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From a layman's perspective, it seems like it's mostly an expected outcome of college degrees becoming a class signifier. In 1990, only a fifth of American adul
by sb057 9mo ago
From a layman's perspective, it seems like it's mostly an expected outcome of college degrees becoming a class signifier. In 1990, only a fifth of American adults had bachelor's degrees, with those who held them making 70% more than high school graduates. A sizeable gap, sure, but those non-college graduates have minimum wage retail workers and general laborers, and union steel and auto workers in the same educational bucket.
By 2020, it had risen to well over a third of Americans who had bachelor's, and 105% more income for those with them. One might expect a dilution in a degree's value, but I think it's just a matter of minimum wage workers still being high school graduates, whereas virtually all professional workers (including the increasingly few manufacturing workers) needing a bachelor's to get past the first stage of HR.
[1] https://educationdata.org/education-attainment-statistics https://educationdata.org/education-attainment-statistics
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States#Income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
- asdff 9mo ago10% increase is a lot lower than I anticipated what with all the talk about a B.S. being the barrier for entry these days.
- tobyjsullivan 9mo ago20% to 33% is not a 10% increase, if that’s what you’re referring to. That’s a 65% increase.
- Spartan-S63 9mo agoEven still, over more than two decades, only a ten percentage point increase is still somewhat mind-blowing. As someone who grew up upper middle class in a wealthier suburban area, I lived in a bubble where the vast majority of people I went to high school with went off to college and got bachelors degrees. To me, it seemed that that was the norm for most Americans, but that's far from reality.
- asdff 9mo ago65% increase seems big but this also means only 13% more adult americans are degree holders which seems remarkably paltry to me after almost 40 years of "thou shall go to college" being preached to highschoolers.
- jchallis 9mo agoOnly about half of Americans who go to college finish their degree. The saddest part of the college debt crisis are the kids with debt and no degree to pay it off.
- SequoiaHope 9mo agoCollege got very expensive. If it hadn’t I’m sure we’d see higher numbers.
- asdff 9mo agoI think that depends on if you go out of state or in state. My alma mater has frozen in state tuition for at least 10 years now, maybe longer. Plenty of flagship in state schools are only around 12k-15k a year. In a world where you can now crack 15 an hour unskilled now while living with the parents over the summer you can probably cover a lot of that almost like it was in ye olden times.
- SequoiaHope 9mo agoSeems like things have been relatively flat for the last decade, but costs are roughly double what they were 30 years ago. https://www.npr.org/2025/11/20/nx-s1-5600854/college-costs-have-risen-dramatically-in-the-last-20-years-heres-why https://www.npr.org/2025/11/20/nx-s1-5600854/college-costs-h...
- rendaw 9mo agoGP means a "plus ~10%" not a "times ~1.10" increase.
- foundddit 9mo agoApparently nearly half of college students drop out. [1] That gives us most people going to college, but a significant portion not graduating. [1] https://educationdata.org/college-dropout-rates https://educationdata.org/college-dropout-rates
- red-iron-pine 9mo agostats also show that the average student is now taking longer to graduate, easing towards ~6 years instead of 4 takeaway is probably that a lot of not-really-qualified students are going to 4-year schools and probably shouldn't.
- ajross 9mo agoI don't follow? If the population of college educated adults is growing, it's by definition becoming less selective and would be expected to show less skew. College educated people used to be a "special" demographic, now they're much closer to the rest of society. But the data shows the opposite effect, with the lifespan benefit of a degree more than doubling.
- rayiner 9mo agoIt might be a skewed distribution where life expectancy drops off rapidly below the median but isn’t that different at the top. So it’s not a big difference when it’s the bottom 90% and the top 10%, but it is when it’s the bottom 60% versus the top 40%.
- ajross 9mo agoWell, sure, but generally when your hypothesis demands a highly non-linear distribution function to make sense, it's just wrong. That might be true; the math could be made to work. But if it were, that is the result the study would be pushing and not the bland thing about smoking. It's a smell test thing, basically.
- LorenPechtel 9mo agoWhy shouldn't it be non-linear? Non-linear is what I would expect--the educated know enough to avoid a range of stupid behaviors that lower life expectancy. You see few of the life-destructive behaviors in the degreed group. You also would have seen the same effect in many of the non-degreed individuals but the data didn't separate them. More degrees, more of the careful people move from the non-degreed pool to the degreed pool and the gap between the pools rises. There's also the factor that simply getting a degree screens out many of the people that engaged in such behaviors.
- rayiner 9mo agoI think that's basically correct, but you don't even have to put it in quite those terms. Life expectancy measures are dominated by early deaths. The group of people without a college degree probably includes most of those who are likely to die early (teen moms, structurally unemployed, lumberjacks or electrical linemen, etc.) It also includes a bunch of people without those risk factors (administrative assistants, etc). So as more of the latter group get a degree, the high-risk population comprises a greater and greater share of the group without a degree.