The orthodox argument goes something like this:
On virtually every measure of economic well-being and career attainment—from personal earnings to job satisfaction to the share employed full time—young college graduates are outperforming their peers with less education.
People who get a bachelor’s degree double their lifetime annual earnings. Just look at this chart!
You can read the full, unabashedly self serving case for college education here (NYT). Or the less pretentious, more downmarket version here. The evidence isn’t all too complicated because all sorts of life outcomes correlate well to educational attainment. The education apologists aren’t dissuaded by the mountains of college debt either. There’s a couple of problems with this world view.
The first problem is that Americans still haven’t gotten the message and bent the knee to the good and generous god of The University.
But despite the potential benefits and opportunities available to college graduates – and the potential challenges faced by those who lack a college diploma – Americans have somewhat mixed attitudes about the effectiveness of traditional four-year colleges and other higher education institutions.
Yet even as many college graduates view their own educational experience in positive terms, the public as a whole – including a substantial share of college graduates – expresses reservations about the extent to which various higher education institutions prepare students for the workforce more generally.
College is amazing. Why can’t you understand that, you peasants? Send everyone to college. Case closed.
Certainly skepticism of this view isn’t new and anti-college sentiment has been around for awhile.
Colleges have long been a boogeyman for all that’s wrong with the kids today. Recently, some researchers find direct evidence for how higher education changes moral attitudes:
Our results indicate that higher education liberalizes moral concerns for most students, but it also departs from the standard liberal profile by promoting moral absolutism rather than relativism. These effects are strongest for individuals majoring in the humanities, arts, or social sciences, and for students pursuing graduate studies.
So basically earning a liberal arts degree catalyzes a personal evolution into Oliver Cromwell minus the charisma and military acumen.
(On a related note, some kids at Brandeis did me a favor by creating a Suggested Language List. I can now understand what language is prohibited, why it’s prohibited, and what’s the new acceptable terminology. I was surprised to learn “Trigger Warning” itself is now vorboden. Actually I’m not surprised by that at all.)
That brings us to the second problem. Maybe the kids who were going to do well were always going to do well - college or otherwise.
I generally bought into the orthodox view for a long time. I never thought twice until I stumbled across the Payscale.com college salary data about five years back. I can try to dig up that first report but this years data tells the same story of college graduate earnings in early & mid career:
There’s a lot going on here but suffice it to say the schools consistently producing the top earners recruit from vastly different candidate pools. The divergence between this list and mainstream college rankings really threw me for a loop. How can these random schools produce such outsized outcomes and how can allegedly prestitious institutions punch so far below their weight? Clearly, there’s something interesting happening at the Harvey Mudd, Webb Institute, and Babson because their graduates earn more than some Ivies. (Maybe it’s just that I’ve never met someone from those schools so there’s an enigmatic allure). Conversely, is it possible some schools could be destructive to lifetime earnings? People act sorta impressed if you went to Cornell (#38), Columbia (#36), or NYU (#71). (Maybe New York just poisons your soul or the tuition costs self select for Trustifarians). I’d encourage you to click through the report and come up with your own disparaging narratives about other people’s alma maters.
Some researchers found a clever way to answer some of these questions around selection bias by evaluating kids who got accepted into more than one school in Texas but attended the less selective one. If you compare their earnings outcomes to the students at the more selective schools, one might be able to determine how much a better school drives earnings.
I’ll preface my commentary on their results with 1) this is beast of a working draft and 2) the charts are all sorts of poorly designed. The blue dots on the chart above are the raw earnings comparisions to UT Austin (the benchmark school). The blue dots are basically the Payscale ranking without any adjustments.
The red dots are the earnings when you add adjustments typically made in this research area (I’m taking their word on this). Those are:
… demographics (gender, race), family income (proxied by free/reduced price lunch status), high school academic preparation (10th grade test scores, advanced coursework, and an indicator for graduating in the top GPA decile), and behavioral measures of non-cognitive skills (high school attendance record, disciplinary infractions, and an indicator for ever being at-risk of dropping out).
Finally, the green dots are the earnings outcomes when adjusted for students who were accepted to several institutions but went to the less selective one. Basically,
Students who apply to and are admitted by the same set of institutions thus appear to have very similar vertical [earnings] potential regardless of where they actually enroll.
The college experience didn’t drive earnings at all. It was self selection all along. The smart, ambitious kids were always going to do well and the less smart, less ambitious kids weren’t. This research begs the question: if selection bias explains earnings outcomes amongst colleges then does it also explain the earnings effect betwen those who attend college and those who don’t?
There’s something driving the education attainment gap. The dystopian version from the Texas study is that it’s all selection bias. The more optimistic version from the Payscale data is something, something, handwave good things at Webb Institute and bad things at fake prestige NY schools like NYU.
Anyway, I don’t expect Pew, the NYT, or entrenched economists in the academic welfare complex to stop the incessant message of college at all costs. Let’s just say the American hesitation to enroll at all costs might be based in a sane cost/benefit analysis after all.