I was expecting something along the lines of this data: http://www.payscale.com/college-education-value-2013
College continues to provide good value to anyone who anyone who is careful selecting a school and major.
College continues to provide good value to anyone who anyone who is careful selecting a school and major.
""" Return from Attending College: The main financial benefit of attending college is the gain in income received by a college graduate over a high school graduate. However, by choosing to attend college, one is giving up 4-6 years of income one could have received if one went straight to work after high school. Therefore, we calculate the gain in median pay over a high school graduate (Earnings Differential) as the difference between the 30 Year Median Pay for a 2012 Bachelor's Graduate and Weighted 34-36 Year Median Pay for a High School. """
Unfortunately, they fail to take into account that the people who go to college probably would have been more successful anyway.
Unfortunately, they fail to take into account that the people who go to college probably would have been more successful anyway.
here we go:
http://mmss.wcas.northwestern.edu/thesis/articles/get/776/
"I find that family income remains an important positive predictor of eventual adult outcomes. The effects persist even when many characteristics that are related to income, such as parents’ education, home environment characteristics, parental involvement, school characteristics and student ability, are controlled in a regression framework. "
...
"Even conditional on a host of other characteristics such as grades, test scores, and parents’ education and level of involvement, a student from a family earning $50,000 a year can still expect to earn about 10% less in the future than an otherwise identical student from a family earning $150,000 a year. These relationships are all statistically significant at the 1% level."
As an aside, while trying to find income data by education that excludes outliers (sadly, I failed to find anything) as prompted by your comment, I noticed that college graduates with only a bachelors degree represent roughly 20% of every single income group, except for incomes below $30K, where they only represent ~10%.
I haven't had much time to digest the data, so I am quite possibly overlooking something obvious, but wouldn't you expect that number to rise with incomes if simply having a degree provides an income advantage?
It's like looking at Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein and asking if they wouldn't still have become successful bankers had they not gone to Harvard. It's most probable that they'd never even have gotten their foot in the door of the industry.
2. The smart ones who realize that they may be better suited to other tasks and don't feel like starting their adult lives in massive debt.
3. People who, for perhaps social reasons, exhibit very poor academic performance early in life.
4. People with random reasons for not going.
Anecdotal, but I sure know a lot of dumb, incompetent people with degrees.
And they pay me more afterwards? Win-win!