College Isn't Just About Median Incomes at 30
Debates over the value of a college degree fail to appreciate the nuance of early and late career considerations
Lately, the value proposition of college has been the topic du jour.
Critics point out that a four-year degree isn’t worth it. That between the cost of college itself, and the four-plus years of foregone earnings, the value proposition isn’t there. They point out that there are any number of higher-than-average paying jobs that don’t require a degree; that there’s a national shortage of electricians, but an overabundance of marketing majors.
The more astute critics also point out that the wage premium doesn’t reflect an apples-to-apples comparison; that college graduates, as a cohort, have any number of advantages over their counterparts without degrees. That even after controlling for family income, those with degrees tend to have any number of advantages working in their favor. Family support. Conventional academic aptitudes. The ability to delay gratification. The ability to navigate bureaucracy and follow lots of rules.
There are plenty of people without degrees who possess those qualities in droves, and, in and of themselves, those qualities are not necessarily good things. At the same time, conventional wisdom is conventional wisdom for a reason.
For every Elon Musk, there are 6,000 guys getting fired from Burger King for insubordination.
Meanwhile, college’s biggest cheerleaders like to imagine that college itself bestows these qualities upon a person; that by sheer virtue of walking onto a college campus, people will all go on to live longer, healthier, more prosperous lives. That the biggest thing standing between life as a carjacker versus life as a Google engineer is a Communications degree from Northwest Central Dakota State.
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I haven’t bothered to maintain my state bar membership. It just wasn’t worth the time and money.
I’m that far removed from practicing law.
I’ve spent a substantial part of my working career looking over the payroll records for jobs that don’t require a degree. Any degree. And I’ve cried in poor every time.
I’ve also spent just enough time in warehouses and out on jobsites to appreciate my office; to realize that whatever complaints I might have about spending a perfect June afternoon tied to a desk, there are worse things. That there are things a lot more dangerous than stress, and things a lot harder on the body than a sedentary lifestyle.
I’ve worked alongside plenty of people without college degrees, making more or less the same amount of money for more or less the same amount of work.
Strictly speaking, had I picked a plan early on, worked hard, and stuck with it, I could probably have a fair amount more money than I do now, not even taking into account student loans.
From a purely dollars and cents standpoint, forgoing college—or at least forgoing law school—would have made a lot of sense.
Of course, I also haven’t really had to pick a plan.
Sales. Risk management. Consulting. Regulatory review. Technical writing. Performance marketing. Project management.
I’m at least moderately qualified for roughly ⅔ of all white collar jobs.
I’ve also always gotten to pick during my job searches—maybe not between my two ultimate dream jobs, but between two or more jobs. Two or more jobs that were both going to pay middle class salaries. Two or more jobs that each possessed at least some desirable qualities, and had room for advancement. Jobs that all involve sitting in a nice, air-conditioned office; the kinds of jobs where if a person dies in a workplace mishap, it’ll be national news.
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Ultimately, it seems that there are two key stages of the career span that people on both sides are forgetting: The beginning and the end.
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The “College is a waste of four years” crowd tends to forget that 21 year olds are 21 year olds; that they aren’t real geniuses on or off campus.
To imagine a 19 year old who excels at work, thinks carefully about how to plan his career trajectory, and strategizes how to maximize his savings is to imagine a 38 year old regional associate director with a body transplant. The brain development just isn’t there.
Best case scenario, the years from 18-25 will mostly be spent treading water.
Tellingly, this tends to be true no matter which route a person goes.
College? Taxpayer/parent subsidized poverty.
Bouncing around from one fast food job to another? Poverty.
Getting it together enough to get hired on as a bank teller or assistant retail manager? Poverty.
Making $170k a year out on the oil pipelines? Maybe not poverty in the conventional sense, but the odds of having $100 left over at the end of the month are still as slim as ever.
Making $170k a year in one of those tech jobs that they always talk about in the Wall Street Journal? In no way, shape, or form a representative cohort, but still many of the same financial issues as the guys out on an offshore drilling rig.
In fact, in all of these scenarios, treading water is the best case scenario. The years from 18-25 are going to be a net loss for many, debt taking the form of student loans, credit cards, car payments, E.R. bills, legal bills, child support, and/or any number of other financial obligations. Those debts may not all be equal in terms of the “good debt”/”bad debt” equation, but dollar for dollar, to simply be no poorer at 25 than one was at 18 is a rare accomplishment.
In fact, even in past generations—generations where a degree was almost universally agreed to be “worth it”—the real earnings premium didn’t begin to show up until mid-career. No matter the economy, no matter the hype around the wealthiest .2% of the cohort, most 30 year olds aren’t printing money yet.
When critics try to argue that irrespective of tuition costs, the opportunity costs of college outweigh the benefits, they risk forgetting the reality of youth.
They risk forgetting that 21 year olds aren’t 41 year olds. They forget that both youth and compounding interest are wasted on the young. That 19 year olds aren’t known for their career-mindedness.
They forget that part of the beauty of college, at least in the bourgeois ideal, is having free time; time that can be spent exploring thoughts and interests and identities.
It’s rare that college delivers on this premise, even for the privileged, but it’s a widely held premise.
It is, ideally, one of the big benefits of college.
In the fantasy, this is part of what changes the trajectory from “carjacking” to “Google”.
This is what helps set the stage for a lifetime of quinoa and yoga, rather than McDonald’s and Phillip Morris. This is the period of reflection that puts a person on a track of good choices; of planning and thinking rather than waddling up to the Golden Corral line.
And while this line of thinking is both elitist and unrealistic even within the elite, there is something to be said for the freedom of youth. There is something to be said for having more than two weeks of vacation a year, and a schedule that doesn’t revolve around the 8-5 and preventive home maintenance.
It’s easy to forget how banal the day-to-day college experience really is, but at the same time, when we were in college, my friends and I could text one another at midnight asking if anybody was in the mood for tacos.
We can’t do that anymore.
We don’t have the freedom to go on midnight Taco Bell runs. We’re too busy being adults. With adult responsibilities, and adult obligations, and adult jobs that require us to get up early every morning.
There is something to be said for getting to delay the full responsibilities of adulthood; for getting to delay the inevitable tradeoffs between the interesting and the practical. For having the time to read and hang out with friends and learn about new things.
College wasn’t the bastion of intellectual stimulation some proponents make it out to be, but if a person sought it out, there were opportunities. There were interesting courses and interesting classmates and resources nearby.
Furthermore, by keeping students out of the day-to-day professional workforce, college keeps people in sandbox mode for an extra 4-7 years.
It’s…hard to burn any bridges at a job you don’t have. It’s hard to finance out a $90k truck without a full-time job. It’s hard for a house that doesn’t exist to end up in foreclosure. There are 1,000 ways to get into “real” trouble while in college–the kind of trouble that will follow a person–but by the same token, college still allows a wider margin for error than anything else. By and large, the harshest possible punishment in college is being sent out into the real world, to deal with real problems and real consequences.
For all of these reasons, it’s hard to make dollar-for-dollar comparisons in the earliest years. It’s hard to calculate what intangibles are gained by entering the workforce at 18, versus spending another half-decade in an extended adolescence. It’s hard to calculate what’s gained and lost by taking the freeway straight into adulthood, versus meandering the back roads for a few more years.
The final years of one’s working life are equally difficult to calculate.
Just as how the realities of youth—the realities of inexperience coupled with an underdeveloped brain—make it particularly hard to account for the true economic potential of a normally developing 19 year old, the realities of aging can also muddy the equation.
The simple truth is that most 60 year olds are physically capable of staring at spreadsheets for several hours a day.
Most 60 year olds are not physically able to climb highline poles in a storm.
I may not want to spend my 60’s staring at spreadsheets all day. I might worry that the stress and sleep deprivation inherent to full time work will accelerate the aging process; that 6 A.M. commutes at 65 will play a role in developing dementia at 80. I might need to take more days off work. Three decades from now, it may be harder for me to work through illness and sleep deprivation.
But, at the core of things, my mom can stare at a spreadsheet. My dad can stare at a spreadsheet. My aunts and uncles and every other relative over the age of 60 can all stare at spreadsheets. They all have the capacity to spend more than zero hours a day plugging data into cells.
They do not all have the capacity to perform roof installation. Any roof installation.
If an accountant enters the stage of life where mind and body can no longer do 40+ hour workweeks, there are other options.
The options might not pay enough to maintain the old standard of living. The options might mean a real step down in prestige and authority. The options might not be ideal—they might not reflect the value that comes from four decades of expertise.
But, there are options.
Options that pay more than minimum wage, and let a person sit at a comfortable desk in an air conditioned building.
That’s less true of manual labor.
With manual labor, the issue isn’t that a 67 year old with bad knees and a bad back can only spend two or three hours in the mines before needing a break, or that he might need more flexibility in terms of sick days. The issue is that a 67 year old with bad knees and bad back can’t mine coal. Any coal.
One hour of mining coal is one hour more than his body can handle.
For white collar workers, typically, “not being able to retire” is a matter of not wanting to spend one’s final years filling out expense reports for shit pay while a boss named Leighklinn micromanages cubicle decor. It’s about not wanting to shorten one’s final years in the name of adding .00000001% to a company’s bottom line.
For a lot of blue collar workers, this isn’t a choice.
A person doesn’t retire from offshore drilling because he wants to spend more time with his grandkids; he retires from offshore drilling because he can’t handle stairs anymore, and the rig doesn’t have an elevator. The issue is not “Do I want to spend my final years doing this?”, but rather “I can’t do the thing that has paid for my lifestyle all of these years. How am I going to keep a roof over my head now?”
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This is all a gross oversimplification.
There are lots of white collar jobs that don’t require a degree. There are lots of white collar jobs that don’t require a degree and pay very well. Better than anything I’m doing.
There are also plenty of jobs that require both a degree and working body: Nurses can’t sit at a laptop all day. Teachers can’t sit at a laptop all day. A lot of engineering jobs require being able to go out to the job sites and climb on cranes and get in between massive machines. For all of those jobs, the end-of-career considerations start to bear at least some resemblance to those of blue collar workers.
There’s also good reason to question why so many managerial jobs require a degree.
Reasonable arguments could be made that roughly ½ of the white collar jobs currently requiring a degree shouldn’t; that experience in the field trumps any value provided by a piece of paper from University of Central Wisconsin State.
And, these are all very real, very important things to point out.
Right now, individuals and tax payers are essentially subsidizing DildoCorp’s desire to outsource training. Individuals and taxpayers are subsidizing the fact that DildoCorp would rather require a degree than spend an extra three minutes evaluating potential candidates. Students and taxpayers are currently spending billions of dollars not to give DildoCorp a substantively better applicant pool, but to give them an easier screening and onboarding process.
Currently, we as a nation are subsidizing employers who require a degree as a screening tool; who insist that a person needs a PhD to answer phones.
All of that said, there is value in the generalization.
There is value in pointing out where the job market is right now, rather than where one might hope for it to be in 20 years. There is value in looking at the 80% of the jobs a given cohort is funneled into, rather than the 3%. There is value in recognizing that while exceptions exist, different educational paths do funnel people in certain directions, and those directions do all come with their own sets of considerations.
And, at the end of the day, this very complexity means that there are no easy answers. There are no pat conclusions.
Is college worth it, at least from a strictly financial perspective?
Yes. No. Maybe. It depends.
However, the one thing that is certain is that the value of a college degree cannot be determined solely by looking at median earnings for workers between the age of 25-35. That to truly measure the value of a degree, one has to look at both what is gained and lost in both the first and final years of a career; to reconcile the ideals of a given course against the pragmatic realities.