I graduated from college when I was 21 so there is further proof. I am fairly certain that the vast majority of people in my graduating class were younger than 23 so I am fairly certain that the OP is right and the statistics are wrong.
Then again, I may be forgetting some relevant concepts regarding set theory I was taught in my graduate statistics classes.
What do you think the average American makes in a year? And what percentage of US households do you think make more than $100,000 in a year?
ETA: don’t look it up. Go with your gut. Or survey your social circles and get back to us - but no googling!
Just your use of the word “nightclub” is telling…
Just speaking broadly about drinking establishment clientele (never mind staff who work at such places, or people who can’t afford to go out at all) - did you talk to anyone in any blue collar neighborhood bars? Country music bars? VFW/AL bars? Biker bars? Mexican-oriented dance clubs? Inner-city African-American or Hispanic bars/clubs? Bars that cater to personnel from nearby military bases? Anyone in any sort of rural setting at all?
I can sort of understand why the majority of these people have Bachelor’s Degrees, but I don’t understand why the vast majority of them are getting them on time. There was another statistic that I can’t found saying that the average college student was older than 22. They didn’t even say college senior. They just said college student. Yet I have a hard time finding a senior older than 22 let alone a sophomore or junior.
Why wouldn’t you believe that most people who finished managed to do so “on time”? I entered college at 18, finished in 4 years, most of my friends there (who didn’t drop out) did the same…a few might have taken an extra year (which cost them/their families many thousands of additional dollars).
Find it and get back to us (and let us know if that includes graduate students, community/vocational college students, etc.)
I work for a very famous company but in a very blue collar facility. Out of the 250 people that work there, only me, the Big Boss and a handful of others have college degrees. However, education is listed as a core priority and they mean it but only for certain people that are truly serious about it. They have a program that pays for almost all college education costs for very determined blue-collar employees with potential. That is an incredible deal but there is a huge catch as well. You also have to work full-time in a very demanding industrial setting and maintain both your work and your grades in class to remain eligible.
I have three younger work friends that I am trying to encourage to stay in it until they graduate because they have the talent but it is certainly extremely demanding during some of the years when their counterparts are partying or having kids. They are all 28 - 30 and want to do better financially later in life.
The same thing applies to people that join the military after high school so that they can use the benefits both during and after their enlistment to get a college. It isn’t possible for most of them to finish by 23 either.
I think your blind-spot is that you don’t know enough people from different demographic groups. The suburban family that expects their children to go 4 and out for a bachelors degree may seem like the normal American thing to do but it really isn’t in statistical terms. Even those don’t always succeed by 23 but there are lots of others out there who can’t or won’t finish college that young because of their own early expectations, their culture or basic circumstances.
I grew up in a tiny town where almost no one went to college right out of high school. I was the only one that went to a reputable college straight out of high school and that was only because I was a teacher’s son that happened to get a full scholarship. I moved away and believed for years that all of my classmates were destined to slave away at menial jobs forever because of their lack of education but that didn’t turn out to be the case.
Many of them did go back to college later with some surprising results. A lady from possibly the poorest and most criminal families there could possibly be used her Air Force enlistment to get a college degree and is now a decorated full Colonel in the Air Force. The directionless cashier I worked with in high school is now a Vice-President of a famous national bank. Lots of the women went back to college to become nurses and some are now advanced practitioners. Some went into teaching as well. All of that happened on their own timeline however. In the area I grew up in, it was more normal for people to get married at 18 than it was for them to go off to college but the order doesn’t really matter as long as you eventually get it right.
The wonder to me is how we’re now 66 posts in and the OP is still failing to see the unrepresentativeness of his idea of sampling.
Okay. I just went all over my city with 20 copies of the same survey asking people if they had a Bachelor’s and if they did, how old they were when they got it. All but 2 people got a Bachelor’s Degree before they turned 23, with many who got it at 21. I went into different restaurants, different stores, etc. I got as random as I could and still I got the same results as usual.
Where do you live, brahmsacademic? There are large differences in the percentage of people with bachelor’s degrees depending on what city, metropolitan area, and state you live in. Here’s a list of the educational attainment of people in each U.S. state:
So it varies from 48.5% to 17.3% according to what state you live in. The difference is about the same when you look at metropolitan areas. Here’s a list for each of the one hundred most populous metropolitan areas:
In this case, it varies between 46.8% and 15.0%. And it’s even clearer when you look at the variation between cities. Here are lists of the American cities with the most and least percentages of bachelor’s degrees:
The variation here is between 58.5% and 11.3%.
So based on your survey, you now believe that 90% of the American population have a bachelor’s degree?
Seriously, let’s set aside the issue of your own surveys or whatnot. Do you think that TPTB are simply lying about how few people get BAs?
I agree with everybody that the OP is flunking sampling pretty thoroughly. Though based on post #68 I give him bonus points for trying to get better at it.
But …
One of his contentions (backed up by cites) is that a pretty hefty portion of bachelor’s degree holders did not get the degree before age 23. IOW they didn’t complete it in the 4 years immediately following high school; instead they got it later in life, even if it was just a year later. He seems to be sampling almost entirely folks who did do the traditional HS+4 => Bachelor’s program.
As far as I can see none of us are addressing that issue.
IIRC from the 80s & 90s it was common that folks enrolled in the UC system in California ended up needing 4-1/2 or 5 years to complete their degrees. Due to exploding enrollment the system simply didn’t offer enough seats in the core classes for everybody to get all their classes in the typical 4 years. Some lucky folks did win all 8 class-seat lotteries and did complete all their classes within 4 years; most didn’t. Given that California represents about 10% of the whole USA and probably 15% of US college graduates, any sample excluding this cohort will be skewed.
Overall the OP is doomed to fail as long as he’s trying to duplicate a national statistic by surveying people in his home town / city.
Alright, I understand that most people who are financially well-off are likely to have Bachelor’s Degrees. That still doesn’t explain why most of the people I surveyed got them before they turned 23, especially since the statistics I provided say that even of the people who do go to college, most don’t graduate in 4 years. I don’t see why there would be any financial difference between someone who earned a Bachelor’s Degree 21 and someone who earned a Bachelor’s Degree at 23.
Because the poorer you are, the less money you have for tuition and room and board, so on average the longer it takes for you to graduate from college because you will have to attend college part-time or take terms off to earn more money.
I still want to know where you live.
I can’t tell you where I live. I understand that the people who take longer that 4 years may have less money during college, but once get their degree, they can get just as good a job as someone who got their degree on time. Most of the people I surveyed already had their degrees.
Because the amount of money your parents have is actually more closely correlated with your income in the future than your intelligence or your eventual education level. There are all sorts of benefits that you get from having well off parents that will help you get a higher paying job. They will tell you what the good jobs are. They will tell you what the good colleges are. They will make sure that you get through college quickly (which means that you will have time to make more money) rather than slowly. They will make sure you don’t waste time on other things rather than getting your education.
Most people’s parents don’t help them after college, regardless of how long it took them to get their degree.
Lots of parents do help their children after college in finding a job. Lots of parents help their children while they’re in college (or taking a break between terms of college) which helps them get through college quickly. And most of the help comes before they enter college, and that help depends to a large degree on how much money they make.
That may have been as random as you could get, but it’s still not actually random.
Maybe you should start asking all these college graduates you know to explain what you’re doing wrong, because it doesn’t seem like the repeated attempts by posters here are doing you much good.
I can’t tell you why you are getting wildly different results than reality for the vast majority of the U.S. let alone the planet because you won’t give us any details about your ‘study’. I can tell you that you really should have taken a statistics class while you were in college if you ever were because it would have made the answer to this question obvious.
You are embarrassing yourself with your lack of statistical education and your general ignorance. I will try to be generous though. I can walk you through a huge factory staffed by people that have extremely specialized skills. Most of them probably make more money than you do but only a very few have a college degree at all but there are a very few that are being paid to go back to college so that they can get their degrees and get higher level promotions. They will finish in their late 20’s to early 30’s and it is a great deal for the few that can do it.
This is in Massachusetts, the #1 education state at all levels. Even here, it isn’t even plausible that 90% of people in even the most expensive areas have college degrees. It is extremely rare to even break 55% in any area. Do you even begin to understand how unrealistic what you are claiming is? Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg started college here but never finished so the grand total of college degrees between two of the richest people in the world is zero. They would need to go down as a firm X on your theoretical checklist.
The national average for at least a bachelors degree is just over 30%. Younger people are somewhat higher but it is nowhere near the numbers you are claiming unless you work as a janitor on the campus of high prestige college or are a waiter at a really exclusive country club.
BTW, I am not trying to be mean but your responses and lack of understanding are frustrating. Your results are not possible anywhere in the U.S. so there is something very wrong with your survey and/or your sampling.
Let me give a very basic example. If you told me that your survey showed that 50% of men were admittedly and exclusively gay based on your finding, I would tell you to try to survey some people outside of certain San Francisco nightclubs because the results are obviously wrong. The same thing would apply to trying to calculate the average American’s weight by selecting people at a Weight Watchers meeting or a Sunday morning all-you-can-eat buffet. It isn’t going to give you an accurate result.
Sampling theory goes well beyond that but you have even mastered the most basic and rudimentary concepts yet.