How much is that degree really worth?

Quote from QuikrRetirement:

Re-read the title of the thread How much is that degree really worth?
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So phucking what? How much is that degree really worth when you factor in the lost opportunity cost of years of higher education, in addition to the actual expense, when someone with an 8th grade education owns this:

<img src="http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=2886789">

Creative Commons license: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cindy47452/2676368775/sizes/s/in/set-960767/
 

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Quote from peilthetraveler:

They used to say with a college degree, you could earn $1.6 million dollars more over your lifetime than with a high school diploma.

Turns out the real number is more like $400k over 30 years. I bet if they factored in the extra taxes on high income the college graduates make, and add in the extra income that the high school drop outs make from the EIC on their taxes with all their kids they pop out and a college degree is worth even less.

http://finance.yahoo.com/college-ed...nt-paltry-return?mod=edu-continuing_education
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Going to college is never about the degree but belonging to an educated group of people,
getting into and intellectual environment where there is a much better chance to succeed
in life in general rather than doing business with your colleagues in the coal mine…
( no offense coal miners, thank you)
 
From the article cited in the OP, the top school is:

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Rank: 1
School Type: Private
City, State: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Graduation Rate (%): 94
Total Cost to Graduate ($): 189,300
30-Year Net Return for Investment ($): 1,688,000
30-Year Net Return for Graduates ($): 1,796,000
Annualized Net ROI (%): 12.6

Suppose you're 18 years old, just graduated from high school, and you have $189,300. Do you spend the $189,300 on four years of college, graduate, and go straight to the cubicle as a computer programmer? Or is there a better use for the money? You can get MIT lectures for free online at http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/

I watched a couple of the lectures from here: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-01-physics-i-classical-mechanics-fall-1999/

In the photo, the professor is demonstrating the principle of conservation of energy. He has rigged a pendulum with a 15.5 kg weight at the end and let it swing. He is demonstrating that due to conservation of energy, the weight will not return to a height greater from what it was released and therefore will not smash him in the face.

What is the purpose of college? Is it because people are so lazy they will not learn unless they are threatened with receiving a bad grade in a course?
 
When I graduated from college in 1982, I tried to get a job with my chemistry degree. My best offer was a job testing horse urine for drugs at a racetrack. The pay they offered me was so low, it was less than what I was already making as a cook at a hotel. So I just kept working at the hotel until I started grad school. Horse piss, for crying out loud.

Not sure if that recession was worse than this one or not. Does anyone have a perspective on that?
 
Quote from drcha:

When I graduated from college in 1982, I tried to get a job with my chemistry degree. My best offer was a job testing horse urine for drugs at a racetrack. The pay they offered me was so low, it was less than what I was already making as a cook at a hotel. So I just kept working at the hotel until I started grad school. Horse piss, for crying out loud.

Not sure if that recession was worse than this one or not. Does anyone have a perspective on that?
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I think this one is worse. In 1982, there wasn't the problem with unaffordable health insurance. If you were unemployed, self-employment was an option. Currently, if you're unemployed, self-employment is possible, but you can't afford health insurance. So the tendency is to hunker down, conserve every dollar, and do nothing. As a consequence, there is very little job creation by small businesses. This is more like 1932 than 1982.
 
Not sure if anyone mentioned it, but one flaw in the college vs. no college debate is that it does not control for intelligence.

The average IQ of college graduates is substantially higher than non-graduates. When you look at the IQ of elite school graduates, it is leaps and bounds above those who do not go to college.

So a real study on the value of college would need to control for this.

If you look at the examples the media loves to trot out (look at bill gates! look at michael dell! look at steve jobs!) they forget to mention that all these individuals (and anyone else who succeeds even to a lesser degree in a similar fashion) have overwhelming talent and intelligence that vastly swamps what most people are capable of, making the "example value" for the average joe considering college useless.

Few people understand that the high income professions or even a successful business career are by nature shut off to a large portion of the population.

College is to some extent just a filter that removes a large portion of the "not capable" from the selection pool. It is a heuristic that most everyone uses with full knowledge that it is not universally true.
 
From the CEO of Zoho:

"What if the college degree itself is not really that useful? What if we took kids after high school, train them ourselves?" I talked to a lot of people internally, and one of our product managers introduced me to his uncle, a college professor, who he thought might be interested in hearing me out. As I shared our observations on recruiting, he shared his own experience in over twenty years teaching Mathematics and later Computer Science. It turned out we shared a common passion. He joined us within a month to start our "AdventNet University" as we very imaginatively called it. This was in 2005. He went to schools around Chennai to recruit students. So as not to distract anyone from their existing plans, we waited till the school year ended, went to several schools to ask for bright students who were definitely not going to college for whatever reason (usually economic). We then called on those students and their parents, and explained our plan. We started with an initial batch of six students in 2005, who were in the age range 17 or 18.

That proved to be an outstanding success. Within 2 years, those students would become full time employees, their work performance indistinguishable from their college-educated peers. We have since expanded the program, with the latest batch of students consisting of about 20, recruited not just from Chennai but smaller towns and villages in the region.
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http://blogs.zoho.com/general/how-we-recruit-on-formal-credentials-vs-experience-based-education
 
Quote from 1prometheus:

Not sure if anyone mentioned it, but one flaw in the college vs. no college debate is that it does not control for intelligence.

The average IQ of college graduates is substantially higher than non-graduates. When you look at the IQ of elite school graduates, it is leaps and bounds above those who do not go to college.

So a real study on the value of college would need to control for this.

If you look at the examples the media loves to trot out (look at bill gates! look at michael dell! look at steve jobs!) they forget to mention that all these individuals (and anyone else who succeeds even to a lesser degree in a similar fashion) have overwhelming talent and intelligence that vastly swamps what most people are capable of, making the "example value" for the average joe considering college useless.

Few people understand that the high income professions or even a successful business career are by nature shut off to a large portion of the population.

College is to some extent just a filter that removes a large portion of the "not capable" from the selection pool. It is a heuristic that most everyone uses with full knowledge that it is not universally true.
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good post, but the hypothetical study you mention would have to control for all variables, not just intelligence & drive, in order to be valid. you'd have to control for everything from learning ability to motivation to ethnicity, heck even your height and weight. in reality such a study is practically impossible, so the best they can do is compare two very large population samples (one with degrees and one without). the large samples tend to average out the variables.
 
Quote from blackjack007:

good post, but the hypothetical study you mention would have to control for all variables, not just intelligence & drive, in order to be valid. you'd have to control for everything from learning ability to motivation to ethnicity, heck even your height and weight. in reality such a study is practically impossible,
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This is not true.
 
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