The infographic above was sampled from the organization Third Way’s assessment of the state of higher education in the United States in 2019:
This report examines whether US institutions of higher education are successful in educating and preparing the next generation of workers. Specifically, it looks at three critical measures of success: 1) college completion; 2) post-enrollment-earnings; and 3) loan repayment. It examines these outcomes at four-year, two-year and certificate-granting institutions. It also provides a breakdown by educational sector, including student success rates at public, private non-profit, and for-profit institutions. We also examine whether institutions are succeeding across multiple measures, as federally-funded higher education institutions should ultimately be leading most of their students to graduate, earn a decent living, and pay down their loans over time.
and it’s a pretty fair summary of their findings. They also find that many are unable to pay the educational debt they’ve acquired with the pay they’re bringing down with their degrees.
I wish the article only cited medians in the context of normal distributions and standard deviations. As it is there’s no way to determine the relevance of the median. They may be completely irrelevant as would be the case in distributions other than normal ones.
There is one interesting factoid in the piece. The majority of students of more than 10% of four year institutions cannot pay down the interest on their educational debt let alone the principal after five years.
Multiple different conclusions may be drawn from Third Way’s assessment. You could decide that more loan subsidies are in order. You could infer that non-loan subsidies are necessary.
My own conclusion is that the number of people pursuing higher education is considerably higher than the number of jobs that pay what people with higher educations might be expected to earn. One metric that might support my conjecture is whether employers are increasingly demanding degrees beyond bachelors of their applicants (they are). For too many young people higher education is no longer the key to a brighter future but a treadmill.
WE should stop giving out loans that go to schools where people are unable to repay them. We had done that with some of the for profit schools where 80%-90% of grads were unable to pay back loans. Now, that has been undone by DeVos and this administration. This needs to be reinstated and expanded to all schools. We also need to track and publicly publish this kind of data, though again, I think DeVos has stopped that. You used to be able to sue an institution that defrauded students by giving them false information about graduation and employment rates. Now DeVos has made it more difficult to do that.
I dont see us making a lot of headway changing beliefs about the necessity of education. I do think we might have change if we start holding educational institutions accountable.
Steve
While I agree that institutions whether for-profit or putatively not-for-profit should be held more accountable and that the standards for educational institutions need to be tightened rather than loosened, IMO even if everything you list were corrected and more it would have no material impact on the problem because it’s based on a false premise.
In order for higher education to be the key to a good income we either need to increase the number of jobs that pay such incomes or decrease the number of people seeking jobs that require higher education. I think the evidence that every web developer or clerk needs a bachelors let alone a masters degree is non-existent.
The median salary for an LPN is $45,000 per year. Requiring an LPN to have a college degree would not raise the salary of LPNs. It would tend to increase the cost of becoming an LPN and result in more LPNs bearing unaffordable debt. IMO that’s where we are in a nutshell.
I’ve heard that personnel departments use the sheepskins as a handy way to thin the pile of resumes.
Part of the problem?
Median salary for some college is $38,000 and for an associate degree is $42,000. If they are using real earnings, then they are including the shift differentials that LPN earn for working at night and on weekends and holidays, so it doesn’t sound like an outlandish salary to me. Also, the positions are pretty hard to fill and keep filled.
If an LPN had a bachelor degree they would be an RN.
” I think the evidence that every web developer or clerk needs a bachelors let alone a masters degree is non-existent.”
Sure, but we know that businesses have stopped spending money on training workers. That degree works as a marker to show who at least has the ability to work towards something for 4 or 5 years.
Steve
As I said, it’s a treadmill. They’ll require a degree for LPNs and a masters for RNs without increases in pay.
I am curious at what the study does not look into; how much of the difference in outcomes among different institutions is due to the ability to select who their students are?
i.e. A 4 year university that has an admission bar of 1 standard deviation above median will do better then the local community college or credential institute that has no admission bar (except ability to pay) in any measured outcome (alumni earnings, graduation rate, etc).
Isn’t that the crux of the dispute? No one knows how much success someone that goes to Harvard is due to (1) being talented enough to get admitted to Harvard or (2) what a student learns while at Harvard (values, knowledge).
You certainly can’t get that from looking at medians without digging deeper into the distributions.
“I am curious at what the study does not look into; how much of the difference in outcomes among different institutions is due to the ability to select who their students are?â€
That would be a bingo.
“No one knows how much success someone that goes to Harvard is due to (1) being talented enough to get admitted to Harvard or (2) what a student learns while at Harvard (values, knowledge).â€
The amazing Kreskin says, half and half. The profs are better. The competition is better. And the ability of the profs to force feed their (superior) Students faster and deeper is more robust.
After that, it’s just a question of whether you are trying to produce practitioners or academics.
“As I said, it’s a treadmill. They’ll require a degree for LPNs and a masters for RNs without increases in pay.”
Not for a long time. Guess you are not aware that not all RNs have a bachelors degree. That has been a long battle and it is still underway. Wha tis going on that you probably wouldn’t know is that there is a push for specialty nurses to get doctorates. This is all driven within their profession. I see no advantage for me in their having a doctorate. Wont make me want to hire them. (Tuitions are running $60k-$70k per year. Getting that doctorate means another year of tuition.)
Steve
Only vaguely in that I’ve heard of “degree RNs” and “certificate RNs”.
I think the pace of change is likely to continue to accelerate and the direction of the change will be towards increasing educational requirements. Note, too, that the pace of increasing requirements is likely to proceed faster than expanded life expectancy which means that the increases will need to be paid over the a career span not that much different.
From the nurses I know, hospitals with high turnover rates for doctors are run by the nurses, and this has been my observation at Charity (New Orleans) and to a lesser degree at the VA.
They are akin to military NCOs, and they do not get the recognition they deserve.
OT: Robots taking over the world
At the VA medical center, the area for taking blood was not the same as the lab, and periodically, somebody would need to roll a cart between the two. Apparently, the VA has begun using robots to ferry the blood to the lab.
There must be sensors for the robot to activate the automatic doors and radar to keep from running over people. The last time I was there the robot got stuck at one of the doors. I think somebody came through as it was trying to get through, and it ended up getting stuck in the doorway.
I am not sure why, but one of the VA personnel had to keep the door open. So, the robot eliminated the cart delivery task, but it created a task to keep the door open when it gets stuck.
It was amusing, but because nobody could use the door, it also created a fire hazard.
It’s funny you should mention it. I’ve been sort of casually putting together a graph of the ratio of the median wages for various medical specialties and the median wages of RNs and LPNs over the period of the last 40 years. The results are exactly what I would expect but might come as a surprise to others.