The big thing for me with top schools is the "baseline quality of the degree". I didn't go to a top school, but spent my time studying everything math and CS related I could, and managed to get an awesome education. At the same time, I am fully cognizant of the fact that peers who were less driven likely were more easily able to skate by, for the most part. So when a resume comes across my desk from a guy from my alma mater, I don't exactly know how to evaluate it -- there's no "well this guy went to CMU or MIT, so I can assume a modicum of strengths". I wouldn't turn down a candidate for an interview because of their school (or lack thereof), but coming from top schools generally frames you in a different way, in my book. If anything, I tend to gauge the difficulty up slightly more quickly in my questions.
If an applicant has less than a couple years experience, it's fair to expect/ask for GPA. If they have a lot of independent projects and a clear passion, I'll often excuse a low/missing GPA.
GPA is about as flawed as alma mater, but I think combined they give a useful signal.
In lieu of GPA I ask what kind of classes they took and what were their favorites. That list is a much better indicator, I think. It also lets you gauge what kinds of questions you can reasonably ask and the types of solutions that you can expect. If someone didn't have to study graph theory, they likely won't see a graph theoretic answer and you shouldn't as a question that leads heavily to that type of solution, and if someone studied a lot of combinatorics, you might see them bijecting your problem to other problems they've seen.
My philosophy is that you ask questions either a) to ensure someone knows material they say they do (if you claim you have a bunch of Java experience, you are expected to know how java.util.collections works or how the final operator works, as examples) or b) to see how someone thinks. The questions I ask sometimes truly do not have answers, but seeing the walls pop up and the candidate try to work around the walls tells me a lot about how they will approach problems in the workplace.
In technical fields this is usually reliable (someone who went to CMU or MIT and graduated probably put in a pretty high baseline level of work), but in more liberal arts fields school quality correlates much less to a baseline quality level. At my alma mater (Amherst), for example, the easiest course of study would be to take 4 humanities classes / semester, spend 12 hours/week in classes, write 3 papers/semester for each, and then you're done. 50% of the student body does this. The hardest would be to double up on lab sciences (physics + chem, for example, or physics + neuroscience), which entails about 20 hours/week of classes, 30-40 hours/week spent on problem sets, 2 midterms and a final.
I've heard that Harvard is similar: the grade distribution at Harvard is roughly 10% As, 80% Bs, and 10% Cs. Getting an A at Harvard implies that you really did a lot of work, but getting a B could imply everything from "You really did a lot of work but just missed the cutoff" to "You learned basically nothing from your undergraduate education."
Grade inflation has really made these inferences even more difficult; for example, the median grade at Harvard is actually an A- (not the well-balanced distribution you hypothesized).
The grade inflation has been going on at Harvard for longer than that. Best not to rely on anecdata over data. Especially since the group of Harvard students you hung out with was likely far from a random sampling.
>"You really did a lot of work but just missed the cutoff" to "You learned basically nothing from your undergraduate education."
Or maybe they learned exactly what they needed to do to game the system. Does doing a lot of work correlate to learning more? Seems both sides of the huge distribution got the same perceived outcome, just one did it easier.
Parent poster is speaking from the perspective of a hiring manager trying to evaluate the candidate. From that perspective, the critical question is "Will this person perform well at my company if I hire them?" Gaming the college degree system and learning the domain-specific information needed to perform well at a job are very different skillsets. Assuming a small team with a focused mission, general work ethic and ability to quickly absorb information correlate well with the latter, but not the former. (In a big company where nobody knows what anybody else is doing, the correlation often goes the other way and ability to game the system correlates better with success, but usually those don't have individual hiring managers evaluating resumes.)
I disagree. What in my post said that I wouldn't have given myself a shot? I would have brought myself in for an interview and interviewee me would have to had proven myself to interviewer me, same as someone from an elite school or a dev bootcamp.
The figures described seem to argue the opposite of the headline. If you get a 12% return on the cost of your education regardless of where you go, then that means that more expensive colleges are providing a commensurate increase in returns.
The fact that they can maintain 12% return is fantastic, and you should be spending every last cent you can afford on that. After all, if I offered you a 12 cents a year if you give me a dollar today, and someone else offered you $12000 a year if you give them $100k this year, you'd probably take the latter.
And this is not even counting the fixed cost of the time you spend going to university. The cheap and the expensive both charge you the same in time. But the latter gives you a phenomenally higher return on that time.
These ROI calculations on degrees are more of a (flawed) basis for encouraging (less often, discouraging) college. They are not useful. It may seem like a good idea to develop an "ROI for college", but it distracts from what's important.
First, much of the value of a degree is in getting your first job (networking at elite schools must be helpful however). As your career progresses, the importance of having a degree diminishes. Leaving aside Med, Law, etc.. where you have to have it.
Second, your pay is not a pure output of your degree. What field you're in and the salary prospects in that field, how hard you work, how much you negotiate you salaries, how often you change jobs, what part of the country you live in, (I would argue) simply how smart you are - some would say even your race and gender.
Another metric could be, cost of tuition vs. one year avg. salary in your field. If I went to college 20 yrs. ago for computing and the tuition was 5k a year, and the average salary is $100k - and go to college now, the cost is $20k - do the math on college value. Kind of a joke right now I can get the Android dev job for $100k prob without the degree.
The value of the degree varies widely by desired career.
If you want to be a splashy top executive, it's very helpful to have a top-tier MBA, and experience in management consulting or investment banking. If you want experience in IB or MC, it's very helpful to have an ivy league undergrad degree, ideally in something like econ.
If you want to be a great engineer, it's very helpful to go someplace, hang out with smart people, take hard classes, write code outside class, and make sure you make the most of the experience, wherever you are.
If you want random assholes to think that you're a great engineer, it's very helpful to go to MIT, Stanford, or CMU, and just make sure you don't do so poorly that you don't graduate.
When will journalists finally learn that Payscale is absolutely useless for this kind of analysis? The Payscale sample is solely graduates who never got a grad degree.
All this data suggests is that STEM majors are more likely to get high-paying jobs with only their undergrad degrees. It completely omits the many humanities/arts majors who go on to graduate study and thence to perfectly lucrative careers.
Their website seems structured that way, and also seems to have very few samples in Canada at least... It's better than nothing, but it wasn't all that convincing for me personally.
I don't know this survey. But I've read similar and recently published surveys on the subject. Notably, if you stratified the sample to remove computer science students the conclusion is reversed.
i.e., they're essentially saying, if the uni is very selective (e.g. Harvard), the ROI is similar to say a state college.
But they're disregarding that Harvard, whoever subsidises you, is a $100k investment or w/e, and state colleges are $10k. Just making up ballpark numbers here.
Now the ROI might be the same, i.e. they might both end up earning roughly 1.5x their investment in annual salary. But seen this way, everyone appreciates there's a gigantic difference in where you study, even though percent wise the ROI is exactly the same.
Future income is the primary reason people pursue higher education. We tell people from the time they hit middle school that they need to be preparing for college so they can get a good (i.e. high paying) job.
I heard this from my peers in undergrad all the time and it befuddled me. I thought "so ... you have no curiosity about the world? about how stuff works?."
I'm not claiming that I had hifalutin ideals; I knew that money was important, but I had this (perhaps naive) idea that if I became an excellent practitioner in whatever I did the money would follow.
I just wasn't prepared to hear "I'm just here to get a good job" from most of my peers. Some, I would expect, but not most.
It's really easy to think that a set of life decisions are good because they worked well for you, but that's not how the world works: Across every road, there are a lot of events we cannot control, decisions made with imperfect information. We make mistakes, we fail, through no special fault of our own. Every path is great if you are talented AND lucky. But it makes no sense to evaluate a road by just looking at the top successes: If that were the case, I'd tell my son to go into acting, because it went great for Tom Hanks and Brad Pitt.
No matter how hard you work, or how talented you are, the very top is something we cannot guarantee to anyone. So it's pretty rational to look at a career path, a set of life decisions, by looking at average cases, not just the very top.
Going out there because you are curious about the world, and ending up doing something where only the very top percentiles do well is only a great story if you win. I know a girl that went with those lofty ideals into psychology, along with a high IQ. She now answers phones at a call center. Two PhDs in biology: One is teaching English in Japan, because she couldn't bear a 20+ year post doc path, getting paid less than half of what I made in my first job out of school. My brother, top of his class in biology too. Got a Phd with honors. But he was born in the wrong country, and his best job offer is for a position that asks him to do 10+ hour days, rotating into the night 1'3rd of the time, all for 850 euros a month. Welcome to a country with over 20% unemployment.
So it's really easy to think it's important to have curiosity as long as you also pick a profitable course of study too, or are quite lucky. Otherwise, it's the same mindset that can dig you into a hole.
Picking a career just because of the money, and not getting any love for it as you go is a road to failure too: Many people drop out of programming for those reasons, and few options are more profitable on average than programming. But I can't blame people for keeping an eye out of the available options. I know I did: There were many things I thought I would have enjoyed doing, and I picked one that also looked profitable. I can't say I regret it.
There is no "the world". There are only people making choices, often on the basis of a default morality they've never thought about.
The kinds of failures you're describing are exactly what you get when the default morality is "Make as much money as possible".
You can say it's currently maladapted to expect more, and that's possibly true.
That doesn't mean it's an ideal situation, or a praise-worthy one. If the talents of smart people are consistently underutilised, that's a social problem and not just a series of unrelated individual failures.
> If the talents of smart people are consistently underutilised, that's a social problem and not just a series of unrelated individual failures.
I agree, but I think the social failure is that we tell people to "do what they love" and "follow their dreams" instead of "do something important" or "do something where you can make a difference".
The things that, say, English majors do are probably as objectively important as the things I do at work, but the field is overcrowded to the point that the value added by each additional entrant to the field is significantly reduced. So it's hard to find work that pays well for English majors (at least if they stay in their field).
Another thing is that "do something you love" misses is that you should find a career that you love. If you love your college experience but hate the jobs available to you afterward, that degree may not be a net positive.
> But he was born in the wrong country, and his best job offer is for a position that asks him to do 10+ hour days, rotating into the night 1'3rd of the time, all for 850 euros a month. Welcome to a country with over 20% unemployment.
I thought "so ... you have no curiosity about the world? about how stuff works?."
I don't know when you went to school, but now you can satisfy that curiosity with the Internet. The reason for school is to make connections, and have proof of experience for your resume.
A thoughtful graduate student schooled me on this, when I was a Junior working in her lab. She was interviewing widely, looking for a job that suited her goals. She said "If you take the highest offer, then they're deciding for you. Its just prostitution then."
Prostitution doesn't stop being prostitution just because you accept a lower rate. If it's prostitution to take the highest paying job, it's prostitution to take any pay at all.
There are certainly other factors to consider than just salary, but to dismiss that consideration as "prostitution" is absurd. Money may not buy happiness, but it buys everything else. I'm a big fan of food, clothing, and shelter, all of which money can buy in abundance.
But I was lucky to pick a field with high pay and lots of good employers, so I have the luxury of choosing both.
The data actually support the exact opposite conclusion from the headline: if the IRR of a degree is constant, then the payoff is proportional to the cost (i.e. the amount you invest). More selective schools tend to be more expensive. So pay N times more for tuition, expect to earn N times more in the long run.
I was with you up until the very end. Pay N times more for tuition, expect to earn N times more _on_your_degree_investment_ in the long run.
That doesn't mean your entire income will be N times higher.
For example if you spent $100k on your tuition in year 0, and the rate of return from that degree is 10% per year, and assuming you spend the returns rather than reinvest them, then your degree is adding $10k/year to your income.
But you're not living on $10k/year, you're earning $80k/year, $10k of which is attributable to your degree.
So to complete the exericse, if you had spent 2x on your education, you would be making $90k/year. Not $160k.
I think we're both wrong, but I think you're wronger than I am.
Yes, it's true that N times spent on tuition does not equal N times more money in an absolute sense because the baseline income for spending zero on tuition is not zero.
However, the article said that the ROI on tuition was 12% annualized, which means that you're not reinvesting the proceeds. If you reinvest the proceeds, then that is additional return on top of the 12%.
But the details are not really relevant. What matters is that the headline is wrong. Where you do to school does matter.
If smart students choose selective schools and smartness is associated with ROI, we would expect to see a correlation between ROI and school selectivity. That we don't is interesting.
If merit is highly correlated with school selectivity, then selectivity can be considered a proxy for smartness/determination/etc. If that's the case, education ROI appears to be not strongly correlated with merit (via the selectivity proxy). That is very interesting.
Actually, the chart shows a pretty damning story for selection bias: despite all the selectivity of schools, there's no sign of improvement in returns for more selective engineering schools. It makes a bit of intuitive sense: any MIT/CMU/Stanford/etc premium on degrees would be capped by management salary structure, since fresh grads don't typically earn more than their boss. It's possible that a linear fit is not a great model, as the little data there is on the far left chart is all above average, but the 10x engineer isn't registering on the radar.
As for what people can do differently: if you have equal chances of succeeding at the most selective arts and humanities college, or the least selective engineering, choosing engineering will net you better 20 year salaries. Especially relevant if you're considering humanities as a law degree path -- the LSAT has logical reasoning test, and if you can hack that, you can probably do okay in engineering math / CS classes.
>Actually, the chart shows a pretty damning story for selection bias: despite all the selectivity of schools, there's no sign of improvement in returns for more selective engineering schools.
But since we're talking about ROI and not salary, you very much want to get into the most expensive, most selective engineering schools. If I invest money in bonds these days I'm going to get less than a 5% return - if I can get a 12% return I want to invest as much as I can borrow.
It says "return on degree", so is the income measured relatively to what they spent on the degree? If so, it obviously depends still very much on where you study, as top schools cost much more.
That's my reading, too. If top schools have a great return on investment, then the total returns must be significantly higher because of the size of the investment.
Exactly, that confused me too. It would be like saying all the schools cost the same because the interest rate for student loans is the same regardless of amount. There is a huge difference between paying 5% on $1,000 and 5% on $100,000.
Its also interesting that they did the cost net of financial aid, so probably looking at the average cost of the degree, creating a much larger variance than the data set indicates.
There is another HN article that shows salary for STEM majors at mid career was equivalent, irrespective if school. According to that article, at 44, I'm making more than the average MIT grad of the same age, and I went to KU.
Not true all the time. There is a state university in the Philippines called Rizal Technological University, located in Boni Avenue, Mandaluyong City. In that university, there's a college called CEIT or College of Engineering and Industrial Technology. One of the courses offered by that college is Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering and in that course there is a subject called Advanced Programming. Guess what is taught in the subject called "Advanced Programming"? Ready?... they are teaching HTML. You read it right, HTML or Hypertext Markup Language.
It's looking at ROI. And the cost of education typically correlates with quality and long-term earnings. (Put your pitch forks down, not all schools, just generally.) So, if I think about this on a 20 year horizon. I have a $50K degree program at a state school vs a $200K degree from Harvard (numbers rounded). Lets just use 10% as the ROI. At 10% over 20 years, the return on the state school is ~$336,000. For Harvard, this yields ~$1,350,000. So, the ROI might be the same, but you basically get an extra million over 20 years for getting into Harvard.
Because there is a big selection bias in university education, it's hard to say that Harvard caused someones income to go up using your math. I prefer this post from last year which tries to calculate value-added.
Why does selection bias even matter? If you go to Harvard, you will make more than had you gone to a boring state school. Period. Is there selection bias? Yes. Does it change the fact the Harvard kid is wildly successful? No.
Because if the effects are due to selection bias, and you've been accepted to both Harvard and State School, you should pick State and earn an even higher return.
If it's not selection bias, then you can conclude Harvard causes success and you should go there.
> compare the career earnings of graduates with the present-day cost of a degree at their alma maters, net of financial aid
Woah, what? So a degree that cost $1 but raised your career earnings by $100 would be at 100%? 1000%? Not sure how they're doing the math, but it completely dwarfs the rest. And shows how obviously flawed the measure itself is.
One of the key things left out is the baseline cost of time. A few years of your life is not free and probably makes for a pretty high baseline cost.
> One of the key things left out is the baseline cost of time. A few years of your life is not free and probably makes for a pretty high baseline cost.
Hm, wouldn't that already be accounted for in using 'lifetime earnings'? If someone doesn't go to college and earns $1m, and another person goes to college and earns $1.1m, then the extra 4 working years apparently didn't compensate enough. Plus, college can be a lot more fun than working.
For most people I agree. However, as someone who has graduated from a top school (U. of Michigan), I can't tell you how many times my credentials have got me both interviews and jobs. Where you go to school CAN make a big difference, but it depends on the school, the person, and the field of study.
I don't mean to be mean, and I assume you mean CS, and I went to a no name school in the south myself, but having worked for 20 years at google, microsoft, amazon, and startups, I don't think of U of Mich as a top school. The easy top list in CS is berkley, cmu, stanford, maybe cal tech. People say their school is this or that, but 2nd and 3rd tier schools just don't matter at all. Maybe for your first job in that state? It's all about what you can do, your capabilities, your experience, and your interview skill too. Is U Mich is the top 20 or something?
I definitely didn't go to a top school, but I am amazed at people who say their school was a top school or almost top school. I am just saying as someone who interviews people every week: your school doesn't matter to me - it is just what you have done in your career, and what you can do now.
I went to University of Illinois for math (grad school), and I haven't really seen that effect, although it probably didn't hurt. I've mostly gotten interviews because of my open source credentials & impressive accomplishments for early in my career.
I'm of the opinion that while school calibur might be able to get you interviews and jobs a lot of times, it's selecting for mediocrity since it doesn't go for professional accomplishments...and thus avoids hiring high performers, who generally want to work with other high performers.
I have friends at UIUC and the difference in recruiting is night and day. I didn't get any response when I applied to Dropbox and Citadel over the last 2 years, but on the UIUC Computer Science Facebook page both companies post internship opportunities with direct recruiter emails, sometimes saying "anybody can interview" (for Dropbox). As someone who goes to a school of decent, but lower caliber this is a significant difference.
I left grad school in a bit of a surprise move during the great recession, so I missed all of the recruiting opportunities when I left - it took me 2 1/2 years to find a job, but afterwards I've made every effort to stand out on my own merits.
Oh yes but that leaves tons of brilliant people who didn't goto any of the ivies ready to hire for those of us not wanting to compete with the SV app style startups. I used to be a bit annoyed by this attitude when I worked as a contractor at a Google data center. Well first it was still a boon to get Google anyway associated with my resume, but second I realized Google and SV and the rest were missing out on lots of brilliant engineers, makers, and programmers. Turns out hard technical problems care less about technical pedigree than humans. ;)
It seems to say that where you studied matters if it's not a STEM degree.
For me, the explanation is that it's relatively harder to determine whether someone has learned their stuff if it's Math or Science, but quite hard if it's creative writing or history. There's an xkcd about this.
That's why something like an online coding test might work: someone clueless will not be able to write that palindrome quiz. You can have a zero false positive rate at the expense of a false negative rate (competent people can freeze in exam situations). With essay subjects, it's pretty hard to separate the BSers from the real deal. You'll always have some false positives.
This is only about earnings (the study is from PayScale), and does not take into account all the other advantages from elite schools, not all of which can be measured easily. Like money/happiness metrics, eliding those advantages may cause one to come away with a simplistic understanding of the relationship between school and outcomes. America cares about elite schools for a reason:
this is actually a little disappointing form the Economist which usually has great high quality content. Do we really need to visualize statistics to prove that comp sci pays more than a degree in library studies? how about if you get your MBA from a community college vs NYU or Wharton? Once you compare apples to apples you'll certainly see a statistical difference in ROI based on the WHERE.
If you want to get a job based on what you learn at college, you can do that at a lot of places.
If you want to get a job because your roommate started a billion-dollar tech company, or inherited a billion-dollar company, or has a parent who is the President of a foreign country, you had best go to Harvard (or maybe a Princeton/Stanford type).
You can learn how your roommates parents started a billion dollar company (i.e. How to be successful) at Harvard. You can't at your state school -- because your roommates are playing video games or went downtown for the night.
For intelligence. Society, on the contrary, is build upon status, papers and titles - a hierarchy in general, so in the social aspect "where" matters the most. Ask any British about Oxford.)
Btw, studying CS in MIT (a school which traditionally taught principles and big ideas) and in, say, third-rate school that taught Java coding makes a huge difference.
It is not a coincidence that it was MIT and Stanford from where the best things in CS came from (and we should not forget the "parallel universe" of Standard ML and eventually Haskell, which came from UK schools).
These are presumably undergraduate programs. Medicine and law would be professional degrees.
Pre-med is typically science (biology). Pre-law is typically political science or psychology. Those strike me as more likely arts here, though you'd need to look at the source study's classifications.
I don't know if it curves up so much as the bottom gets chopped off. In other words, there are fewer bad selective colleges than bad non-selective colleges, but with selective or non-selective the good colleges are equal.
