"Virtually every single member of congress, every senator, every Capitol Hill staffer, every White House advisor, every Fed governor, and every major political reporter is a college graduate."
Who cares? Notice that they didn't mention Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Kay, Richard Branson, Michael Dell, Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Frank Lloyd Wright - who arguably have all contributed more to this country than our established political leaders recently. Clearly this is the washington post - but the myopic view of looking at the political arena, if anything - shows what is wrong with associating college with "smart, capable, and adding value to our country." I'm just saying that many people in the US are not proud of legislators - and saying that they all went to college hardly proves a good point.
Hard work, natural curiosity, caring about your community, a desire to learn and being in the right place at the right time has more to do with being successful and adding value to our society than becoming part of the "College club" that is Washington.
What about the people who dropped out of college hoping to be the next Bill Gates or Richard Branson and failed? These guys are now part of the statistics shown on the graph.
Bill Gates was successful and dropped out of college. He was also hard working and curious. Does that mean that everybody else who's hard working and curious will be as successful without a diploma? I wouldn't bet on it.
Also, having a desire to be in the right place at the right time doesn't guarantee that you'll do just that.
I agree that having a diploma is not what is going to make you successful. But at least, it gives you better odds to beat economic troubles, which is the point of the article.
You grab a sample of some of the most successful people in over 100 years, people who are quite literally one in many millions, and use this to say people over-value college?
If we could all be that lucky, then sure, college would be worthless. But there's a hundred million people for each one of those who want to have something instead of all or nothing.
You've missed his (meaning the quoted guy's) point. Imagine that the graph showed unemployment amongst African-Americans, women or any other group under-represented in congress. They won't solve the problem becuase they're insulated enough from it to either not know it's a problem or simply not care.
Those are anecdotal. Statistically take everyone without a degree, and everyone with. Check the unemployment rate in one group and compare it with the other. If you want to focus on one particular field (say software engineers) look if the percentages with and without a degree in that field are equal than the overall population, or more skewed toward one group or the other.
For every Bill Gates there are millions of people cleaning toilets and working at McDonald's.
If someone is unemployed that can barely hold a keyboard without dropping it calling himself a software engineer is out of a job is counted it gets a lot harder though.
You can stick labels fairly easily on the various degrees, they may not mean much in terms of practical knowledge but they do put up a lower boundary that they had to cross. For auto-didacts you run the gamut all the way from incompetent bumbler to ace, and there is no foolproof way to separate those when looking at large groups but it will make a huge difference to the outcome of the study.
Especially in the IT sector there is a lot of "I am an 'x'" where X is anything from the set of recent buzzwords.
So I don't think you can make even that comparison in an easy and reliable way, what people call themselves may not be what they actually are.
All the arguments over the value of college always seem to ignore one obvious element—some of us go to college because we will learn things we could not or would not otherwise learn. I'm a Computer Science senior right now, and sure, I could have learned all the stuff I learned from buying my own books, but I never would have. Also, the awesome professors, though rare and littered among terrible ones, completely make it worth it.
"I'm a Computer Science senior right now, and sure, I could have learned all the stuff I learned from buying my own books, but I never would have."
One of the weird things about college or university is that it gives one social license to spend four years, or more, learning something as an adult.
If you were not enrolled in a university, but instead diligently reading books, solving problems, writing essays etc. for four years without being otherwise employed, people would find you eccentric at the very least. But once officially enrolled at an educational institution, society thinks it is not only perfectly fine to do the same things, but to take on large amounts of debt for the privilege of doing so.
This is very true. I sometimes use the fact that I'm a phd student as a cover to study other, completely unrelated things (and get paid for it). It's weird to see institutional validation bias into play.
As opposed to myself: I'm a Psychology Research graduate working as a Computer Engineer (for the last few decades) who taught myself an awful lot of what I know from reading books and manuals...
I did Electronic Engineering and about 60% of my year group are now all pure management. Some of the rest are "consultants". I'd say around 15% went into engineering.
I went to learn something & to have a damned good time doing it. A lot of people I met were there because they had nothing else to do and at least could get a job at the end.
Yeah. Some of us like to go to university just for the joy of the experience, leaning new stuff, being surrounded by experts in the field.
Sadly these type of abstract advantages cannot be quantified and hence are always forgotten. If I took a degree for the money and not the interest then I would have chosen Economics or Management, not Physics! And what about those who chose foreign languages? Or literature? Etc...
Hopefully there's more than monetary advantages in going to uni.
some of us go to college because we will learn things we could not or would not otherwise learn.
And some of us went to college because we had to prove to HR people that we know what we know with very expensive pieces of paper. I stopped going to college after I didn't attend classes or buy books for a semester, and got substantially the same grades. I didn't attend classes or buy books because I wasn't extracting value congruent to the time and money it cost to attend class. I ultimately made the decision to not go at all because the amount of money I was making running my business exceeded the amount I could make with a degree working for someone else.
Computer science is probably one of the easiest fields to learn without formal instruction because deliberate practice is so easy and information is so accessible. The absolute most I learned in a college course was in a digital logic course. After the first class, the professor, whom I had before, took me to his office, told me I wouldn't learn anything in the class, gave me an FPGA development board (similar to http://www.altera.com/products/devkits/altera/kit-cyc2-2C20N..., fpga, ethernet, usb, flash card reader), told me to read about Verilog, build something interesting, and to not attend class, he'd just give me a grade on whatever I built. I implemented a basic computer that would read and execute instructions off the memory card. Almost everything in computer science came together once I implemented jump instructions. I got almost nothing out of most classes, but an incredible amount out of that one. College is tedious if you already know a lot about a subject.
If I could go back and was really interested in learning, I would have moved close to a college, and paid professors for short duration one-on-one instruction and guidance, probably just an hour or two a week, with independent study. It would have been substantially less expensive and more effective. You can't get a degree that way, but you can learn. I find the pacing of college courses to be too slow, if I am interested in learning about a new subject now, I'll get course videos and speed them up a bit, and skip ahead liberally. I can usually get through a semesters worth of lectures in a day.
You're mixing up computer science and programming. Programming is easy to learn without formal instruction. Theory on the other hand, can and does become quite complex. Sure, its still possible to learn theory on your own, but the professor with the Turing award makes things much easier.
Actually, I'm not mixing them up. There are incredible amounts of information readily available that will enable you to learn theory. If you are smart and motivated, you can learn theory without instruction.
To be honest, I don't think I (or a majority of people) could learn theory without help. Math and theoretical CS are pretty hard. I can't count the number of times that I've had questions that only a TA could answer for me. To be fair, there are resources now like mathoverflow, but I've found having a knowledgeable human you can have a lengthy discussion with is invaluable.
That can be said about any field. You stated that computer science was one of the EASIEST fields to learn without formal instruction. My claim is that learning theoretical ideas, discrete mathematics, automata theory, and formal languages without formal instruction is not any easier than any other scientific field, such as chem, physics, or mathematics.
I would argue that because of the computer savviness of computer scientists, documents and tutorials about computer science are more likely to be easily located and properly formatted for display on the internet.
That again is a false assumption. I have professors who are great theorists but can't use a computer very well. It doesn't take computer savvy to be able to do computer science well. Hence my statement that you are confusing computer science and computer programming. The tutorials you see online are for practical applications. What you're seeing isn't computer science at all. Just a byproduct of it.
I know that I wouldn't ever have known anything about (or probably even ever been exposed to) such ideas as incompleteness, undecidability, graph algorithms, etc. I'm not so sure you understand what computer science actually is. It's not trade school.
Economists of education (Mark Blaug is one whose writings on this subject I have read) point out that college students start out as young people who come from higher socioeconomic status families, all over the world. Those young people thus have better social connections to succeed in paid employment and more capital to found businesses and invest and do other things that lead to high income in the next generation than do young people who are unable to afford college. Moreover, college attendance, even though it costs money to the students, is heavily subsidized by general taxation all over the world, and college subsidies operate as a wealth transfer from working non-college-attending young people to studying college-attending young people. It's not clear at all that there is any added value from the educational operations of a college
and that college-educated people can look at a cross-sectional chart like the one jacquesm kindly submitted here and believe that it shows a longitudinal causation relationship is a demonstration of how badly colleges fail at teaching statistics.
Going to college allows you to tap in to that network of social connections though, which in turn will increase your chances a bit.
No guarantees there though, on an individual level.
Now, what would be more surprising is to show that an increase in education level would show a decreased chance of being employed. So in that sense this graph should really not surprise anybody.
I've done something else (no access to PhD employment stats, maybe someone else does?), I've changed it in to an 'employment' graph, instead of an unemployment graph:
Did you just subtract the values in the original chart from 100%? If so, that's not the actual employment level. Unemployment means seeking work but not finding it; it excludes everyone who is disabled, discouraged, or simply not looking for work (e.g. full-time moms).
The overall unemployment level in the U.S. is a little under 10%, but the employment level is somewhere around 65-70% (iirc). So 20-25% of the population is still unaccounted for in this figure. A chart breaking that down by education might be interesting, too.
> disabled, discouraged, or simply not looking for work (e.g. full-time moms).
Ah ok, I wasn't aware of that distinction (I figured they'd been taken out). Still, the larger point stands, the difference looks huge when you look at this graph, but it is 'upside down', we're talking about the tops here, not about a base 0 reaching to 15%, but a base 0 reaching to 100% where this is the remnant between the tops and the maximum.
What you're saying is that the maximum should have been 80% or 75% instead of 100%.
I can't speak to the validity of this graph, but my immediate response is to think of all of the other factors that go into getting a job. I know people with the personality and intelligence to get jobs they are unqualified for, quickly earn promotions, and never go a week or two without being employed. I also know people who cannot hold down a job painting doors.
College degrees are handed out like candy to anyone who pays enough money and jumps through enough hoops. Relying on education level as a signal of ability is ridiculous, and the existence of this graph shows why: we emphasize education for the sake of financial gain.
People who truly crave knowledge and training are lumped in with people who thrive on doing what they're told and avoiding independent thought. There is more to a person than their education level, and when it comes down to being truly valuable in a business, some of the motivations for education are probably a detriment.
I cannot prove causation, but all the job applications I recall seeing ask for the applicant's educational level. Companies use that as one of their qualifiers for choosing whom to hire. In other words, those that have access to college have better access to employment.
Yeah, but I also can say that there are a lot of jobs out there that ask for a college degree, but are more than willing to drop that requirement for the right person.
Yes, the article should prove causation precisely because it has nothing to do with the point of the article.
The article is about the correlation, not the causation.
You can find such people now and before the economic crisis. For the quote to be correct, the rate of employment among graduates before or during the crisis should be the same.
I am not saying that he is correct (I don't know, I don't have the stats). But your point is not valid evidence for this discussion.
I know a lot of people who graduated from 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 with zero job prospects. The more experienced people are getting the jobs, understandably.
I'd be interested to know if it is really the amount of schooling that effects employability or if having less education is indicative of some other innate characteristic of a person. ie: low IQ or unmotivated etc...
Not innate, but social. A college degree is a very middle class, upper middle class thing to have. Not having a college degree is lower middle class, working class. It's faux pas to say "there's no unemployment crisis facing the upper middle class" though, so it's couched in cargo-cultish terms: "follow the early-adulthood formal-education rituals of the middle class and share in their good fortune".
As pointed out in one of the comments, this doesn't hold for recent college grads. I know a lot of very smart people who graduated in the past 2-3 years and cannot find jobs.
So the non-diplomaed one is currently studying, working with dad without being registered as a worker or doing some stuff on-line or off-line that may be bringing some bucks for him??
Another thing the graph doesn't take in consideration is that as a non-diplomaed, you can afford to be jobless or work pretty much anything; however, as a college graduate with loans, you probably can't.
I think this is a larger topic/problem is to be just shortened in one graph.
I don't understand this graph. Wouldn't "no diploma" also include "no college" and "some college"? And wouldn't that mean that the line would be in between those two rather than being longer? Or is this referring to no high school diploma?
I'm also curious what the graph would look like if you included people who have Masters and PhDs.
And among college graduates, there simply isn’t an economic crisis in the United States.
With a family member having a masters degree in education, and recently being laid off with about 700 other graduate degree holding teachers in an entire school district, I'm not buying this.
I personally go to university because I think it is a lot of fun.
It's not really stressful, I still have some time to do little side projects (most of the time, I am able to find a type of lecture that allows me to do that stuff on the side).
That fact that there's a correlation between education and employment doesn't tell us if there's a causation. What's very likely is that the kind of people who will prioritise getting a degree is also the kind of people who can and will adjust and pivot to a new type of employment environment.
If you're trying to decide to go to college, you're already very likely to be employable. Telling a 50 year unemployed old blue collar worker that he should have gone to college is a "let them eat cake" response.
Ok the typical correlation/causation argument doesn't apply here. There have been MANY studies on degree vs. employment and the results always look like this.
Second, stop using the word pivot when it doesn't apply. Not only is it a stupid buzzword, people aren't even using it correctly!
> That fact that there's a correlation between education and employment doesn't tell us if there's a causation.
Agreed, but there very well might be, and there probably is, the question I think is not 'if' but 'how much'.
> What's very likely is that the kind of people who will prioritise getting a degree is also the kind of people who can and will adjust and pivot to a new type of employment environment.
Yes, there is a certain flexibility involved there, it's hard to re-train someone whose industry has just been outsourced from under them, all their domain specific knowledge has just turned worthless.
Knowledge workers have it a bit easier in that sense, they still have the problem but they might be able to adapt quicker than 'skill' based workers.
> If you're trying to decide to go to college, you're already very likely to be employable.
Yes, most likely.
> Telling a 50 year unemployed old blue collar worker that he should have gone to college is a "let them eat cake" response.
Telling someone what they should have done in the past is totally dumb, it didn't happen that way so it's completely pointless.
But for the people you outlined above, the ones trying to decide to go to college or not might do well to realize that one day they too will be 50, and if they're in the possession of a college degree then it might be to their advantage.
Notice that's a might, the article does not do much to explain the background of the graph, and I think that it has some truth to it but that is not evident from the presentation.
I think that HN actually has a higher average education level than most fora, and that people like you (and me) are the exception, not the rule. And I do have some understanding of statistics, not enough to read a typical stats paper but I know a median from an average (that seems to be the deciding factor ;) ).
The graph to me indicates that there is some correlation between education and unemployment (especially given the fact that the graph is showing a continuous trend) but does nothing to explain that correlation in a way that you could conclude 'if you get a degree your chances of being unemployed are smaller'. That might be true, but is not a valid conclusion.
Another thing that the graph does not tell you (but general statistics does) is that you can't say anything about individuals, only about populations.
But it's an interesting graph nonetheless and I think that it would be good to take it in to account while researching this sort of thing further.
A background in statistics is useful, even if you only get the basics, but I think that even that is not a requirement to understand what the graph says and which caveats you should be aware of.
Yes, it is true that correlation is not causation but the article is not claiming causation. It is observing that the correlation between the unemployment rate and the education level of those in power means that they are out of touch with the problems of those suffering. It is the correlation that is the basis for the argument, the fact that lower education levels might be causing the higher unemployment for the specific populations is not relevant and is never claimed by the article.
Who cares? Notice that they didn't mention Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Kay, Richard Branson, Michael Dell, Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Frank Lloyd Wright - who arguably have all contributed more to this country than our established political leaders recently. Clearly this is the washington post - but the myopic view of looking at the political arena, if anything - shows what is wrong with associating college with "smart, capable, and adding value to our country." I'm just saying that many people in the US are not proud of legislators - and saying that they all went to college hardly proves a good point.
Hard work, natural curiosity, caring about your community, a desire to learn and being in the right place at the right time has more to do with being successful and adding value to our society than becoming part of the "College club" that is Washington.