You may have noticed that the unemployment rate for high school dropouts is 11%. for people with a PhD, it is 2%. The unemployment rate for a high school graduate is 4% for a college graduate it is 4%.
You can argue philosophy all you want, but the numbers are conclusive.
PhDs have an unemployment rate of 2%. People love sharing lurid tales of destitute PhDs, but these stories are more about wish fulfillment than reality.
Did you read this? Every ROI I saw listed in your cite is strictly positive.
This is regardless of how soft the major is, as long as the student can manage to earn the degree. They even dis-aggregate returns from private vs public universities. It’s not a “myth” that earning that piece of paper increases wages for those who can manage the task.
The numbers are conclusive for people who are capable of graduating. That’s not everyone.
Although furt’s cite directly supports your literal statements, the poster is correct that there is a broader cost-benefit analysis to consider. College is a great investment for great students. It’s a terrible investment for terrible students, because they have a high probability of failure when trying to jump every last hurdle and thus reap the fruits of the sheepskin. They must pay the enormous costs in making the attempt but don’t earn the final reward that comes to those who successfully finish.
I’m sorry, but those numbers are useless, because they are examples of precisely what I asked you in advance not to offer: “the useless figures that lump MIT math majors with 1500 SAT scores with 750 SAT score kids enrolling in sociology at East Shitwater State.”
Your claim was “any degree from an accredited institution, even in a “stupid” major-- is strongly correlated with a higher income.” Looking at aggregate figures for all college graduates no more supports this than do the overall statistics on happiness for married people make the case that “marrying anybody, even an alcoholic asshole, is strongly correlated with happiness.”
So, again: please cite the claim you made. I’ll even link to the kind of data you’re looking for:
What you want are some counter-cites indicating that, despite what those numbers suggest, your claim was true and ***every ***major in every college in America outearns the HS median – and in fact does so by a big enough margin to make back their student loans, plus four years of foregone wages. (And please bear in mind that the vast majority of for-profit schools are accredited).
I’d be amazed if you found such data, but I’m willing to be amazed.
Apologies: I said “negative,” but meant “worse than the returns on putting the same amount of money in the market and four years of wages with a HS diploma.” i.e. a poor investment, in that if a private college Sociology major ROI is only ~20% ROI, you’re better off investing the money you would have borrowed, and earning $100k during those four years.
Maybe if “total lifetime earnings” is your only metric. In reality land, four years at $25k doesn’t get you ahead in any real way- you are probably immediately spending what you make to support what is likely not an awesome quality of life. It’s treading water.
The quality of work is also something many people care about. You can make good money breaking rocks in the coal mines, but people have a quirky preference for doing mentally stimulating work in climate controlled offices. People also like jobs that offer health insurance, training, retirement plans, and sick leave-- which are much more likely to be found in jobs with higher education.
Telling academically capable people they are better off not going to college is bad advice that will harm whoever takes it. I wish people would stop saying this based on their hunches and “student loan” hysteria.
Yes, there is a creeping baseline. People seem to have gotten along fairly well years ago when a high school diploma or a BA was enough for a successful long-term professional career. So one or both of these things are happening:
Jobs today are just more complex. This may be true in some fields, but what about public schools? They are as bad, if not worse, than they were in 1914 when you could teach with a two year career certificate and a BA was a fast-track to principal or superintendent.
It’s a vicious cycle of people one-upping each other. Ten years ago, a bachelor’s degree became the basic requirement to be a widget quality control engineering specialist. Five years ago, there were so many graduates who wanted to get in the field that hiring managers decided to trash the resumes of anyone whose bachelor’s degree wasn’t in Widget Science, Widget Engineering, Doodadology, or Thingumbopery. Liberal arts majors suck. They are good at problem solving, but they don’t know crap about widgets and we don’t have any budget to train! Everyone and their little sister started competing to get in to those programs and State U started becoming much more selective, so the University of Profits started a convenient weekend Bachelor of Science in Widget Science degree. Hiring managers in the top 20% of companies started shunning those degrees as wannabees who just won’t ever be good enough. In certain metro areas, it has become known that Conglom-O, faced with so many qualified applicants with non-for profit widget degrees, decided to require a Master of Science in Widgetry, Widget Science, or Widget Engineering, a Master of Widget Science, or a Master of Thingumbopery with a Certificate in Widget Analysis. The University of Profit is now frantically rushing to roll out their new online fast-track second master’s for people with a master’s degree in another field who want to enter the widget field or who have been out of the widget field and want back in.
And this is something that I tangentially agree with even sven. I hear the “better not going to college” or “pick up a trade instead, you can be master electrician/carpenter/contractor/etc.”, only when it is applied to lower income students, without regards that they may have the smarts to succeed in college. Not thinking to tell instead “well, study more so you can apply to more scholarships” or “let’s see if you qualify for financial aid for the university you want” or “make sure you attend an university that is good for what you intend to study”, or something else. Also not thinking that for every master electrician that has its own company and makes six figures, there’s probably 20-50 others who make less, sometimes considerably less, and who could have perhaps majored in something in college and landed a better paying position.
Also, that guy making the six figures and owning the company? Also someone who may have had the academic smarts too.
Develop lesson plans that fulfill multiple levels of standards (nation, state, local) and sequence skills in a particular sequence of learning that ties in to all the other classes.
Make good use of technology in the classroom, which may range from PowerPoint to individual tablets. Understand both the technology itself, how to use it for learning, and how to help kids with it.
Manage a range of special needs, often with their own IDPs, for kids who would have once been segregated, institutionalized or just forgotten.
Read, evaluate and make use of evidence-based teaching methods. Stay on top of latest education research and know enough about peer-reviews studies to understand which techniques are appropriate for their classroom.
Rely on child psychology for discipline, rather than corporal punishment and expulsion.
And perhaps most importantly, kids today learn research skills, writing and critical thinking, not just facts. Kids today have Wikipedia and don’t need to spend a week memorizing state capitals. They are being taught higher-order skills from the beginning.
Just a generation ago, sharing a simple business contract could require a typist, courier, notary, records keeper and file clerk- a whole range of low-skill jobs. Now it takes 30 seconds via email. Remember how people used to work their way up from mail clerk? Well, I haven’t worked at a company with a mail room in decades. A guy whose sole job is to sort mail seems absurd. Even entry level today is much higher. Our interns don’t fetch coffee-- they draft papers and crunch numbers.
This isn’t a bad thing. Globalization erased some of the barriers that used to keep our labor market inflated. We are entering an era where some countries are bosses and some are worker bees. With our educator system, we are well prepared to be a boss country. But not if we do dumb stuff like encourage kids not to go to school.
Right. Everyone things trade school is a great idea for other people’s kids.
The other problem with the trades is what happens from 55-67. Those years are awful if you are on your feet, climbing ladders, hauling heavy shit. Those jobs are impossible if your knees give out, if you develop MS, if you get in a bad car wreck and damage your back.
I do think it’s pointless to force a kid to go to college if he doesn’t want to go and his academic performance is lackluster as it is. And there are smarter and stupider ways to go to college. But it’s a very rare child I would encourage to skip it entirely.
I would agree - but only by highlighting the phrase “academically capable”. What I believe has happened is that the circle has been widened to include a larger number who are not “academically capable”. This is being supported by the financial industry writing loans and legitimate universities, as well as the notorious for-profit colleges, selling the ideas that “OMG! OMG! YOU HAVE TO HAVE A DEGREE!”
For many, it really is indistinguishable from a racket top-to-bottom.
Personally, I have a suspicion that the easy availability of relatively high paying manufacturing jobs meant that a guy could get out of high school, go to work at the factory/plant, and over the course of his life, make a decent middle class wage and support a family.
Trade jobs and professional jobs were much like today- being a roofer paid shit back then just like it does now, and being an engineer was reasonably lucrative back then as well.
Since the early 1970s, the manufacturing jobs have either gone away, or become somewhat less skilled due to automation and computing. The technology/IT sector of the economy has grown from almost nothing in the same time frame.
So you end up with that big chunk of the population that would have gone to work at the plant out of high school thinking that they have to have a college degree to have the same lifestyle as their parents, and the schools seeing big dollar signs from more students, and therefore you get a LOT of people going to school who otherwise wouldn’t have gone.
There’s a reason that most second and third tier state universities were usually founded as teacher colleges- there wasn’t a market for that many graduates from schools like that, except in the teaching field, which did need that many graduates. And most professions still don’t need that many graduates, hence the numbers of people with college degrees doing blue-collar jobs, etc…
The worst part is that it devalues the degree across the board; having degreed graduates as admin assistants and MDC codes just makes people think they’re not worth anything
Wait … was lifetime earnings not what you had in mind when you said “Let’s get a fact out of the way here: A college degree-- any degree from an accredited institution, even in a “stupid” major-- is strongly correlated with a higher income.”
Are you withdrawing that claim?
And no, I disagree that working right out of HS is a total waste. Someone who lives at home and works for four years fulltime at a could easily save up $20k in four years. That’s enough to start a small business, or make a down payment on a house in some parts of the country. Contrast that with the graduate with a degree in art pulling shots at Starbucks and owing $40k in loans.
Actually, most of the career-oriented “dirty and dangerous” jobs – coal mining, trash collection, etc. do come with benefits, often good ones.
And you’re right; a lot of people do prefer “indoor work, no heavy lifting,” and they are extremely well-advised to get a degree. A lot of people who spend all day in a cube doing “mentally stimulating” things like clicking on spreadsheets find it soul-crushing, and wonder if they would have been better off driving a big rig/cutting timber/laying cinderblock instead of going down the culturally-approved “go to college or else you’re a loser” route.
There are a couple dozen job-related reality shows on TV, but AFAICT none of them take place in an air-conditioned office. There’s a reason for that.
Unless you have some definition of “academically capable,” you want to use, this is a meaningless sentence. 1/4 of all four-year colleges in America are officially open enrollment, another 1/4 or more are essentially so. According to the higher education industry, if you have a GED, a pulse and can sign the loan forms, you are “academically capable.”
No one is telling 1900 SAT kids they should forego college; maybe a few should, but most kids that smart can figure it out for themselves. It’s about the 1100 SAT kids who are being told to go get "any degree from an accredited institution, even in a “‘stupid’ major.'” The fact is that that kid is 90% unlikely to graduate, but rather than do the hard work of telling him to think realistically about his skillset, we tell him to “chase his dreams” and then forget all about him when he drops out.
There’s a thread active right now in the Pit on payday loans and rental furniture; I don’t know if you’ve been in there, but I can only assume that you’d be on the side of: “eh, if the poor and stupid can’t figure out it’s a bad use of their money, too bad for them.” That’s exactly the upshot of a “college is for everyone” mentality.
Has it occured to you that just possibly other people might have knowledge and experiences different than yours? Perhaps even more?
In my own case, before working as a education researcher, I spent ten years teaching college freshmen, at State U, community colleges, and for-profits. At all three, I saw kids who were highly unlikely to graduate, and were very unlikely to ever hold one of those “mentally stimulating” jobs that pay over $15 an hour, but there they were borrowing money, because they were told to.
The ones that quit after a semester or two at community college will be fine. But there were other others I saw who were going to graduate with five-figure debt and I knew with certainty were never going to hold a job higher than “assistant manager” at a Denny’s. There’s absolutely no shame in that; Assistant Manager at Denny’s is good, honest job, and you can raise a blue-collar family on that salary. Though, of course, it’ll be tougher to get by on it if they’re paying $150 a month in student loans for the next 10-20 years.
These were good, honest people – usually poor and/or racial minorities – getting fucked over by (mostly) white people with PhDs who bragged about great it was and how noble they were for opening the door to opportunity to everyone, and it pissed me off to be part of it.
So thanks for the condescension, but I feel qualified to opine on the topic.
In 2012, the median wage for an electrician was $49,840.
In 2012, the median for those with a bachelor’s degree was $57,000.
Subtract $30,000 in loans on the one side, as well as four year’s foregone income.
I would absolutely encourage my kids to learn a marketable skill. Might do my best to insist on it. Would definitely do it if he was median or lower IQ. And most trades don’t require school.
That’s part of what unions are for.
In most trades, there are senior jobs that require less physical strain - foreman, trainer, management, etc.
I also tend to think that the relative awfulness of being on your feet and hauling heavy shit at 60 depends a lot on what you’ve done for the last 40.
Except you forgot the part where I insisted on instead of focusing on trade, focus on how to obtain the degree with spending the least amount of money, either by studying or by doing better research into financial options available. It is quite possible to obtain an undergraduate degree without going into debt to get it. I’m a Millenial, and I did it. My student loans come from part of my professional education (and that’s another rant).
Again, not everyone, even a “senior”, capable of being foreman, trainer, management. Nor are there enough of those positions to accomodate a lot of aging workers. Some aged workers will not qualify for them.
I have a funny story about definitions of standards of competence. When I was a kid, I was told by my parents that I had better remain a “student in good standing”, which they defined as getting nothing but A’s and B’s. I actually went and looked up the formal definition of this in the high school student handbook, and according to the handbook, a student was “in good standing” (yes, they used that exact term) if they were making at least a D in a certain percentage of their classes. You could be getting two F’s and D’s in all your other classes and still remain in “good standing”.
OK. Assume the electrician works 44 years and the college grad works 40. Entry level pay for an electrician is 30-50% journeyman pay (cite), so we’ll add those four years at half the median pay rate. In 44 years, the electrician makes $2,093,280.
For the college grad, assume a $30,000 student loan at 6% (most federal lending is less than this) with a ten year payoff period - the total payoff amount is just under $40,000. Over the same 44 years, the college grad nets almost $150,000 more than the electrician does, even missing out on those first four years. That’s a significant number (it’s clearly not a wash), but maybe not as high as I would have expected.
But why electricians? You picked a relatively high-paying trade there - for construction trades across the board, the 2012 median income was $38,970. Using that number, the college grad out-earns the high-school grad by more than $600,000 over 40 years. If you’re going to complain about college stats that include MIT math majors, how do you justify picking electricians rather than pipelayers or bulldozer operators?
Have you actually done the trade work that you’re proposing for other people? The fact that I have a PhD now is due in no small part to my experience working in construction trades in my late teens and early 20s, and learning firsthand that I didn’t want to do it forever.
What are the ratios of available jobs out there, in terms of training, and how many jobs are available per year?
I suspect that the number of college jobs and skilled trade jobs aren’t anywhere near plentiful enough for everyone who wants one, and there will always be some significant number of people who wash-out of the higher education or trade school route and end up doing something unskilled or semi-skilled.
Plus, it doesn’t make sense to emphasize college or trade schools if the jobs aren’t there- it might be better to do something more like the European education systems and slot people based on testing. Even though it’s somehow anti-American to suggest to someone that they’re not college-level bright and should do something in the trades, it might be a better option for more people over the long haul.
New student loans are capped at 10 or 15% of ones disposable income, and come with generous deferrals in case of hardship. After 25 years (or 10 if one works in government or private sector) they are forgiven.
Student loans are not crippling our youth. I’d like to see a better system, sure, but not at the expense of our nations ability to compete in today’s high skilled global market.