What Is College Worth? | Hacker News Reader

What Is College Worth?

newyorker.com

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For any purchase I like to ask people, "Is this an investment, or is it a hobby?". It applies to anything from houses (usually a decent investment) to cars (usually a poor investment but often needed as part of an investment in a career to commute), and even a college education.

If you're independently wealthy [1] or your family will take care of you, viewing college expenses as an enrichment experience (akin to a trip to Europe) is just fine. If you see it as an investment with future earning returns, then its cost efficacy must be examined rigorously.

[1] I know a HS dropout programmer (a BSD guy) who's now independently wealthy and studying math in France as a hobby.

How would you classify taxes? Of course, I am being a little sarcastic. Another category is unavoidable spending, just like paying taxes. you don't want to do it, and your return from it is debatable in some circumstances but you have to do it due to legalities.

If it's absolutely unavoidable (ex: water bills for drinking water, base level housing cost, etc), then I consider that to be the category of "investment" where you're valuing something for its present and future utility.

You may be correct that taxes are of a separate category (though it affects decisions for both investment and consumption)

I think in Europe people would view higher education as both enrichment and an investment in your future. The issue they becomes how to calculate return on investment on something that's 20%, no wait 35%, or is it 30% a hobby and 80% or... hmm... an investment :-) I imagine you could always try to calculate the value of the enrichment too, but how would you know beforehand, and how would you compare this with enrichment opportunities outside of college? Definitely something people should be thinking about, but I don't think examining cost efficacy rigorously is as easy as you make it sound.

Absolutely. Not easy at all. In my case, 10 years after the fact, I look back and think that my college education has turned out to be 60% investment, 40% enrichment. My Masters degree on the other hand has been about 20% investment and 80% enrichment (unfortunately). I certainly didn't expect my advanced degree to be such a bad investment! ;)

>If you're independently wealthy [1] or your family will take care of you, viewing college expenses as an enrichment experience (akin to a trip to Europe) is just fine.

On of the goals of the vast public higher education infrastructure that boomed in the 1960s was to bring that enrichment experience to everyone. And it was successful at this - participation in liberal arts majors was quite high until relatively recently.

Harpers [0] has an excellent piece on the topic.

[0] http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/the-neoliberal-arts/

Wanted to message you but couldn't find a contact in your profile so I'll write it here.

This was a wonderful read. Really appreciate you sharing it with us.

There is another factor in your analysis. Education may have more than purely local advantages. That is, it may be a good investment for me to fund other people to get a college education, even if they regard it as a hobby.

For examples: I may run a business producing collegiate sweaters, so want more people in college, I may enjoy telling bad puns about philosophers and am willing to pay for others to learn some philosophy so I don't have to explain myself all the time, and we as a cultural may be on a better footing if there are more people who understand the historical development of the US - even if that history education has little direct economic benefit to the person who received the education.

Very good point. Unfortunately we currently accomplish that through segregation, both self directed and otherwise. :(

How do you view it if you live in a country where all higher education is completely free, no matter if you study liberal arts or law?

Please don't forget about living costs (room and board for the years the degree will take - 3 for a licence, 5 for a masters), and opportunity costs (you could have worked full-time and advanced a career). Tuition being free only reduces by a fraction the total cost of a degree.

> “In 2013, 90% of DeVry University associate and bachelor’s degree grads actively seeking employment had careers in their field within six months of graduation.” That sounds impressive—until you notice that the figure includes those graduates who had jobs in their field before graduation.

Quite frankly, I think it sounds impressive even with that stipulation.

For those who don't want to wade through the entire article, they answered their question about halfway through:

> "Looking at the actual return on the costs of attending college, careful analyses suggest that the payoff from many college programs—as much as one in four—is actually negative. Incredibly, the schools seem to add nothing to the market value of the students."

College, what the rest of the world might call university, has value beyond paychecks. I know it is popular to look down on higher education these days, but there are real personal advantages. Anyone leaving a proper university at least knows how to read and write. That cannot be said of today's highschool students.

I truly enjoy being able to follow science even though is has nothing to do with my field. The ability to pick up and journal on astronomy and understand everything it has to say is something I could not have developed at a vocational school. A couple months of in a hard-math stellar astronomy course yields a lifetime of enjoyment.

I highly value my college experience, but then again I was able to avoid student loans by becoming a staff member and getting essentially a full scholarship plus health care (since there was no bachelors degree applicable for a web development job back then).

I can't help but notice that the way student loans are handed out like candy to 18 year-olds who do not yet have the education and experience to understand the implication of those loan burdens is a pretty slimy modus operandi. It just doesn't jive with the high-minded ideals that university's tout publicly.

>It just doesn't jive with the high-minded ideals that university's tout publicly.

Good private schools have excellent financial aid for students whose parents can't pay, and the high-minded ideals were brought to "the people" in the form of heavily taxpayer-subsidized state universities for much of the twentieth century. These institutions aren't going to abandon their values, though the state subsidies that made it possible without debt are long-gone.

The state subsidies are still there, what has changed is the cost of attendance. Universities are willingly complicit in overselling the benefits and downplaying the cost of higher education to teenagers for whom other options might be more appropriate. That is dishonest to say the absolute least, and juxtaposed with these institutions' "values" is quite hypocritical.

This applies to for-profit private schools, sure, but these days it applies to our hallowed state schools as well.

>That cannot be said of today's highschool students.

Of those that have a chance to make it to college, it probably can be said.

>I truly enjoy being able to follow science even though is has nothing to do with my field.

And this is a great side benefit of getting a good education. But taking out a 5 figure loan to buy this benefit?

If you are already getting a degree that will ensure your ability to pay back your loans, then adding a few more classes just to explore areas of interest is a pretty good deal. Often the cost is only that of textbooks and lab fees if you were already at full time.

> He cites a survey, carried out by PayScale for Businessweek in 2012, that showed that students who attend M.I.T., Caltech, and Harvey Mudd College enjoy an annual return of more than ten per cent on their “investment.” But the survey also found almost two hundred colleges where students, on average, never fully recouped the costs of their education.

I've never been a fan of the U.S. News et al college ranking methodologies. Publishing historical–as well as forecasted–ROIs would be a far superior metric.

Forecasted ROIs are meaningless considering major is more important for ROI than where you went to school. Harvey Mudd isn't a better university than Harvard, Yale, or Princeton just because its graduates go almost exclusively into what is currently a lucrative field. (MIT, Caltech, and Harvey Mudd are good because of their rigor, which is unrelated.) As it stands, a forecasted ROI ranking would almost certainly be topped by miscellaneous dev bootcamps because of their cost structure.

It is foolish to ask this question. It presupposes that college value is something that should be decided by the market.

Just make it free, like the civilized world.

A person gains some $N in financial gains and personal fulfillment for going to college. Regardless if tuition comes from the individual or the taxpayers, the society as a whole is still paying some $M for a person to go to college. Society gains some additional $R through the person going to college.

I posit that for some individuals, sending that individual to college is beneficial to society (N + R > M), and for others, it is not (N + R <= M).

If the government decides everyone goes to college at its expense, then some individuals for whom college would not be socially beneficial will go to college. This will be a societal loss.

Alternatively, the government could try to figure our who would be beneficial to send to college, and pay only for them. This would maximize societal gain if done correctly. However, I for one would not trust the government to make this decision impartially or correctly.

But when the market decides who goes to college, it is up to each individual to decide whether or not college will be beneficial for them. Hopefully, informed individuals can make that decision correctly. (Of course, when an individual decides, they do not consider the societal benefit R, only the personal benefit N. This could be solved by a government subsidy worth R, either in a grant or in favorable interest rates on a loan.)

I do not see a reasonable way in which a controlled economy for higher education could maximize societal gains.

No. You are still analyzing it in terms of the market. I don't agree with this paradigm altogether when it comes to public good. Your sentence "a person gains some $N in ..." has absolutely no meaning for me.

How else can we evaluate good if not by it's value? I understand that not all the benefits of college are monetary, but we need some unit of account to describe the immaterial gains of a college education.

Would you rather a billion dollars or a college education? If you say the former, than value of college is clearly less than a billion dollars.

Sure, we can evaluate it by value. But that value does not have to be monetary. You're still thinking in the same paradigm, see? You're saying if it more than a billion dollars or less... That's not the way to talk about education. Just acknowledge it as a public good - and keep it in the public domain. Stop monetizing it.

I think a good person to read on this would be John Stuart Mill, who said when the economy reaches any reasonable level of wealth that made it unnecessary to continue to grow, then the prime purpose of life becomes the development of human faculties. Things like monetary gain stop having meaning.

The best thing I got out of university was exposure to political discourse. I also took some geography classes in addition to my engineering classes which were eye opening and set me on a path to having a hobby level interest in history. The focus is always on economic benefits to society of higher education in the short term: jobs and skills and such. More important is that people who are more educated will make better democratic participants, which will benefit society generally (but perhaps not the same people who are aiming to benefit from skilled workers ... )

If everyone in a democratic society would benefit from this, it ought to be part of the compulsory education that everyone receives as a teenager.

Plus, if we had better junior high and high school educations in this country, we could cut out a lot of the general education requirements in colleges and graduate in 3 years instead of 4. With today's tuition rates, a 3-year degree could represent a substantial amount of money saved for the average student.

As I recall from my time in public schooling institutions, the presence of students that really didn't want to be there taught me mostly two things.

1) 'Respect my authoritah' (from (some) of those running the place, but enough that it was learned)

2) What I imagine (and thankfully have never verified!) are the skills necessary to survive in jail.

Everything else I learned by reading ahead in the books, or from science programming before those television channels became infected with reality TV nonsense.

>it ought to be part of the compulsory education that everyone receives as a teenager.

There is so much material I would like to add. A better course in our modern day political system (with sub sections for specialized local government). Financial info. Enough psychology to understand how people are manipulated. A basic course in contract law. A course in one's rights. And a good statistic course that goes over basic human errors when dealing with stats.

BTW the Baking Science and Management degree is for large scale baking. One option for BSaM degree requires the same math/physics as Engineering while I believe both require Organic Chemistry. Easy to make fun of the degree if you don't know the requirements and the goal.

The American Institute of Baking is close to K-State and it brings in bakers from around the world to learn even more about large scale baking. This includes knowing why the batch went wrong.

Very interesting stuff if you like applied chemistry.

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