College for the Masses – NYTimes.com

• College for the Masses – NYTimes.com

  Best to move on to a four-year degree for expanded economic opportunities even at the risk of incurring student loan debt just wisely select a degree that is in demand.

  tags: education learning college university graduates undergraduate tuition employment

  • How much money should taxpayers spend subsidizing higher education? How willing should students be to take on college debt? How hard should Washington and state governments push colleges to lift their graduation rates? All of these questions depend on whether a large number of at-risk students are really capable of completing a four-year degree.

  • Students who score an 830 on the SAT are nearly identical to those who score an 840. Yet if one group goes to college and the other doesn’t, researchers can make meaningful estimates of the true effects of college.

  • Enrolling in a four-year college brings large benefits to marginal students.

  • The benefits were concentrated among lower-income students, both studies found, and among men, one of them found.

  • Strikingly, the students who initially enrolled in a four-year college were also about as likely to have earned a two-year degree as the other group was.

  • That finding is consistent with other research showing that students do better when they stretch themselves and attend the most selective college that admits them, rather than “undermatching.”

  • “If you give these students a shot, they’re ready to succeed,”

  • . More broadly, a long line of research has found that education usually pays off — for individuals and societies — in today’s technologically complex, globalized economy.

  • Some liberals seem worried that focusing on education distracts from other important economic issues, like Wall Street, the top 1 percent and the weakness of labor unions.

  • Enrolling more students in community colleges may well make economic sense. So, in all likelihood, would creating more and better vocational training, for well-paid jobs like medical technician and electrician, which don’t require a bachelor’s degree. The United States, Mr. Autor says, “massively underinvests” in such training.

  • Millions of people with the ability to earn a bachelor’s degree are not doing so, and many would benefit greatly from it.

  • The unemployment rate among college graduates ages 25 to 34 is just 2 percent, even with the many stories you hear about out-of-work college graduates.

  • College graduates are also healthier, happier, more likely to remain married, more likely to be engaged parents and more likely to vote, research has found.

  • But the new findings are the latest, and maybe strongest, reason to believe that college matters.

  • “I fell in love with learning,” he recalls. With his parents suffering financial problems, he worked almost full time while in college

  • Today, he is a psychotherapist at a local high school and also counsels adults as a professional coach.

  • Doing so helps them learn how to finish other obstacle courses and gives them the confidence that they can, so long as they stay focused. Learning to navigate college fosters a quality that social scientists have taken to .

  • “Just walk around. There is something about that energy on campus that makes you want to be better.”

  • how many students fall down and don’t figure out a way to keep going. Dropout rates typically hover around 50 percent, which leaves students with the grim combination of debt and no degree

  • Many community colleges have even higher dropout rates than four-year colleges. And most people with no college education are struggling mightily in the 21st-century economy.

  • Is college for everyone? Surely not.

  • Others would rather not spend four more years in school and can find rewarding, well-paying work as a medical technician, dental hygienist, police officer, plumber or other jobs that require a two-year degree or vocational training.

  • “It’s genuinely destructive to give people the message that we’re overinvesting in college, that we’re in a college-debt bubble, that you’ll end up as an unemployed ethnomusicologist with $200,000 in debt working at Starbucks,” Mr. Autor, the M.I.T. economist, said. “That’s not a message you would want to give to anyone you know who has kids.”

  • Back then, a high school education was the new ticket to the middle class. Today, a college education is.

  • Americans agree that “our kids” should go to college. The debate is really about who qualifies as “our kids.”

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