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Beckee is correct that college graduates earn more than non-graduates, but some fraction of the earnings differential results from the higher average intelligence and persistence the college grads had when they started college. Anthony Carnevale has recently documented what he terms "The College Payoff" http://cew.georgetown.edu/collegepayoff/ , and Richard Vedder, an economist who is more skeptical of the value of college, has commented on the report:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/americans-over-or-under-educated/30007
Americans: Over- or Under-Educated?
Chronicle of Higher Education
August 8, 2011

Carnevale's method is to look at the 2009 earnings by education level and to estimate career earnings from this.

I linked to this report the other day. I think it was in this thread, but it's easier to link it again than go back and find it:

http://pewsocialtrends.org/files/2011/05/Is-College-Worth-It.pdf

I know there's a lot of information there, but you will find the calculation on page 83 and the graphs on pages 88 & 99 particularly germane. Also, the bar graph on page 36 that shows 86% of college graduates polled who said college was a good investment for them personally.

Here's more recent data from Planet Money:
http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2011/04/01/Unemployment-by-education.jpg?t=1301669694&s=51

And the article from whence it came:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/04/01/135036740/6-ways-of-looking-at-unemployment

If you do not agree with my stance that college is important, you have the right to ignore me and find data to support your own stance. So do my students. If you think money is a terrible reason to go to college, it's not my favorite either, but my students need to make an informed decision on something that may have such a big impact on their futures.

For the record, I was teaching stance and evidence and had presented "stance" as being somewhere between opinion and hypothesis when I showed a slide that said, "Stance: College is important". The evidence I presented clearly showed that most people with a high school diploma had jobs and that some people with graduate degrees did not find their jobs interesting.

My students had been learning mean, median, and mode in math class, and we talked about the fact that there are always people in each category who make more than the average and people who make less. For example, a kid called Bill Gates got into Harvard, but decided he'd rather start a company called Microsoft than graduate. My students came up with their own examples of relatives that make a decent living without a college degree, and some can already recite the College Is Important speech they got from their own parents.

Yes, but to get a complete picture you must also poll the people who started college and dropped out.

A four-year liberal arts degree is for the top 20% or less of the IQ distribution, as Val wrote, and students of average intelligence should consider other post-high-school paths. A good paper discussing this is

"Beyond One-Size-Fits-All College Dreams: Alternative Pathways to Desirable Careers" , published in American Educator, v34 n3 p2-8, 10-13 Fall 2010 (the magazine of the American Federation of Teachers).

at
http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/fall2010/Rosenbaum.pdf . Here is the abstract:

The vast majority of high school students plan to attend college--and believe that a bachelor's degree all but guarantees them a high-paying job. What many of them don't know is that those who are not well prepared are not likely to graduate. They also don't realize that plenty of career-focused certificates and associate's degrees lead to satisfying careers that pay just as well as, and sometimes better than, careers that require a bachelor's degree. If detailed information on the broad array of higher education and career options were made available to them, students would have more incentive to work hard in high school and a better chance of achieving their dreams. This paper aims to identify three elements of the BA-for-all movement that are potentially harmful: (1) the idealization of the BA degree, which results in ignoring excellent options like an applied associate's degree in mechanical design technology, graphic communication technologies, dental hygiene, or computer networking; (2) the promise of college access, which results in high school students seeing their slightly older peers go off to college, but not seeing the trouble many have once on campus; and (3) the cultivation of stigma-free remediation, which results in many "college" students not even knowing that they are in remedial, noncredit courses. The authors discuss each of these issues and call for three simple remedies: (1) realizing that many good jobs do not require a BA; (2) fully informing students about their options; and (3) honestly telling them what it will take to succeed.

Yes, there is a college bubble, but who is going to determine who gets to go to college? Maybe there should be limited loans for liberal arts degrees and more loans for computer science and engineering?

If you choose medical technology, there are loans, for literature, not so many. And the competition for the loans will then make people think about careers as they choose a college. In my day, kids did that. You thought about what you wanted to be and chose college accordingly.

Not that you couldn't change your mind but you thought about college as the path to X,Y,Z job. You were expected to come out of college with a job and move out of your parent's house and be able to support yourself. Not well, but still support yourself.

Ren

College is the new high school. And college has always been somewhat of a pyramid scheme.

The major problem is the non-dischargability of the student loan debt, which is a real problem in the law school complex right now.

Go to a poor law school and you still get larded up with $150,000 in loans you can't get rid of.

And remember also that most of them will be burdened with student loan debt.


On average, people with degrees in classical liberal arts subjects or subjects like engineering or science or economics presumably end up with interesting higher-paying jobs. But I'm not sure how people with degrees in watered-down subjects fare.

It really bothers me to see colleges granting degrees to people without requiring them to spend a lot of time thinking carefully and analyzing stuff (e.g. complex math problems or analyzing a novel or historical event and writing a paper). People who haven't learned this skill aren't truly educated in a classical sense of the term. Plus, as studies have been showing, they aren't learning the skills required to analyze a situation and make sense of it. Here's an example of grade inflation trends and reduced learning outcomes in American colleges and universities.

A question Beckee and anyone else who's arguing in favor of encouraging everyone to go to college: what do you think of all the information that's been presented on this thread showing some very negative effects of pushing everyone to go to college?

You could poll the people who had gone to college and dropped out, but a study I read about ten years ago found that every college class you take has an impact on average income, whether or not you graduate.

So you're basing your stance on a single study that you read ten years ago that may or may not have been well-designed and that could be completely out of date now? What about all the new information that a number of people have been presenting here?

Since I am flying to another island to take the GRE today, and would like to replicate the results I got 16 years ago when I took it, I'm going to use an old teacher trick of asking a robust question and stepping back.

In a post-industrial economy (one in which manufacturing jobs have been leaving the country for lower wages abroad for decades), what alternatives do we have? What data do we have for the long-term benefits of those alternatives?

You didn't answer my question and obviously didn't even read the abstract that Bostonian posted. Is avoiding the issue an old teacher trick that you use?