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I wouldn't be surprised if the returns to college are negative (after factoring in opportunity costs) for the median person who went to college... but that would be across the whole population of college-goers, and not within institution. I'd guess the bottom quartile of graduates at a state's flagship public university are still better off with the degree than not.
Another aspect to consider is most students don't know which category they'll fall into. They don't know, ex ante, whether they'll be part of the group that benefits from going to college, or part of the group that won't. Their parents don't know either.
They could have a pretty decent sense of which group they were in, if the relevant information were provided to them by the adults responsible for doing that.
If you aren’t the best student in your high school classes you probably won’t see large returns from college.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if it’s negative. The statistically insignificant returns are for most graduates. Most ever-attenders don’t graduate and their returns are almost all negative.
They could have a pretty decent sense of which group they were in, if the relevant information were provided to them by the adults responsible for doing that.
I'm not sure about that. Especially for first-generation college students whose adult network doesn't have much experience in that world.
If you aren’t the best student in your high school classes you probably won’t see large returns from college.
I think this also depends where your high school is.
The adults I’m primarily referring to are the government teachers and councilors who just propagandize for college.
My other point isn’t that you have to literally be the top student, just that you have a sense of how you stack up intellectually with your peers. So, if you knew that returns to college are not significant for 90% of students, you would have an idea which group you’re probably in.
Agree with you on the distribution, I mean, I got my degree (a B.S.) in Psychology. It doesn't really reflect much at all in what I do now.
I think it is the debt issue that could force a change. Unless that gets addressed, kids are going to be saddled for so long that it makes the degree hard to justify.
https://m.stacker.news/141892
We talked about returns to college a bit in your other post but something I didn’t mention there is that the returns are extremely unevenly distributed within degrees as well as between degrees.
It has not been the case that college typically pays off for students, even though it does on average. That’s because the returns are very high for the very best students and basically non-existent for the majority of students.
Most people would be at least as well off without going to college, as far as we can tell from the available data.