Turns out Texas has some of the best data when it comes to tracking this as Texas has a ton of data on people going into these programs.
College essentially does work out compared to only graduating from high school granted there is a huge variance in how much it does.
I didn't see this one coming but certificate programs for the most part are not work it with only 4 of the 11 listed resulting in gains.
An associate degree backs up the general conclusion that your information technology associate's degree is not going to help you like a four-year college engineering degree.
You really can’t draw those kinds of conclusions from this kind of data.
Returns to education might be the most heavily studied topic in economics because it’s so tricky.
What you’re seeing here is mostly just the differences in productivity between people who pursue each type of degree. That’s called “ability bias”.
Here is the full report, which covered roughly 1 million students for 10 years and goes into detail about how the benefits vary. It highlights the type of degree, major, quality of the institutions, demographics of the students, and whether students complete the programs.
It's by no means perfect, nothing like this ever will be, but it is another sign.
I don’t doubt that the data quality is great. It’s just that you can’t infer from simple averages what the returns are.
In order to estimate returns, you also need a measure of each student’s counterfactual earnings, which is very difficult.
Who is the reference group? The charts say "people who didn't enroll". The footnote says "data from public colleges". I can only assume that the reference group is "people who didn't enroll in a public college"?
That seems like a mish-mash of a lot of different kinds of people.
I don't think so, I would assume private would be covered as well because Baylor University and SMU are both private but huge schools. Rice is also a private one but extremely well-regarded.
I thought they were just looking at earnings minus financial cost of college for those who attended, which has a great many shortcomings.
Hmm...interesting data, and it changes from one decade to the next.
When I first graduated in the early 1990s I had an English degree and could write or analyze my way out of anything, but I couldn't land a decent paycheck job - only temp work.
Then I got a business degree and that produces a solid paycheck by the late 1990s, but the writing skill above became essential to getting promoted and moving up.
I've since earned a psych degree and a few others for the fun of it, but the psych degree was the most essential for management and understanding how to deal with people, especially organizational psych.
Certs are really for skill-upgrading, not getting a job per se. They help open promotional doors when you want to side-step into another area.
And I've earned 3 IT degrees but they haven't produced a cent in income yet. Those really are for my projects when I retire. I have no illusions of a 2nd career in tech with them. I'd rather hang out my own shingle with a new income stream since I've been running my own business with ecommerce for a few years already.