What You Get Out of College Is Who You Put Into It

College is far more a reflection of status than it is a path by which to reach it.

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Americans who drive Volvos live far longer than those who drive most other cars. Who knew that driving a vehicle that looks like a child’s drawing of a car might save your life?

A Volvo might be good in a crash, but so would a lot of other cars. A Toyota or a Kia might do just as well or better. The life expectancy of Volvo divers isn’t about what’s in them, but rather who. 

Women, particularly affluent women, buy Volvos. And rich women live longer than anybody else in our society. On the road, where men account for three quarters of all traffic fatalities, and off, women as a group outlive men by an average of six years. And rich people outlive poor people by an even greater margin, almost 16 years at the extremes.  

So, if you want to have the best chance to live to a ripe old age, don’t buy a Volvo. Be a rich woman. Which might be very challenging for many Americans …

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    “Mounk and the researchers get closer to the point in the acknowledgement that it is graduating from college, not what one learns there, that makes the difference”

    Bryan Caplan (The Case Against Education) makes this point in much more cynical terms

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  2. Betsybowditch

    Don't know how many people have seen the story, which originated in the LA Times and has now gone national, about "the tenant from hell" who exploited LA's tenant-friendly laws to stay in a Bel Air Airbnb for a year and a half without paying rent.

    In some of the articles, like the Daily Mail, it is mentioned "she is a Harvard graduate" and comes from a family of great accomplishment. The reason Harvard has been mentioned is because she prevailed in the competitive winnowing process and yet chose to become a scammer or grifter and this doesn't add up.

    By contrast, Rep George Santos engaged in background fabrication on an unprecedented scale. But why he did it is no mystery. He wanted to project the success he'd never earned.

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  3. Andrew W.

    A quick scan of the googles suggests that people who graduate from 18+ month trade schools do nearly as well as 4 year college graduates taken as a whole (while acknowledging that it's not equivalent to being a software engineer from MIT). While it's not clear that this comparative achievement level persists over time, it would be somewhat reasonable to assume given lower debt rates, higher employment rates immediately post school, shorter opportunity cost time before joining the workforce. It's not an identical springboard into the middle class but fairly close. I suspect that, similar to the assumption that a college degree shows evidence of drive and trainability, graduation from a rigorous trade school shows much of the same thing.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Kurt

      Yup. "....graduation from a rigorous trade school shows much of the same thing." I'd add that following graduation, if said individual pursued self employment and building a small (or large) business, it shows MORE of the same thing. There's a lot of opportunities that aren't talked about, but they're there.

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  4. MLE

    Gates and Zuckerberg didn't finish college, but they both were raised in professional, upper middle class households, and both of them got into Harvard. Whenever I hear the argument that "Bill Gates didn't finish college," I counter that the average college drop out isn't dropping out of the nation's top university with the beginnings of a world-disrupting company already in the works.

    I don't think that college is for everyone. Having a degree increases the likelihood of getting a middle class job, but there are other pathways, as long as you are willing to work hard. My electrician has a big speed boat because, unlike my husband and me, he went straight to trade school and employment and eventual small business ownership and didn't have the opportunity loss of college and graduate school, etc. However, there are many more electricians who never take those leaps to self-employment and who end up making a lot less than the average college graduate who has a B average in accounting.

    I don't know the statistics, but I'm willing to bet that receiving a college diploma correlates closely to having parents with a college degree, having married parents, having middle class or upper middle class parents, and having financially stable parents. Yes, there are always exceptions to the rule because ultimately we are individuals and not statistics.

    I remember when my son was going to be baptized, the pre-baptism information session from the church talked about how the only characteristic National Clearinghouse Scholars had in common was that they all ate dinner with their families on a regular basis. Why? It's probably multifactorial. Families that eat together tend to be more stable and organized (and we know that children need structure). Children develop language and social skills by having dinner with their parents rather than by eating alone. Parents who are able to eat with their children on a regular basis probably have the kinds of jobs that allow them to be home at meal times. Being in the kind of environment that allows regular family meals allows the basic needs of a child to be met so that he/she can then focus on things like academic excellence. There's no magic to the family meal, it's what allows the family meal to happen.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Bel

      Your point about electricians is on point. Plumbers too. A master plumber with their own business can easily out earn college graduates. A plumber employed by a chain cannot.

      Stability requires both a skill and a plan.

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      1. Avatar photo
        Kurt

        You got it.

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  5. James Morphew

    The single-dimension profound discoveries of correlation have a long history of misleading readers. Mr. Stirewalt gets closer in his conclusion, mentioning the familial similarities that also correlate. Put more simply, those who show the productivity and stamina to complete a college degree are likely to show similar productivity and stamina as they pursue their lives and careers. And, yes, I am using only two blurry parameters in my description, making all conclusions suspect. Let's not forget that neither Steve Jobs and Bill gates completed college degrees.

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  6. Avatar photo
    Show Jay Janney the 🚪!

    This is a painful essay to read.

    I come from a working class family, a 'neck family. My father likely had dyslexia, so he flunked out of college. And yet...I became a Ph.D, am a tenured full professor (and before you ask, a full professor does not mean I am a "full of it professor"). I became a department chair and now run a center, edit a journal. I live the good life.

    How did I do it? IDK. I read at an early age, the books of my siblings. So I was reading at 3 and 4 years old. My teachers had to rubber band shut my books since I read ahead. I was blessed with a curious mind, and some academic skill. I'm still curious.

    But I chose not to live in the academic community near our campus, as I didn't feel I fit in there. Neither did my wife. She grew up poorer than I did, but became a pharmacist. We chose a small town 40 minutes from campus, where we are in "the elite" because of our degrees and income. Lol, as if I am an elite! This is a town where school teachers in the public schools are seen as elites.

    I can see firsthand the pathologies of those who are not degreed. But they look at my life and cannot imagine how to get to where I am. It's two different worlds, and I don't really fit in either. When I am here, I don't discuss my research, or even what I teach. I don't call myself a professor here, but a teacher. I wish I could help them, but they don't see a pathway into college.

    A closing story. On my way to meeting every Sunday, we passed by a local university. 100 yards off the road was a dormitory, I called it the filmstrip building, because that was what it looked like at night. When I was 5, I felt I belonged there. It scared me because I knew no faculty, and had no clue what a professor was. All I knew was this was where I belonged.

    When I was 23, I shared this story over ice cream with my best friend, Christy. She, btw, lived in that dormitory. After I shared about my calling, she slid her hand across the table to gently hold mine. Softly she spoke up "𝙎𝙤, 𝙮𝙤𝙪'𝙧𝙚 𝙨𝙖𝙮𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙮𝙤𝙪'𝙫𝙚 𝙗𝙚𝙚𝙣 𝙖 𝙫𝙤𝙮𝙚𝙪𝙧 𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧 𝙨𝙞𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙬𝙚𝙧𝙚 𝙛𝙞𝙫𝙚 𝙮𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙨 𝙤𝙡𝙙? " Zing! She got me. She laughed, took a bite of ice cream, before commenting "totally see it". Ten years later, when I finally went back to school for my Ph.D, my friends and family all laughed how it took so long what they had long seen in me.Show less

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    1. Avatar photo
      Bel

      I was also a first generation college student. I knew when I was 10 that I would leave home and not return. I guess I was a voyeur too.

      I am guilty of living in a super zip and liking it. I'm scarred by where I grew up and like my bubble where my kids nerdiness is seen as an asset and not a target for ridicule.

      It's not surprising that a smaller % of college students are first generation; there's more middle age adults with college degrees then 30 years ago. It is concerning that so many don't graduate.

      However, I always wonder what happens to kids like me today, whose parents thought a degree was important even though they didn't have one, and had teachers pushing toward college. Do they still graduate?

      I also find it unsurprising that people with college degrees marry people with colleges degrees now that so many women have a BS/BA. I bet in the college/HS pairings of the past the wife was smart enough to go college but wasn't encouraged too. That quite different then marrying someone incapable of college level work.

      Not because college makes you a better person. It's makes some people worse. But intellectual compatibility is important.

      Finally, the lack of a degree does not have to lead to bad outcomes. Anyone can make more or less optimal or more or less dangerous choices. Lord knows I've watched family members make one bad choice after another, making their lives more difficult then they have to be.

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      1. Avatar photo
        Show Jay Janney the 🚪!

        Times are different today. Christy's Mom was a HS grad, SAHM, married to a college degreed engineer. They did well. today, their grandkids are strongly expected to go to college.

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  7. Raincheck

    Graduation from college is also a marker of someone with a certain minimum level of intelligence who is also capable of finishing something. I know many cases of people who are from a family with all the advantages, and whose siblings mostly have college degrees, but they did not complete theirs, for one reason or another. Some are only a class or two short and claimed to finish college on their resumes. They got the initial jobs a college degree would earn them. But as workers, those who actually finished are almost always more successful.

    Completing college is a sign you came from a family where that was important. Probably from an affluent family. You may have won in the brains lottery. All that is very true. But it can also be a marker of ability to stick with something and make the necessary sacrifices, all else being equal.

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    1. Scianti7

      This is what my family told me when I was in school & wanted to take time off. I listened & they were correct. It's finishing the work that matters, & having stuck with it to accomplish the goal says a lot.

      I think that we could expand that out to anyone who works for & accomplishes certification, I would love to see that study.

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  8. Avatar photo
    Tele

    In an age where a high school degree is a participation trophy, getting your bachelors shows you can start, persevere, and finish something. It should show that you can take in information, process information, and explain it to others.

    My Dad always said "the company will train you for what they want to do, you need to prove you're trainable."

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    1. Chrisnorthinger

      I don't think that's wrong, and it certainly seems to have become the reasoning of most employers. High school is free, more or less mandatory to attend, and mostly completed before the legal age of adulthood. With statistically insignificant exceptions, college is none of those things. So while most are capable of graduating HS, the social and economic difficulties in graduating with a Bachelor's are significantly higher. It's not just dedication and academic performance, though obviously those are also crucial.

      The result seems to have become as you've said the easiest way for hiring companies to decide who is trainable and who is not is to see if they have a 4 year degree. I get it, it makes sense, but as more recent studies have shown it doesn't actually mean as much as one might think and college grads in many circumstances statistically make for less desirable employees. I'm glad, at least for now, many jobs formerly closed to anyone without at least a Bachelor's have been opened to anyone with desirable qualifications. It's a bit nuts that DC was looking to restrict daycare workers to anyone with a 4 year.

      Personally, I come from a family of mostly trades people. I grew up with divorced parents unable to provide direct financial support but that earned too much for me to qualify for financial assistance. I also came of age during the Great Recession, where at my first job I was surrounded by college grads waiting tables. It's one of the great "what ifs" of my life, but I never liked school growing up and I don't think I would have had the dedication to go to school full time while also working full time for almost half a decade, so I didn't. Most friends with degrees either came from well-off families or have debts close to my mortgage, or both. It's a complicated issue with many facets, but I think Mr. Stirewalt did well to illuminate some of it.

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    Kevin M. James

    It's well-known in higher-ed that rankings and reputations are based much more on inputs (incoming GPA and test scores and social capital/socioeconomic status on the student side, accumulated prestige and total money raised and spent on the institution side) than on discernible outputs...especially the closer you get to the highly-selective elite end of things.

    Which isn't to say that excellent educations aren't available, and taken full advantage of, at lots of places every day. But all too often that happens almost as an accidental result of the inputs, and/or depends greatly on the initiative and wisdom and fortuitous choices of students and their families (underlining the importance of the student-side inputs).

    If one doesn't have a vision, or just doesn't care, about using those privileged years to obtain anything beyond an expensive piece of paper (and of course attending football games and swell parties), one will be likely to come away from college with nothing to show for it but an expensive piece of paper (and possibly-hazy memories of attending football games and swell parties).

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    George.Skinner

    I think college isn't going to benefit everybody, and I think Chris Stirewalt is correct to assert that people often mistake the effect (college education) for the causes that lead to that education and success. However, I've only got to look to my own family for some evidence of how college can shape and benefit you. I've got relatives who went to college, and ones who didn't (and often actively eschewed it as a "waste of time.") A lot of the ones who didn't get college educations have been very successful, but some have also been notably unsuccessful. Basically, the range of outcomes seems wider without that extra education. I've also noticed that the succeeding generations either end up getting college education or becoming less successful. It's getting harder to make your way in the world without some sort of post-secondary education; raw talent and drive can't level out the advantage provided by an education, particularly for a person with comparable talent and drive.

    Finally, my Facebook feed made it clear that my non-college educated relatives were far more likely to buy into any of the conspiracy theories floating around during the COVID pandemic. College education can change your habits of mind, encouraging critical thinking and making you more aware of complexity and nuance. This is only a trend, not determinative of individuals.

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