Just How Hard is University to Overcome
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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.
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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?
Associates degrees have the lowest barrier to entry for the "I'm a college degree holder" mark. Many jobs only say "degree required" or are more willing to negotiate when you have an AS. Because getting one is so easy, they value is easy to justify.
Also, they give you roughly two years of being "degreed" to look for work while you pursue a bachelor's degree which can be handy if you are trying to play both sides of the fence.
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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:
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.
Another thing to point out is that The unexamined life is not worth living...
If it's just about wealth, but the quality of life.Could I make more money in some blue collar trade doing 80 hour weeks in physically demanding labor? Sure. But I like what I do, and the travel has secondary benefits and that carries some value. There's always a way to make more money. If there's anything I've learned from internet forums is MANY people have reasons (some are dumb to me, whatever) to not make more money.
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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:
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.
Another thing to point out is that The unexamined life is not worth living...
If it's just about wealth, but the quality of life.Could I make more money in some blue collar trade doing 80 hour weeks in physically demanding labor? Sure. But I like what I do, and the travel has secondary benefits and that carries some value.
Sure, but the question is - does college aid or hinder that? And everything we've seen statistically and observationally gives no indication that it aids in that for people in careers where college is optional. I totally agree with the premise, but believe that college makes achieve the more esoteric goals harder to do.
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@storageninja said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
If there's anything I've learned from internet forums is MANY people have reasons (some are dumb to me, whatever) to not make more money.
Like SAT scores, income potential is a proxy for freedom and power. Tracking income, we assume, gives us insight not just into how much you could earn, but how much value you can get from a career. So, for example, if my goal was not money but the ability to control the location where I work, the length or my day, work from home or weeks of vacation a year, we assume that tracking income in the brackets reflects my ability to demand whatever benefits matter to me.
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This can't always be true, and I think that money proxies power poorly between career categories. But within a single one, I think that it is pretty useful. For example, a high earning IT pro has more power to dictate what matters to him more than a low earning one. But a high earning IT pro comparing to a comparably paid doctor or pharmacist would not be able to compare.
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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 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.
I've read a number of studies where they've actually been finding that raw IQ matters more to the question of why the rich people are rich (who didn't inherit it) and the poor are poor more than anything. The problem is of course, there's really not much that can be done if you don't have a high IQ, because there's about nothing anyone can do to improve their IQ. If, as they say, IQ is really just how quickly and efficiently people can process and utilize data, the theory that IQ directly effects probability for success makes a fair bit of sense. They haven't said anything ultra-conclusive in their studies aside from the fact that they found pretty universal links between higher IQ and greater success in general.
It would naturally make sense too that those with higher innate intelligence are more likely to be able to self-teach more content more quickly than those with less, but higher IQ would then also by the same theory penalize those people even more in the University setting. Interestingly enough though, the studies were all being done by big colleges and universities world-wide as a collaborative effort.
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The link that @StorageNinja posted is interesting.
Though @scottalanmiller they list the national salary average as $33,500.
So is your number of $38K for HS higher because in theory HS might garner more salary?
Those are also medians, BTW.
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@tirendir said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
I've read a number of studies where they've actually been finding that raw IQ matters more to the question of why the rich people are rich (who didn't inherit it) and the poor are poor more than anything. The problem is of course, there's really not much that can be done if you don't have a high IQ, because there's about nothing anyone can do to improve their IQ.
You can, actually, but it is hard and you can only move the needle a little. But you can do something about it. When I was at the hedge fund, they had a lot of research on this because they were very interested in the best of the best and not just how to find them, but how to nurture them.
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Did someone hijack your account?
Why do you keep saying college.
It's throwing me off, looks suspicious.
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@tirendir said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
It would naturally make sense too that those with higher innate intelligence are more likely to be able to self-teach more content more quickly than those with less, but higher IQ would then also by the same theory penalize those people even more in the University setting.
That's a great point, and I agree. The more capable you are, the more university penalizes you. The more your time is wasted, the more classes are boring, the less the professor has benefits for you, the more the classroom discussions are wasted, etc. University benefits are greatest to those that struggle the most. One of the reasons that I feel society promotes university is that it is a "leveler" making more people fit in the bell curve by making the bottom look not so bad and the top look not so good.
Large industry wants to hire the middle, the college system makes a bigger middle. It providers more worker bees at lower cost for the system.
