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A college degree is a lousy investment

The truth behind recent tuition discounts
Summary: when sticker price is reduced, so is financial aid. It's a wash. Watch the bottom line. Two good links in the article about pricing colleges.

Searching Wake on college navigator

AVERAGE NET PRICE BY INCOME |2011-2012 |2012-2013|2013-2014
AVERAGE NET PRICE BY INCOME|2011-2012|2012-2013|2013-2014
$0 – $30,000| $20,493 |$21,854 |$13,603
$30,001 – $48,000| $27,173 |$28,079 |$12,497
$48,001 – $75,000| $30,015 |$31,941 |$17,762
$75,001 – $110,000| $33,026 |$34,631 |$29,042
$110,001 and more| $41,379 |$42,543 |$47,174
 
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So The Economist ran a ranking of colleges based on value add. Essentially, they tried to figure out how much a college added to a graduate's 10-year post graduation salary than if that same graduate had gone to school elsewhere (i.e. an attempt to disentangle the college's value add from the student's inherent abilities and built-in social advantages).

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/10/value-university?fsrc=scn/fb/te/pe/ed/ourfirstevercollegerankings

WFU is said to carry $6,174 in value add. Duke is around $7,800.

UNC Chapel Hill? negative $2,615. Vandy and Emory are also slightly negative, but Davidson is positive $7,642.

The methodology is explained in detail in the link.
 
Seems like a reasonable methodology to yield what they wanted to find out. Many of those outcomes don't look like they'd be all that significant. In other words, a good number of schools are producing incomes right around where you'd expect. It would also make sense to present the outcomes in order of percent over and under.

The big stories I see include:

MIT owns Cal Tech and Harvard crushes Yale but it doesn't look like there's a Boston bias from not accounting for some unique factor about the area.

None of the UNC system schools are above water except School of the Arts although most of those differences don't look significant.

FAMU has the highest return among Florida publics and is one of the few HBCUs with positive figures.

They could have used a multilevel model with state as the level-2. Some of the state schools seem to vary together positive or negative.
 
2&2 Slider To Leyritz said:
#letkenpomchooseyourcollege
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Great suggestion!

Rank Team Conf W-L Pyth AdjO AdjD AdjT Luck Pyth OppO OppD Pyth
1 Duke ACC 0-0 .9384 115.4 1 91.1 9 69.3 107 +.000 1 .0000 1 0.0 1 0.0 1 .0000 1
2 Kentucky SEC 0-0 .9364 112.2 7 88.8 2 67.6 244 +.000 1 .0000 1 0.0 1 0.0 1 .0000 1
3 Virginia ACC 0-0 .9271 110.4 14 88.5 1 63.5 349 +.000 1 .0000 1 0.0 1 0.0 1 .0000 1
4 Kansas B12 0-0 .9265 111.9 10 89.7 4 70.3 53 +.000 1 .0000 1 0.0 1 0.0 1 .0000 1
5 Villanova BE 0-0 .9229 112.3 6 90.5 6 68.6 161 +.000 1 .0000 1 0.0 1 0.0 1 .0000 1
 
Very interesting. Wonder why NC State came in so low at -$7433? I would expect a school with a lot of STEM majors would do well in the market.

My HS guidance counselor wanted me to go to W & L, but I was not interested. Whooops.
 
Knight said:
I'm sure some of the STEM folks do well, but they're anchored by an enormous liberal arts curriculum churning out english/history majors, psychology/sociology majors, and teachers.
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Engineering/Life Sciences/Natural Resources/Physical Sciences make up 53% of the undergraduates last year

Design/Education/Humanities/Textiles/Management were the other 47%

Interesting.
 
TownieDeac said:
Engineering/Life Sciences/Natural Resources/Physical Sciences make up 53% of the undergraduates last year

Design/Education/Humanities/Textiles/Management were the other 47%

Interesting.
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A small price to pay for having actual real life girls attend your school

#gopack
 
The title doesn't fit the analysis. They needed to calculate the cost of not attending college and the cost of attending and not getting certification or degrees. That's different than the calculating the different returns on degree by prestige, major, and cost.
 
Analyses like that treat going to college as a static decision with static cost and long time returns that are distinct from going to college. Now that's true for a lot of people but they were going to college for four years and graduate anyway. The GS analysis is decent enough to parse out differences between them.

For people deciding whether or not to go to college, it isn't a one time decision after they graduate from high school. It's a continuous month by month decision depending on their life circumstances, a decision they make for the rest of their lives.
 
How many people work for Goldman who didn't go to college ?
 
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/...-but-the-picture-isn-t-all-bad-124548361.html

8f458530-112c-11e6-95b6-3dc15a8067f5_Screen-Shot-2016-05-03-at-8-42-46-AM.png.cf.jpg


The latest figure by the nonprofit Institute for College Access & Success shows seniors leaving college with an average 28,950 in debt.
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The New York Federal Reserve says the median salary for recent college graduates–the point at which half earn above and half earn below—stood at $43,000 in 2015, up from $39,992 the previous year, based on government data.
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In other words, new college grads have been finding jobs with salaries a decent amount above what they owe in student debt. Mr. Kantrowitz says that means most graduates’ debt burdens are “manageable.” That is, they should be able to pay them off within 10 years, with money left over to cover all other bills.
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The first thing to understand is that among the 40 million or so Americans who collectively owe $1.2 trillion in student debt, there is great variation. Engineering majors earn far more, on average, than teachers, for example. Those who attend prestigious nonprofit universities fare far better than graduates of nonselective public colleges. Poor black students borrowed more than their white peers, even though they often attend worse schools.
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What is the proper amount of debt, impacts of student loan debt on household creation and the overall economy
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/much-student-loan-debt-too-100000670.html

Half the income increase attributed to a college degree should be enough to repay the student loan within 10 years. If half the extra income coming in doesn't pay off the loan in 10 years, the student probably overpaid.

Using data from 2013, Kantrowitz shows that college graduates ages 25-34 earn a median of $18,530 more annually than their peers who didn't graduate from college. After taxes, that yields $10,655 per year, and half of that is a touch over $5,000, or a little more than 10% of income available to repay student loans.
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Those with too much college debt were more likely to:

- Delay buying a home (49.8% vs. 38.1% of those without excessive debt)
- Delay getting married (27.1% vs. 20.9%)
- Delay having children (36.4% vs. 27.9%)
- Take a job instead of enrolling in further postsecondary education (43.3% vs. 33.0%)
- Take a job outside of field (50.8% vs. 36.4%)
- Work more than desired (47.8% vs. 36.4%)
- Work more than one job (33.0% vs. 23.4%)

In short, debt prevents college graduates from following their dreams, from working in their field of study (making college a bit of a waste), makes them more likely to delay starting a family, and makes them more likely to work a second job.
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LOL. You are right. Just be glad I'm not starting a new thread each time. :thumbsup:
 
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