All the data that currently exists shows better outcomes for students that go to college. One would expect this even if college had no benefit to students because the population of students that go to college is pre-selected. Before they attend, students that go to college, on average, demonstrate better analytic skills than the students that do not go to college. They also, on average, have access to more existing wealth and other resources through their family.

In the absence of perfect data (which is almost always the case in sociology), it is reasonable to look at case studies to try to make sense of reality. It is not bad practice. It is what Harvard Business School does. It's what product managers and UX designers do when creating products. It's what marketing teams do when selling products.

Feel free to disagree with the interpretation of anecdotal data, but statements should not be dismissed out-of-hand because no p-value accompanies them.

I have two family members who have been pipefitters for 20 years. Both make more than I do as a software engineer. Another is a doctor, and makes more than they do. But another does boat repair, and makes more than the doctor.

If the last decade is any indication, skilled labor - especially those not afraid to own their own business, are set to make a killing. It's nearly impossible to even get people to come out for normal household jobs anymore - they're all way too busy with more lucrative clients.

I'm not sure what you mean by limited window unless we are talking about professional athletes and some categories of manual laborers.

> In addition many are not welcoming to women at all, regardless even if you take the highest paying trades

This is rapidly changing. Also, there are also skilled trades that are mostly women (e.g. cosmetologist, many medical roles).

> do they pay more than the highest paying careers that require higher education?

When we factor out jobs that require 8-12 years of education, in general, yes the trades aren't a bad deal.

> 2. Which boot camp? How many people ended up like your daughter? How much was it? Without these facts no comparison can be made.

I'm not turning this into an ad for the school my daughter went to. Cost was literally 1/2 of he first year salary over $40,000. It was capped at a maximum amount. She ended up paying about $6k, but it was contingent on her getting a job that payed better than $40k.

3. Some colleges perhaps, smart people can get full scholarships and even without that community college plus a cheap state school isn’t expensive.

I have five kids. My first was straight As, great test scores, and we still ended up with $6-8k of expense per semester after the full ride scholarships paid for tuition at a small private college.

Ok, here is the biggest community college in the US: Ivy Tech. $2,400 per semester for 12 hours, plus fees. It's not that expensive, but they also have less than 20% of students complete their degrees...

> Link to your study? Did these people not go to college?

It didn't matter what education level they attained, across the population the outcome was consistent. Having a job while young made a huge difference - almost as much as having a degree.

4. As you’ve already demonstrated college is hardly required let alone loans.

Yep.

Stop this. The most accurate predictor of a person's lifetime income is the income of their parents. Children of wealthy parents are more likely to go to college. It's like saying "People who drive expensive cars in high school make more money over their lifetime, period".

I question the statistical literacy of people who make the argument that going to college has a significant causal impact on future earnings.

Which is why the parent comment specifically mentioned "skilled trades". If you're not familiar with the term, think plumber or electrician instead of roofer or outdoor landscaper. The working window for skilled trades is also far greater than software engineering.

UCLA is 13k per year, *if* you are from California. Classes are likely impacted (even upper division) so even if a person goes to UCLA just for the last 2.5 - 3 years they could easily owe > 30k

The real cost

- rampant corruption (in california, if they ever opened the books on the non-profit entities it would be a major stunner and awakening for many people). Last I saw there was ~100 non-profits serving ~20 campuses . You can read more https://www.calstate.edu/csu-system/auxiliary-organizations/.... But what they don't tell you, those books are private and not shared with the public. Rest assured, they are money laundering machines.

- rent seekers like Pearson and Mcgraw Hill (fun fact, did you know the 2 joined forces to run a company called Follets that runs most campus bookstores (how is that allowed?)

- administration bloat

2. Probably a little. These boot camps are mostly a scam like many colleges today.

3. You can do college cheap. You can also get a scholarship if you qualify. You can do college the expensive way if your parents will pay for it. Taking a $100-200k loan for it is stupid.

4. Yes.

Which leads me to the conclusion: College degrees used to get you higher pay, people overbought that and someone filled the market, people now can't sell their college degrees for money. Worse, many of them have raked up debt to get that college degree.

Sounds familiar? This is like people buying the top in a crypto, realestate, stock-market bubble. But you add a few steps and the thing sounds legit. (Did you ever wonder why people buy MLM and not go directly and buy a Ponzi Scheme).

Economists are now finding that as more women move into a profession, the pay goes down. Similarly, when computer programming moved from a female dominated profession (early days) to male dominated (now) the pay went up. Medical fields that have higher proportions of women have lower pay. Along these lines, as college skews more female (college grads are like 60/40 female/male now) the "college grad" professions are having a declining wage premium compared to non college grad jobs.

3. Scholarships are not based on intelligence. They are based on access to resources. Many good scholarships require references, achievements, good writing, and lower income. Hard to do that in a city school, if at all. Those that get the scholarships come from parents that know how to game the system. This leaves first generation students far out of the equation. To add to that, judging students based on their high school is a terrible method of educating.

4. A degree has become more required if you don't have the resources to already live in a major city for your work. For example, you can work in software if you live in cali cities far easier than if you live in Utah. If you're coming from Utah, you have to pass the "I'm a drone" test of getting a degree. Many people would like to work in something other than trades, hence university.

University no longer functions like we think it does. Large amounts of it are now online, auto-graded, with instructors barely doing any work other than showing up. Housing and tuition costs have skyrocketed with far less scholarships than ever before. I recall a 40,000 scholarship 8 years ago that simply doesn't exist anymore, along with a number of others. Many of these are funded by various communities or collaborations of companies, and over time the over corporatization, lack of funds and lack of community have lead them to just not offer scholarships anymore. Why give away free money? A really easy way to upset a number of teachers, especially high school teachers, is to tell them to try to locate applicable scholarships for their students. They can't. Perhaps a couple that maybe add up to $800 one shots. Half of that being a local scholarship. They get very hand wavey and think 1 of 3 scholarships from Microsoft or Google is reasonably obtainable, yet realistically it would be similar to winning the lottery.

There are many bright and hard working students I meet daily that simply cannot get the support they need and cannot devote their time to learning what they need to. It is absolutely brutal the number of hours some of these students are working just to survive. We give the largest amount of support to students whom are already well off and tell those that have to work for what they have to go away. That's American education as I see playing out as we speak.

And yet incomes have held stagnant through the entire rise of college attainment. That contradicts the notion that there is more money to be made.

Within a given population, those who are born more capable will earn more than those who are less capable. Those who are born more capable are able to go further in school and be more productive in the workplace for the same reasons. Someone born with a crippling disability that forced them to drop out of high school also struggles to find gainful employment for the same reasons.

However, over time, those in similar standing seem to end up making the same amount of money no matter what. If the existence of college and everything associated with it were to magically vanish, those born more capable would still earn more money over their lifetime than those born less capable.

The state school where I live charges $18K/year for tuition and housing. That sure isn't cheap, especially for a mediocre school. Graduating with $72K in debt from this school would be a waste of money if you aren't doing a STEM program, and if you are, there are far better schools.

Exactly.

These types of post often ignore the actual work being done.

A graduate student might make a comparable hourly rate to an amazon warehouse employee, but he or she can also go to the bathroom and sit down.

Your "period" makes me think about more questions, not less.

1) Will that still hold in 2070? Kids who are now 18 are likely to be working at least until then. How do the developments over time look like? Won't the increasing shortage of tradespeople drive up their compensation?

2) How does a finer division by majors look like? I would be surprised if every major out there made more money than, say, an electrician.

3) Lifetime is a very long timespan. College grads are deeply in their debt in their 20s and 30s, so they can afford starting a family less. They will be better off when they are 50, but in the meantime they possibly sacrificed a an unborn kid or two to their tuition debt. This is a nasty tradeoff.

Plenty of coding bootcamps have great placement rates and great salaries. For example, the median salary at Boston's Launch academy is $72k. The median salary for Fullstack Academy Grace Hopper in NY is $90k.

https://static.spacecrafted.com/b13328575ece40d8853472b9e0cf...

https://static.spacecrafted.com/b13328575ece40d8853472b9e0cf...

This organization verifies outcomes independently: https://cirr.org/data

I know several people who have gone to both of these, the data is legit, that's the outcome I saw from the graduating class.

> 3. Some colleges perhaps, smart people can get full scholarships and even without that community college plus a cheap state school isn’t expensive. Link to your study? Did these people not go to college?

Even "cheap" state schools aren't so cheap https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college We're still talking on average $25k/year. But that depends heavily on the state. In some states, you pay $14k in others $30k. Either way. Not cheap.

The rise in cost has been amazing: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_320.asp In the 1960s total tuition + room + board inflation corrected was only $1000!

There's a long way to go on this, but there are definitely people pushing back on it in various ways, including a number of women welders, electricians, bricklayers, etc all posting about themselves and their experiences on Tiktok:

https://www.tiktok.com/discover/women-in-trades

I ended up loaning $80K to him, so that he can open his own small welding shop. It is likely that money is gone forever without return. Even now with his own welding/metal fab business it is a constant struggle - winning bids inconsistently, short cash runway, $28/hr, can't afford to pay for his medical insurance, late night work to ensure new projects are coming in, abuse from general contractors who exploit small subcontractor welders, big boys clubs (small subs can't get those projects), etc.

1. Many trades also are your own business, and can immediately scale for income - many plumbers, electricians, etc are millionaires with a small team of employees less than 15.

2. Google offers free marketing certification for this reason as well, it's not impossible for marketing/seo people to make 100k annually. It's very, very common.

3. Many colleges are not worth it and is debt- look at most state schools and you'd see a semester costs minimum $45,000. Yes there's community colleges.

4. Even community colleges require loans, and have programs of financial aid that is really "apply for fafsa, apply for stanford loans and then have pipelines for private debt.

“ Average College grads make more money over their lifetime, period.”

There are huge selection effects in play. It is true that even after controlling for these effects, college has economic value. But the statement about making more money isn’t the right framing at all. There’s a whole chapter on this in the book called “Mastering metrics”. You might want to pick that up - it’s a coffee-table book for the quantitative-minded person.

Bootcamps charge a lot upfront and success rates as measured by good-paying jobs are low.

That's a claim none of you sources can or even could support. Past performance is no guarantee of future returns.

Many universities aren't welcoming to men at all.

So that doesn't mean that if those people hadn't gone to college they wouldn't be making that extra money.

No one is saying that people that go to college are less valuable, what's in question is exactly what is college attendance adding that can't just be created in a less expensive, less elitist and more efficient environment.

Period.