Bloomberg article: Is College Worth It?

[polly_mer]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-28/buyer-s-remorse-high-debt-and-low-pay-leave-some-grads-rueful

Highlights:

"In recent years, more Americans have completed college degrees -- lowering their rarity in the workplace, and eroding the wage premium they can command."

"A separate survey by MidAmerica Nazarene University offers a glimpse inside the student mind, finding that more than one-third of college seniors and recent graduates wished they had gone to a different school -- because of high costs, or lack of fulfillment from their courses."

"one of the findings from the Federal Reserve Board's sixth annual survey of household economics: Just two-thirds of those graduates believe their investment in education paid off."

Thoughts?

[ciao_yall]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-28/buyer-s-remorse-high-debt-and-low-pay-leave-some-grads-rueful

Highlights:

"In recent years, more Americans have completed college degrees -- lowering their rarity in the workplace, and eroding the wage premium they can command."

"A separate survey by MidAmerica Nazarene University offers a glimpse inside the student mind, finding that more than one-third of college seniors and recent graduates wished they had gone to a different school -- because of high costs, or lack of fulfillment from their courses."

"one of the findings from the Federal Reserve Board's sixth annual survey of household economics: Just two-thirds of those graduates believe their investment in education paid off."

Thoughts?

Written by someone who will see to it that their kids go to college.

And, written by someone who wants college to only be for a privileged elite so they don't have to pay taxes for someone else's kids to have the same opportunity.

[mamselle]

"A separate survey by MidAmerica Nazarene University offers a glimpse inside the student mind, finding that more than one-third of college seniors and recent graduates wished they had gone to a different school -- because of high costs, or lack of fulfillment from their courses."

Well, the likelihood that

a) the grass is always greener, and

b) the current reverse-engineering beliefs that a course fulfills the student's requirements rather than the student fulfilling the course's requirements

..are together going to mess with those findings big time.

M.

[marshwiggle]

A couple of points:

Sentiment also splits by age: About 8 in 10 boomer-aged adults say that the benefits of their bachelor's degree outweighed the costs, while only about half of respondents under the age of 30 -- a generation when degrees were more widespread -- feel the same.

This has a ridiculous cohort problem; boomers have had 30ish years of employment to reap the benefits of their education; respondents under the age of 30 have had only 5 or so.

Also:

Benefits outweigh costs by discipline:

• Engineering - 81%
• CS - 77%
• Business - 71%
• Education - 69%
• Physical sciences/math - 68%
• Life sciences - 64%
• Law - 61%
• Social/behavioral sciences- 60%
• Health - 59%
• Humanities- 55%

[polly_mer]

Written by someone who will see to it that their kids go to college.

And, written by someone who wants college to only be for a privileged elite so they don't have to pay taxes for someone else's kids to have the same opportunity.

Interesting perspective.  I don't expect my child to go to college at 18 because of who he is and what I know about how those folks do in college at 18.  Most of my college friends didn't finish or didn't finish on their first couple of tries.

I'm happy to pay taxes for people who really want an education and will benefit from it.  I was a poor kid on full scholarship and it was a huge benefit to my life and to society.

However, I'm much less willing to pay taxes for a sham, box-checking exercise that doesn't result in either an education or a better society.  I'd much rather people who can think of better things to do with their time do something else and close a bunch of Potemkin colleges.

[marshwiggle]

However, I'm much less willing to pay taxes for a sham, box-checking exercise that doesn't result in either an education or a better society.  I'd much rather people who can think of better things to do with their time do something else and close a bunch of Potemkin colleges.

I think something like tuition which is around 10% of the median household income makes it reasonably affordable for most but discourages excessive box-checking. (And like you, scholarships paid for my tuition as essentially a first-generation university student.)

[Hegemony]

I wish American high school education were more reliably sound (and well-funded), so that employers could be sure that high-school graduates were qualified for more kinds of jobs. For instance, one of our U graduates went on to work for a car-rental agency.  There's nothing particularly abstruse about the car-rental business, so that a student should need four years of college education to qualify. But as it is, a high-school diploma is no guarantee that an applicant is fully literate — nor is a college diploma, sadly. It just means more debt and more years grudgingly trying to struggle through courses that many don't care about.  I certainly wish the system were different.  And I wish there were more opportunities for kids without a college degree, mine included. I don't wonder that numbers of college graduates are dissatisfied with the system.

[Hibush]

A couple of points:

Sentiment also splits by age: About 8 in 10 boomer-aged adults say that the benefits of their bachelor's degree outweighed the costs, while only about half of respondents under the age of 30 -- a generation when degrees were more widespread -- feel the same.

This has a ridiculous cohort problem; boomers have had 30ish years of employment to reap the benefits of their education; respondents under the age of 30 have had only 5 or so.

Two other cohort problems will affect the impression of the cost-benefit relation ship.  First,  a lot of boomers had a low-cost education relative to the under 30s because tuition was nominal at may public universities. So the cost really was less. Second, if you are currently paying on your student loans the cost is going to seem bigger, and the boomers finished paying a long time ago.

[spork]

"Of course, it depends on what you studied -- and at what kind of school. Two-thirds of those with bachelor's degrees from public and private not-for-profit schools see benefits higher than costs, versus just half who attended for-profit institutions . . .

One-quarter said they didn't pursue the major they desired due to pressure from family or friends, while even more felt that the field they wanted to pursue would be too difficult."

I'd say someone's answer to the "is college worth it?" question is probably heavily affected by what kind of student the person was. The person who believed that a bachelor's degree was by itself a magic ticket to an effortless, lucrative career is probably going to be disappointed by their earnings after four years of box checking.

[pigou]

And, written by someone who wants college to only be for a privileged elite so they don't have to pay taxes for someone else's kids to have the same opportunity.

I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad thing. What if 20% of Americans went to college, but the universities that remained offered rigorous courses to motivated students -- rather than giving credit for learning how to create folders in Windows for people who want to do the minimum to graduate with a 2.5 GPA?

The remaining 80% wouldn't be doomed to live with a high school degree. They could complete rigorous apprenticeship programs that prepared them for (well paid) jobs in many white collar industries. We have this odd system where apprenticeships are (almost?) universally limited to blue collar positions, even as on-the-job training would likely be vastly more productive for people who just want a degree so they can start working. All the people who phone in their philosophy assignments and take the easiest science classes to pass the requirements would simply benefit much more if they had a position in an industry they were interested in, got paid instead of paying tuition, and could take evening classes to learn relevant skills (perhaps entirely funded by their employers).

The question of whether "college is worth it" depends so obviously on the college you're attending. Harvard University? Sure -- and it doesn't matter what you major in. University of Phoenix? No -- and it doesn't matter what you major in either. There's a wide range in the middle, but it can't be a social optimum to have no "cutoff" point where people have no sensible alternative than to pay UoP so they don't get eliminated by HR filters. That's bad for everyone involved (except UoP, I suppose).

That is, the problem isn't that people go to college when they are ill prepared and unmotivated to do so. The problem is that for most of them, this is probably still the rational thing to do -- because we fail to provide them a better alternative. It's not like prestigious apprenticeships aren't possible... Germany and Switzerland show how. When I lived in NYC, I met a couple people in their early 20s from Switzerland who were doing their apprenticeships at major banks. They received a Midtown Manhattan studio (around $4,000/month) on top of a decent salary for a year or two before returning to Switzerland and working for that bank. The internships were probably as competitive as admission to very highly ranked universities -- but came with basically a guaranteed job offer and trained them for something they really wanted to do.

I wish American high school education were more reliably sound (and well-funded), so that employers could be sure that high-school graduates were qualified for more kinds of jobs.

Doesn't the US spend more per student than just about any other country in the world? I doubt more spending is the solution here...

[Hegemony]

I don't know about average U.S. high school funding and how it compares with other nations, but the funding for schools in poorer areas is criminal.  I went to one of them and I know. And even in my affluent area right now, the high school is so poorly funded that students have multiple "study halls" that count as class time by some sleight of hand, so that a student might have three study halls per day, because they can't afford teachers for all class periods.  My kid's sixth-grade class had 55 students, because they couldn't afford two teachers for the sixth grade. So ... not funded well enough to give those kids everything they actually need.

[pigou]

https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/education-spending.htm

The US spends $13,000 per student per year on secondary education. Compared to, e.g., $10,500 in Finland, which is widely viewed as having one of the West's best education system.

I admit to having limited experience, but I do occasionally speak to kids in disadvantaged high schools. What's shocked me repeatedly is that these classrooms have the latest tech gadgets, e.g. a smartboard and a laptop for every student, but then the first 20 minutes of a 50(?) minute long class are spent setting up the technology and getting students onto Google Docs. The technology seems to be a required checkbox, rather than an enhancement of classroom activities. But that's a lot of money (and, even more importantly, time) that could be spent better. I suspect at a high-income school, the kids have enough experience with technology that they can set things up much quicker -- so someone saw it working there and thought to just roll it out more widely.

Despite the abundance of tech, they can be lacking in other domains. One teacher showed me their economics textbook and was so embarrassed that she didn't understand any of it... I flipped through a couple pages and it clicked pretty quickly: the textbook was over 60 years old, barely readable for me, and required a background in calculus -- entirely useless to students reading below grade level (or anyone, really). The poor teacher thought she was ill prepared when she was simply handed completely unusable material.

Which is to say: money is important, but we also need to do a much better job figuring out what to actually spend it on. A model of education that is based on an assembly line and that doesn't capitalize on student's intrinsic interests (or respond to their individual learning challenges) probably isn't going to do all that well no matter how much we spend on it. Wealthy students are likely to do better because they can afford to have the extracurricular activities that actually do help them learn.

[Hegemony]

I would guess that in Finland, every school spends $10,500 per student, whereas in the U.S., basing school funding on local property taxes means some schools are spending $20,000 and some schools are spending $6000.  The badly-funded schools I'm familiar with are certainly not fussing with tablets and electronics; instead they're trying to keep the rats out and putting buckets under the leaks from the roof. 

In fact, in the middle of this post I went and looked up my old home town, and I read that they now spend $5,013 per student.  And these are students who frequently come from terrible home situations, so these are the pupils who really need all kinds of interventions and support in addition to fairly-paid teachers and modern textbooks.  I see the average SAT score there is 849 (and I imagine most students don't take the SAT, so those are the high achievers) and the percentage of grade-appropriate math proficiency is 13%. When I was there, about 1/3 of the teachers were valiant souls trying to do their best in the face of overwhelming odds, and the other 2/3 where people so badly educated and illiterate that they couldn't get an actual adequately-paid teaching job anywhere else.  I do remember my Speech teacher teaching us a unit on "funny stories," or, as she termed it, Antidotes.  We didn't have any textbooks at all, so I only found out that a funny story is actually called an anecdote when my parents told me.

Paying the teachers living wages and supporting the schools with even and reasonable funding would go a long way towards having high schools that actually teach students well, which would go a long way toward keeping many of us college profs from having to teach at a high school level.

[Hibush]

https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/education-spending.htm

The US spends $13,000 per student per year on secondary education. Compared to, e.g., $10,500 in Finland, which is widely viewed as having one of the West's best education system.

The means may contain different expenses, so it's helpful to check what is included.

In my school district, the cost for transportation is $1,500 per student. In Finland, they use public transportation, so that expense is not part of the education budget.

The district also spends about $9,000 per regular student and about $32,000 per special-needs student. Much of that difference would be in the health-care budget in Finland. Going from 10 % special-needs to 15% special needs has a big impact on the mean expenditure.

[mamselle]

Re: pigou's description of German and Swiss internships, I have two German friends whom I meant by chance about 20 years ago who were here on such internships (called "practical training semesters") which, as pigou described, included housing, a stipend, and a very rigorous program of oversight and student response via papers, projects, etc.

One, with who I'm still in touch, did so much work that he was hired as a consultant,then full-time, and has since been promoted twice, in the company he first worked at.

He was required to do at least one or two more semesters at other places (and some were EU-based, some US) but kept showing up here (or we'd meet in Berlin or Paris if I were there) because the first place just clicked for him.

I lost touch with the other student when she married a fellow from a very conservative group that seemed to stifle a lot of the brightness and energy she had always shown, and I don't know if she continued her work (she was studying to become a nutritionist) but she had similar placements before she finished.

N= 2, but I was impressed with the blend of scholarship and practicality in their programs, then and since.

M.