Does it Matter Where You Go To College?
Happy 2019 everyone and welcome back!
Most colleges have application deadlines in January. So I thought I’d start the new year with an edition for all the exhausted parents and nervous kids: Does it matter where you go to college?
Articles:
- Does It Matter Where You Go to College? -The Atlantic
- It’s Time to Tell Your Kids It Doesn’t Matter Where They Go To College — Time
- What Straight-A Students Get Wrong — Adam Grant, NY Times
- The Inescapable Weight of My $100,000 Student Debt — The Guardian
- The Future of College Looks Like the Future of Retail — The Atlantic
Read widely. Read wisely.
Max
p.s. Thank you to everyone who became a contributor to The Weekend Reader over the holidays! I really appreciate it!
Recommended Readings
1. Does It Matter Where You Go To College?
The Atlantic (8 min)
Summary
The bottom line: Do you make more money if you go to a more selective school? No. Unless you are a woman or a minority. That is vastly oversimplifying things. You’ll have to click through to the article for the full story. This is an interesting read.
Some highlights:
In November 2002, the Quarterly Journal of Economics published a landmark paperby the economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger that reached a startling conclusion. For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers.
This month, economists from Virginia Tech, Tulane, and the University of Virginia published a new study that reexamines the data in the Dale-Krueger study. Among men, the new study found no relationship between college selectivity and long-term earnings. But for women, “attending a school with a 100-point higher average SAT score” increased earnings by 14 percent and reduced marriage by 4 percent.
For the vast majority of women, the benefit of going to an elite college isn’t higher per-hour wages. It’s more hours of work. Women who graduate from elite schools delay marriage, delay having kids, and stay in the workforce longer than similar women who graduate from less-selective schools.
2. It’s Time to Tell Your Kids It Doesn’t Matter Where They Go To College
in Time Magazine, by William Stixrud, the co-author of The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives, with Ned Johnson. (14 min)
Summary
Two authors talk about how (and why) we over-stress the importance of college when talking to our kids.
Selection
So why don’t we tell our kids the truth about success? We could start with the fact that only a third of adults hold degrees from four-year colleges. Or that you’ll do equally well in terms of income, job satisfaction and life satisfaction whether you go to an elite private college or a less-selective state university. Or that there are there are many occupations through which Americans make a living, many of which do not require a college degree.
Many adults worry that if their kids knew that grades in school aren’t highly predictive of success in life, they’d lose their motivation to apply themselves and aim high. In fact, the opposite is true. In my 32 years of working with kids as a psychologist, I’ve seen that simply telling kids the truth — giving them an accurate model of reality, including the advantages of being a good student — increases their flexibility and drive. It motivates kids with high aspirations to shift their emphasis from achieving for its own sake to educating themselves so that they can make an important contribution. An accurate model of reality also encourages less-motivated students to think more broadly about their options and energizes them to pursue education and self-development even if they aren’t top achievers.
3. What Straight-A Students Get Wrong
Adam Grant in The New York Times (8 min)
Summary
Adam Grant is always a good read. This article is no exception. The social psychologist talks about Type-A kids who get Straight-A grades and suggests they may be missing the bigger picture.
Selection
The evidence is clear: Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years.
In a study of students who graduated at the top of their class, the education researcher Karen Arnold found that although they usually had successful careers, they rarely reached the upper echelons.“Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries,” Dr. Arnold explained. “They typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.”
This might explain why Steve Jobs finished high school with a 2.65 G.P.A., J.K. Rowling graduated from the University of Exeter with roughly a C average, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. got only one A in his four years at Morehouse.
4. The inescapable weight of my $100,000 student debt
The Baffler and The Guardian (23 min)
Summary
MH Miller left university with a journal full of musings on Virginia Woolf and a vast financial burden. He is one of 44 million US graduates struggling to repay a total of $1.4tn. Were they right to believe their education was ‘priceless’?
A terrific first-hand story of the debilitating impact of student debt. It makes one skeptical about whether the degree is worth all the financial stress.
Selection
Now 30, I have been incapacitated by debt for a decade. The delicate balancing act that my family and I perform in order to make a payment each month has become the organising principle of our lives. I am just one of 44 million borrowers in the US who owe a total of more than $1.4 trillion in student loan debt.
I have spent a great deal of time during the last decade shifting the blame for my debt. Whose fault was it? My devoted parents, for encouraging me to attend a school they couldn’t afford? The banks, which should have never lent money to people who clearly couldn’t pay it back to begin with, continuously exploiting the hope of families like mine, and quick to exploit us further once that hope disappeared? Or was it my fault for not having the foresight to realise it was a mistake to spend roughly $200,000 on a school where, in order to get my degree, I kept a journal about reading Virginia Woolf? (Sample passage, which assuredly blew my mind at the time: “We are interested in facts because we are interested in myth. We are interested in myth insofar as myth constructs facts.”) The problem, I think, runs deeper than blame. The foundational myth of an entire generation of Americans was the false promise that education was priceless — that its value was above or beyond its cost. College was not a right or a privilege, but an inevitability on the way to a meaningful adulthood. What an irony that the decisions I made about college when I was 17 have derailed such a goal.
5. The Future of College Looks Like the Future of Retail
The Atlantic (8 min)
Summary
Online retailers like Amazon and Warby Parker have found there is a benefit to having brick and mortar stores. The future of retail will be a mix of online shopping and real-world stores. Apparently, that is the future of college as well — a mix of physical facilities and online courses.
Selection
The number of students in the U.S. enrolled in at least one online course rose from 1.6 million in 2002 to more than 6 million in 2016.
As online learning extends its reach, though, it is starting to run into a major obstacle: There are undeniable advantages, as traditional colleges have long known, to learning in a shared physical space. Recognizing this, some online programs are gradually incorporating elements of the old-school, brick-and-mortar model — just as online retailers such as Bonobos and Warby Parker use relatively small physical outlets to spark sales on their websites and increase customer loyalty. Perhaps the future of higher education sits somewhere between the physical and the digital.
75 percent of the 56,000 undergraduates at the University of Central Florida, in Orlando, took at least one online class at the school last year, even as they were enrolled in face-to-face courses. (Another 10 percent took a hybrid course, a mix between online and face-to-face.) Nearly a third of the university’s classes take place online, which officials say has eliminated the need to build at least five additional classroom buildings.
Postscript
Does it matter where you go to college?
Our spending would indicate we think it does. According to the Atlantic, American parents now spend almost half a billion dollars each year on ‘independent education consultants,’ and that’s not counting the cost of test prep or flights and hotels for campus visits.” In the casino of the American economy, many American parents are betting big that elite colleges will help their kids succeed.
Some stats suggest that they’re not crazy for thinking this. Again, according to the Atlantic, “Elite schools seem disproportionately responsible for minting the American elite. About 45 percent of America’s billionaires and more than half of Forbes’s list of the most powerful people attended schools where incoming freshmen average in the top first percentile of SAT scores.” There are more than 200 law schools in the U.S. but all nine of the current Supreme Court Justices attended either Harvard or Yale. Similarly, every president since George H.W. Bush attended an Ivy League school.
But those stats paint a misleading picture. While the very pinnacle of business and politics is over-represented by graduates of “elite” schools, the majority of students who attend those schools don’t reach the very pinnacle. A student who gets into Yale may have “won the lottery,” but their prize is simply another lottery ticket. For some, skipping through the Gothic porticos of elite campuses will open doors to success that only a handful of people in a generation experience. On average, however, as the Dale-Kreueger study found, students at elite colleges won’t experience career or financial outcomes any better than equally qualified high school students who don’t attend those schools.
It is true that women benefit financially from attending elite schools, but not because they earn higher salaries. The study from the first article suggests that on average, they simply work more. It appears women who attend elite schools tend to prioritize careers more than women who don’t.
When we were living in New York City, my wife and I attended an evening seminar for navigating the New York public and private school options for our daughter. The presenter talked about for parents to hire tutors for their children to prepare for the gifted and talented tests in pre-school. Looking around the room I saw mothers and fathers diligently scribbling notes about any edge they could potentially give their child. I felt my palms begin to sweat. Surely not all the families in this room could get the highest marks. Would it only be those who could spend the money who would get into the good programs?
Then I started wondering, what is this all for? At a superficial level, the answer was obvious — you get a tutor so your kid can get into a good G&T program. You do that so that they can get into a selective middle school and then into a selective high school so eventually, they can get into a selective college. Why? That’s where the answers start to unravel. So they can have a miserable, though lucrative, career as a corporate hoop jumper? So they can be no more financially successful than their peers at other colleges?
And what kind of success do I want for my kids anyway? Ultimately I want them to have good character and to be happy. Unfortunately, those things aren’t highly correlated with elite school attendance either.
We have made the college application process into a high-stakes, high-anxiety ordeal, but the stakes are lower than we think. Within a very few years after college, it is who you are rather than where you came from that will count the most. And there is a lot more to who you are than where you studied History.
As the MH Miller article described, student loan debt can cripple a person. Could it be that we need to come to terms with the uncomfortable notion that college might not always be worth it, regardless of the cost? The good news is we are also seeing the dawn of a new era in higher education, one that mixes expensive in-classroom experiences with cheaper online instruction. This may help bring costs down. We may also see more students take alternative educational paths, like three-month coding schools. We are on the precipice of a big disruption in higher education. The more expensive it gets, the more people will look for alternatives because they won’t believe it matters so much where you go anyway.
In another sense, yes it matters where you go to college. For many of us, we make life-long friends in college. As a result of sharing the life-altering experience of living away from home for the first time, you have the opportunity to grow up a lot together. You have adventures, you have stress, you have success. And you begin sharing these things with your friends in college. In my case, in college, I also met the girl who would become my wife. So where we went to school mattered a lot.
To all the applicants, my hat is off to you. Applying is a lot of hard work. You’re probably nervous about how it will turn out. That’s natural. Just remember the research here — it suggests it’s all going to turn out fine.
- Max
