“College is good for you, says study by college” almost sounds like a joke from the department of self-interest, except this was, in fact, the take away message from a huge study published last week by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. On average, a bachelor’s degree will boost your lifetime earnings by 84 percent over a person who only has a high school diploma, while if you major in petroleum engineering the benefits could go up to 314 percent.
“For most students,” says the report, “when asked whether to go to college, the answer should be a resounding ‘yes.’” Although, looking through the data, one might respond with a lingering gulp when considering counseling psychology, a major that will likely result in you earning less than the average high school graduate while at the same time increasing your need for a graduate degree more than most other majors.
Indeed, the core message of the report, which appears to be “relax, investing in a college education in a time of economic uncertainty really is worth it!” is less interesting than the stories suggested by its wealth of data. Naval engineering is not a major where you’re likely to meet many women, for instance; while you won’t find many men in early childhood education. Computer engineering is the most popular major for Asians (33 percent), while biological engineering is for Hispanics (22 percent), and school student counseling is for African Americans (38 percent).
Among the big picture narratives, the most obvious (and, perhaps, predictable) is that it still appears to pay to be a white man in the workplace: among the top 10 majors with the highest median earnings for women (remember, the median is the midpoint), nine were still lower than for men; thus, the median wage for a man with a major in computer science was $79,000, while for a woman it was $70,000. The disparity was greatest in chemical and electrical engineering, and only in information sciences did women equal and exceed men.
Less obvious but acute in its own way is the appearance of a science divide along racial and ethnic lines: while computer science, engineering, mathematics, and the physical and biological sciences hold considerable appeal for white, Asian and, in certain instances, Hispanic students, no hard science subject occupies a slot among the most popular majors for African Americans.
Still, imagine if the pharmaceutical industry came out with a study showing how drugs improved your life and that even though drug prices were increasing you were still better off spending more on them. Of course, in the obvious sense that drugs can cure, this is true and abundantly so; but the skepticism and tough questions raised by such a self-congratulatory and self-interested exercise would be deafening.
It is not to disparage this fascinating study by Georgetown’s researchers to suggest that omitting the costs of college helps all the benefits to shine. How, for instance, do college loan repayments, take the luster off these earnings?
More to the point, how has the erosion of high school standards simply extended and amplified the cost of education for everyone? Consider the problem identified by Eric Bettinger and Bridget Terry Long in a 2004 paper for the National Bureau for Economic Research (“Shape up or Ship Out: The Effects of Remediation on Students at Four-Year Colleges”).
“Nearly one-third of first-year college students require remedial education in reading, writing, or mathematics and the length of time students need to complete these courses appears to be increasing,” they write, adding that “most are underprepared, recent high school graduates.”
It is hard to see how society benefits economically by deferring core competence in literacy and numeracy for so many until after high school. Nor is it easy to see how we all benefit from the cost of remedial education, which was estimated in 1997 at $1 billion dollars per year for public colleges alone. As the former mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, complained in 1998, the city’s university system “devotes far too much money and effort to teaching skills that students should have learned in high school.”
And if you defer a significant part of high school until college, what you should have learned in college gets deferred to graduate school or not learned at all. Even at highly selective colleges, the rambling journey towards knowledge means that an undergraduate majoring, say, in biochemistry will be up to two years behind their equivalent in a highly selective college in the United Kingdom.
This is not a judgment about relative intelligence; it’s a judgment about the relative academic intensity of high school; and it’s also one that academics in both systems have repeatedly confirmed.
All of which is to say that the new study from Georgetown raises many important questions, and we should all be thankful for it. But we shouldn’t rush to justify our academic system for the economic benefits it bestows without taking a much harder look at the costs.
“For most students,” says the report, “when asked whether to go to college, the answer should be a resounding ‘yes.’” Although, looking through the data, one might respond with a lingering gulp when considering counseling psychology, a major that will likely result in you earning less than the average high school graduate while at the same time increasing your need for a graduate degree more than most other majors.
Indeed, the core message of the report, which appears to be “relax, investing in a college education in a time of economic uncertainty really is worth it!” is less interesting than the stories suggested by its wealth of data. Naval engineering is not a major where you’re likely to meet many women, for instance; while you won’t find many men in early childhood education. Computer engineering is the most popular major for Asians (33 percent), while biological engineering is for Hispanics (22 percent), and school student counseling is for African Americans (38 percent).
Among the big picture narratives, the most obvious (and, perhaps, predictable) is that it still appears to pay to be a white man in the workplace: among the top 10 majors with the highest median earnings for women (remember, the median is the midpoint), nine were still lower than for men; thus, the median wage for a man with a major in computer science was $79,000, while for a woman it was $70,000. The disparity was greatest in chemical and electrical engineering, and only in information sciences did women equal and exceed men.
Less obvious but acute in its own way is the appearance of a science divide along racial and ethnic lines: while computer science, engineering, mathematics, and the physical and biological sciences hold considerable appeal for white, Asian and, in certain instances, Hispanic students, no hard science subject occupies a slot among the most popular majors for African Americans.
Still, imagine if the pharmaceutical industry came out with a study showing how drugs improved your life and that even though drug prices were increasing you were still better off spending more on them. Of course, in the obvious sense that drugs can cure, this is true and abundantly so; but the skepticism and tough questions raised by such a self-congratulatory and self-interested exercise would be deafening.
It is not to disparage this fascinating study by Georgetown’s researchers to suggest that omitting the costs of college helps all the benefits to shine. How, for instance, do college loan repayments, take the luster off these earnings?
More to the point, how has the erosion of high school standards simply extended and amplified the cost of education for everyone? Consider the problem identified by Eric Bettinger and Bridget Terry Long in a 2004 paper for the National Bureau for Economic Research (“Shape up or Ship Out: The Effects of Remediation on Students at Four-Year Colleges”).
“Nearly one-third of first-year college students require remedial education in reading, writing, or mathematics and the length of time students need to complete these courses appears to be increasing,” they write, adding that “most are underprepared, recent high school graduates.”
It is hard to see how society benefits economically by deferring core competence in literacy and numeracy for so many until after high school. Nor is it easy to see how we all benefit from the cost of remedial education, which was estimated in 1997 at $1 billion dollars per year for public colleges alone. As the former mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, complained in 1998, the city’s university system “devotes far too much money and effort to teaching skills that students should have learned in high school.”
And if you defer a significant part of high school until college, what you should have learned in college gets deferred to graduate school or not learned at all. Even at highly selective colleges, the rambling journey towards knowledge means that an undergraduate majoring, say, in biochemistry will be up to two years behind their equivalent in a highly selective college in the United Kingdom.
This is not a judgment about relative intelligence; it’s a judgment about the relative academic intensity of high school; and it’s also one that academics in both systems have repeatedly confirmed.
All of which is to say that the new study from Georgetown raises many important questions, and we should all be thankful for it. But we shouldn’t rush to justify our academic system for the economic benefits it bestows without taking a much harder look at the costs.
