Unprecedented USA Student Loan Debt

[Rikurzhen]

Well we just used science to get our answer in Ireland and you used figures pulled out of your ass.

I actually have research backing me up. Employers don't value your degree in Women's Studies, they value your intelligence. Once cognitive ability is controlled for, the smart HS student who never went to college earns about as much as the similarly intelligent Women's Studies major who completed college. The actual value of her Women's Studies subject mastery is almost nil.

Well it would explain why Ireland is being a choice location for many countries around the world to set up.

Education sure hasn't helped you understand the world you live in. Ireland is a popular destination for establishing operations because it has a 12.5% corporate income tax rate compared to America's 35% corporate income tax rate.

 

[Rikurzhen]

Are these people who are commenting about education got any?

I'm fairly confident that I have more degrees than you.

 

[Rikurzhen]

No education equals lower wages for most. No way for a worker to stick it to their employer. And then they are told they should be thankful for the job. Pathetic.

Question: Do you see life as a game where you "stick it to the man"?

Now, that is pathetic.

You see a life of no options and no freedom... Education gives freedom..

Jobs give freedom.

 

[Unkotare]

Are these people who are commenting about education got any?

I'm fairly confident that I have more degrees than you.

.............

 

[Rikurzhen]

Are these people who are commenting about education got any?

I'm fairly confident that I have more degrees than you.

.............

Doesn't change my confidence. Sorry. I know you gave it your best try. Better luck next time.

 

[Unkotare]

.............

Doesn't change my confidence..[/QUOTE]


Yeah, that's what makes you look like such a wannabe pretentious douche. You don't have to do that to yourself.

 

[Rikurzhen]

Yeah, that's what makes you look like such a wannabe pretentious douche. You don't have to do that to yourself.

I don't do that to myself, I do these things to get under your skin.

 

[Unkotare]

Yeah, that's what makes you look like such a wannabe pretentious douche. You don't have to do that to yourself.

I don't do that to myself,....

You're doing it right now.

 

[CowboyTed]

Are these people who are commenting about education got any?

I'm fairly confident that I have more degrees than you.

Please share your education..

 

[CowboyTed]

Well we just used science to get our answer in Ireland and you used figures pulled out of your ass.

I actually have research backing me up. Employers don't value your degree in Women's Studies, they value your intelligence. Once cognitive ability is controlled for, the smart HS student who never went to college earns about as much as the similarly intelligent Women's Studies major who completed college. The actual value of her Women's Studies subject mastery is almost nil.

Well it would explain why Ireland is being a choice location for many countries around the world to set up.

Education sure hasn't helped you understand the world you live in. Ireland is a popular destination for establishing operations because it has a 12.5% corporate income tax rate compared to America's 35% corporate income tax rate.

Womans studies is usually a base degree to other subjects like woman's health,...

As for your corporate tax thing, hey dumbass what is the corporate tax rates in Eastern Europe... Close to 0%...

The effective rates in France are below 10%...

I suppose if you got an education you might have known that...

Is College Worth Your Time and Money

Problem with your research is you actually quote none of it. I find this surprising from someone who has some much education behind him.

You would get seriously marked down in exams or paper for just pulling those facts right out of your ass.

Actually my proof is really simple... Why do employers ask for degrees when they can just give people an IQ test and start them on minimum wage and have them running their company...

So show us your research on college doesn't matter? Come on college boy...

 

[boedicca]

It's not a coinkidink that Obama pushed tons-o-debt on students and is now promising "forgiveness" for gubmint service.

 

[CowboyTed]

It's not a coinkidink that Obama pushed tons-o-debt on students and is now promising "forgiveness" for gubmint service.

By judging your spelling the education wasn't wasted on you...

 

[Mr. H.]

Contract Law.

It's not just for breakfast anymore.

Or is it?

How is student debt different from, say, mortgage debt? Auto debt? Credit card debt?

Truth is, it's not.

Fuck Liberals and Democrats to hell.

 

[boedicca]

It's not a coinkidink that Obama pushed tons-o-debt on students and is now promising "forgiveness" for gubmint service.

By judging your spelling the education wasn't wasted on you...

Judging by your boring responses, it's quite clear that a sense of humor is not your forte.

 

[Rikurzhen]

Womans studies is usually a base degree to other subjects like woman's health,...

As for your corporate tax thing, hey dumbass what is the corporate tax rates in Eastern Europe... Close to 0%...

The effective rates in France are below 10%...

I suppose if you got an education you might have known that...

Is College Worth Your Time and Money

Problem with your research is you actually quote none of it. I find this surprising from someone who has some much education behind him.

You would get seriously marked down in exams or paper for just pulling those facts right out of your ass.

Inequality and Ability:

Using data from the NLS, Murnane et al. (1995) report that basic cognitive skills learned prior to high school had a much larger impact on the wages for 24-year-old men and women in 1986 than in 1978 in the United States. The cognitive measures they use are basic skills such as following directions, facility with fractions and decimals, and interpretation of line graphs. In other research, Ferguson (1993) finds that adding basic skills into the wage regression wipes out the estimated growth in the return to schooling during the 1980s in the United States. Using the AFQT score as a measure of ability, Ferguson shows that the return to basic skills rises during the 1980s and converges within all education groups. . . .

In contrast to the literature summarized in Section 2, these results are the first to show that a measure for mental ability is becoming increasingly important within sectors over time. The addition of IQ also serves to wipe out the limited increase in the return to education in the professional sector, as well as decreasing the estimated increase in the return to education in the service sector: the return to education in the service sector increases from 9% to 11% instead of 9% to 14% without IQ. However, the inclusion of IQ into the analysis does not meaningfully affect the size or trend of the residual variance within each of the three occupational sectors. . . .

The addition of IQ into the analysis reduces the returns to education, particularly for 1992, so that there is virtually no appreciable increase in the return to education in either sector after controlling for IQ. The increasing return to education found in Table 6 is now picked up by the increasing return to IQ in the professional and service sectors. . . .

The results show that ‘‘residual inequality’’ is increasing over time due to an increasing emphasis on mental ability and/or the general unobservable skill within each occupation. Consequently, the trend in residual inequality is being driven by technology not only dispersing the variances of abilities, but more importantly it is increasingly emphasizing general skills versus sector-specific skills over time.​

I'm loaded for bear on papers dealing with labor market dynamics. Here's one that you might like:

The College Wage Premium, Overeducation, and the Expansion of Higher Education in the UK

Although there is little evidence that, on average, the college premium has shown any significant trend changes in recent years, despite the large increase in the flow of graduates into the labour market, we have shown that there seems to have been a marked fall in returns for recent cohorts across almost all subjects for both men and women. Breaking this down further into graduates in high SOC jobs compared to low we see that the fall is entirely confined to the latter. Indeed, we find that for men, and especially for women, there is a large increase in the proportion with maths and engineering degrees getting graduate jobs and that, conditional on this, the return is rising. This would be consistent with the falling numbers in the flow of such graduates.​

Here's another one. Note the same pattern is found in Hong Kong as was found in the UK - graduates from earlier cohorts earned larger returns on their educations than do recent cohorts.

Shrinking Earnings Premium for University Graduates in Hong Kong: The Effect of Quantity or Quality?

In 1989, the Hong Kong government embarked on a program to increase the provision of first-year first-degree places from 7 percent of the 17–20 age cohort to 18 percent. The number of university students doubled in five years. Since university places are tightly controlled by the government, the expansion program represents an exogenous increase in supply of university graduates to the labor market. This paper shows that the increase in supply has brought about a decline in the earnings premium for college workers. Moreover, the decline is more substantial among younger workers than among older workers. We also find that locally educated university graduates used to earn significantly more than did overseas graduates. Their earnings advantage, however, had declined between 1986 and 2001, particularly among the younger age group. These observations suggest that the decline in the university earnings premium is probably more the result of declining quality of university graduates than of a labor market crowding effect.

Sorting out the reasons for the declining college premium has implications for public policy. If the crowding effect is the major cause, this means the demand for college workers is rather inelastic, so that the labor market cannot accommodate a large increase in supply of college workers without reducing their wage. In that case, policy makers may have to re-think whether Hong Kong should continue its policy of expanding post-secondary education. If declining quality of university graduates is the major cause, then the policy focus should fall on how to improve the quality of higher education.​

Now that paper didn't control for cognitive ability but when considered in conjunction with the findings of this paper, a fuller picture does emerge:

Ability, Educational Ranks, and Labor Market Trends: The Effects of Shifts in the Skill Composition of Educational Groups

This paper uses educational ranks – cohort-specific relative rankings in educational attainment – as a control for changes in the composition of educational groups.5 This approach assumes that individuals in different cohorts with the same educational rank, i.e. those in the same place in their cohort’s educational attainment distribution, have about the same level of ability. Thus, the ability (or unobserved skill) of high school graduates in 1940 was more like that of college graduates in 1996 than their counterpart high school graduates.

As mentioned above, accounting for these changes in the composition of educational groups profoundly changes our picture of the U.S. labor market. Increases in the college/high school differential are considerably smaller but more concentrated among younger workers, and it is more difficult to argue that the earnings of less educated groups have deteriorated. . . .

Interestingly, when the data are sorted by educational quintile, a remarkably different pattern emerges.27 For example, between 1969 and 1989 high school graduates and dropouts experienced declines in their weekly earnings of 2.4 and 8.7 percent, respectively, while the weekly earnings of those in the lowest three quintiles rose by an average of 8.5 percent. These findings suggest that changes in the composition of the less educated may explain their widely documented declines in earnings. Changes in composition also appear to affect differences between educational groups. For example, the log difference between college and high school graduates increased by 8.2 percentage points between 1969 and 1989, while the difference between the highest and middle quintiles decreased by 5.4 percentage points. Consistent with the finding in Table 1 of increasing differences in ability (or unobserved skill) between college and high school graduates, accounting for changes in composition appear to explain much of the recent increase in earnings differentials between college and high school graduates. . . .

One might wonder whether the strong results for the effects of changes in the composition of educational groups on weekly earnings education differentials hold for other outcomes, such as employment and annual earnings. In fact, the effects of including educational ranks are considerably stronger for these outcomes. For annual employment, education differentials are slightly negative once educational ranks are included suggesting that employment differentials are more closely related to a person’s educational rank than their educational attainment. Moreover, accounting for changes in composition of educational groups results in change in the 1969-1989 college/high school annual employment differential switching from a 1.3 percentage point increase to a 0.9 percentage point decrease.

Similarly, the results for annual earnings are quite strong. For example, the difference in annual earnings between college graduates and high school dropouts increases by 32.6 percentage points between 1959 and 1989. After accounting for changes in the composition of educational groups, this increase falls to a dramatically smaller 11.5 percentage points. Without question, accounting for changes in the composition of educational groups generates a very different picture of the U.S. labor market.​

In both Hong Kong and the United Kingdom, and the US too, college graduates from earlier generations earned larger rewards for their education than does the present generation and this last paper fills in the blanks, colleges are now drawing deeper into the intellectual talent pool in order to fill their classrooms. When colleges only skimmed off the top of the talent barrel, then high intelligence and college education became synonymous. When colleges end up pulling the top 60% of the high schools class instead of the top 6% then the linkage between high intelligence and college degree is broken.

The issue that you and I are addressing is how much labor market reward is generated by the black box of college education. The UK data showed that math and engineering graduates do well for themselves because they're a small proportion of total graduates and both have skills desired by the market. This attribute is even observed in the GRE test data for those students who think about applying to graduate school:

Those who do not go on to graduate school are drawn atypically from the upper tail of the GRE quantitative distribution and the lower tail of the GRE verbal distribution, both of which are expected to raise their earnings. On the other hand, those who go on to graduate school are drawn disproportionately from the lower tail of the quantitative GRE distribution and from the upper tail of the GRE verbal distribution, both of which lower their opportunity costs of graduate school.​

All those psychology classes and art history classes and sociology classes, well, they're not really doing much for students in terms of increasing their labor market skills and returns to wages. Some specific skills are rewarded and that's what research is picking up as the residual effect after controlling for cognitive ability. Now sure, an art history major who gets hired by an art museum will earn a return on her studies of art history, but if she is hired to be an advertising copywriter, the advertising agency isn't hiring her for her knowledge of art, they're hiring her based on her documented ability to be admitted into college, having the perseverance to complete the degree and on her class rank and the reputation of her college. She's bought herself a credential. The employer only cares about her ABILITY, not her education. The credential signals information about ability.

Actually my proof is really simple... Why do employers ask for degrees when they can just give people an IQ test and start them on minimum wage and have them running their company...

Because Civil Rights legislation has made it illegal to do so. Companies don't like getting sued for discrimination, which is what happens when they hire by IQ tests. This was decided by the Supreme Court back in the 1970s. College degrees are a proxy measure of intelligent. What a 2 hour test can determine is now measured by a very expensive degree which takes 4 years of time to acquire.

 

[Rikurzhen]

This might add some texture to the discussion. Slate:

The evidence is overwhelming. Take tank gunners. You wouldn't think intelligence would have much effect on the ability to shoot straight, but apparently it does. Replacing a gunner who'd scored Category IV on the aptitude test (ranking in the 10-30 percentile) with one who'd scored Category IIIA (50-64 percentile) improved the chances of hitting targets by 34 percent. (For more on the meaning of the test scores, click here.)

In another study cited by the RAND report, 84 three-man teams from the Army's active-duty signal battalions were given the task of making a communications system operational. Teams consisting of Category IIIA personnel had a 67 percent chance of succeeding. Those consisting of Category IIIB (who'd ranked in the 31-49 percentile on the aptitude test) had a 47 percent chance. Those with Category IV personnel had only a 29 percent chance.

The same study of signal battalions took soldiers who had just taken advanced individual training courses and asked them to troubleshoot a faulty piece of communications gear. They passed if they were able to identify at least two technical problems. Smarts trumped training. Among those who had scored Category I on the aptitude test (in the 93-99 percentile), 97 percent passed. Among those who'd scored Category II (in the 65-92 percentile), 78 percent passed. Category IIIA: 60 percent passed. Category IIIB: 43 percent passed. Category IV: a mere 25 percent passed.

The pattern is clear: The higher the score on the aptitude test, the better the performance in the field. This is true for individual soldiers and for units. Moreover, the study showed that adding one high-scoring soldier to a three-man signals team boosted its chance of success by 8 percent (meaning that adding one low-scoring soldier boosts its chance of failure by a similar margin).

Smarter also turns out to be cheaper. One study examined how many Patriot missiles various Army air-defense units had to fire in order to destroy 10 targets. Units with Category I personnel had to fire 20 missiles. Those with Category II had to fire 21 missiles. Category IIIA: 22. Category IIIB: 23. Category IV: 24 missiles. In other words, to perform the same task, Category IV units chewed up 20 percent more hardware than Category I units. For this particular task, since each Patriot missile costs about $2 million, they also chewed up $8 million more of the Army's procurement budget.
​

 

[Unkotare]

Are these people who are commenting about education got any?

I'm fairly confident that I have more degrees than you.

Please share your education..

You won't get an answer. But then, you seem like kind of a douche yourself, so...

 

[Rikurzhen]

Are these people who are commenting about education got any?

I'm fairly confident that I have more degrees than you.

Please share your education..

You won't get an answer. But then, you seem like kind of a douche yourself, so...

It's the freaking internet, I could be lying and no one would know. I'm saving everyone the trouble of being skeptical.

 

[Unkotare]

It's the freaking internet, I could be lying and no one would know. ...

Everyone knows.

 

[Politico]

Contract Law.

It's not just for breakfast anymore.

Or is it?

How is student debt different from, say, mortgage debt? Auto debt? Credit card debt?

Truth is, it's not.

Fuck Liberals and Democrats to hell.

Because a home loan gets you a house. A basket weaving degree gets you kindling material.