Just How Hard is University to Overcome
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@storageninja said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
If you narrow to the top 100 schools, the top 5 programs for income at each, and control for people with a SAT score under 1350 (or whatever the new damn scale is, but a top 20% score) and from a family who is middle class or lower, what is the outcome of college vs. non-college. I suspect you'll see a slightly different outcome with the numbers.
Right, and everything we've seen statistically and logically says that we'd see a skew that shows college as a huge failure by a margin we've never imagined. That's exactly my point. If we narrowed it to just the people in the decision matrix, it wouldn't give the appearance that college had any value like it does when we look at the whole pool. Those people, with ambition and resources, have the most to gain by skipping college. They have the least benefit from college replacing parental or societal connections.
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@storageninja said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
Do I agree with generalizations that it should be avoided? That may be a bit too harsh.
It's not that it should be avoided. It is that it should be considered carefully because all available data says it is highly risky and very difficult to overcome. It's a huge gamble. Can it pay off? Sure, anything can. But betting on college as a career investment is a lot like betting on bonds. Could they pay off? Sure. Do people have this emotional attachment to them and think that they are conservative investment vehicles? Absolutely. Does financial math show them to be a smart investment? Hell no, they are huge risk and investing in bonds is a gamble against the market and all market history!
Yet people do both, with the same "it's just what you do" attitude. Forgetting to actually do the math and follow the logic.
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And in the same way, bonds sound smart because people compare to the alternative of shoving money in a mattress. College sounds good when the alternative is sitting in your parents' basement for four years doing nothing. But when you consider the actual reasonable alternatives that would be considered a baseline like investing in an S&P500 Index or studying at home while trying to work in your field suddenly the "cost of lost opportunity" risk becomes really clear.
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@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
Good or bad, this is just career questions, though. And physicians are very skewing to the numbers because they stay in school for forever, then make a huge income once they are out, for a very short career. So they make the income sound great, but often don't earn that much.
I wouldn't say their careers are short, just delayed and highly variable on hours in the later years. My wife has attendings in her program in 70's and one in 80's (they work part time). Infectious disease lends itself to working as long as the mind still can remember things and spot patterns.
"Red" Duke was still in the OR in his 70's and 80's (although I don't think he was doing much more than directing residents in the later years), Guy technically lived in the memorial Herman hospital with his dogs.
Also, a lot of doctors don't break 200K (and many barely make over 100K). Pediatric Infectious disease somehow actually makes less than general pediatrics....
Doctors used to not have the higher levels of debt (My cousin had like 20K in the 90's, my wife had well over 100K and that's low by today's standards). Doctors also used to get higher reimbursements from Medicare/Medicaid. Massive fraud in the 70's and 80's have led to a wildly different situation. Those assholes burned a lot of good will....
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@storageninja said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
I wouldn't say their careers are short, just delayed and highly variable on hours in the later years.
Delayed IS shorter, unless you get people to live or work longer. Four to seven years of school is a huge percentage of your career life no matter how you look at it. Even if you do the rare 60 year career length which almost no one ever does (I hope to) a master's degree is likely 10% of your career right there.
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We don't really have good stats yet due to the FIELD being too young to have produced full career lengths yet, but IT is likely to operate in the same way with people working in the field until they drop. IT might be more demanding than most fields, but it also requires far less physical demands and has a tendency to keep the mind sharp and moving from things like administration to planning and design can make staying in the field right up till you drop very plausible.
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@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@storageninja said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
You are lumping in people with Church Recreation Majors (Yes this is a major, and oddly the only person I know who has it, makes over 100K, although not doing anything related to the major).
Right, on the college side church rec majors are included. On the non-college side, people intending to never do anything but be a cashier at Mcdonald's are included. This "lumping" favours the college system in the stats.
It wouldn't surprise me if Baylor graduates a hell of a lot more family consumer sciences degree's (home Ec) than it does pre-med (It's a top program but not a lot of graduates). The person who doesn't want to do anything but be a cashier at McDonald's is going to have a VERY small ven diagram with Economics degree seekers accepted to the University of Chicago.
I agree it should be considered more strongly, but I think some VERY simple rules could be established for people seeking college.
Have a plan for graduating with less than xxx debt, or expense.
If you are going to be out of work xxx number of years and incur xxx cost, you need to make sure the program at the university is going to generate yyy impact.Avoid Tier 3 schools, for profits, degree's in animal husbandry and philosophy.
Seek out: Tier 1 schools below xxx cost, majors [top 10] at schools that are a [top 10] for that degree. -
Unfortunately, truly meaningful stats are impossible to get. Determining who "could have" done college and how that would have gone is subjective. And which college kids "could have" taught themselves vs. those that needed college to get them by as they simply weren't good enough to do it without college but could with college is likewise, a guess. Going to college and skipping college create their own causes and effects that are so much more dramatic than purely the college attendance decision.
What we know is that attending college takes away the greatest opportunity to demonstrate motivation, critical thinking and self education that anyone is offered during their lifetimes; and that what few stats we get show that college doesn't pay off on the pure averages and that logically the way the stats are they dramatically favour the college system. Those are what we have to work with. Does college have value? yes and no. Can college have value, yes. But the value is not intrinsic to college, it's just that college doesn't remove the potential for value.
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@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
We don't really have good stats yet due to the FIELD being too young to have produced full career lengths yet, but IT is likely to operate in the same way with people working in the field until they drop. IT might be more demanding than most fields, but it also requires far less physical demands and has a tendency to keep the mind sharp and moving from things like administration to planning and design can make staying in the field right up till you drop very plausible.
I've never seen anyone work in IT at 80 besides Ross (He's in management still at the Godplex last I heard, although I'm not sure if he's still around after the sale to NTT). Someone willing to hire mercenaries and violate international law is the kind of guy I'd rather work for....
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@storageninja said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@storageninja said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
You are lumping in people with Church Recreation Majors (Yes this is a major, and oddly the only person I know who has it, makes over 100K, although not doing anything related to the major).
Right, on the college side church rec majors are included. On the non-college side, people intending to never do anything but be a cashier at Mcdonald's are included. This "lumping" favours the college system in the stats.
It wouldn't surprise me if Baylor graduates a hell of a lot more family consumer sciences degree's (home Ec) than it does pre-med (It's a top program but not a lot of graduates). The person who doesn't want to do anything but be a cashier at McDonald's is going to have a VERY small ven diagram with Economics degree seekers accepted to the University of Chicago.
I agree it should be considered more strongly, but I think some VERY simple rules could be established for people seeking college.
Have a plan for graduating with less than xxx debt, or expense.
If you are going to be out of work xxx number of years and incur xxx cost, you need to make sure the program at the university is going to generate yyy impact.Avoid Tier 3 schools, for profits, degree's in animal husbandry and philosophy.
Seek out: Tier 1 schools below xxx cost, majors [top 10] at schools that are a [top 10] for that degree.Of course, and I have written guides on how to select colleges and college programs and college majors all focused around how to get the maximum benefit from the college experience. There are ways to make it relatively likely to not be too bad. But, the issue always is, anyone that is going to seek out, understand and listen to all that advice is almost always the exact same person that has all of the capability of skipping college to great effect. The two, we expect, overlap as groups on the Ven Diagram almost entirely.
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Another thing that is often overlooked is how college risk plays out. Going to college and losing the time (and money) at that life stage means that college success hopefully pays off and college disaster is life crippling. You might never recover from it. And there is no going back.
Skipping college, however, carries only tiny and delayed risk. You might earn less, but failing when skipping college almost never means major disaster, just "slightly less than ideal income." The college "skipper" also carries the Ace up their sleeve - they can reverse the decision and obtain a degree anytime that they want and rejoin the college group. They don't give up that option by attempting the other approach.
So one approach carries a potentially disastrous risk for small potential gain. While the other carriers very low risk for slightly higher potential gain. If treating the college decision analytically from a financial arbitrage viewpoint, the risk factor makes college scary.
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There are risk mitigation strategies that students should know about and leverage more often, even when going to school. For example, I strongly recommend students consider "bail" options like starting at a community college and going for an AS/AA first and a BS/BA only after completing the Associates degree. This gives a milestone, a resume boost, and an academic checkpoint and bailpoint halfway through the degree.
If after two years you realize that college isn't for you, you can wrap something up and have options for later. You can pick back up on a BS easily if you want. You have something for your resume. What you want to avoid is putting years into a BS and then not finishing, nothing is worse than that.
The Associates approach gives you way more time to consider your BS/BA options and you'll be far better at deciding what to do for that portion of your academics when you have two years of college experience under your belt.
Some high end public four year schools offer two year degrees along the path, like SUNY Empire, so that you can do the same thing without using a community college, too.
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@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
Unfortunately, truly meaningful stats are impossible to get
The Integrated post secondary Education Data System is pretty damn comprehensive.
One metric, Default rates for a school are a HELL of a good proxy for expected outcome.
Laurus College has a 20% default rate. I can't tell you that someone who didn't go to SUNY would not have made MORE than the 895K 20 Year Net ROI (compared to 24 years, less the cost of school), but that's still a damn impressive number above average.The Department of Education actually has income by major stats for schools.
https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?380438-Provo-College -
@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
"bail" options like starting at a community college and going for an AS/AA first and a BS/BA only after completing the Associates degree. This gives a milestone, a resume boost, and an academic checkpoint and bailpoint halfway through the degree.
Personally, I wish I'd taken a skip year. Would have been more valuable to go work for a little bit, and go backpacking Asia for 6 months to figure out what I wanted to do in life.
I never put really any faith in associate degrees. I thought the stats are a lot worse on them?
They do save money, but you cut a lot of the networking shorter coming in as a junior into upper-level classes. My network (that helped me get my first job, and some other key connections) came from those first 2 years of easier classes and more time for.... non-studying activities.
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@storageninja said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
Unfortunately, truly meaningful stats are impossible to get
The Integrated post secondary Education Data System is pretty damn comprehensive.
One metric, Default rates for a school are a HELL of a good proxy for expected outcome.
Laurus College has a 20% default rate. I can't tell you that someone who didn't go to SUNY would not have made MORE than the 895K 20 Year Net ROI (compared to 24 years, less the cost of school), but that's still a damn impressive number above average.The Department of Education actually has income by major stats for schools.
https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?380438-Provo-CollegeThe problem isn't that there aren't stats for those schools, but that there aren't stats for the alternatives. So knowing what an isolated university outcome is likely to be is great, but only tells one side of the story and leaves us with zero information about the other side.
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@storageninja said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
Personally, I wish I'd taken a skip year. Would have been more valuable to go work for a little bit, and go backpacking Asia for 6 months to figure out what I wanted to do in life.
Also highly recommended, they say (I have no stats on this, but I've been told this a bit) that a skip year spent meaningfully traveling (that's not subjective, is it?) is more likely to positively impact lifetime income than finishing a degree will.
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@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@storageninja said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
Unfortunately, truly meaningful stats are impossible to get
The Integrated post secondary Education Data System is pretty damn comprehensive.
One metric, Default rates for a school are a HELL of a good proxy for expected outcome.
Laurus College has a 20% default rate. I can't tell you that someone who didn't go to SUNY would not have made MORE than the 895K 20 Year Net ROI (compared to 24 years, less the cost of school), but that's still a damn impressive number above average.The Department of Education actually has income by major stats for schools.
https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?380438-Provo-CollegeThe problem isn't that there aren't stats for those schools, but that there aren't stats for the alternatives. So knowing what an isolated university outcome is likely to be is great, but only tells one side of the story and leaves us with zero information about the other side.
You can find proxies for success that have statistic significance. Economic background, SAT scores, etc. Economists have been studying "why are rich people rich, and poor people poor" for a REALLY long damn time.
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@storageninja said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
I never put really any faith in associate degrees. I thought the stats are a lot worse on them?
Not when doing the "big averages." If you do the giant full industry averages PHD does the worst, by far, masters and bachelors are really, really close with bachelors just barely ahead and associates beats them all but loses to not doing anything.
Each higher degree takes you farther from the best chances. Or, if you ignore lost opportunity, each has a tiny benefit (except PHD.) No matter how you look at it, PHD never makes sense to do if money is the goal.
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@storageninja said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@storageninja said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
Unfortunately, truly meaningful stats are impossible to get
The Integrated post secondary Education Data System is pretty damn comprehensive.
One metric, Default rates for a school are a HELL of a good proxy for expected outcome.
Laurus College has a 20% default rate. I can't tell you that someone who didn't go to SUNY would not have made MORE than the 895K 20 Year Net ROI (compared to 24 years, less the cost of school), but that's still a damn impressive number above average.The Department of Education actually has income by major stats for schools.
https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?380438-Provo-CollegeThe problem isn't that there aren't stats for those schools, but that there aren't stats for the alternatives. So knowing what an isolated university outcome is likely to be is great, but only tells one side of the story and leaves us with zero information about the other side.
You can find proxies for success that have statistic significance. Economic background, SAT scores, etc. Economists have been studying "why are rich people rich, and poor people poor" for a REALLY long damn time.
Find any study for this, though. It's all about motivation and self education. I've never seen anyone do a study that in any way would be useful to compare against college. My guess is that the researchers are all from colleges and know that they'd be defunded if they produced that data.
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@storageninja said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
They do save money, but you cut a lot of the networking shorter coming in as a junior into upper-level classes. My network (that helped me get my first job, and some other key connections) came from those first 2 years of easier classes and more time for.... non-studying activities.
Typically, but only typically, community colleges let you move faster. Mine, for example, had a policy that once you made the Dean's List the school had no authority to dictate your limits. But the school did have a cost cap at 11 credit hours. Anything over 11 in a semester was free. But only someone on the Dean's List could go over 12 without special approval (easy for 13-14 hours, hard beyond that.) Because I was DL my entire time in school, I took my credits to the limit at 33 credit hours per semester and even took overlapping classes, classes during lunch, even classes, etc. Triple full time for the price of regular full time. Rarely will a four year school allow you to do that.
