From the article kindly submitted here: "The data comes from an analysis by Payscale, a salary data and software company for individuals and businesses."
In other words, the data is correlational, and not based on random assignment to an experimental condition and control condition. So we have no idea what the causation is here. By my observation, the kind of young people who get into private engineering colleges are different already, at high school age, from the kind of young people who don't go to college at all, so it's by no means clear that attending college causes any part of their difference in earnings in adult life.
For someone going to college with someone else's money (whether the someone else is a parent, a government agency, or a fee waiver by the college), sure, go to as much college as you can eat. Being paid to be a student is a very happy condition of life. But for someone who is paying for college out of pocket, the economic calculations become different, because college has to be paid for with present dollars, but its claimed economic return comes in future dollars, if at all. Economists, of course, have finance calculations for figuring out the approximate present value of a future income stream, and quite a few economists think (if only we could resolve that issue of causation) that what colleges charge for tuition is a bargain compared to the economic value of gaining a college degree.
A young person of college-applying age will, according to research,[1] be very strongly dissuaded from applying to college if poor, even if also smart. But dumb high school students from rich families go to college in large numbers. Only some of the Ivy Plus research universities and liberal arts colleges make much of an effort at all to identify high-ability students from low-income families and recruit those. Right now college mostly advantages the economically advantaged.
[1] Partial list of links to commentary and research on low-income, high-ability students:
>In other words, the data is correlational, and not based on random assignment to an experimental condition and control condition.
If you would like to see studies that use random or quasi-random selection into education, there is a huge literature in labor economics on this topic. For various reasons such literature would never make it onto HN.
By "make it onto HN" I mean as a story - the comments tend to be much more varied.
Mainstream economic research covers very similar topics, and uses very similar methods, to stories that make it onto HN. However since it isn't sold as "using data in cool ways", it's not immediately apparent that it is HN material. For example, a very famous economics paper uses school district boundaries to measure some effect (can't remember exactly what they measure). The idea is that people on opposite sides of boundaries should on average be very similar except for being in different districts. This hypothesis can be checked by looking for measurable jumps across boundaries.
Another thing is that economics papers tend to use regression methods that look quite boring and don't involve interesting scatter plots. So to the untrained eye a blog post with scatter diagrams and maps can look like a novel use of data and technology, while in fact the methods are very standard.
"because college has to be paid for with present dollars, but its claimed economic return comes in future dollars"
Please explain how someone who has school loans at low interest rates has to pay for college with present dollars as opposed to future dollars.
Re: "Ivy League" - Separately none of any of these analysis ever takes into account things that simply can't be measured. I can attest to the doors that open when you have attended an "Ivy" school because guess what enough people are impressed to provide a benefit. Perhaps someone can write that off as an "anecdote" but hate to say it I've seen it with others to many times, and, well even the mainstream media always points out when someone goes to a top college (or is a Kennedy for that matter). Of course you could also argue that people aren't impressed when someone is a Physician if you want but that also opens doors and gets better opportunity in many many cases.
Like a pretty girl (or tall handsome man) who gets more attention some things just can't be quantified with all the academic apparatus and analysis known to man. But irl if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck it's a duck usually is correct an overwhelming number of times.
In other words, the data is correlational, and not based on random assignment to an experimental condition and control condition. So we have no idea what the causation is here. By my observation, the kind of young people who get into private engineering colleges are different already, at high school age, from the kind of young people who don't go to college at all, so it's by no means clear that attending college causes any part of their difference in earnings in adult life.
For someone going to college with someone else's money (whether the someone else is a parent, a government agency, or a fee waiver by the college), sure, go to as much college as you can eat. Being paid to be a student is a very happy condition of life. But for someone who is paying for college out of pocket, the economic calculations become different, because college has to be paid for with present dollars, but its claimed economic return comes in future dollars, if at all. Economists, of course, have finance calculations for figuring out the approximate present value of a future income stream, and quite a few economists think (if only we could resolve that issue of causation) that what colleges charge for tuition is a bargain compared to the economic value of gaining a college degree.
A young person of college-applying age will, according to research,[1] be very strongly dissuaded from applying to college if poor, even if also smart. But dumb high school students from rich families go to college in large numbers. Only some of the Ivy Plus research universities and liberal arts colleges make much of an effort at all to identify high-ability students from low-income families and recruit those. Right now college mostly advantages the economically advantaged.
[1] Partial list of links to commentary and research on low-income, high-ability students:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/business/economy/25leonhar...
http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/18586.html
http://siepr.stanford.edu/publicationsprofile/2555
https://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/2011sum...
http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap....