LogFAQs > #901772666

Ms. Ruppel Shell writes about science, social justice and the economy.

wtf.... Does the NYT not use the Oxford comma? Oh, plus the "social justice" movement is bullshit and anybody who tries using it as a platform is suspect.

Young people and their families go into debt because they believe that college will help them in the job market. And on average it does. But this raises a question: Does higher education itself offer that benefit, or are the people who earn bachelors degrees already positioned to get higher-paying jobs?

Probably less a matter of "better positioned" than "more able." That said, the most successful individuals often don't get stellar grades in college. Your average CEO is more likely to have a 2.4 GPA than even a 3.6.

Its a cruel irony that a college degree is worth less to people who most need a boost: those born poor. This revelation was made by the economists Tim Bartik and Brad Hershbein. Using a body of data, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which includes 50 years of interviews with 18,000 Americans, they were able to follow the lives of children born into poor, middle-class and wealthy families.

[...]

The authors dont speculate as to why this is the case, but it seems that students from poor backgrounds have less access to very high-income jobs in technology, finance and other fields. Class and race surely play a role.

...and this is exactly why it's not worth taking self-tagged "SJ" experts seriously. It's pretty commonly known that it's not *just* the degree that matters, but also where you got the degree and your major. Partly because you're buying into a better social network by attending better schools, but also there's the relative prestige.

There are other issues, like lowered standards over the years and a glut of college-educated labor, which have also depressed the value of a degree. The latter is acknowledged later in the article but the former isn't really touched upon.
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There are precious few at ease / With moral ambiguities / So we act as though they don't exist.