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If you listen to the experts, they’ll tell you that, despite the rising
cost of a degree, college still pays off.
And the statistics bear this argument out. A college graduate will on
average make $1 million more than a worker with just a high school degree over
the course of his lifetime, making even a six-figure upfront investment well
worth it in the end. Yet anecdotal evidence abounds of students who either
flunked out of college or graduated with large debt loads and are still unable
to land jobs that will make the investment in a degree pay off.
How do we reconcile the statistics with these stories? This chart from the
Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that we can miss a lot when looking at
just the average experience:
The bottom quarter of earners with a college degree don’t make more money
than the average high school graduate. And this hasn’t really changed much in 40
years. In fact, this graphic shows that a college degree has become more
valuable even for the bottom quarter of earners, likely as a result of the
evaporation of high-paying blue collar jobs, like those in the manufacturing
industries. Of course, over the past 40 years, the cost of a degree has
increased 12-fold, while a degree holder isn’t making more money at all, when
accounting for inflation.
So, it’s quite likely that, given the huge upfront investment for a college
degree, many more workers today would have been better off not going to college
at all. There are a few caveats that should be mentioned, however. First, we
don’t know for sure how much money this bottom quarter of degree-holding earners
would have made without their college education. Furthermore, much of this could
boil down to career choice: there are many jobs that require a degree but don’t
pay very well. If someone earns a degree for reasons beyond making more money,
it could be that the upfront investment is worthwhile regardless.
That being said, the above graph is certainly evidence that both the public
and private sector need to make serious changes to provide higher education more
efficiently. Unfortunately, this bit of information isn’t really helpful for the
millions of Americans who need to decide how and where to send their kids to
college.
There is a well-established principle in behavioral economics that people
systematically overestimate their abilities in general, and we can see this in
the exponential increase in college costs. Up to 25% of college grads would
probably be better off not pursuing a degree, yet nobody actually thinks they’re
going to be the ones for whom the investment doesn’t pay off.
Further compounding the problem is the fact that students usually don’t
have a great idea of how they are going to fare in college, or what sort of
degree or career they will pursue until after they’ve already made the decision
to attend.
One could argue that all this uncertainty is evidence that we should be
investing more in public support of higher education. There’s plenty of evidence
that there are what economists call “spillover effects” from students educating
themselves, that society as a whole benefits from higher education. So there is
justification for paying for higher education with tax dollars. And since
students don’t know ahead of time what degree they will personally benefit from,
it’s possible that students will just begin to forego college altogether,
hurting society in general. There’s evidence that this is beginning to
happen.
In the meantime, students who are unsure of what they want to study or do
are probably best advised to be very cost-conscious when choosing a college, and
to be unafraid to wait until they are sure how they will use their degree before
they start to pursue one.
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发表于 2016-7-10 18:10:49