Its hard to take the conclusions of such an article seriously, especially with regards to the gender pay gaps, when they aren't normalized for degree program. Unless you are comparing Engineering women versus Engineering men, or College of Eng. in school A versus CoE in school B, it is utterly impossible to meaningfully compare schools A and B as well.
You're right, there's not enough detail here to make any solid points. I wonder how many of these people 10 years later are stay at home moms/dads with little to no income? And is it meaningful to count them if they are?
It's rather arbitrary which thread of the two to pick as primary. Arguably it should be the original source, but then the article gives more background, and people have linked to the original source in the thread. We can change it if people feel strongly about it.
I think you must take these concepts into account if you're going to think about how to "fix" or "disrupt" education.
1. Most students who go to elite colleges pay for what they can afford. While there are exceptions and financial aid is not perfect, the college bubble and loan crisis is largely occurring at for-profit colleges, 3rd tier universities, and the smaller liberal arts college.
2. Most students who go to elite colleges are not attempting to optimize their future salary, but are positioning themselves to succeed and obtain prestige in science, law, medicine, politics, or academia. Many graduates of South Dakota School of Mines earn more than the POTUS, and salary optimization is not what many college applicants value.
3. You do not and should not go to college primarily to sit and learn in classrooms. You go for the peer connections, professor mentorship, intellectual resources, and industry connections.
4. Outside of technology, it is almost impossible to correctly learn and succeed in most intellectual fields without attending college. See: science, medicine, law, politics, literature, the arts. In technology, students who go to adequate universities and take advantage of the resources and connections offered there are merely at an enormous advantage.
5. It is impossible to talk about (a) elite universities (top ~20 schools), (b) "top 100" universities, (c) small elite liberal arts colleges and conservatories, (d) lower ranked state schools, and (e) for-profit and/or trade schools under the same umbrella of "education" and have a productive conversation. There are all widely different environments where widely different rules apply and different policies should be considered.
People go to elite colleges for the same reason that you're on HN and not Reddit right now.
Think of the weird kids in football-obsessed small towns who really like school and read classic literature for fun. The kids who enjoy high-brow media like NYT/Economist/New Yorker/Atlantic/NPR in places where reading anything in public would get you accused of being uppity. The kids who want to be professors, surrounded by future business and communications majors.
Admission to an elite college, for these students, is chance to finally be surrounded by people smarter than they are, people who understand them, people who hold their own in debates both inside and outside the classroom and have interesting things to say, people who care about the world beyond how it can make them rich. Gen-ed humanities are tiny discussions around conference tables, and instead of staring blankly and cracking jokes, people actually contribute, erring on the side of too much rather than too little. To the one kid out of 35 who took English class seriously, that's fucking amazing.
Of course, these people exist in small quantities everywhere, but at many elite schools they exist with a density approaching 100%. The ability to come of age surrounded by that kind of crowd is incredible, and it should be available to everyone who has the taste and talent for it. Fortunately, donors tend to agree, and the endowment can usually make it happen.
Just want to tack on to number one, out-of-state schools. When an eighteen year old is presented with the option of choosing a first-rate (let's say top 100) out-of-state school or a second-rate in-state school, it's a hard decision that can lead to a 4x tuition hike.
I think the worth of a college education varies so much from person to person, as well as field to field. If you are becoming a doctor, going to college is 100% necessary for obvious reasons. But for a programmer, it may not be, depending on the person.
More than helping you learn how to code, a college education helps you learn HOW to learn how to to code. You won't get much useful experience until you are in an internship or doing actual work in the field learning from people that are better than you. You can spend forever on theories, but it will never actually get you anywhere unless you put it to use. For the people that need to learn how to learn, the price of college can be worth it. For others, it can be a waste of time and a LOT of money.
Not so; medical schools are somewhat unique in only requiring certain college coursework. One can complete a medical degree whilst never finishing a bachelors degree. The most prominent example of this is the Kentucky Senator Dr. Paul who graduated from Duke with an M.D. and has no bachelors degree.
I think it depends on the circumstances of your self learning. In general I think its harder to get a programming/software engineering job nowadays than it was 15-20 years ago without a degree. I mean, if you were self taught on PHP/Perl/Linux in the 90s, then you could've gotten yourself in on the ground floor without a CS degree. Likewise for any new tech stack that gets introduced, immersing yourself in it can certainly make up for not having a CS degree.
Carnegie Mellon has salary information for each major. For example, computer science majors: http://www.cmu.edu/career/salaries-and-destinations/2015-sur... have a mean starting salary of $103,608 and median of $105,000. This doesn't include any stock, stock options or bonuses yet. Out of 192 students, 32 joined Google, 19 joined Facebook and 12 joined Microsoft.
> There are two notable limitations that researchers should keep in mind for all of these metrics. First, the
data are not yet available to produce program-level earnings data. Research suggests that the variation
across programs within a school may be even greater than aggregate earnings across schools; for
instance, STEM and health majors frequently earn more than students who study in other fields. Second,
the data include only Title IV-receiving students, so figures may not be representative of schools with a
low proportion of Title IV-eligible students. Additionally, the data are restricted to students who are not
enrolled (enrolled means having an in-school deferment status for at least 30 days of the measurement
year), so students who are currently enrolled in graduate school at the time of measurement are
excluded.
Although, looking at the data, the real problem is that half the colleges have PrivacySurpressed values for those fields.
Can anyone understand the logic of the NYT releasing this article, then going into the wage gap aspect, without mentioning that the data can't be quantified by major?
It also doesn't mention any steps taken to account for the willingly unemployed/underemployed- assuming both partners in a marriage will desire to work full time to maximize their earning potential seems like it's worth a disclaimer.
I really do wonder how much of these gaps can be attributed to the universities themselves. Elite universities are more likely to attract successful and motivated and thus will "produce" more successful graduates than other universities. No name state colleges are more likely to attract the less successful high school students and thus they will likely produce less successful graduates. I bet there is nearly as much correlation between SAT scores and pay as the eliteness of the attended university and pay.
Yup, selection effect bias. There was a long term study on this (sorry no link, I don't remember exact details, just that it was pretty solid, could have been famous Terman study [1] or something similar).
People who were admitted to elite universities but for whichever random reasons ended up not going there ended up being as successful as their cohort peers who did attend elite institutions. What mattered was "good enough for Ivy League" not Ivy League education itself.
The ratio of income inequality is immensely higher than the ratio of tuition cost, which is at least kind of interesting.
Also the education bubble is economically sustainable if and only if the population is selected to be elite ivies only. A nation where nobody makes over $10/hr unless they're in the ivy aristocracy (therefore attending for free with substantial scholarships and aid) doesn't mix well with $60K/yr tuition for a non-elite school.
> At Bennington College in Vermont, over 48 percent of former students were earning less than $25,000 per year. A quarter were earning less than $10,600 per year.
Bennington always impressed me as as rich kids' school. I have to wonder how many of these former students are living off of trust funds.
Interesting. He also calls out Bard. That rang a bell for me so I looked it up. 31% of 2014 graduates were in the visual and performing arts. Maybe some of these schools just attract people who aren't expecting to have a strong economic return on their investment.
He calls out schools where the students aren't repaying their loans later. It might be interesting to analyze the data to relate income to repayment of student loans (or lack of loans altogether.) It would be interesting to see if there are schools where the students make no money but pay back their loans on time.
I went to Bennington for two years, and while it has that reputation, and there are some rich kids running around (myself included), there are a surprising number of working and middle class kids going there, and then coming out of school with no prospects.
Anecdotally, there are a surprising number of waiters, baristas, and other people doing jobs that are in no way informed by their years of study.
I looked at the data and was struck by the fact that the top schools by ten-year earnings were medical schools. This led me to believe that the data doesn't distinguish between undergraduate and graduate programs. If that's the case, then an undergrad-focused school like Bennington is going to be penalized versus a school that has mostly grad students. If your pool of students is, say, 70% grad students, then they're going to be further along in their careers at the ten year mark than an institution where 90% of students are undergrads.
I feel like a tremendous factor behind the numbers for middle-tier schools is simple geography. For example, I make more than double what many of my college friends who I consider at least equally as smart and motivated as I make, and it's pretty clear that the only reason is I chose to move to California whereas they stayed in Nevada.
Colleges in sparsely populated areas will probably always have dramatically lower numbers given the tendency of graduates to stay close to home, regardless of the actual quality of education. The salary numbers should take the region of a former student's job into account in some way.
Does your comparison with your friends take location into account? E.g. if you're in SF and they're in Reno, then expatistan[0] claims your costs are 57% higher.
I was thinking the opposite: finally a .gov website that looks good and is easy to use. Who cares if their exact design choices aren't your particular favorite. This page is much better than the average IRS web page. So the real question is: why can't the .gov web pages that really matter get up to speed?
I don't think it's that bad. It's a nice way for people to be able to read more content from the insights if they'd like, while not using a lot of vertical space on the page for those who don't want to read it. It only uses enough space to give the viewer an opportunity to read it.
Interesting article. I graduated from (and interned) at UCLA while the need-based financial aid initiative was rolling out[1]. Obviously, it's the primary factor in minimizing student debt (it's obvious to see that students with well-to-do families have more financial support than poor ones).
An issue I take is conflating public institutions with private ones. I remember UCLA & Berkeley admissions people always struggling to poach students that might attend Stanford/Caltech, but the issue is very complex. Huge endowments are just part of the story.
It makes sense that a wealthy private school (Harvard/Princeton/etc.) has more extra-academic connections that help students get better jobs. Smaller class sizes also make a difference. I just think the article tries to talk about too many things and doesn't end up doing any of them justice. The gender stuff shoehorned at the end is a prime example.
> "students at private for-profit two-year and four-year institutions have high rates of borrowing and their graduates often have large amounts of debt."
Isn't that expected? Students who go to for-profit schools by definition have to pay their way through so it would make sense they have higher levels of borrowing and debt.
I wouldn't say "by definition," but yes it seems for-profits don't often offer scholarships as much as other schools. I think the real problem the article points to with for-profits is that they don't lead to good paying jobs and therefore the graduates are unable to pay off their large debts.
Are people finally starting to ask where the DoE got its earnings numbers to increase student loan tuition caps, the resulting tuition hikes across the board, explosion in the private education market, and the zero risk (except to the tax payers) student loan interest income keg party?
How is grad school factored in? At my school, a very large portion (~40%) of students go on to masters/PhD/law/MD right after graduation. This could deflate salary numbers compared to what those students make when they actually enter the workforce.
The data is not particularly uniform, with NULLs and PrivacySurpressed values everywhere.
I wanted to play around with SAT/ACT data and create correlations with other variables...but the only values reported are 25% quantile and 75% quantile for accepted students (they derive a midpoint between the two...by averaging them, which is wrong). Hmrph.
I love that to support their headline, the article states that at hundreds of colleges many students aren't earning more than high school graduates 10 years after graduation. Then in the next sentence says that those hundreds of "colleges" include barber academies, cosmetology schools, and for-profit colleges.
They're certainly not institutions I would normally consider 'collegiate'. And god knows they're not Universities. They're trade schools.
But, barring the fact that they're an Apples-to-Oranges comparison to typical liberal arts colleges and should be segmented as such in the data, I nonetheless think it's interesting information. Trade school expansion is often touted as a reasonable alternative to pushing more people into the higher education pipeline. To that end, we should seek to highlight and study which trades are actually worth pursuing from an economic perspective.
There are still plenty of traditional liberal arts colleges in that group. For my alma mater (Oberlin College) only 52% of students are earning more than high school graduates. Pretty sad.
We believe that we should cram as many people in the country as possible through our current conception of a university.
There are several reasons people want to believe that's a good idea:
* They believe that someone with a B.A., B.S., etc. is a higher class person than one without
* They believe that putting everyone through the system will bring everyone up to that higher class, thus removing the negative effects of classes in society
* They believe that it's the only path to education
* They believe it's somehow immune from various biases, corruption, infighting, trend-following, etc.
* They believe it's a diverse forum for the free exchange of ideas, and that all reasonable ideas are given their due consideration
* They believe that "good colleges" are good and lead to success because of the quality of the education and the insight of the professors
Unfortunately, none of those are true. Until we admit that, we can't fix the problem.
When we do admit those things, we can acknowledge that:
* A person who reads a lot of books and participates in discussions with others who have different opinions has as much claim on "good citizenship" as anyone else (college or not), and it doesn't take tens of thousands of dollars
* Language, history, and art classes can be quite effective by teaching language, history, and art; and not spending the entire time on politics
* Vocational schools are probably the right place for a lot of things, including programming and software engineering (though a university might be the right place for Comp. Sci.). When we figure out software engineering, perhaps it belongs in the university, but for now it's not an established discipline.
* If we really want people to get a more academic education, giving them a loan and demanding them to pay it back regardless of bankruptcy makes little sense. Maybe that makes sense for vocational school, where it's more of a straight investment. But for a purely academic education, it's probably a lot cheaper to provide it anyway, so lots of financial approaches could work.
* "Good colleges" are good because of the kind and quality of students that they concentrate in one place -- in other words, a social club built around an academic theme. (This is really the one that makes it obvious that bringing more people into the university system won't have the same results as the ones who are in it now.)
College isn't the only method to become educated. Going in debt for on College lark is a social acceptable way to spend money, but it isn't the only way to win. If you know what you want to do chase then chase all methods to get trained. Otherwise spend some time traveling the world to figure your life and then consider spending $200K ~ $400K on college education. Don't waster your time on these for profit degree mills. Their product sucks and no employer cares you got a purchased a degree from Phoenix College
[+] [-] brandmeyer|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matthewaveryusa|10 years ago|reply
For those visual people like myself, this is the most telling: http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Projects/BPEA/Fall-2015_emb...
[+] [-] vlunkr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|10 years ago|reply
It's rather arbitrary which thread of the two to pick as primary. Arguably it should be the original source, but then the article gives more background, and people have linked to the original source in the thread. We can change it if people feel strongly about it.
[+] [-] tstactplsignore|10 years ago|reply
1. Most students who go to elite colleges pay for what they can afford. While there are exceptions and financial aid is not perfect, the college bubble and loan crisis is largely occurring at for-profit colleges, 3rd tier universities, and the smaller liberal arts college.
2. Most students who go to elite colleges are not attempting to optimize their future salary, but are positioning themselves to succeed and obtain prestige in science, law, medicine, politics, or academia. Many graduates of South Dakota School of Mines earn more than the POTUS, and salary optimization is not what many college applicants value.
3. You do not and should not go to college primarily to sit and learn in classrooms. You go for the peer connections, professor mentorship, intellectual resources, and industry connections.
4. Outside of technology, it is almost impossible to correctly learn and succeed in most intellectual fields without attending college. See: science, medicine, law, politics, literature, the arts. In technology, students who go to adequate universities and take advantage of the resources and connections offered there are merely at an enormous advantage.
5. It is impossible to talk about (a) elite universities (top ~20 schools), (b) "top 100" universities, (c) small elite liberal arts colleges and conservatories, (d) lower ranked state schools, and (e) for-profit and/or trade schools under the same umbrella of "education" and have a productive conversation. There are all widely different environments where widely different rules apply and different policies should be considered.
[+] [-] superuser2|10 years ago|reply
Think of the weird kids in football-obsessed small towns who really like school and read classic literature for fun. The kids who enjoy high-brow media like NYT/Economist/New Yorker/Atlantic/NPR in places where reading anything in public would get you accused of being uppity. The kids who want to be professors, surrounded by future business and communications majors.
Admission to an elite college, for these students, is chance to finally be surrounded by people smarter than they are, people who understand them, people who hold their own in debates both inside and outside the classroom and have interesting things to say, people who care about the world beyond how it can make them rich. Gen-ed humanities are tiny discussions around conference tables, and instead of staring blankly and cracking jokes, people actually contribute, erring on the side of too much rather than too little. To the one kid out of 35 who took English class seriously, that's fucking amazing.
Of course, these people exist in small quantities everywhere, but at many elite schools they exist with a density approaching 100%. The ability to come of age surrounded by that kind of crowd is incredible, and it should be available to everyone who has the taste and talent for it. Fortunately, donors tend to agree, and the endowment can usually make it happen.
UChicago's 2000 Aims of Education address says it better than I can: http://aims.uchicago.edu/node/77
[+] [-] jonesb6|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hueving|10 years ago|reply
Is there any source for this? It's always something I've wondered about but haven't seen anything concrete indicating one way or another.
[+] [-] jdmaurer|10 years ago|reply
More than helping you learn how to code, a college education helps you learn HOW to learn how to to code. You won't get much useful experience until you are in an internship or doing actual work in the field learning from people that are better than you. You can spend forever on theories, but it will never actually get you anywhere unless you put it to use. For the people that need to learn how to learn, the price of college can be worth it. For others, it can be a waste of time and a LOT of money.
[+] [-] tanderson92|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZanyProgrammer|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rawnlq|10 years ago|reply
The data for MIT is very similar (even same median starting salary of $105,000 for EECS): https://gecd.mit.edu/sites/default/files/about/files/2014-gs...
So if you can just graduate in the top half of your class in at a good CS school you start with a 6 figure salary.
[+] [-] minimaxir|10 years ago|reply
> There are two notable limitations that researchers should keep in mind for all of these metrics. First, the data are not yet available to produce program-level earnings data. Research suggests that the variation across programs within a school may be even greater than aggregate earnings across schools; for instance, STEM and health majors frequently earn more than students who study in other fields. Second, the data include only Title IV-receiving students, so figures may not be representative of schools with a low proportion of Title IV-eligible students. Additionally, the data are restricted to students who are not enrolled (enrolled means having an in-school deferment status for at least 30 days of the measurement year), so students who are currently enrolled in graduate school at the time of measurement are excluded.
Although, looking at the data, the real problem is that half the colleges have PrivacySurpressed values for those fields.
[+] [-] droopyEyelids|10 years ago|reply
It also doesn't mention any steps taken to account for the willingly unemployed/underemployed- assuming both partners in a marriage will desire to work full time to maximize their earning potential seems like it's worth a disclaimer.
[+] [-] solidangle|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bd|10 years ago|reply
People who were admitted to elite universities but for whichever random reasons ended up not going there ended up being as successful as their cohort peers who did attend elite institutions. What mattered was "good enough for Ivy League" not Ivy League education itself.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Studies_of_Genius
[+] [-] dovereconomics|10 years ago|reply
Many talented students can't afford or avoid debt in elite universities.
At the same time, less competitive students may get accepted because of donations/connections/preparatory schools.
[+] [-] VLM|10 years ago|reply
Also the education bubble is economically sustainable if and only if the population is selected to be elite ivies only. A nation where nobody makes over $10/hr unless they're in the ivy aristocracy (therefore attending for free with substantial scholarships and aid) doesn't mix well with $60K/yr tuition for a non-elite school.
[+] [-] rglovejoy|10 years ago|reply
Bennington always impressed me as as rich kids' school. I have to wonder how many of these former students are living off of trust funds.
[+] [-] bhntr3|10 years ago|reply
He calls out schools where the students aren't repaying their loans later. It might be interesting to analyze the data to relate income to repayment of student loans (or lack of loans altogether.) It would be interesting to see if there are schools where the students make no money but pay back their loans on time.
[+] [-] bwilliams18|10 years ago|reply
Anecdotally, there are a surprising number of waiters, baristas, and other people doing jobs that are in no way informed by their years of study.
[+] [-] GabrielF00|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schwabacher|10 years ago|reply
They released the data under an open source license and have the source of the website on github! It's built w/ Jekyll!
https://github.com/18F/college-choice
If you asked me a year ago how likely I thought this was, I would have guessed something like 1%.
[+] [-] Uroboric|10 years ago|reply
Colleges in sparsely populated areas will probably always have dramatically lower numbers given the tendency of graduates to stay close to home, regardless of the actual quality of education. The salary numbers should take the region of a former student's job into account in some way.
[+] [-] kspaans|10 years ago|reply
0 - http://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/reno/san...?
[+] [-] CydeWeys|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andyidsinga|10 years ago|reply
see: http://www.ed.gov/blog/2015/09/colleges-where-students-earn-... and http://www.ed.gov/blog/2015/09/schools-with-low-costs-and-hi...
[+] [-] Namrog84|10 years ago|reply
Do people who make websites nowadays hate people and want to see the world(wide web) burn?
[+] [-] etep|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] striking|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdmaurer|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dvt|10 years ago|reply
An issue I take is conflating public institutions with private ones. I remember UCLA & Berkeley admissions people always struggling to poach students that might attend Stanford/Caltech, but the issue is very complex. Huge endowments are just part of the story.
It makes sense that a wealthy private school (Harvard/Princeton/etc.) has more extra-academic connections that help students get better jobs. Smaller class sizes also make a difference. I just think the article tries to talk about too many things and doesn't end up doing any of them justice. The gender stuff shoehorned at the end is a prime example.
[1] http://www.ucla.edu/admission/affordability
[+] [-] dreamdu5t|10 years ago|reply
Isn't that expected? Students who go to for-profit schools by definition have to pay their way through so it would make sense they have higher levels of borrowing and debt.
[+] [-] minimaxir|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gkop|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkhpalm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superuser2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minimaxir|10 years ago|reply
I wanted to play around with SAT/ACT data and create correlations with other variables...but the only values reported are 25% quantile and 75% quantile for accepted students (they derive a midpoint between the two...by averaging them, which is wrong). Hmrph.
[+] [-] learc83|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stdgy|10 years ago|reply
But, barring the fact that they're an Apples-to-Oranges comparison to typical liberal arts colleges and should be segmented as such in the data, I nonetheless think it's interesting information. Trade school expansion is often touted as a reasonable alternative to pushing more people into the higher education pipeline. To that end, we should seek to highlight and study which trades are actually worth pursuing from an economic perspective.
[+] [-] snegu|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffdavis|10 years ago|reply
There are several reasons people want to believe that's a good idea:
* They believe that someone with a B.A., B.S., etc. is a higher class person than one without
* They believe that putting everyone through the system will bring everyone up to that higher class, thus removing the negative effects of classes in society
* They believe that it's the only path to education
* They believe it's somehow immune from various biases, corruption, infighting, trend-following, etc.
* They believe it's a diverse forum for the free exchange of ideas, and that all reasonable ideas are given their due consideration
* They believe that "good colleges" are good and lead to success because of the quality of the education and the insight of the professors
Unfortunately, none of those are true. Until we admit that, we can't fix the problem.
When we do admit those things, we can acknowledge that:
* A person who reads a lot of books and participates in discussions with others who have different opinions has as much claim on "good citizenship" as anyone else (college or not), and it doesn't take tens of thousands of dollars
* Language, history, and art classes can be quite effective by teaching language, history, and art; and not spending the entire time on politics
* Vocational schools are probably the right place for a lot of things, including programming and software engineering (though a university might be the right place for Comp. Sci.). When we figure out software engineering, perhaps it belongs in the university, but for now it's not an established discipline.
* If we really want people to get a more academic education, giving them a loan and demanding them to pay it back regardless of bankruptcy makes little sense. Maybe that makes sense for vocational school, where it's more of a straight investment. But for a purely academic education, it's probably a lot cheaper to provide it anyway, so lots of financial approaches could work.
* "Good colleges" are good because of the kind and quality of students that they concentrate in one place -- in other words, a social club built around an academic theme. (This is really the one that makes it obvious that bringing more people into the university system won't have the same results as the ones who are in it now.)
[+] [-] djabatt|10 years ago|reply