It Depends What You Study, Not Where
economist.com
economist.com
GPA is about as flawed as alma mater, but I think combined they give a useful signal.
It seems to me you should ask questions you expect the candidate to be able to give good answers for, period.
I've heard that Harvard is similar: the grade distribution at Harvard is roughly 10% As, 80% Bs, and 10% Cs. Getting an A at Harvard implies that you really did a lot of work, but getting a B could imply everything from "You really did a lot of work but just missed the cutoff" to "You learned basically nothing from your undergraduate education."
Or maybe they learned exactly what they needed to do to game the system. Does doing a lot of work correlate to learning more? Seems both sides of the huge distribution got the same perceived outcome, just one did it easier.
It's inflated, but then again, how much Harvard coursework mastery is actually necessary for your job?
Mastery or not, if your score bumped you out of the curve, you were getting a B.
Friends in Ivy League schools would get As or incompletes.
The fact that they can maintain 12% return is fantastic, and you should be spending every last cent you can afford on that. After all, if I offered you a 12 cents a year if you give me a dollar today, and someone else offered you $12000 a year if you give them $100k this year, you'd probably take the latter.
And this is not even counting the fixed cost of the time you spend going to university. The cheap and the expensive both charge you the same in time. But the latter gives you a phenomenally higher return on that time.
First, much of the value of a degree is in getting your first job (networking at elite schools must be helpful however). As your career progresses, the importance of having a degree diminishes. Leaving aside Med, Law, etc.. where you have to have it.
Second, your pay is not a pure output of your degree. What field you're in and the salary prospects in that field, how hard you work, how much you negotiate you salaries, how often you change jobs, what part of the country you live in, (I would argue) simply how smart you are - some would say even your race and gender.
Another metric could be, cost of tuition vs. one year avg. salary in your field. If I went to college 20 yrs. ago for computing and the tuition was 5k a year, and the average salary is $100k - and go to college now, the cost is $20k - do the math on college value. Kind of a joke right now I can get the Android dev job for $100k prob without the degree.
If you want to be a splashy top executive, it's very helpful to have a top-tier MBA, and experience in management consulting or investment banking. If you want experience in IB or MC, it's very helpful to have an ivy league undergrad degree, ideally in something like econ.
If you want to be a great engineer, it's very helpful to go someplace, hang out with smart people, take hard classes, write code outside class, and make sure you make the most of the experience, wherever you are.
If you want random assholes to think that you're a great engineer, it's very helpful to go to MIT, Stanford, or CMU, and just make sure you don't do so poorly that you don't graduate.
All this data suggests is that STEM majors are more likely to get high-paying jobs with only their undergrad degrees. It completely omits the many humanities/arts majors who go on to graduate study and thence to perfectly lucrative careers.
Do you have any sources for this?
i.e., they're essentially saying, if the uni is very selective (e.g. Harvard), the ROI is similar to say a state college.
But they're disregarding that Harvard, whoever subsidises you, is a $100k investment or w/e, and state colleges are $10k. Just making up ballpark numbers here.
Now the ROI might be the same, i.e. they might both end up earning roughly 1.5x their investment in annual salary. But seen this way, everyone appreciates there's a gigantic difference in where you study, even though percent wise the ROI is exactly the same.
I'm not claiming that I had hifalutin ideals; I knew that money was important, but I had this (perhaps naive) idea that if I became an excellent practitioner in whatever I did the money would follow.
I just wasn't prepared to hear "I'm just here to get a good job" from most of my peers. Some, I would expect, but not most.
I've remembered that for 35 years.
There are certainly other factors to consider than just salary, but to dismiss that consideration as "prostitution" is absurd. Money may not buy happiness, but it buys everything else. I'm a big fan of food, clothing, and shelter, all of which money can buy in abundance.
But I was lucky to pick a field with high pay and lots of good employers, so I have the luxury of choosing both.
I don't know when you went to school, but now you can satisfy that curiosity with the Internet. The reason for school is to make connections, and have proof of experience for your resume.
No matter how hard you work, or how talented you are, the very top is something we cannot guarantee to anyone. So it's pretty rational to look at a career path, a set of life decisions, by looking at average cases, not just the very top.
Going out there because you are curious about the world, and ending up doing something where only the very top percentiles do well is only a great story if you win. I know a girl that went with those lofty ideals into psychology, along with a high IQ. She now answers phones at a call center. Two PhDs in biology: One is teaching English in Japan, because she couldn't bear a 20+ year post doc path, getting paid less than half of what I made in my first job out of school. My brother, top of his class in biology too. Got a Phd with honors. But he was born in the wrong country, and his best job offer is for a position that asks him to do 10+ hour days, rotating into the night 1'3rd of the time, all for 850 euros a month. Welcome to a country with over 20% unemployment.
So it's really easy to think it's important to have curiosity as long as you also pick a profitable course of study too, or are quite lucky. Otherwise, it's the same mindset that can dig you into a hole.
Picking a career just because of the money, and not getting any love for it as you go is a road to failure too: Many people drop out of programming for those reasons, and few options are more profitable on average than programming. But I can't blame people for keeping an eye out of the available options. I know I did: There were many things I thought I would have enjoyed doing, and I picked one that also looked profitable. I can't say I regret it.
The kinds of failures you're describing are exactly what you get when the default morality is "Make as much money as possible".
You can say it's currently maladapted to expect more, and that's possibly true.
That doesn't mean it's an ideal situation, or a praise-worthy one. If the talents of smart people are consistently underutilised, that's a social problem and not just a series of unrelated individual failures.
I agree, but I think the social failure is that we tell people to "do what they love" and "follow their dreams" instead of "do something important" or "do something where you can make a difference".
The things that, say, English majors do are probably as objectively important as the things I do at work, but the field is overcrowded to the point that the value added by each additional entrant to the field is significantly reduced. So it's hard to find work that pays well for English majors (at least if they stay in their field).
Another thing is that "do something you love" misses is that you should find a career that you love. If you love your college experience but hate the jobs available to you afterward, that degree may not be a net positive.
Why not move?
It wont.
For most people, a library solves that more efficient and cost effectively than a university, at least to the level that they care about.
It would be nice if university were cheap enough to be an answer to curiosity, but as it stands,
Likewise, my brother never got into cs because both of our parents worked in grey cubicle hells. People evaluate jobs on many factors other than pay.
That doesn't mean your entire income will be N times higher.
For example if you spent $100k on your tuition in year 0, and the rate of return from that degree is 10% per year, and assuming you spend the returns rather than reinvest them, then your degree is adding $10k/year to your income.
But you're not living on $10k/year, you're earning $80k/year, $10k of which is attributable to your degree.
So to complete the exericse, if you had spent 2x on your education, you would be making $90k/year. Not $160k.
Yes, it's true that N times spent on tuition does not equal N times more money in an absolute sense because the baseline income for spending zero on tuition is not zero.
However, the article said that the ROI on tuition was 12% annualized, which means that you're not reinvesting the proceeds. If you reinvest the proceeds, then that is additional return on top of the 12%.
But the details are not really relevant. What matters is that the headline is wrong. Where you do to school does matter.
If smart students choose selective schools and smartness is associated with ROI, we would expect to see a correlation between ROI and school selectivity. That we don't is interesting.
If merit is highly correlated with school selectivity, then selectivity can be considered a proxy for smartness/determination/etc. If that's the case, education ROI appears to be not strongly correlated with merit (via the selectivity proxy). That is very interesting.
As for what people can do differently: if you have equal chances of succeeding at the most selective arts and humanities college, or the least selective engineering, choosing engineering will net you better 20 year salaries. Especially relevant if you're considering humanities as a law degree path -- the LSAT has logical reasoning test, and if you can hack that, you can probably do okay in engineering math / CS classes.
But since we're talking about ROI and not salary, you very much want to get into the most expensive, most selective engineering schools. If I invest money in bonds these days I'm going to get less than a 5% return - if I can get a 12% return I want to invest as much as I can borrow.
Its also interesting that they did the cost net of financial aid, so probably looking at the average cost of the degree, creating a much larger variance than the data set indicates.
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It's looking at ROI. And the cost of education typically correlates with quality and long-term earnings. (Put your pitch forks down, not all schools, just generally.) So, if I think about this on a 20 year horizon. I have a $50K degree program at a state school vs a $200K degree from Harvard (numbers rounded). Lets just use 10% as the ROI. At 10% over 20 years, the return on the state school is ~$336,000. For Harvard, this yields ~$1,350,000. So, the ROI might be the same, but you basically get an extra million over 20 years for getting into Harvard.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/10/value-u...
If it's not selection bias, then you can conclude Harvard causes success and you should go there.
Woah, what? So a degree that cost $1 but raised your career earnings by $100 would be at 100%? 1000%? Not sure how they're doing the math, but it completely dwarfs the rest. And shows how obviously flawed the measure itself is.
One of the key things left out is the baseline cost of time. A few years of your life is not free and probably makes for a pretty high baseline cost.
Hm, wouldn't that already be accounted for in using 'lifetime earnings'? If someone doesn't go to college and earns $1m, and another person goes to college and earns $1.1m, then the extra 4 working years apparently didn't compensate enough. Plus, college can be a lot more fun than working.
I'm of the opinion that while school calibur might be able to get you interviews and jobs a lot of times, it's selecting for mediocrity since it doesn't go for professional accomplishments...and thus avoids hiring high performers, who generally want to work with other high performers.
I definitely didn't go to a top school, but I am amazed at people who say their school was a top school or almost top school. I am just saying as someone who interviews people every week: your school doesn't matter to me - it is just what you have done in your career, and what you can do now.
For me, the explanation is that it's relatively harder to determine whether someone has learned their stuff if it's Math or Science, but quite hard if it's creative writing or history. There's an xkcd about this.
That's why something like an online coding test might work: someone clueless will not be able to write that palindrome quiz. You can have a zero false positive rate at the expense of a false negative rate (competent people can freeze in exam situations). With essay subjects, it's pretty hard to separate the BSers from the real deal. You'll always have some false positives.
An interpretation is: for humanities, who you know matters more than what you know (ie, the connections you make).
https://medium.com/@spencer_th0mas/why-america-cares-about-e...
If you want to get a job because your roommate started a billion-dollar tech company, or inherited a billion-dollar company, or has a parent who is the President of a foreign country, you had best go to Harvard (or maybe a Princeton/Stanford type).
The trouble with linear methods is that they often fit to the bulk of the population and have poor fit at the extremes.
Btw, studying CS in MIT (a school which traditionally taught principles and big ideas) and in, say, third-rate school that taught Java coding makes a huge difference.
It is not a coincidence that it was MIT and Stanford from where the best things in CS came from (and we should not forget the "parallel universe" of Standard ML and eventually Haskell, which came from UK schools).
Ironically, where did this author learn grammar?
Pre-med is typically science (biology). Pre-law is typically political science or psychology. Those strike me as more likely arts here, though you'd need to look at the source study's classifications.
If they used a curve fit they'd have seen the line curves up as Admission rate decreases.