Selfishly Speaking, Who Should Skip College?
The central thesis of my The Case Against Education is that actually-existing education is a terrible waste of taxpayer money. Since signaling, not building human capital, is the main function of education, the main effect of government subsidies is credential inflation. In economic jargon, my claim is that education has a low (indeed, negative) social return.
Along the way, however, I also show that the private (or, as I prefer to call it, the “selfish”) return to education heavily depends on pre-existing student ability. Despite misleading statements by mainstream education economists, college attendance in particular is not a good career investment for most of the population.
In January, Chris Rufo got a lot of pushback for highlighting the high salaries of the managers of Panda Express and Chipotle restaurants. One eloquent example of such pushback (though don’t miss this pushback to the pushback):
In a debate over whether the problems facing young men are really that bad, Christopher Rufo argued that things are actually pretty good and suggested that there are great jobs at Panda Express and Chipotle. It’s one thing to tell kids to go to trade school; it’s quite another to start celebrating demeaning service sector jobs. Of course, people need to work at places like Chipotle. But telling smart white men to settle for them is tone deaf beyond belief.
Rufo may have only been highlighting the “decent” pay at these jobs to demonstrate “full employment.” But the implications of posts like this and others in the current debate demand that young white men need to accept declining status. Their parents had respectable, white-collar jobs that provided for a family. Now the sons (never the daughters — they’re told to follow their dreams and go to college) have to settle for a dead-end job.
What does my number-crunching in The Case Against Education say about all this? First and foremost: know thyself.
Don’t base your life choices on what your immediate social circle finds “demeaning.” As Dirty Jobs repeatedly proves, people routinely get used to jobs that initially disgust them.
Don’t base your life choices on whether parents and teachers constantly tell you that you’re “smart.” They’re not trustworthy assessors of your intelligence.
Don’t rule out options because they require “declining status.” If your family’s initial status is above average, declining status is the mathematical norm. That’s what “regression to the mean” means.
What should you do instead? First and foremost: Get objective evidence on your own intelligence.
If your SAT score is at 1200 or greater, your odds of successfully finishing a “real” major are quite good.
If your SAT is in the 1100-1200 range, it’s a toss-up.
If you’re in the 1000-1100 range, only try college if your peers consider you an annoyingly hard worker.
Below 1000? Don’t go.
Supplement this with a candid assessment of your work ethic. If you got markedly better grades than peers with similar SAT scores, count that as a 50-100 SAT point buff. If you got markedly worse grades than peers with similar SAT scores, count that as a 50-100 SAT point hit.
What will go wrong if you ignore my advice? The most likely scenario is that you spend years worth of time and tuition, then fail to finish your degree. Maybe you’ll keep failing crucial classes. Maybe you’ll keep switching majors. Maybe you’ll die of boredom. The precise mechanism makes little difference: Since about 70% of the college payoff comes from completion, non-completion implies a terrible return on investment.
The second most-likely scenario is that you find a really easy major that allows you to graduate even though you just aren’t much of a student. This, in turn, puts you at high risk (probably >50% chance) of permanent “malemployment,” where you simply can’t find a college-type job despite the B.A. in your possession. Again, this implies a terrible return on investment.
Clever readers will be tempted to protest: “But Bryan, what about your advice to ‘Do Ten Times as Much’?!” Instead of telling people with poor SAT scores and low grades to skip college, shouldn’t I tell them to finally apply themselves?
Answer: If you are sincerely willing to multiply your academic effort by a factor of 10, then give yourself an extra 200 SAT points. But almost everyone who claims to be willing to do so is either lying to self-deceiving.
Furthermore, if you’re really willing to try that hard, why not devote yourself to success in a non-academic endeavor where raw intelligence matters less? A non-academic endeavor such as… rising up the hierarchy at Panda Express or Chipotle.
P.S. Contrary to many, Panda Express tastes better than Cowen-anointed “authentic” Chinese food like Mama Chang’s…
"Don’t base your life choices on what your immediate social circle finds “demeaning.” As Dirty Jobs repeatedly proves, people routinely get used to jobs that initially disgust them. "
This is too dismissive and fails to empathize with the situation people find themselves. For most people, 90% of the motivation behind why they do anything is to fit-in with perceived expectations and norms of their social circle. Telling them to just not do that is not very helpful.
People have impulses to both fit in to their social circle, but also to rise in social status.
My vague historical impression is that, for most of human history, your occupation and social circle was determined at birth. So people didn't have much choice but to conform and work hard.
What's different is that, in modern times, you now have the option of---at great expense---moving up in social class through credentialism. In the ancestral environment, calories were scarse which leads to modern obesity. Similarly, in the ancestral environment, opportunities to move up
in status were scarse, which now leads to overconsumption in things like education.
I agree that we need to cut back spending on education. But in terms of personal advice given to other people, two things need to be discussed seriously and without condescension:
(1) You have instincts to climb in social status. These instincts are not always helping you. Strongly
consider if the benefit of rising in social class is worth the cost. Try to be introspectively honest about this (e.g rely less on your gut feeling and more on hard metrics like SAT and grades---you discuss this point well in the main body of the post).
(2) If you insist on rising in social class, be smart and agentic about it. I've known a lot of people who hit a quarter-life crisis (stalled out at work; their long-term relationship going through a rough patch) and their response was to go back to school. This is a kind of "comfort-eating": you indulge
in education because it gives felt-sense of rising in status. But are there perhaps other ways to transform your social circle/social environment without indulging in education? I don't have any solutions here, unfortunately, but these are the sorts of questions that need to be discussed more openly.
Overall, this just seems really tough. Once you provide a mechanism to let people rise in social status, people are of course going to flock to it. If you try to limit access to it (for example, by having strict GPA and SAT floors), people will complain (and it's hard to enforce this kind of thing in a free market anyways---do we make fluffy Masters program illegal?)
Another interesting thread that has come to mind: My impression is that in Europe education are overconsumption isn't so dire, despite it being cheaper there. Is that impression accurate? If so, what's the cause of the difference between attitudes towards education across the Atlantic?
The national average for a Panda Express Manager is 55k. It pays so well at the one near Rufo because it's in a posh Seattle suburb with a median home price of $800k. In other words, they have to pay more to attract talent but all the extra income going straight back into the cost of living, leaving you no better off.
If you run the math the $100k manager job will never afford a home anywhere near it.
So basically Rufo can't do math and his sentiment is pure resentment.
If I were to be generous to Rufo, I would say he's in the same blind spot that everyone who owned a home before 2022 has. They don't understand that housing doubled in price or more since 2020 (prices + rates) and that this completely changes what is and isn't a living wage. There really are two Americas based on home ownership, and young men don't own homes.