The Value of Sending Your Kids to College

The Sandbox Political Topics
183

This is what I meant. We can say that science classes teach two things, both “what we know” and “how we know it”. I think students will concentrate on the first and ignore the second unless profs structure classes and explicitly preach the importance the second. My comment was about “Do colleges teach critical thinking?” and “If so, are there ways to do a better job?” not “Do colleges teach facts?”

Do we? Or do we grade them on how well they learned the facts?

I’ll try an analogy (yep, that’s dangerous). Suppose we have some reason to think our society needs a lot of good sprinters. We can give young people a track and some timing mechanism. We can give them a series of different lengths to race. They can practice on their own and eventually pass the time standards. They will probably develop some good sprinting techniques along the way.

Or, we can show them the techniques that make them faster. We can explicitly practice and evaluate those techniques. I think the second approach will produce better sprinters with less human effort than the first.

The difference between “trusting osmosis” and “specifically teaching what you want them to learn”.

Yeah, college profs “poking around” probably contributed to Western advances. But, I don’t see that as relevant to the question of whether most ordinary students (some of whom never talk to a tenured prof in some mega universities) gain a lot of critical thinking skills or gain as much as they could have.

We should have started here. Yes, I think if you can’t measure it you can’t claim you’ve done it. And, if you want to do a better job, you should be measuring.

You disagree, I’m not sure why.

Maybe we’ve had dramatically different experiences in college. I went to an ordinary liberal arts college where 50% of the degrees were BSEd (mine as well). It was an ordinary middle of the road school. It was not filled with top 5% HS grads. Later, I was a grad student and TA at a large state public university. As a TA I taught a lot of classes that covered stuff I had taught as a HS math teacher. (I also got one opportunity to teach 3rd semester calc and even taught an undergrad abstract algebra class.) I didn’t try teaching “critical thinking” skills beyond what’s needed implicitly for those classes. The normal experience of students at that university included math as necessary for their majors (which was often that one HS algebra course I taught) Hardly anyone took abstract algebra.

I can imagine a school that really had all top 5% grads. Profs targeted those top students with challenging questions. They went to small discussion classes filled with talented thinkers and even more talented profs. These topics were so fascinating that students had similar discussions late into the night. Maybe that’s more like your experience? If so, I can see where we’d come away with different opinions on the state of college education.

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Math and physics teach deductive reasoning fairly well (in the logical sense, not mathematical sense, I’m treating mathematical induction as logical deduction here), as in, the consequent necessarily follows the antecedent.

But the real world is not filled with deductive arguments, it’s 99.99% inductive reasoning. This kind of skill is needed to be able to persuade and convince. Using analogies, for example, but also spotting logical fallacies like slippery slopes and strawman.

In this sense, I think philosophy classes (symbolic logic aside, as that is basically just math as it focuses on deductive logic), specifically focused on moral dilemmas or contemporary issues that cover both sides of the issue, teach a specific area of critical thinking that math does not cover.

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185

The point about about not needing a college education for certain jobs is dead-on accurate. Certainly by 1995, employers were demanding a college degree up front for a variety of jobs, many of which required skills that didn’t need a college education. It was mostly a tool to weed out applicants, but it was also a way for employers to chest-thump we have a highly educated work force as if that was really important.

I suspect in 2021, it’s even worse.

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If we’re still talking about actuarying? I’d say my math classes involved a lot of deep thinking (to understand) and a lot of creative thinking (for proofs). I do use creative thinking on the job. But I don’t know if I “learned” that in college.

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If it’s not intended for a career, then I guess my response is ‘must be nice’. Nobody in my family (well, other than me, but I’m not 20) have the luxury of taking 4 year degrees where the primary purpose is something other than get a job after graduation.
A music degree or a history degree would certainly be interesting, but they both do very little for the probability of finding a successful paying career after school. And I think it’s reasonable to expect that 20yo’s should be doing stuff that makes them self-sufficient financially.
And I say that in the context of my doing an undergrad degree, and currently working on a masters degree, for the purposes of little more than ‘I want to’. I’ll never use either in my career. But I’m paying for it myself,and already have a career. That, not uncoincidentally, affords me the time and funds to do stupid crap like take degrees for nothing other than interest’s sake.

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I’ll raise my hand on that one. We all got teaching degrees. Hardly “high paying” by actuary standards, but in my neighborhood pretty good deal - not working in hot, dirty factories.

I also thought I’d enjoy all the “high brow” thought at college. But, that was a bonus (and my dad would have enjoyed that, too, if he had the chance, and he was glad I did). But, the job had to justify the tuition on its own.

I always think of rich Americans 100 years ago sending their kids on the “tour of Europe”. I’m sure for some it was a wonderful, horizon expanding experience. For others it was a wonderful, multi-country drunk. Rich people giving their kids an interesting experience with some extra cash.

Nobody imagined that every kid in America deserved that tour. Nobody thought it made sense for working people to borrow money to send their kids where the rich kids went.

Maybe, after ordinary kids got jobs and earned money and did better than their parents, they could reward themselves with their own European vacation in middle or old age. But, that’s after they earned the fare.

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Measurements are important. As I wrote earlier, I think grades are one measure of competence in thinking.

But the decision to measure is, itself, an exercise in critical thinking. So is the decision about what to measure. You cannot justify either of these decisions by picking to measure something else. The entire effort is, in a sense, very un-critical because it lacks any element of self awareness.

The danger of metrics in business is confusing the concrete thing you can measure with the usually ephemeral thing you actually want to know. Here, there is the constant temptation to focus on productivity instead of critical thinking.

My conjecture (because I don’t pretend to be terribly well informed on this) is that whereas college used to be a path into the middle class, now it is the only path. This creates all sorts of incentives for a variety of people to turn the college degree into a consumer product, namely an admissions ticket. And if students to go school simply to get a piece of paper, and professors and administrators give classes simply to manufacture that piece of paper, then I agree it will not be worth much. It’s not clear to me the degree to which this has happened.

I would make an analogy with pure science research. Even though such research has created enormous economic gains overall, most individual projects will never have any economic value at all. But they have to be evaluated according to their own peculiar values and goals, which are determined by culture and history. Trying to evaluate each research project as if it were a company product designed to produce a return would mean no research at all, which in the aggregate is not economically best.

Maybe part of our disagreement is that you are arguing for what you worry college has become, while I am arguing for what I think college can be. It would not surprise me if a lot of college graduates do not learn a lot of thinking. But I think they could have, if they had wanted to. And it also would not surprise me if a lot of people posting here who don’t think they learned much in college would change their minds if they could meet a parallel version of themselves who never went to college.

On a somewhat unrelated point, I do not think you need top students and professors for students to benefit a lot from a college education (not that you were saying that, exactly.) But I do think the desire and incentives need to be right.

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I mostly agree with you, but would just add to this.

I think it’s more than just deductive reasoning.

Both require building complex mental models to represent quantities. I’m reminded of this every time i try to explain something as simple as reading a histogram. There is something there that is very much creative, and not simply deductive (although almost none of us will be good enough to use it to think of something truly new of course.)

And as an experimental science, physics has a huge component that is not deductive at all.

But i agree with the sentiment of your post. Philosophy can teach important ways of thinking that physics and math usually do not. In addition to your example, I also think philosophy can be radically self reflective in a way that math and science at least almost never are.

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191

Odd, I take that as a support of what I’ve been saying. Applying this to college science, it’s easier to measure knowledge of facts than knowledge of the process. If they are both important to society maybe we should make the extra effort to find a way to measure the second. If a certain grade is based only on knowledge of the facts, then that particular grade is not a measure of competence in thinking.

The first two sentences of this paragraph make sense to me. The next two do not. I can’t respond because I don’t understand what you said.

It depends. Suppose the piece of paper indicates that the holder has learned a bunch of facts that an employer would like entry level engineer to know. It also says the holder has successfully worked with other students to solve (artificially set up) engineering problems. It also says that the holder is reasonably good at getting assignments done in a specified timeframe while juggling a number of responsibilities. I think all that is worth quite a bit to a prospective employer.

You mean it could be worth more. But, maybe they got the extra you want just by getting the ticket. How do you know they didn’t learn “critical thinking”?

You assume it is possible to evaluate pure research. If I want to do scientific research, but I want somebody else to pay me to do it, then somehow I need to convince the somebody else that my work is worth funding. Somebody is going to evaluate my proposal.

Society as a whole (parents, students, taxpayers, and donors) probably spend $100,000 on a four year degree (and that doesn’t include the opportunity cost of four years employment for the student). If the college wants to justify a big chunk of that as “teaching critical thinking”, then the college should be willing to show those funders that students really do
gain critical thinking skills while in college, and (better yet) the gain is greater than they would have had from spending those four years elsewhere. If we can evaluate something as fuzzy as “basic research that deserves funding”, it seems we could evaluate this. I’m not anxious to pay for the emperor’s new clothes.

But, why should they want to? I’ll agree that some people just find hard thinking fun. Some of them post here. But, I don’t think that’s a very large fraction of the population.

I think I was saying that. The type of thing that interests you may be the preserve of a small subset of people in college. I don’t know what incentives you have in mind. I think there are others that can benefit from a four year school as a ticket. And more who could benefit from a two year school as a ticket.

I’m not sure how you define “middle class”. I think we can more easily define “median income”. In 2017, about 35% of 25-29 year-olds had “bachelor’s or higher”. It doesn’t seem possible that a college degree can be a requirement for a median income.

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46% had an associate’s or higher, which is pretty close to 50%. I don’t think that education is the only way to the median income, but it certainly stacks the deck. And it is probably more stacked now than it was 50 years ago.

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I’m late to the party and OddSox told me not to read this thread (presumably because he intends to pay for both of his kids to go to college and I’m the current breadwinner in terms of what’s not getting sucked into a black hole, and also in salary).

But also… a part-time job will not cover this (especially if you’re not living at home). I’ve done the leg-work personally.

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Also, if a goal of college is to get a better job, it doesn’t make sense to pay for it with a crappy job.

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For context, my family was poor-ish. We had a house over our head, and food - no luxuries. My mom was and still is a pretty frugal shopper. My father did maintain some sort of government IT-like job for most of my childhood but he once mentioned to me that he was making less than $75 k CAD at retirement. Saving up for my college fund was not a priority by any means.

Anyways, for whatever reason, I was still disqualified for provincial funding. I also got rejected by Scotia Bank somehow. My last resort was a revolving student line of credit from TD Canada - which ended up being a life saver. I started out at the University of Regina while living at home - then I transferred to the University of Waterloo when I realized the measly $450/month my mother was getting for child support would approximately cover my rent. I worked part-time since I was legally old enough to do so, and I graduated at about $26 k in debt (I put every single penny I made back onto the line of credit).

Sometimes when middle class folks get all high and mighty about paying for college for one’s kids like it’s no big deal I get punchy.

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196

Everyone’s circumstances are different for sure. If it’s in relation to my comments earlier that was based on the makeup of this board with kids who I assume to be mostly career actuaries with fairly high salaries relative to the general public.

That’s not everyone’s position, especially in the broader US (or Canada) population(s).

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The value of jucos is (still) vastly underrated, but I’ll also say that not every juco is the same. Some are pretty damn decent, some are advanced kindergarden. The juco I graduated from was IMO pretty solid; I got the same instruction I would have at a university for about $65 per credit hour, with teachers who were generally available during office hours, would on occasion make themselves available at other times if needed, and gave a damn about students learning.

I still graduated with debt, but it was only like $18K and it was all from the last 2.5 years. (I had to do an extra semester because a mandatory class got juggled in the rotation and so it fell out of sequence for me.) Had I gone through the university for everything, the price tag would have been at least double that and probably more.

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Yeah, when we talk about the “value of a college education”, we should really clarify whether we mean 4 year degrees or 2 years. The second could be a two year welding program, for example, that leads to above median earnings.

I assumed this “college teaches critical thinking” discussion was focused on 4 year degrees.

I do not think a 4 year degree is a requirement for a median income. Certainly, people with those degrees are more likely to get over the median, but other people must be making it, too.

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Scientists are the ones teaching the science classes. In my experience, they tend to value scientific thinking, not just memorizing scientific facts (particularly for classes aimed at science majors.) Unfortunately, I don’t think we are going to be able to resolve here how well grades are functioning as a measure of thinking. I certainly don’t think that, say, standardized tests designed by politicians are likely to do a better job. I admit that depending on the class and professor, grades may do a better or worse job at measuring thinking.

You (or whoever) want to measure critical thinking. But how did you decide to do this? You tried to think critically. And how do you decide what to measure? Again, you have to think about it critically. How do you validate these decisions, in other words how do you know you are thinking about it in the right way? You are assuming you know how to do these things, which is itself a very uncritical way of thinking. And in that case, how can you possibly expect to be correctly measuring critical thinking anyway.

If a person isn’t willing and ready to engage in hard thinking (although they don’t have to think it’s fun), then maybe they shouldn’t be in college. Maybe they should get vocational training, particularly if we, as a society, rethink the form that vocational training takes.

I agree that this has value, but I consider that vocational training. If the purpose is to give people job training, then lets give them job training. My guess is we can do it a lot cheaper.

This goes along with my suspicion that a lot fewer people may need to be going to college. (I mean that in terms of our decisions as a society, not he decisions made by individual people in the real world.)

As an example, some of this may be happening with software development. Most of the time, you don’t need a computer scientist; you just need somebody who is familiar with the most common programming idioms and APIs. And companies are using a lot more people who have only attended coding “bootcamps”.

Where you and I may disagree about this is that I think the primary limiting factor should be on how any people are willing to endure the hardship of a rigorous education. As long as people are willing to really devote themselves to learning, then I probably support society subsidizing this. (No, I don’t have good ideas about how to identify these devoted learners.)

Yes, but it is evaluated by other scientists, according to values aligned with scientific research. Gettin grants requires getting results, but those results are measured in ways historically consistent with research. This doesn’t mean that pure research as a whole is supported uncritically. But, as an example, new physics results take an average of 50 years (as I recall) to have any practical use, and most do not. You cannot take a business toolbox, which is already criticized for prioritizing short term returns, and apply it to pure research.

My argument is that the analogous situation for college is looking at grades. Other critical analysis is required as well, such as asking whether a college degree is really needed for all of these jobs, and whether universities are really focused on the right things.

I just don’t want to make assumptions about the kind of people who should be preserved in college. I don’t think you need to be brilliant, or in the top of your HS class. But I do think you need to be willing to engage in hard thinking and studying.

I should have said “financial security”. The term “middle class” has so much baggage with it. You are right, it wouldn’t surprise me if a 4 year college degree is not needed to make a the median income.

200

You weren’t supposed to notice that :tfh:.

I definitely support the idea that parents who can, should support their kids with college. The struggle however, made my own college experience a lot more meaningful to me, even outside of the whole bettering my future career options thing.

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I agree with this, partly because they are focused on teaching.

One potential issue comes from the fact they often serve populations with poor prior education, and who are already working multiple full time jobs to support a family. This can create perverse incentives, because either the difficulty of the class is lowered, or the college has fewer students and therefore less funding, or many of their students are paying money they don’t really have to fail classes.

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How about standardized tests designed by the college professors who say they are teaching critical thinking?

Are you trying to run down a “What is Truth?” rabbit hole?
If not, having an opinion in a dialog is a reasonable part of looking for answers/agreement. I haven’t seen a definition of critical thinking yet, so I don’t know if you consider that critical thinking or not.

I think I agree with this. At least “hard thinking” of a certain type. How we label these institutions would matter.

I have no trouble with your definition or conclusion here

My questions might be “how many” and “how long”? Harvard might say they already do this for a few people.

I have no problem with an evaluation done by other critical thinkers, aligned with a wider community of critical thinkers.

I agree with “hard to identify” this type of person.