There are plenty of educated idiots and street smart but non-degreed people. But if you add up the raw talent at any level of educational achievement you will see significant differences.

The significance is that you wind up with correlary instead of causation. If it’s correlary then the degree isn’t what RESULTS in average higher pay, simply that the caliber of people with higher pay also have degrees.

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In Sweden my birth country 50 % of higher education students come from the top 10 percentile (parents income) mainly from the professional, entrepreneurial, CEO/business classes. This has held true since 1921.

You say that you come from a lower class background it then means that you are an outlier since you succeeded in getting a PhD. You have what is called intrinsic motivation and not the ingrained and for many generation trained “deliberate practice” as well training in being able to delay gratification as has the upper 10 %. The ability to delay gratification is the single most important factor in later life success, it is one of the very few predictors that can be measured at a very early age and shows remarkable consistency over time.

The lack of deliberate practice and lack of capability in delaying gratification is probably why the US school system is failing to achieve results dispite the highest spending per capita in the world (both in actual figures as well as power purchasing adjusted) especially for minority and lower income persons.

I’m not a social Darwinist that believes this is set for all times but it has to be adreesed from a sociology cultural perspective and not from an socio economic perspective. The changing of cultural values is extremely hard and in a country as diverse as the US with such focus on racial and/or minority politics it’s very, very difficult. In Sweden it used to be “easy” since the norm is so narrow and the Swede’s accept no, and I mean no, deviation from main stream norm. You were socially shunned ad ostracized if you didn’t conform. Sweden don’t need laws since Swedes act according to norms and not according to laws. Sweden therefore seem extremely liberal because it laws appear liberal but as a matter of fact Sweden is ultra conservative (not from a religious perspective but from what is socially acceptable). One of the main reasons why I choose to move her and become a US citizen.

And, to tie into today’s post, how can you have a useful debate without educated minds? The value of a college education is way beyond the monetary. Spending four years learning to work with abstract ideas as well as specific knowledge opens and expands one’s mind in such a way which is very difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t had the experience.

For some, college wasn’t their thing. They went into the trades, or found another niche where they did very well because they were smart, disciplined and willing to learn new things. Others didn’t have the financial resources to go to college, but made the most of the brains the Almighty and/or biology gave them to balance income and spending to achieve financial success.

In my case, I took the 8 year route (MS) and graduated with over $30k of debt. I paid that off in two years, and ten years after graduation my house is paid off and I’m half way to retirement, much of which I attribute to the initial salary differential, which has widened over the years. Whenever I found myself out of work, I found another for more pay within 1-4 weeks.

Politics and religion tend to have several fallacies. I find politics/religion a huge turn off and avoid it. Debating about those issues won’t make us into better people or a better country.

Trying to talk to them is like talking to a wall of bricks. They have no love of learning and they lack common sense. They also think their education is complete because they have a 4 year degree.

Education is a life learning process. I do believe motivated, intelligent, innovative, social people will succeed with or without college. My dad had a college degree but he was violent towards me and my mom.

She eventually divorced him. We like to think that education makes people better but some people go through the system and don’t come out any better, to them a college credit is like a trophy.

Our society likes to think that education strips away ignorance and to a large degree it does, I do think that in this day and age you need education beyond a high school degree.

But having had a father who was highly educated, I have to look for other characteristics in a person beyond a college degree. I don’t automatically respect a person or like them just because they have a college degree.

I don’t think that people are better just because they have a college degree.

Thanks tons for running Sarah’s article this morning. Can I be honest? If she keeps up the tone of her first two articles, I can’t get enough of her opinions.

I’m beyond the basics of personal finance — I’ve made a budget (sticking to it is a different issue), am on the way to establishing a comfortable emergency fund, live frugally, don’t have CC debt, invest in my 401k, yada yada. But I have a car note and a ton of student loan debt (at good rates, though )

So reading about budgets and the debt snowball is bo-ring. So is reading about ways to save on laundry soap and toothpaste. I don’t need to squeeze every last dime out of my budget. (Although, I wouldn’t mind learning about extreme couponing.)

I’m ready for the grown-up stuff. For instance, my student loans are at rates low enough where it may not make that much sense to bust my hump to pay them off. If I had loans at 0% interest, should I pay more than I have to? Heck no. It makes more sense to stretch out the payments as long as possible, because paying the same monthly payment in 2025 results in paying on my loan with cheaper dollars than the same amount today. (As Sarah mentioned, inflation is a debtor’s friend.)

I also want to learn about tax policy. While it is true that nobody should spend money merely for the tax benefits, it is absolutely critical to understand the impact taxes have on personal finance. For instance, I have a choice between a Roth 401k and a traditional 401k. Should I pick the Roth or the traditional? All responses to that question begin with, “If you expect your tax rate in retirement to be greater than your tax rate today…” How the @#$@#% should I know what my tax rate in retirement is going to be? What I can tell you is that there are huge standard deductions and exemptions on earned (and interest) income. Today, a couple married filing jointly can have $26,400 in earned income before paying one cent in tax. (These are inflation adjusted, so they’ll increase substantially in 30 years.) So investing through a Roth just because I think tax *rates* are going up may not be the smartest thing to do. Seeing some different opinions on what might influence tax policy and the structure of our tax code would be hugely helpful. They might not be able to tell me what to do, but they can educate me.

I also want to learn more about economics. Why? See above about inflation. It can help me as a debtor, but hurt me as a saver. Discussing that shouldn’t be taboo. Second, every single piece of investment advice that I read starts out with, “assume an average annual return of X%.” But past performance is not indicative of future results! If we’re talking about investing in index funds (which is more or less segments of the whole economy) we need some understand of what drives the economy as a whole.

In summary, politics has a very real and direct affect on my wallet. When I’m shortsighted, I want to keep as much as possible of what I make. But, there’s another part of me who realizes that thought might be penny wise and pound foolish. I need to be educated beyond my comfort zone if we want to end up like Barbados instead of Jamaica.

Avoiding those issues does a disservice to your readers in the 2nd and 3rd stages. To me, discussing the above issues doesn’t make it a political discussion, but a philosophical one. And for those who can’t handle an adult post with a corresponding discussion, well, may I suggest they skip the comments?

Good to meet you today! And sure, send me one of your 41 pre-written posts. I’ll slot it in.

Best,

Sam

If you want to look justify a pro-college stance with stats, then you should at least consider ALL the stats.

Obviously, these are all just averages…you and I are not average, right?

Is it really that going to college makes these people more successful, or is it that people who were already on a success-bound path because of their background are more likely to go to college?

Some of both? I see lots of people with unmarketable college degrees unable to find quality work, and others who may have never finished college get good jobs because they have marketable skills. Granted, all the people in my sample of college drop-outs could have finished but left to take jobs at software startups and such. Others got a college degree because someone told them it was a good idea, but never learned to do anything particularly valuable and are having a tough time getting jobs better than $12/hour administrative positions, despite the degree.

It seems that we have a huge sector of people in America who have been brainwashed to sacrifice belief in reality in the name of ideology: people who don’t believe in evolution, in the science of global warming, and that believe that exterminating the poor will bring America to a new age greatness, This is wrong and deluded.

Economics is a social science, which is different from the hard sciences, but it’s still a science, and as such it aims for empirical proof above partisan ideologies.

I’d like more science in this blog, please. Truth is liberating and empowering.

And the other point about resolution is valid. Engineers and scientists make a LOT more money on average than someone with a BA in history or art. Simply lumping all of them together as having a Bachelors degree doesn’t make much sense to me.

In the future, if you post a piece like you did this morning I would suggest trying to post them in pairs, allowing both sides to be considered. Rather than pretend political perspective don’t exist just do your best to fairly represent both sides (I’d suggest the Costco magazine as a reference as many of those arguements are enlightening and very respectful). And if you can’t find a staff writer who could have provided a counter arguement to this morning’s post then that illustrates the point I just made.

Also, I come from a lower-class background, and do not have college-educated parents. I don’t think ambition and motivation are as socially-determined as you do.

Finally, you use an interesting (yet accurate) set of words in saying “The degree/career success correlation is also explained…”. The key being “also,” since the correlation is so complex.

Two anecdotes do not make a statistic (nor cancel each other out, in our case), of course. The point is that it comes down to the individual. A graph (like the one above) shows the general trend, but there are always outliers (as I said above).

No need to get bent out of shape. Just look at the trend and move on. It doesn’t apply to everyone.