Comments on: Predicting a degree's value

By: hardlyb

hardlyb — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 22:18:07 +0000

I do not believe that going to Harvard is a ticket to the good life, but I have been surprised over the years how much going to grad school at Stanford has helped me. The connections that I made there have affected the trajectory of my career in ways that I would never have expected, and the branding has been a big help, too. I don’t hear this from my friends that went to Princeton, for instance, so I do not think that it’s true that any selective school is the same as any other one. And I’ve been told by Stanford graduates in other fields that they have found the same thing, although I’m pretty sure that not all of my classmates would say this.

By: Mike Curtis

Mike Curtis — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 00:38:56 +0000

Education is a tool. The chisel does not tell the sculptor what to carve any more than an Ivy league degree can tell the graduate what to do. How ever, or where ever you learn, pales in comparison to motivation, self-actualization, and intrinsic talent; in determining what you actually accomplish

By: Tom DeRosa

Tom DeRosa — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 22:40:04 +0000

Interestingly, I just read about a study that says the college you choose has almost no impact on lifetime earnings:

http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2009/11/21/its-not-the-school-its-the-student/

By: Mark Roulo

Mark Roulo — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 18:25:03 +0000

“It’s dangerous to assume that the degrees that have offered the best payback *historically* will be the ones that offer the best payback in the future.”

Yes, it is.

But it is reasonable to assume that easy majors with little content from poor schools (stereotypically … Rural Southwestern State Tech U) will be less economically valuable than difficult majors (often difficult because of math) with lots of content (hard to BS through physics, for example) from well regarded schools.

This is true for almost any model you have for why degrees are valuable:

1) Hard major versus Easy *signals* that the student is smart. If the difficult major actually teaches relevant content, all the better. A classics degree, for example, signals that the student can learn *something* real (Latin and Ancient Greek), even though the particular skills are unlikely to be used “for real”. A physics or engineering degree sends the same signal (with less verbal signaling and more math signaling) while also providing a better chance to be useful.

2) Selective school versus easy school again signals “smart”, but also tends to run equivalently named classes/harder and faster. A BS in physics from CalTech, for example, is going to cover more ground than a BS in physics from RegionalRuralTech. So, again, you get both “signaling” (they let me in, so I must be smart) and content.

It is, of course, possible to pick a “hot” major that becomes less hot (think physicists in the years after the cold war ended … lots of national labs were downsizing). But even those people tend to do better than the people that spent 4 years taking easy intro courses with little content. They may not do as well as they had hoped, but still better than the other route.

-Mark Roulo

By: david foster

david foster — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:21:39 +0000

It’s dangerous to assume that the degrees that have offered the best payback *historically* will be the ones that offer the best payback in the future. This is the same kind of error made by those who assumed that because house prices went up a lot historically, they would *keep* going up at similar rates.