges at low cost or free tuition for the betterment of society at large and to be more competitive on a world theater as a whole. This wouldn't replace the need for private, more expensive universities, just as public schools haven't eradicated private schools. A rising tide raises all boats, as it were... and with a future of increased automation or offshoring, a more educated workforce would do well for us.

I couldn’t agree more. In fact, one thing I don’t understand from the Fed’s data is why the IRS (for example) or the government itself doesn’t instantly see the benefits of educating everyone at their expense, because it would immediately pay for itself many times over with the increase in tax income.

30% of 4 year college students graduate with zero debt. Of the remaining 70%, median debt is $30k. A 2x expected lifetime return is millions.

What other investment at that age has a better expected ROI?

Isn't that relatively confounding information? A person who would succeed, might succeed with or without a degree.

The way the information is presented implies causation. Get a degree, earn twice as much.

Yes! To some level that’s absolutely true and a good point.

There’s been a ton of study of the question of whether people succeed because of the skills they gained working on the degree versus the credentialism of just having a degree. The answer across many papers is that it’s a healthy mix of both, that there is a large component of causality (getting a degree leads to success) as well as a large component in the other direction (being smart & driven leads to getting a degree).

Do note that a wide swath of our economy is based on jobs that require a degree, and are not based on being “successful” with or without. It’s not a fair playing field where there’s equal opportunity to people without degrees. A big part of the income gap happens because our system is setup to reward degree earners, and so it’s guaranteed to be at least partly causal.

Also really important to pay more attention to what actually happens as opposed to what could happen theoretically. Yes people might succeed with or without degrees, but how often does that actually happen? There are some amazing and compelling anecdotes, but ignoring the stats is a bad idea if you’re trying to decide whether to go to college or not.

Look at patents in the US as an example of how people might succeed with or without a degree. There is no degree requirement and nothing stopping people from inventing without a higher education, nonetheless the overwhelming majority of patent holders have degrees, the majority are advanced degrees beyond bachelor.

https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/most_inventors_have_g...

Not intelligence but insecurity is the formula for success. Truly intelligent people are comfortable figuring stuff out along the road. Success is accidental and might even be worth avoiding.

Keep in mind most of that difference is probably not a consequence of the 4 year degree, but just a selection bias of people getting degrees generally also being the people that earn more.

dahart, you are absolutely owning this thread!

Thank you for providing measured, balanced, and considered explanations, expansions, and clarifications.

First rate.

> The Fed has published very recent stats in the US that people with a 4 year degree on average earn 2x the income of people without a degree.

I'd really like to see a breakdown by major and institution. I don't think going and getting just any 4 year degree is going to make you a success.

> people with a 4 year degree on average earn 2x the income of people without a degree

I feel like the better measure would be comparing their productivity, rather than the base rate at which society, on average, appears to value degrees.

The question was whether education is a good investment, which poses the idea of some kind of return on an initial cost. The investment question was posed in the form of personal cost and personal return. In that sense, productivity is not a measure of the personal return of an education. I mean a few people might see it that way, and it could be associated indirectly with success, but by and large productivity on it’s own is not a benefit.

Productivity could be seen as the social return for a social (tax based) investment in education, and indeed we do measure things like GDP and compare nations on a global scale. In that sense, education appears to be a good investment socially. Countries that have high rates of education also have high GDP.

Aside from that, unfortunately, it’s extremely difficult to measure “productivity”. You might want to take a stab at trying to define what that even means for people in various careers. It’s easy to measure the productivity of factory workers, but insanely hard to measure productivity for doctors or writers or advertisers or nearly any white collar job. Is productivity measured by how much output there is, regardless of quality? Is productivity measured by how much money exchanges hands? These things could be even worse than valuing education, no?

Also, this doesn't take into account the fact that people who get a 4 year degree are more likely to have parents who are well off. In a lot of ways a college degree is just a measure of your parent's socioeconomic status.

Not to mention the selection effect: if you took the cohort that would finish four year degrees and didn't send them to college, they would still be making more money.

This has been studied. It’s true but only with caveats and qualifications. Yes they’d be making “more”, but the only important question is how much more, and the answer is that it’s not nearly as much as the degree holders. One really big reason for this is that income is partly based on having the degree, not some kind of objective idea of skill or intelligence or determination.

Of course, there's a dramatic premium on college degrees, no question about that. But the selection effect in that statistic is disproportionately important to understand, even if at this moment in time its magnitude is low. It helps understand the counterfactuals necessary to think about how the credentialist dynamic can or may change. Eg if you can cleanly extract the signal that employers are getting from it, you can decouple it from the corrupt, extractive institutions that are currently squatting over the credential.

I’d be careful not to jump to the conclusion that credentials are bad or requiring them amounts to anything corrupt, extractive or squatting.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with requiring that a job applicant meet minimum standards, in fact most people are wildly in favor of requirements when it comes to, say, doctors & lawyers, not to mention our infrastructure designers and safety inspectors, etc.. It’s certainly within the purview of the employer to define those requirements, and okay for them to require some well rounded ness and non-vocational skills, right?

The selection effect has, like I mentioned earlier, been studied extensively, and many researchers have come to the conclusion that despite the credentialism, college degrees also do impart useful knowledge and skills on the degree holders, even when attempting to adjust for many possible confounding factors such as family income, family education, and the filtering weight of the credential system. It’s not that hard to accept that the majority of people who spend 4 or more years trying to learn actually do learn something and achieve some general skills, right?

It’s complicated, but I don’t necessarily see it as a bad thing that society & business widely agree to allow the bachelor’s degree to represent a certain level of preparedness. Yes, it’s a wildly blunt measure, often inaccurate, and it may be commonly misinterpreted too, since we’re really talking about minimum standards, and not a measure of skill, but I see reasons why the state of things might have evolved this way and might not necessarily be broken to a first approximation.

> I’d be careful not to jump to the conclusion that credentials are bad or requiring them amounts to anything corrupt, extractive or squatting.

I'm not assuming this. I have independent reason to consider universities to be corrupt, extractive institutions. This is downstream of their oligopolistic position wrt the labor market, but a hypothetical set of less-evil institutions than our current universities would still be an efficiency problem to be solved.

The early steps places like Google have taken towards accepting certification programs are an example of (attempting to) cleanly separate the value that a degree confers, without cutting off access to large swathes of the population or condemning them to mountains of debt.

Ie, there's a lot of signal in degrees, but there's a LOT of noise, and there's a massive amount of economic and moral value in finding better-quality signal.

> I see reasons why the state of things might have evolved this way and might not necessarily be broken to a first approximation

Yes, I hope this comment makes it clear that I'm not assuming that degrees are literally useless for hiring. But that is an extremely low bar, and I think it's similarly difficult to justify the claim that degrees are a remotely efficient bar for a big chunk of what they're currently used for.

I grew up rich enough that I was able to deeply enjoy four years of intellectual exploration and partying, but that's cold comfort for the people locked out from being a firefighter or starting medical school or a thousand other productive pursuits, because they couldn't surmount the barrier of an additional tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars that the inefficient degree requirement confers.

This isn't just theoretical: the choking-off of opportunity is IMO a massive tragedy relative to a world that was less enamored with the degree. That doesn't suggest we can simply burn the job market's credentialism down, but we can be clear-eyed about the current system's flaws and set our headings correctly for incremental change.

I see; and I pretty much completely agree. It is indeed a shame that we allow citizens to bear the cost of education personally, and that it even has to be a choice or justified as investment. You’re right that the cost acts as a pre-filter for income just to get in, and that the university system has flaws and is inefficient. I like the way you summarized it at the end and aspire to stay clear-eyed and oriented towards incremental improvement. Thanks for clarifying!

Why? I can't eat productivity.