Wisdom from Arnold Kling:
Or, perhaps, college filters out people with low cognitive ability, low conscientiousness, and other adverse traits. I want to see an experiment, in which some people are randomly chosen to go to college and others are chosen not to go to college. Then, proceed to compare outcomes. Meanwhile, nonexperimental data is of little or no value.
He’s referring to this NYT story: Even for Cashiers, College Pays Off.
Leonhardt presents strong arguments and evidence. Consider this chart:
Also, Leonhardt has this to say:
Then there are the skeptics themselves, the professors, journalists and others who say college is overrated. They, of course, have degrees and often spend tens of thousands of dollars sending their children to expensive colleges.
He’s right on this point too. While it is easy for me to see the waste, when everybody else who is smart and on the ball is going to college, how can I not follow along and do the same for my children? I will be happy if my children go a different route and I will support them in their choices, but they are under the same peer group pressure I am subject to.
My instincts tell me Arnold is correct, but it will be hard to any particular individual to go against the trends.
You’ve put up a lot of great posts on education, Mike and while I don’t come by as often as I should, I have read them all.
You’re a good blogger, but you might want to lose that captcha code thing, other bloggers and blog readers hate it and are less inclined to leave a comment if they have to deal with it.
If you can’t, I’ll give you my standard, oft repeated, bit piece of advice – move to WordPress, it’s free, user friendly for you and your commenters and catches all spam in a nice little filter behind the scenes. They make it easy to transfer your existing blog, including cached archives.