Asymmetrical Information

"If everyone gets a college education, there's no divide for you to stand on one side of[.]"

Does this mean that the object of getting an education is to feel superior to others? I don't think you mean that. I am well aware of your penchant for irony.

More to the point, not everyone should get a college education since "readin' and writin' ain't everybody's thing." Some work well with their hands and don't need a diploma.

But I wonder, when considering the practical advantage of higher education, if even getting an advanced degree these days means obtaining more clout other than social status. Hell, even having a medical degree doesn't guarantee riches these days.

Call me naive, but I can do without the implicit classism of getting an education to differentiate yourself from the "unwashed masses."

Your humble 40-something BA grad.

For years now I've been thinking that there would be a backlash against the college-or-else mindset. As I saw it, given the high and ever-increasing cost of a college education, and the increasingly obvious fact that most majors do little in terms of career training or imparting of useful knowledge, more and more young people would turn away from college and instead seek well-paying jobs in the skilled trades and elsewhere (yes, such jobs exist, probably a lot more of them than we think).
Of course, I've been wrong. There's been no backlash, and in fact the percentage of high school graduates going on to college keeps rising.

"Call me naive, but I can do without the implicit classism of getting an education to differentiate
yourself from the "unwashed masses." "

But people looking to hire can't do without it. There's a lot of idiots out there, and they're kind of a pain in the ass to get rid of (thanks to current employment law), and the only way to avoid hiring them is to look for something that differentiates those who aren't idiots.

Getting an educational degree that isn't given away like candy is one of the better differentiators available. It would be better still if it didn't require a large chunk of what should have been our young adulthood getting it...

Jane,

I find it difficult to believe that you graduated from grade school with both your logic and writing skills fully developed. If so, you are truly far more gifted than I have given you credit for being until now.

If you believe the reports from many colleges, one of the things they do manage to accomplish is teaching their high school graduate college "freshpersons" to read before they become college graduates. They also teach some of their college "freshpersons" (though certainly not all, including not all future journalists) to write coherently before they become college graduates.

I find it difficult to believe that grade school graduates who have not learned to read with help over 8 years are capable of self-learning algebra, geometry, calculus, chemistry and physics. (In my own case, at that stage in my life, I find it inconceivable.) Assuming high school level self-learning were possible, fluid mechanics, fluid dynamics, structural design, solid geometry, kinematics, etc. would be even more of a stretch.

Certainly, there are those who may be capable of self-learning at these levels, but they are definitely not the norm. I have spent countless hours throughout my career helping college graduates learn to write clear, concise, logical technical reports.

Having both a BS and a BA as well as a Masters, I must call BS on your assertion that post secondary education offers no useful skills or knowledge. I don't disagree with your assertion that college and graduate school are signalling mechanisms. However, as an engineering undergraduate and graduate student, I did learn quite a lot in college and graduate school. Some of what I learned was theoretical and/or applied knowledge in my field while other things I learned consisted of peripheral skills like dealing with bureaucracy, working in a place that is doing real engineering, etc..

In addition to signalling and passing on knowledge and skills, college imbues people with a common culture. College graduates have certain common experiences and beliefs (typically) that they don't necessarily share with their high school graduate peers.

Oh, and you really need to proofread that entry, unless the typos are ironically proving that college teaches no useful skills... :)

EI

There is, I think, another type of signalling that plays into the desireability of college. Employers aren't that interested in hiring young people for responsible jobs. Being in your mid 20's is itself a signal of responsibility, which can be greatly enhanced by having accomplished something useful during the period of young adulthood.

One of Heinlein's later books featured an independent California "republic," a pure democracy with a strong "progressive" bent, in which it had been noted that people with bachelor's degrees enjoyed, oh, I don't know, a 25% greater average salary than people laboring under less education. So the California government awarded every California citizen a B.A., and made the law retroactive ten years or something. Unfortunately, a few years after this historic decision, they noticed that people with master's degrees seemed to have a salary advantage over those without them, comparable to the old advantage bachelor's degree holders had had over the less educated, so there was a movement underfoot to award master's degrees across-the-board and retroactively too.

I'm the least well-educated person in my generation of my family, I think, with two lousy bachelor's degrees and no prospects for a master's until at least after my youngest is in school. Sometimes it bothers me. Then I realize that I'm sitting on one end of a virtual log with thousands, hundreds of thousands of teachers on the other end, and I get back to work.

One wonders what the effect would be if half the colleges in the nation were turned into trade schools, or closed, and all scholarships be given only on merit, and all student loans be unsubsidized. While we all know diffident high school students who bloomed in college, we probably know many more who wasted many years in college only to secure jobs not as good as ones they could have landed right out of high school or after three years in the military or two year apprenticing in a trade.

" If everyone gets a college education, there's no divide for you to stand on one side of"

The divide will simply shift to what your degree is in.

A degree is the price of admission in the higher-level employment pool and little more.

As one who hires people, I don't expect to use one fact the college graduate learned in college. Because I work for a technical company, I know that a college graduate's knowledge is obsolete anyway.

What I hope a college gives a student is social polish, discipline and writing ability.

Ed: Although many colleges are complaining that their incoming students have poor reading and comprehension skills, there is no evidence that colleges are doing anything to improve those skills by the time the students graduate. From what I've seen, studies suggest that although those skills tend to be poor when students enter college, they decline even further by graduation.

Jane - As a fully recovered former English major, I fully agree that SOME college educations provide very little in the way of job skills other than a chance to mature. However, I've noticed a distinct difference in the ability of our new hires to get the job done. Those with accounting degrees are much better equipped to quickly master the tax and financial planning concepts we use in serving our clients. Those with degrees in economics or finance just have a much more difficult time. Years after graduation, this is distinction still holds.

While I joke that Congress has repealed my Masters in Tax several times since I graduated some 18 years ago, that's only true in the sense that the actual tax code sections I studied in school have in many instances been replaced with different provisions. Still, my Masters degree has given me a foundation that others with different educational backgrounds just have a much more difficult time developing on the job.

So, for liberal arts majors, I agree that a degree is not much more than a signaling mechanism. For those focused on more technical subjects, like engineering or accounting, I think the degree does far more than just signal.

Weirdly enough, I was having just this conversation yesterday at work.

I think, for many careers, college is pretty useless nad pointless. It doesn't teach you any marketable skills.

Some programs do -- engineering, science, and medicine are pretty good examples of things where you actually learn something useful and marketable. But that varies, too. The only reason I knew anything about how to do something in a real molecular biology lab was from the undergrad volunteering I did. Not from any class I took -- I learned the theories, but no class showed us the methods and practiced actually doing PCR or a western blot or anything.

My brothers, my dad, and my husband are all doing quite well, in the white collar world, without a Bachelor's degree. (Sys admins, a writer, and a CTO.) Heck, my mom was VP, without a graduate degree.

My sister and I did get bachelor's but neither of us ever used them in our jobs. (She's a philosophy major NOC manager, and I'm a biologist turned writer turned programmer!)

Many of the people I knew with PhDs in the 90's had to leave it off their resumes in order to get a job -- they were considered overqualified for most science jobs. Employers were afraid they would want oo much money or that they would leave as soon as they found a better job (which was laughable becaus ethey couldn't get even one job, much less multiple job offers!). So more education isn't always better. I'd sure be bitter if I toiled through a graduate degree and it ended up keeping me from getting a job. :P

So yeah, I totally agree with the original post. There are many paths. You have to weigh the pros and cons, the costs and benefits, and pick the best one. And it's not always college.

"If everyone gets a college education, there's no divide for you to stand on one side of;"

And you went to UPenn and U Chicago?

This is what is driving the mania for high priced brand name colleges. Why else would they be able to get away with charging >$30K/yr?

If everyone gets a college education, there's no divide for you to stand on one side of

I do not believe that Tyler's argument presupposes having a side. We all oppose to slavery and favor of human rights (unless there are a few utilitarians running around here!). That is a part of our conception of our selves and yet it is not contigent upon their being other people who favor slavery and oppression.

Similarly, Mormons and Protestants have a conception of self that involves certain spiritual and moral concepts that are not contingent upon others not having them.

Even more generally, most (all?) societies raise their children to share, respect others etc... and that is not contigent upon their being others who do not share or respect others.

I'm not sure that a college education is worth the time and money, but it may benefit a person in ways other than providing immediately-applicable skills.

A friend of mine that joined the army in order to pay for college has talked many times about how being in the military widened people's views. People that grew up in one place among one set of people, without ever having travelled (think of the people who had never left the city of New Orleans before Katrina), suddenly had to deal with others from a completely different background.

College can provide a similar benefit. I grew up in the midwest and went to college in NYC, and I was shocked at how insular the East Coast Ivy League college kids were. It was a new and unexpected experience for them to meet someone from a small Midwestern city, and they asked some very odd questions (this was in the 1980s, and one person asked me if we had heard yet of the Beatles in the midwest).

In the college (Finance) classes that I teach now, I tell my students that what I most hope they'll remember are the concepts, and that I hope they'll be able to apply them in many situations. If one of them was reading a news article and realized that the statistics being cited suffered from a selection bias or a small sample bias, or that a particular program might cause problems due to bad incentives, I would be very, very happy. Of course, I don't know if that has ever happened...

Again, maybe it's not worth the money. But it's hard to say, since the total benefits are difficult to measure.

If the advanced degree gives you skills that make you more productive, it would make sense that you should earn more. Isn't this econ 101?

OTOH, a masters in something like "Ethnic Studies" may not result in as high productivity. But I'm sure most people here see that among their friends. The guy w/the CompSci PhD has his choice of offers and the PhD in Comparative Litterature has fewer.

Not all advanced degrees are the same.

There's often a false dichotomy made between the signaling model and the human capital model of education. The degree is a signal of the acquisition of a certain level of human capital. It helps reduce the informational asymmetry of the hiring process. You may be a brilliant autodidact, but without a degree how do you prove your brilliance to a prospective employer?

The other reason degrees are important is raiding. Employers have little incentive to train workers in skills that can possibly be used by other companies. Workers are expected to get their training on their own. Alot of us were not humanities majors and actually use our knowledge in our jobs. I think most humanities majors go into their programs with a sense of shooting for a high career goal (academic, writer) but still have a back up plan (law, b-school, IT, teaching). So, what of it?

I recommend Personnel Economics for Managers, by Edward Lazear (a Chicago man, he was appointed head of the CEA recently).

"Because I work for a technical company, I know that a college graduate's knowledge is obsolete anyway." I'm an electrical engineer. What I learned in college was mostly not obsolete or irrelevant - but it covered very little of what I needed to know for my first job. Even after the first job, every project is different and requires learning about new technology and methods. The primary importance of an engineering degree is that it serves as a signaling mechanism, that tells employers you can work very hard, do math, dig into the books and learn what you need to know for each project, and also that you're more or less capable of acting like a middle-class American so you are unlikely to come to work drunk or rob your fellow employees. However, it does also give the background to understand the relevant books, articles, datasheets, etc.

Similarly, the tax accountant's degree covered now obsolete laws, but it also gave a background to help decode new laws, proved he could do arithmetic (at least), and proved that he could act middle class. A degree in economics provides the same signalling functions, but the background isn't quite the same.

Then there are degrees like liberal arts and journalism. They signal the employer that you are middle class. Maybe they prove that you are literate, but I'm not sure that can be counted on anymore. Judging by what some journalists (not our Jane!) have written, a J-degree certainly doesn't prove any skill at arithmetic or clear thinking. In many fields, it's also obviously possible to get a PHD and be hired as a professor without being able to think. So those degrees are mainly signalling mechanisms.

Then there are degrees like liberal arts and journalism. They signal the employer that you are middle class. Maybe they prove that you are literate, but I'm not sure that can be counted on anymore. Judging by what some journalists (not our Jane!) have written, a J-degree certainly doesn't prove any skill at arithmetic or clear thinking. In many fields, it's also obviously possible to get a PHD and be hired as a professor without being able to think. So those degrees are mainly signalling mechanisms.

College may or may not have honed Jane's writing skills. IMO, first a writer needs to learn reading, writing, grammar, and spelling, but my grade school covered that adequately. Then you have to read a lot of good writing - at least ten times as many books as there will be time to cover in class. This improves your vocabulary and provides lots of examples of good writing to follow. Finally, you have to write, get constructive feedback on your writing, rewrite it better, and so on until you've consumed several forests. High school and college teachers may help with that by forcing you to put in the time and providing the feedback, but there's no guarantee that you'll ever find a teacher who can do this well.

What a teacher cannot do (past ~4th grade) is to tell you how to write.

Education isn't supposed to provide any useful skills; that's why we call it education, rather than training. Employers expecting particular skills should hire graduates of vocational schools.

I teach engineering, and we don't pretend that our graduates have particular skills (unless you think being able to solve certain kinds of equations, for example, is a skill. I don't). What they have is background knowledge, and familiarity and facility with certain branches of mathematics. We teach them the language of engineering, so that they can learn it. Most jobs in the field require specialized knowledge that has to be learned on the job.

This is no different than many other fields. I recall reading several years ago that the head of Harvard's law school admitted that their graduates were incapable of actually practicing law. They expected them to learn that on the job. (I forget what it is that Harvard was supposed to have taught them.)

FXKLM,

In undergraduate engineering school, if you can't read and comprehend, you can't survive, no less graduate. If you do graduate college, it is from the affiliated business school. However, it is possible (easy?) to graduate from engineering school without being able to write well.

Colleges reportedly spend significant effort on remedial reading and math programs. The idea that their efforts result in lower skill levels at graduation is frightening!

What's cool is that we live in a society where one can actually make a living with a degree in comparative literature, fill in the blank studies, or costuming - yes, you can get a degree in costuming. Its why I have so much faith in a service economy, and so little concern when I hear that "all our jobs are being shipped overseas".

> They expected them to learn that on the job. (I forget what it is that Harvard was supposed to have taught them.)

Didn't you ever see "The Paper Chase"?

"You come in here with a skull full of mush and you leave thinking like a lawyer."

I would have to disagree somewhat. I have a bachelors degrees in Physics and Mathematics and a masters in Physics. I am also a high school drop out. While I do not directly use what I learned in my undergrad and grad, I have no doubt that I couldn't *do* my current job without that experience. The strength of mind I built in college makes it possible for me to do what I do today.

However, I deeply question the value of secondary education. I literally would have been better off left to my own devices from say grades 6 on. There is NO education really going on in middle and high school, it's just prison^H^H^H^H^H day care.

Not all degrees are worth having. My next door neighbor has a Masters in Theater (whatever that means).

He just landed a job at Home Depot. When he interviewed they asked him what hourly wages did he think he should be paid. He replied $20 to $25 per hour.

He starts next Wednesday at $10.00 per hour.

Just another anecdote.

I'm a youngish twenty-something. My dad has a PhD and my mom has a masters degree. I have a BA (philosophy and English) which I took primarily so I would learn to think and write better, certainly not with any expectation that my degree or any of my classes would give me directly applicable job skills. Instead I worked in retail for a while (everyone really should try it) and am now throwing myself into being an entrepreneur. I have no immediate plans to work on any further degrees. My wife, on the other hand, immediately went back to school for her MA, and her parents only have BAs.

BTW, Tolber, in college I worked on a couple productions under a guy with a Masters in Theater (and a couple other related degrees). In his case it meant he knew everything there was to know about putting on a stage production. He was very cool and commanded a respectable salary for rural South Carolina.

Another engineering degree here, and another vote for "signaling mechanism, but not only". I think the earlier "false dichotomy" assertion about captures it.

My school was already behind on the technology curve while I was there, and it is true that much of what I learned isn't necessary and/or directly applicable out in the workplace -- BUT I learned principles, terminology, teamwork skills, and the locations of resources that would have been very difficult to find, assimilate, or develop independently. Toward that end, there was a wide pool of talent present -- both fellow students and instructors -- without which I *never* would have grasped some concepts.

Perhaps a person can get the equivalent of a "womyn's studies" degree by spending six hours a day reading the latest publications in extreme feminism and then writing summary analyses thereof, but many essential skills for good engineering practice (and a number of other technical and scientific fields) are only learned by doing in a controlled environment, often with a $100k+ worth of equipment that no employer would let you touch for several years due to breakage or liability risks.

I have to say that about 90 percent of the truly useful things I have learned in my life were NOT the result of formal schooling.

Also, I personally know several folks with Masters and PhDs that I would not trust with the job of parking my car. They have great learning, but no common sense or practical skills.

That said, higher education does indicate a few useful traits to prospective employers.

However, they would be wise to heed the words of a wise woman, Amy Kissling, "Education is neither a cure for stupidity, nor a substitute for intelligence."

"it will onl drive the elite to get more education as a way of differentiating themselves from the unwashed masses."

Star-bellied Sneetches

Don't worry Jane, there will always be a divide. If everyone got a Masters, there would always be a PhD. divide. If everyone got one of those, schools would just make a new super-PhD program.

Not sure that additional degrees are all that impressive to most employers. They start to wonder when you are actually going to do some work.

Thats an interesting perspective !

I could command a salary twice that of my fellow Humanities baccalaureates not becauase I was any smarter or had more clearly signalled my middle classedness, but becuase my four intensive years of Engineering School allowed me to develop economically differentiating skills.

My five years Engineering graduate school only widened the salary gap - again, as a direct result of acquired skills. So clearly, there is something more to this higher education than mere signalling.

wow....so...you're all comp-sci and engineering nerds, here? That must be why I like this place. ;)

(Another cs/ece post-grad.)

Nate.

interesting discussion, because if you read this blog, you likely believe in markets. if you do, all those people shelling out for college/gradschool almost certainly can't be wrong -- by definition, they are acquiring something of value. further, college entrance is competitive -- that is, further evidence of demand. so even if you cannot agree on what people are acquiring that is of value -- skills, connections, signalling -- they clearly are getting something of value. and i don't think you get very far assuming all the consumers of highly expensive education are suckers, because it's been going on long enough that it's unlikely to be some sort of enron-like facade. put another way, you may not like the backstreet boys or stephen, but that many million consumers by definition cannot be wrong. put yet another way, how many of those saying there's not much value in the education have put money where mouth is and counseled others to forego education?

Didn't we just have this discussion on this site a couple of months ago?

Add me to the engineering mix, although I was in the military at the time and never got to practice engineering. A law degree and a few jobs in various fields later, I finally discovered patent law, where I can actually combine my engineering degree and my law degree and have fun in my profession.

"Most post-secondary education (possibly most post-primary education), does not confer any useful skills upon students"

As a humanities student, I used to believe this... until I started hanging out with scientists and engineers. Then I realised it was just my post-secondary education that had been a waste of time (at least from the standpoint of productivity).

Another one with an engineering degree here.

I think you do learn useful skills with an engineering degree. I have never actually worked as an engineer, I decided in the final year of my degree that I would go nuts if I did this for the rest of my life and so after finishing the degree I promptly did another one in economics.

But, I have found the following advantages of an engineering degree:
- you wind up very comfortable with numbers and basis calculus. By the end of three years I may not have understood vector calculus, but I knew what a second differential was in my bones. This was useful when I got work as a forecaster.
- you know a lot about testing and project management. This is generally useful.
- you can interpret between engineers and normal people. At the moment I spend a lot of time interpreting between engineers, economists, and other people.
- you can program (actually, I think the second most useful thing I ever learnt during my school years, after learning to read, was when I spent several months off school sick at age 11 and taught myself to program out of boredom.)
- you pick up other useful tidbits. That one lecture on the history of patents worked out very conveniently.

On the other hand I think it also has a signalling value. In my current job it gets engineers and technicians and economists to listen to me seriously even when it's not directly applicable to what I'm talking about.

I learned everything I ever needed in college. A BA has made me an oracle of all things. :o)

"I recall reading several years ago that the head of Harvard's law school admitted that their graduates were incapable of actually practicing law."

I think this is a misunderstanding. Many recent law grads don't have much knowledge of the detail work in practicing law: e.g. which form to file in triplicate at which court. Their paralegals pick up this slack initially from what I've read.

I wanted to add that I thought the comment about the Heinlein novel was facile. Typically there are initiatives to increase educational attainment, but most citizens and policy makers also understand that to mean increased human capital to go along with this. For instance, there has been a lot of drive towards testing as well as graduation. Only economists are aware of the concept of signaling, and the distinctions that separate it from the human capital model. My labor economics text even suggests that the distinction is really not so important.

I am FAR from denying that there is a large signalling component to my line of work (I teach at a reasonably highly ranked [#61 in the USNews list] liberal arts college), but....

Our students come to us from good school systems and prep schools.

In general (and this is based on 6.5 years of anecdotal evidence) they CAN'T write clear, error-free expository prose at first. We teach them to do that. That's more than 'signalling.' There really is some serious content to be acquired in higher education.

Computer Science degrees here. BS and later, an MS.

There's some merit to the signalling argument but I learned one heck of a lot at college. I think anony-mouse summed it up for me pretty well.

It sounds like Tyler Cowen is, in small part, making the argument that the students are signalling _themselves_.

From Jane's quote: "By choosing many years of education, you are telling yourself that you stand on one side of the social divide." From his original post: "I view education as a self-commitment to being a more productive kind of person. Education is about self-acculturation." Also: "So your identity is shaped by what you are doing, and your peers, between the critical ages of thirteen to your early twenties. Those are precisely the years covered by our educational system."

Thus, Cowen makes the argument that education is not about learning how to perform a trade, it is about molding the self into the section of society that performs that trade. Higher education is where individuals learn how to think about themselves in relation to the rest of society.

This question--is it education itself that's important, or just what it signals--is a pretty big issue in economics. I think most economists--despite what Tyler implied--are on the "it's the education itself" side. The three big arguments for it, which came up in a paper in the Journal of Political Economy in 1974, are that:

1. years of education tend to explain more variation in earnings than diplomas, degrees, and other credentials, even though credentials are probably the stronger signal;

2. the difference in earnings between more or less educated people actually increases as people get more work experience, even though education probably becomes a less important signal as people build up their careers and reputations;

3. if it's really the signal rather than the education itself, why haven't we just replaced schooling with intelligence tests and save a whole lot of money?

(1) and (2) hold up to recent data, though (1) gets challenged every so often; (3) isn't really a data observation so much as a conclusion from an assumption that we know what we are doing.

Wow. Engineering school sure didn't teach me one thing. I never knew there were people out there that thought their cars and computers were invented by just any old undifferentiated college grad.

While I tend to agree that much of education is just a signalling mechanism you still can not avoid the point that when you look at starting salaries for new college graduates the salary range by major is about 100% -- ie., graduates of the harder disciplines like chemical engineering have starting salaries that are about double those for easier liberal arts degrees. So there seems to be more then just signaling in this.

As yet another engineering graduate, I'll say I thought undergraduate education was important. However, I'm glad that I didn't go to graduate school. Being in school gives you too much broad coverage of everything in an engineering field, and not enough of any specific area. There also is no coverage of many technologies used in a real work environment. Having a Masters degree also makes it more difficult to find a job at the level you are looking for. We're always hearing how much more money people with advanced degrees make, but in many cases, people aren't getting much, other than status, out of those degrees. Relating any kind of academic achievement is going to correspond to more success and money, but that doesn't make it a straight cause & effect, i.e. those same people would be making more money without the advanced degree.

However, I'm glad that I didn't go to graduate school. Being in school gives you too much broad coverage of everything in an engineering field, and not enough of any specific area.

Whereas engineering grad school requires you to take that general knowledge and apply portions to a much narrower area of expertise, i.e., the thesis/project which proves you are worthy of a graduate degree.

Runs somewhat contrary to your argument, really.

"why haven't we just replaced schooling with intelligence tests and save a whole lot of money?"

Because there's a whole lot more than intelligence involved in making a good worker. Very few jobs require a genius-level IQ, but nearly all of them require constant hard work. You don't find out if someone is capable of that from a test on one day, but some college degrees serve as a signal that the graduate worked quite hard for four years, and most signal that at least the graduate did more than just a cram session the night before the test. The degree is also usually a signal that the graduate managed to avoid behavior bad enough to be kicked out of school.

It would seem from this thread that we have two things under the heading of college education:

1) Degrees in the hard sciences, math, and engineering, which seem to convey real value above and beyond simple signalling.

2) Other degrees, which seem to simply to be a signalling mechanism.

Perhaps we should consider whether there are cheaper ways to signal in case 2.

"if it's really the signal rather than the education itself, why haven't we just replaced schooling with intelligence tests and save a whole lot of money?"

It's generally illegal for employers to do that.

"2. the difference in earnings between more or less educated people actually increases as people get more work experience, even though education probably becomes a less important signal as people build up their careers and reputations;"

Under the signalling model, the traits being signaled don't just disappear after school. People better able to cope with school are also better able to cope with more intellectually demanding jobs throughout their careers.

"1. years of education tend to explain more variation in earnings than diplomas, degrees, and other credentials, even though credentials are probably the stronger signal;"

So given the same credentials, taking longer to get them translates to a better career? That doesn't quite seem to add up. Or is it simply that a college dropout with three years of college does better than a college dropout with one year of college?

College education does create a not particularly intellectual elite. This group often professes the so-called progressive political values, and are bemused or outraged when one of their peers suggests the people are not the bricks and mortar with which to build their ideal society.

How could anyone disagree with them? They're smarter than thou!

It seems to me that the main thing being signalled by a college degree is that the holder of the degree has or at least had the resources to squander tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives on a project of dubious value.

It's a kind of conspicuous consumption which tells an employer that you fall into one of three categories:

1. Rich and indulgent parents
2. Extremely good at milking a bureaucratic system
3. Able and willing to work incredibly hard, in effect doing two full time jobs at once, one of which has a large negative pay rate, in order to accomplish little of value to yourself, ie. a sucker.

Put me in category 3.

Now, while I do think that there is a signalling effect for some employers, especially in categories 1 and 3, for the most part I think the thing is entirely over rated. 20 years after college, I've had exactly two employers who knew or cared if I had a degree. Both were low paying part time jobs, one in a library, and one teaching.

It's clear that there are a couple of areas, medicine comes to mind, for which the degree is both useful and necessary. I strongly suspect that if one were to eliminate those very highly compensated professions from the statistics all other differences in earnings could be explained by selection bias based on the three conditions signalled above.

It also troubles me that in reading many summaries and discussions of the value of a college degree the future value of the missed earnings and sometimes even of the tuition is ignored.

I have no idea what field John works in or why he thinks that it would translate into other professions. In IT lots of luck even getting an interview if you don't have a degree. It might be possible if instead towards the top of your resume you can post professional certifications relating directly to the job but even then it's questionable.

quadrupole writes

It would seem from this thread that we have two things under the heading of college education:

1) Degrees in the hard sciences, math, and engineering, which seem to convey real value above and beyond simple signalling.

2) Other degrees, which seem to simply to be a signalling mechanism.

Excellent summarizetion.

Went I went to college, I thought that many students where taking classes in "busy work". Whereas, I found that I had to do real work in computer science classes. Ditto for engineering, but I didn't take too many of these

If the view expressed in this thread are correct, I didn't realize how right I was. I admire a liberal arts education and feel I missed out by not taking more literature and history classes. But they wouldn't help me with my job. However more english composition and communications classes would have helped. And maybe engineers and computer science grad should be required to take more of those.

However more english composition and communications classes would have helped. And maybe engineers and computer science grad should be required to take more of those.

Hear!

I T.A.'d three semesters for my engineering school's only real "writing fundamentals" class, an LAIS-division program designed to expose incoming freshman to the cultural and social aspects (and pitfalls) of engineering while requiring them to show/develop some minimum level of written proficiency. Of course, they fight against it tooth and claw ("I didn't come here for this!"). The only other professional writing experience they receive is in an introduction-to-engineering course and, later, in Senior Design.

Ironically, since leaving school I haven't yet found full-time work in my core discipline, and have have been working mainly on a part-time consulting basis for a reverse-engineering/IP firm -- meaning, about 70% of my income has been derived from applying research and writing skills.

I don't quite agree that more english composition and communications classes would have helped. I would agree that strong instruction in composition and communication would have been invaluable, but I've never seen an english comp or communication class that provided such instruction. In fact the only person I know of who actually GOT excellent comp instruction in the course of their education was my brother, who was on scholarship at Exeter...

P.S. If anyone can point to a source of good comp instruction, I'd be quite grateful :)

Quadrupole:

"Degrees in the hard sciences, math, and engineering, which seem to convey real value above and beyond simple signalling."

All degrees act as signals, regardless of the subject. Why would an employer they take a chance on an autodidact when they can hire someone who has some sort of independent certification of their ability? This is particularly true for scientific and technological endeavors.

Arnold Kling on Tech Central Station has a good long essay in which he points out that so far no one has been able to construct a signaling mechanism that can compete with formal education.

I have no idea what field John works in or why he thinks that it would translate into other professions. In IT lots of luck even getting an interview if you don't have a degree. It might be possible if instead towards the top of your resume you can post professional certifications relating directly to the job but even then it's questionable.

I realize probably no one will ever see this buried so deeply beneath other things, but I just had to respond.

Actually, I do work in IT. So does my brother, and quite a few other people I could mention off hand who do not have a degree (I and several others I know do, but that just empasizes that there's no direct correlation). Anecdotal evidence is always suspect, but adequate when answering a characterization such as this.

In regard to the question of whether my observations might apply in other fields I'd like to point out that I did admit in my original comment that there are some areas for which a degree is necessary. I have a friend who is a physician, and I know several chemists also who would not have their jobs without a degree. I agree with others who have mentioned above that those degrees fall into a different category.

I suppose we have only our own experiences to guide us, but my observation has been that, with the exceptions I mentioned, college degrees are over rated at least as much in other fields as they are in IT. That was certainly true in broadcasting when I worked in that field.

John writes

Actually, I do work in IT. So does my brother, and quite a few other people I could mention off hand who do not have a degree (I and several others I know do, but that just empasizes that there's no direct correlation).

I do know quite a few people in IT who do not have a degree.
As a generalization, the non-degreed people may be decent programmers but usually are not good software engineers. There are issues with design and maintainablity that tend to arise.

I said it's a generalization; I know excellent non-degreed software engineers and some folks with degrees in the field who are hopeless. I learned stuff getting my degrees that I believe has a significant positive effect on the long-term stability of the software I develop.

There seems to be a lot of selection bias here (Computer Science types), but I believe John's wrong about future value.

In CS, expect that you start out of school making $40k+ if you're willing to relocate to an urban area with a B.S., $60k+ with a M.S. Most of these students couldn't get anything better than a tech-support or help-desk job without the degree, making $20k+. We're a state school, so tuition + living expenses are still around $10k. Although those were historically upwardly-mobile positions, without the background they get in university they wouldn't be qualified to move up except in that part of the hierarchy, which is the lowest-paid segment of those companies. (The pay rates are a lot better than that in areas with high cost of living; I've talked to one company that starts BS graduates at $100k. On the other hand, I teach in a college town on the beach, and so many of our graduates don't want to leave that local pay rate is depressed by $10k or more below the national average.)

The rule of thumb in graduate school was that you maximized lifetime earnings by leaving with a master's. My peers who did back in 1995-6, started over $70k a year in California or Massacusetts and are now in management or research positons. Staying on for the Ph.D. definitely had opportunity costs, but the faculty was very upfront in warning us about that.

The richest man in all of human history is a college dropout.

All he's done is change the way every one of us interacts with everyone else. His deeds have improved all our lives.

Imagine what he could have achieved if only he had stay in school and graduated. He could have "signalled".

w sol vason -

I've stayed out of this discussion because, essentially, it and I are too alien to each other for me to bring anything to it or take anything away from it. Maybe that's because I'm too bourgeois, which is a possibility commenters have noted. But I'll just note that Bill Gates himself was bourgeois (well, more than that) before he dropped out of college. He didn't need to worry about signalling very much because he was born into a family that already had substantial personal wealth and he specifically had a million dollar safety net. Gates is many things, but a good example of the uselessness of college isn't one of them; the "risk" he took by dropping out was considerably lower than mine if I'd done the same thing (not to mention that I didn't have a clever scheme for what to do if I did drop out).

Quartencan,

The point i intend to make is that Harvard in the 80s had little to offer in the field of PCs that was up-to-date . Indeed, Universities generally teach out-of-date, antique material in subject areas such as electronics, chemistry, physics, medicine, law, accounting where results matter more than the credentials of the actor.

Universities are on the leading edge in those fields where progress is never made or where the notion of progress is ridiculed - theatre arts, sociology, psychology, teaching, political science, philosophy, literature, economics - in short all those endeavors where success can be measured only by the number of credentials acquired; and sometimes by the number of dead bodies produced.

In a capitalist economy new knowledge, new discoveries, and new applications are generated within for-profit businesses by people who may or may not have proper academic credentials.

I have a masters degree in medieval history (7th century LeMans) which I used to start a computer company which has prospered for 30 years. I've discovered that programmers who built their own machines in their basements and wrote game programs while in high school (and perhaps never graduated hs) are usually better programmers than the products of college Computer Science Depts. On the other hand, pschologists should have credentials unless they are bartenders.

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