Let’s see, of the six members of the public I spoke with today in conjunction with my job, I think one of them had some college, but did not graduate. The rest all graduated from high school, tho.
The uneducated are out there in vast numbers. You just aren’t looking in the right places.
I’m looking in all the places that don’t require a degree and have absolutely nothing to do with education.
Just because they don’t require a degree and have nothing to do with education doesn’t mean they’re the right places. Do you think a 25 year-old HS dropout who works full-time at McDonald’s or Walmart is going to be on an online dating site? Or have a Linked in account? Or is going to list their education on Facebook as “I dropped out of high school”. Come to thing of it, how are you finding “random people” on Facebook? Friends of friends? Not random. People who liked pages that you liked? Not random. People who belong to the same groups as you? Not random.
You remind me of a conversation I’ve had many times regarding work.Someone will say something generic - like "The hours you work don’t matter , only the results. ". When someone points out that that doesn’t apply to all jobs, the first person says, “oh you must live in a different world than me” until it’s pointed out that he or she doesn’t account for the receptionist, the police, security guards and all the many other people in his/her world with jobs that never get done. It’s the same with you- I’m sure you encounter people on a daily basis who don’t have bachelor’s degrees at all, much less by age 23. You’re looking at Facebook and other social media and dating sites. That can’t possibly be your entire world. Try Walmart, or McDonald’s or attendants at the gas station or the sanitation workers or …
Hell, I work for a university and plenty of people I interact with daily don’t have a college degree.
Very few of the people I know in that age group have a degree of any kind. Most have graduated high school. Some have GEDs.
What do you think the answer can possibly be, other than that your sample is biased?
(I mean, do you think the statistics are lying? - that in reality everybody went to college, but there’s some conspiracy to hide that fact?)
Actually, they’re people who I don’t share any mutual friends with, liked pages with, or groups with. They’re people who’ve set their profile up so that anyone, regardless of any kind of connection, can see it. Those are the people I look it.
The fact they are engaged in social media at all will bias your results.
Why would you assume that they were all equally grouped? I doubt even your friends know a lot of people in Arkansas, where I agree that such a degree is less common–at least, outside the cities.
This reminds me of an experience I had my sophomore year in college. A few friends and I went out to a club in Baltimore, and I ended up dancing and talking with a guy I met at the club. He asked me what I did for a living, and I told him I was a college student. He said “Wow, I’ve never met a girl who goes to college.” I said “Wow, I never met a guy who didn’t go to college.”
We exchanged phone numbers and got together a couple times after that, and oh my goodness, we were amazed at how different our cultures were. I remember meeting neighbors with gummy smiles because they couldn’t afford dental work. People used to walk and take the bus because they couldn’t afford cars. These people lived so close to me, and yet our paths never crossed because our lifestyles were so different and mutually exclusive. It was a sobering experience.
I guess if you’re defining “area” as “California north of Bakersfield.”
Palo Alto is the Bay Area. Stockton is, well nobody even knows because it’s in the middle of nowhere.
Most probably barely squeak in under 24 without any real issues. Let’s take myself for an example. I was always old for my grade, having a birthday in mid-September, and the Texas cut-off date was Sept. 1, so about 2-3 weeks into the school year, I celebrated my birthday, making me 6 years old for most of my kindergarten year, 18 for most of my senior year of high school, and so on.
What this means is that in college, if I’d graduated in 4 years exactly, I’d have graduated at 22. If I took another year, it would be 23. I actually took an extra year and a half, so I graduated about 3 months after turning 24, and I was on the late side- most people were either a semester behind or a full year behind. Few made it a full 3 extra semesters, and even at that, I was only 3 months older than the cutoff. Had someone in my class had their birthday in the spring, rather than in the early fall, they’d have still been 23 when they graduated, even with the extra year and a half.
And to the OP’s question- it’s almost certainly selection bias. There’s a whole segment of the population that you probably don’t even interact with except superficially at sporting events and when they are working in service jobs, and the vast majority of them don’t get college degrees.
From the people I interact with in my job, I’ve long ago ceased to be amazed at the number of folk who did not graduate from high school. Many of them seem to be on facebook, tho.
If you do not regularly interact with - say - the bottom quarter of society in terms of income/education (generally strongly correlated with each other) it is amazingly easy to simply not realize they exist, and how many 10s of millions of people are in those categories.
In whatever city you live, how big of a stretch do you NEVER go to? The “bad side” of town. How many people live there, and what do you think their educational level?
If you are a college grad, I bet you have pretty occasional and fleeting interactions with even folk in the 2d lowest quartile - 25-50% in terms of education/income. What do you think is the education level of the majority of store clerks, garbagemen, road workers, etc. ad infinitum have?
Ah, the Sunrise Seaport!
Stockton is the furthest east you can get by river in California, using big ships. This perhaps matters less today than it did during the gold rush when there were no paved roads into them thar hills and once an eager prospector got off the boat he might be walking the rest of the way.
We’re a transportation hub with a bunch of warehouses and distributions centers because we’re about midway down the central valley. We connect the port, which specializes in bulk goods, to railroads and freeways.
I’ve heard rumors that the surrounding area is good for growing asparagus. Well, the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta is good for that, and other crops, and we’re on the eastern edge of that.
Yeah! I might be an outlier! Woo Hoo!
I graduated from college - but after 4 years of education, turns out I was still stupid:(
Anyhow, I work as a mechanic. Out of 13 people in my department only 1 other person has a college degree (could possibly be 2 others; I don’t know what the new guy’s education is). It is the exact opposite in my social life. In fact, almost everyone I know socially has at least Masters level. When I go to meet ups, almost everyone is college educated.
Hey, Stockton has an airport, which I’ve been to twice. From what I understand the biggest thing that happened to the airport in years was when they upgraded from vending machines to a Subway.
Economic data exists in microclimates. When I worked for AT&T we got a location adjustment, and our center got ripped off because though we were just over the border from Princeton, our salaries were based on Trenton, which had a much lower average cost of living.
In an earlier, I provided a link to this statistic, Percentage of persons 25 to 29 years old with selected levels of educational attainment, by race/ethnicity and sex: Selected years, 1920 through 2013, saying that only 40% of people have a Bachelor’s Degree. I mentioned how that no matter where I looked, the majority of people had a Bachelor’s Degree. I was told that this was because the people who don’t go to college don’t use facebook or any other form of social, and that I’m less likely to associate with them. I understand all that now, but that doesn’t explain why these statistics are being contradicted.
Graduation rates of first-time, full-time bachelor's degree-seeking students at 4-year postsecondary institutions, by race/ethnicity, time to completion, sex, and control of institution: Selected cohort entry years, 1996 through 2006 Most College Students Don’t Earn a Degree in 4 Years, Study Finds - The New York Times http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2013/aug/11/ron-johnson/average-college-degree-takes-six-years-us-sen-ron-/ http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2013/aug/11/ron-johnson/average-college-degree-takes-six-years-us-sen-ron-/
These statistics all say that even of the people who do go to college, most of them don’t graduate in 4 years. But everyone I know has graduated, or is on track, to graduate at 21 or 22. But again, it’s not just people I know. I’ll look up facebook and it’s the same story. I’ll also look at profiles of college athletes, and they haven’t taken longer than 4 years either. So even if most people do have Bachelor’s Degree, most of them should not have them at 21 or 22.
Same answer as before. Observer bias.
It is possible to judge a large universe by taking a random sample. Even samples in the hundreds will provide averages very close to the true average. Making sure that your sample is random, or close enough to it for statistical accuracy, is the hardest part.
One property of a random sample is that it reflects all the properties of the universe. That is, the averages in your sample for age, sex, income, race, and all the other demographics mirror the averages for the universe you are sampling. You clearly are not looking at anything other than one property, a bachelor’s degree. Anyone knowledgeable about statistics could have told you in advance that your sample would fail because of that. And it has.
There must be a lot of people going to college part-time – working days, attending evening courses. Those people probably aren’t finishing in 4 years, and they are probably also not so likely to be in your (or my) personal convenience sample.
Two of my children needed five years to finish. Personally, I got through in four years, but only by going year-round.
By the way, have you looked at those college athlete profiles to see if they actually graduated?