Asymmetrical Information

umm, delay gratification.....

i think college is gratification for most, and it's more like delay working

Hi Jane:

In my post I did not take a strong position on whether a college degree was just a signal or whether you learned actually useful things. I think it's a mix, some signal and some real skill development.

I also don't have a strong position on how much signal vs skill there is, especially in aggregate statistics.

My question was whether the real cost of going to college has actually *decreased* because higher tution (assuming no financial aid, but loans are OK) has been defrayed by lower opportunity cost (the wage gap between HS disploma holders and college degree holders)

The "credentialist" versus "human capital" debate about education goes back at least to the 70s, probably earlier. One major piece of evidence for the human capital side is Heckman's research showing that GEDs holders make the same money as high school dropouts. Since GEDs look like high school diplomas, but are much easier to get, this implies that skill matters, at least at the high school level. It's also worth noting too that Heckman thinks that discipline is more important than cognitive skill.

Or, it could signal that GED holders don't have enough self-control to actually finish a proper diploma, so they properly belong in the same category as dropouts when it comes to the risk of hiring them. That is, perhaps it is still about signaling.

40 years ago an uncle who recruited engineers for his firm told me that an engineering degree meant that the individual had the intelligence and self disicpline to learn to to the job they were hired for.

40 years ago an uncle who recruited engineers for his firm told me that an engineering degree meant that the individual had the intelligence and self disicpline to learn to do the job they were hired for.

An English degree? That's a goldmine next to a degree in Psychology, or (shudder), sociology.

Sadly, this is learnt from direct experience (and corroborated by actual studies!). Thank goodness they had the wherewhithawl to insist that I take statistics whilst I wasted my time.

Classics is another major with, ah, limited financial prospects. English at least is decent preparation for a law degree -- if you don't like writing and reading, don't apply. And how does anyone with an "American Studies" degree ever make a living?

I think its kind of silly to assign some dollar value to a college degree. Someone above asks, hows does anyone with an American studies degree make a living? The answer is by working. Most people change careers at least one in their lifetimes and many don't enter the field that their degree suits them for, assuming its fits a career field at all. A college degree is getting to be a bare minimum qualification for entry into many jobs, so its better to have an English lit, sociology or whatever undergrad degree than none at all. People with these degrees are doing all kinds of things. They are editing books, writing for newspapers, teaching, praticing law, selling insurance policies and managing hotels and restaurants, among other things.

And how does anyone with an "American Studies" degree ever make a living?

By teaching American Studies to future generations of American Studies scholars. A sort of career tautology, and very similar to what happens to any Physics majors who don't find employment in a government research agency.

Your point may be true in some situations, but in a lot of ways it isn't. When I hire a physicists I'm not hiring them because they can survive 4 years of a physics undergrad curriculum, I'm hiring them because the way physicists THINK about problems is valuable. I don't care about their knowledge of mechanics, or electromagnitism, or quantum, or thermodynamics. I *do* care very much about the facility of thought you have to develop to be able to handle those topics.

When you look at the earnings gaps for liberal arts majors, your screening point may be true. But for majors that seriously reformat the way your brain works (physics, really rigorous CS, etc) an employer really is buying the brain remodeling they get in school...

Actually... while it can be very hard for a physics major to find a job *in* physics, they are very much in demand in other technical fields.

I've taught liberal arts (local equivalent) for many years. Its history provides a useful perspective. Until the 19th century the three years served to credential future leaders, supply networks, corral the drunks. (Oh and clergymen needed Greek.)

For a few people, however, it was always about self-development. Then as now they tended to be mature-age students like the cotton manufacturer Thornton (in Elizabeth Gaskell's 'North and South') who resumed his studies of Homer once he'd made his pile.

Passing over the link between Greek and self-development, and moving right along to the era of mass education, we're putting vast numbers of people through a program whose components were never conceived of as vocational. The patter about an arts degree providing generic skills is a recent rationalisation.

Here's a breakdown of what I think is the case here in Oz - and having taught in the States and the UK I believe it would apply in both countries.

About 1/3 of liberal arts students cannot benefit from higher education at this stage of their development and would be better served by workforce training. Before anyone yells elitist consider the first year drop-out and overall non-completion rates.

About 1/3 belong in a directly vocational option. Most of them don't have the marks, so they battle on, many of them cheerfully enough.

About 1/3 actually belong, but most of them are served ill by the insistence on smorgasbord curricula. Subjects need to be structured, grouped and lined up with at least some notion of outcomes. A politics-and -history type will take a different path after graduation from the drama-and-dance type, and although it's fun to dabble and dip I doubt that we can afford any longer to provide that luxury after secondary school.

But I wouldn't like to run for office on this program. So welcome to the world of the compulsory second and third and fourth degree.

"Did you take Fries in Grad School? Nuh? Sorry."

A GED means you actully proved you know the material. A high school diploma merely proves you didn't drop out or get expelled.

Jane,

I believe the whole joke was

Engineering major: How does it work?

Science major: Why does it work?

English major: Do you want fries with it?

Seriously, though, college is wasted on most people, including virtually all liberal arts and social science majors, as an intellectual exercise. If suitably motivated, and the curriculum suitably devised, most people could learn the equivalent in less than a year (as you point out).

Only the few, the proud (as it were), the scientists and engineers, actually learn anything potentially valuable to others. (Full disclosure: I was a science major, arts minor, was a science professor for many years). Liberal arts are highly enjoyable, but then, so is drinking beer, and neither skill is in much demand from others.

For most people college is a halfway house between child- and adulthood, with no penalty for anything they accidentally learn there. In the Internet era, it would seem that the educational component could more efficiently be rendered online, after perhaps a year of community service (maybe like the CCC during the Depression?) to address the socialization need.

Q: How do you get a Philosophy major off your porch?

A: Pay for the pizza.

The topic is covered very well (tho' with a UK focus) in Alison Wolf's "Does Education Matter?". My question is not what does a four-year Liberal Arts degree achieve, but "why can't it be achieved a lot more cheaply?" e.g. a company sets itself up: it measures and records IQ at ages 12, 14, 16, 18, it runs a summer camp on writing skills for High School leavers and it puts them through an objective exam to measure those skills. The outcomes are available to any potential employer; the whole exercise costs parents far less than the present system, the employers get the info they want and the children "network" at the Summer Camp. No-one loses except Harvard and the brewers. Why not?

As my father used to say (while I was earning a BA in European History), employers don’t look to college grads as educated, rather educatable.

Certainly applicable in some professions today, yet after 15 years of building houses, I had to go back to school to get on the other side of the blueprints... While I eschewed legacy and did not attend Ivy League colleges for the BA, my BS is from a regional school whose (regional) reputation is as strong as MIT or CalPoly. And that alone has opened doors.

So the lesson I pass along to nieces and nephews is, if the direction in life you choose does not require rigorous technical training, it doesn't matter where you go, as long as you learn.

My brilliant idea of the day:

Replace the foreign language requirement with a four semester math requirement.

A GED means you actully proved you know the material. A high school diploma merely proves you didn't drop out or get expelled.

Yeah, but try getting a non-collegiate job with a GED listed on your application instead of a high school diploma, and you will quickly see which one employers think is more valuable.

After four complete career changes in 20 years, it is my experience that the college degree matters not a whit in comparable value of the professional degree (MCSE, CFA, PE, Registered Rep, etc.).

hbchrist

You have to be kidding about the MCSE... I've been in multiple shops where the fastest way to get your resume circular filed is to have an MCSE on it.

bains,
As an alumnus of CalPoly, I am rather flattered that you conflate us with MIT. However, I suspect you really meant to say CalTech. (After graduating from CalPoly and moving to Boston, I found that the more parochial New Englanders were unduly impressed with my alma mater, perhaps not distinguishing it from the slightly more famous institution down the road.)

I do find it interesting that you think that brand name v. learning tilts more heavily towards brand for technical subjects than it does for non. I have found it to be altogether the opposite. If your education has taught you to DO something, knowing how to do it is valuable. If your education is, in an very practical sense, useless (sorry Jane), then the pedigree seems to matter more.

Economically, your kids might do better if you send them to trucking school.

I am most definitely not kidding, but the MCSE, like most skill training, has waned in value over time. I got mine in 1994, when it was worth something. And, at the time, it was worth far more than my peers with their CS degrees.

"On the other hand, my classmates on average seem to use very few of the skills they learned."

I'd like to see this common statement about the value of an MBA -- which is repeated so often that it has somehow attained the status of "fact" -- used with a little more restraint. I couldn't do my job without the introductory training my MBA gave me. My wife, also an MBA holder, would agree with it, however. Jane, as a former management consultant, is maybe too inclined to agree with it. For certain jobs, an MBA is a signalling device; for others, it provides evidence of a minimum level of expertise required for further advancement. The same approach to evaluating the effect of a Bachelor's is advisable.

Has Winterspeak seen this article: http://www.forbes.com/2002/04/25/0425ceoschools.html ?

As an academic, I think that two of the best improvements we could make would be to a) remove grade inflation and impose nearly universal curves to that graduating in the liberal arts would be just as hard as in engineering and the sciences and b) insist on some sort of post college universal testing.

The former would stop the tendency of students who migrate to liberal arts just to avoid really hard classes and help those liberal arts majors who are genuinely talented and highly motivated.

The latter tests -- if well devised -- would help employers by giving them a metric to see how capable potential employees are and possibly help lesser known schools by having a yardstick that validates the quality of the education.

'I think its kind of silly to assign some dollar value to a college degree.'

Unfortunately my mortgage company has no issue with assigning some dollar value to the letter they send each month.

jn,

You'll appreciate this story. Many years ago the Berkeley faculty in physical sciences were complaining about grade/course credit inflation in the social sciences, which of course the social science faculty vigorously denied. (My favorite was the five unit course in contemporary culture, which apparently consisted of watching movies and discussing them. Makes you wonder what they did on the weekend to relax. Hit the lab and the library, maybe?)

Then some unsung genius compiled statistics showing that some outrageous percentage of social science majors (ca. 50%, IIRC) were taking an staggering number of units that exceeded the record for anyone in the physical sciences in the history of the University of California.

Case closed.

jn

Post collegiate tests are probably not a good idea. As a good example of why, consider the post collegiate tests we do have: the GREs.

The GRE general are so general as to be a joke. No one I knew in sciences even bothered going to bed early the night before taking them, and all scored high.

The GRE subject exams suffer from another problem: fields move on. If you had an up to date physics curriculum as an undergrad you were at a distinct disadvantage on the physics GRE exams, because about 40% of them consisted of subjects nobody bothered to teach in a up to date physics curriculum in the last 20 years, while 30% of what you did learn wouldn't have made it onto the test yet. Likewise in the GRE CS... the test was using Pascal, a language that almost no one outside of academia had used, and that had gone out of fashion even there 10 years before.

But that is a problem with a GRE not the idea of a test itself. The GRE is informative for the vast majority of students whose college education is quite variable. For the elite 50 or 100 colleges, I would like a test that helped distinguish between the very good and the excellent. The problem is that the GRE is like a glorified SAT.

Most Phd programs and some employers would love to have tests that picked out students with high quality advanced training. But then I think all college -- esp the liberal arts should be upgraded.

At an elite college, the curriculum should be hard enough that the average student who was rejected would have a 30-40% chance of failing if admitted.

In contrast, even the Ivies are easy enough that three quarters of those who applied could make it through with a decent GPA.

A real test would reward a new school that could say objectively, Our students are clearly better trained than those from the leading incumbents.

Funny, I just graduated from college, and that was still the current joke then.

(Did I mention I'm a software engineer?)

Science major: How does it work?
Engineering major: How can we harness it to our advantage?
Business major: How much will it cost, and what is it's return on investment?
Whatever-studies major: It exemplifies patriarchical discrimination based on class, race, gender, and diet.
Ecology major: Dude, that harms the environment.
Psychology major: I understand your pain.
Ivy League: How much does it cost just to buy it?
English major: Don't end a sentence with a preposition.
Liberal arts major: You want fries with that?

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