7 ms·

Dan Ariely: At $61K a Year, College Is a Bargain

33 points by msg 13y ago

adamnemecek 13y ago
Nice straw-man there, Dan Ariely.
- Kylekramer 13y ago
  I'm not seeing the strawman? Plenty of people are claiming the cost of university is more than its worth. Ariely is offering a counterpoint. Others argue that education is a right, but he isn't addressing that in this case.
  - adamnemecek 13y ago
    We'll he's saying that the price is right for a '24-hour-a-day college experience' but seems to imply that that is the only alternative to community colleges.
  - freshhawk 13y ago
    I think the straw man is re-framing the "college is too expensive compared to what how it benefits your life later on and compared to how expensive it obviously could be (tuition prices outpacing inflation by extreme amounts over the last 25 years show this)" to be "college is too expensive compared to the cost of the services provided while you are there". I don't know that I'd call it a strawman myself, but I like Ariely's writing so I'm biased. It's certainly not quite the same issue as the one being debated currently.
  - robobro 13y ago
    And hello, sockpuppet.
akkartik 13y ago
His opinions in the interview are much more nuanced than the linkbait title suggests. A better title would be, "Dan Ariely says nice things about College, but in the end he's still doubling down on MOOCs." http://danariely.com/tag/mooc http://danariely.com/tag/mooc
- aet 13y ago
  I'm not seeing the double down on MOOCs. Seems like he is still differentiating between the 4-year experience and the online experience.
- msg 13y ago
  I think the headline is a fair cop, especially because the first question right out of the gate is, is $61K for a year of Cornell too expensive? Ariely says "It's too cheap," and goes on from there about the value of in-person education vs online education. He conducted an experiment on his students and found that the more in-person one of his lectures was, the better their subjective experience was. That said, he is in a very interesting position to explore both sides of the question. It's not too hard to project out into the future and believe university education could finally change in your lifetime. But the people who are in the trenches actually gathering data have the most to say right now.
  - brandoncapecci 13y ago
    Being a student is a essentially a full-time job which one is compensated a negative amount. A reasonable alternative opens up the possibility to get compensated in a positive amount. In terms of just programming, you get might get a job for 60k conservatively and suddenly the difference becomes 120k... every year... for at least 4 years. Teaching oneself the theoretical foundations online is still harder than with a professor but the former was never intended to be a direct alternative so the comparison seems as meaningless as it is obvious. Considering someone with 4 years industry experience almost certainly fares far better on an engineering team than most undergraduate CS majors with a summer internship, the economics of the "in-person experience" just doesn't add up. As someone who left school, the reason I only dabble in online education rather than take it as seriously as a student might is because I have more important shit to do.
    - aet 13y ago
      $60k out of high school? Guess the recession is over. (Median household income in the U.S. is roughly $50k)
dustcoin 13y ago
I was expecting something along the lines of this data: http://www.payscale.com/college-education-value-2013 http://www.payscale.com/college-education-value-2013 College continues to provide good value to anyone who anyone who is careful selecting a school and major.
- EpicEng 13y ago
  I'd like to see a list like that broken down by major. Using averages is such a bad metric, the standard deviation is almost certainly huge.
  - enraged_camel 13y ago
    Median would be a lot more interesting.
  - winslow 13y ago
    You can view the data broken down my major per school once you click on the school.
- nimble 13y ago
  Under methodology: """ Return from Attending College: The main financial benefit of attending college is the gain in income received by a college graduate over a high school graduate. However, by choosing to attend college, one is giving up 4-6 years of income one could have received if one went straight to work after high school. Therefore, we calculate the gain in median pay over a high school graduate (Earnings Differential) as the difference between the 30 Year Median Pay for a 2012 Bachelor's Graduate and Weighted 34-36 Year Median Pay for a High School. """ Unfortunately, they fail to take into account that the people who go to college probably would have been more successful anyway.
  - EpicEng 13y ago
    Unfortunately, they fail to take into account that the people who go to college probably would have been more successful anyway. Eh... I don't know about that. We hammer the "you must go to college to be successful" mentality into every kid these days. A lot of people are going to college these days, and many of those people would be better served pursuing a career in skilled trade IMO.
gojomo 13y ago
Private-university Professor Dan Ariely.
- achompas 13y ago
  Downvoting because this comment adds zero. Read the article. He also teaches a MOOC and has a much more nuanced view than "college is worth it b/c it pays my bills."
  - gojomo 13y ago
    Adds nothing? The article doesn't directly mention Ariely's academic appointments at high-tuition universities Duke and MIT! He's just "behavioral psychologist and good friend of Making Sense" and someone who's taught a MOOC. That selective reporting could make a casual reader think his assessment is being offered against-financial-interest. "Pay for college, not the MOOCs like I've taught!" But quite to the contrary, suggesting people spend $61K/year on a prestigious university is strongly aligned with Ariely's unmentioned (although easy to find and well-known) professional affiliations and paychecks. I don't think this disqualifies his analysis – he's got obvious expertise as both as a MOOC teacher and part of the university system, and I've enjoyed his writing and research. But it's definitely relevant, when it's left out of the story/headline. When delivering a pro-high-tuition-college message, in addition to whatever other insight he brings, he's also a pitchman for the institutions that employ him. Or for comparison, if someone reported, "popular author reports that Apple iOS devices are definitely worth the price premium", wouldn't the fact that the author also worked for Apple be a relevant thing to know?
    - robotresearcher 13y ago
      Is this the same Duke and MIT that are vastly oversubscribed? And he has tenure? There is almost nothing he can say in this context that affects his compensation, his status at the university, or the demand for Duke degrees. That's what tenure is for, and that's a key benefit of elite universities. Faculty can speak very freely. However cynical your stance, there is a real difference between the Apple employee and tenured Duke professor. If this were not the case, people like Noam Chomsky would not survive to contribute as they do.
omarkatzen 13y ago
College is like white horses or expensive sports or boats. It's a positional good into which the wealthy will sink endless resources. The essential cost of a college education is not very high. However, increasing the price of the degree can also increase the perceived value of it, since what people really want (they won't say it, it's not socially acceptable) is access to a higher social class.
- klochner 13y ago
  If you read the article, he argues that the essential cost is high given the services provided: housing, healthcare, education, etc. Imagine you're going on vacation for four years. How much would that cost? Right, if you compare that to college, you would say college really is quite cheap. Now, it's an educated vacation; you get lots of things, but the amount of stuff that you're getting is really quite incredible, so the experience is amazing. I don't think it's expensive for what you're getting.
  - robobro 13y ago
    But college shouldn't be going on vacation for four years. It should be lectures, essays, reading, and exams. All this is not too expensive to supply. I'm sure you think the high prices on textbooks and medicine are well deserved too?
auctiontheory 13y ago
Dan's MOOC class was outstanding - better than most classes I took at Berkeley or Yale. I do think that he tends to idealize and romanticize the "traditional" 4-year US college experience, which he did not himself have.
dpweb 13y ago
The important question is not if the real live college experience is much more valuable than an online course (it is), or if a college graduate income over their lifetime is higher than a non-grad (it is). Pretending that college-grad income levels compared to non-grads is a meaningful measurement (obviously a number of factors goes into ones income, most of them psychological) - over the last 20 years - what has happened to the ratio of college expense to increased income over a lifetime. That trend line is one important measure of opportunity. So in this regard the student of 20 years ago was better off. The costs have skyrocketed in the US in a truly immoral way. Combine that with the current practice of mortgaging your entire future with ridiculous loan amounts, it is an absolute disgrace.
Jormundir 13y ago
Dan's arguments aren't very meaningful to me, precisely because I went to college and my experience was not the one he promotes college to be. The vast majority of the classes I took were taught by GTFs (Graduate Teaching Fellows -- graduate students) rather than any kind of professor, adjunct professor, associate professor, or teacher. They followed a strict curriculum and "deep conversations" were a very rare occurrence. I was actually only taught by a full professor in 2 classes. The majority of the classes I took were required general education fulfillers, again taught by graduate students, and not subjects I was interested in (read: homework grind). There were tons and tons of facilities, athletics, teams, etc. I participated in a lot of teams and loved them, but I probably only took part in 1% of what the college as a whole offered. At the college I went, the average professor makes $91,000 a year. The average administrator salary was $286,000. I agree with Dan that college provides enormous value, but It also comes with enormous waste. When people talk about the outrageous cost of higher education, it is because so little of the tuition money goes towards the actual education, and the few activities a student participates in, and a huge amount goes towards giant administrative fees, unnecessary facility fees, research employees who do not benefit undergraduate students, etc. Is college extremely valuable? Of course. Is the already high and increasing price justified? I don't think so at all. Are MOOCs the answer? Not with the experience and engagement level they currently have. I see college as not worth the cost due to problems of bureaucracy and financial models. MOOCs have a much better model of precision education -- you get to learn what you want to learn, and don't have to support the stuff you don't use. Though they are certainly grappling with huge problems of engagement, and the experience is terribly incomplete due to the lack of physical peers and extra-curricular activities.
- encoderer 13y ago
  "When people talk about the outrageous cost of higher education, it is because so little of the tuition money goes towards the actual education, and the few activities a student participates in, and a huge amount goes towards giant administrative fees, unnecessary facility fees, research employees who do not benefit undergraduate students, " ...Wondering if this is actually true or just something you can say because it seems right enough. Have you done any actual research into this?
cgarvis 13y ago
"Of a million MOOC users, the study found that only an average of half of those registered for a course ever viewed an online lecture for that course. And only 4 percent ever completed the course." I wish I could get 4% of all my visitors to convert!
- jacalata 13y ago
  That's not 4% of visitors, that's 4% of people who went through your signup process.
squirejons 13y ago
insanity...but I guess it is not without precedent. In decades past the elite used propaganda to convince young men to go to war and lay down their lives for nothing. I guess it is easier to convince young people today to go into heavy debt for a degree that has little worth. At least it is easier than convincing them to die for nothing.
hawkharris 13y ago
Many other HN users have raised this point about similar articles, but it bears repeating: We can't put too much emphasis on completion rates as a metric for evaluating online courses. After all, the cost of entry (in terms of time and energy as well as money) is usually significantly lower than that of registering for an in-person college course. For as long as this is the case, online courses will have a significantly lower completion rate. I'm not saying they don't have other serious problems — only that completion rates shouldn't be at the forefront of our criticism.
- Jormundir 13y ago
  Exactly. It's comparing apples and oranges. Investment in going to college: 12-14 years of school getting good grades along the way, SATs and then $20,000-$70,000 a year. Investment in a MOOC: one button click.
stefan_kendall 13y ago
Most of my graduated friends have service jobs, or at best, low paying career related jobs. Learning to weld is more valuable than college for many people. The most valuable thing I did in college was work on my own projects and work an internship. I had my degree delivered to my parents house. It's in a drawer somewhere for their sentimental value. It represents lost years of my life.

33 points by msg 13y ago

adamnemecek 13y ago

Nice straw-man there, Dan Ariely.

Kylekramer 13y ago
I'm not seeing the strawman? Plenty of people are claiming the cost of university is more than its worth. Ariely is offering a counterpoint. Others argue that education is a right, but he isn't addressing that in this case.
- adamnemecek 13y ago
  We'll he's saying that the price is right for a '24-hour-a-day college experience' but seems to imply that that is the only alternative to community colleges.
- freshhawk 13y ago
  I think the straw man is re-framing the "college is too expensive compared to what how it benefits your life later on and compared to how expensive it obviously could be (tuition prices outpacing inflation by extreme amounts over the last 25 years show this)" to be "college is too expensive compared to the cost of the services provided while you are there". I don't know that I'd call it a strawman myself, but I like Ariely's writing so I'm biased. It's certainly not quite the same issue as the one being debated currently.
- robobro 13y ago
  And hello, sockpuppet.

akkartik 13y ago

His opinions in the interview are much more nuanced than the linkbait title suggests. A better title would be, "Dan Ariely says nice things about College, but in the end he's still doubling down on MOOCs." http://danariely.com/tag/mooc http://danariely.com/tag/mooc

aet 13y ago
I'm not seeing the double down on MOOCs. Seems like he is still differentiating between the 4-year experience and the online experience.
msg 13y ago
I think the headline is a fair cop, especially because the first question right out of the gate is, is $61K for a year of Cornell too expensive? Ariely says "It's too cheap," and goes on from there about the value of in-person education vs online education. He conducted an experiment on his students and found that the more in-person one of his lectures was, the better their subjective experience was. That said, he is in a very interesting position to explore both sides of the question. It's not too hard to project out into the future and believe university education could finally change in your lifetime. But the people who are in the trenches actually gathering data have the most to say right now.
- brandoncapecci 13y ago
  Being a student is a essentially a full-time job which one is compensated a negative amount. A reasonable alternative opens up the possibility to get compensated in a positive amount. In terms of just programming, you get might get a job for 60k conservatively and suddenly the difference becomes 120k... every year... for at least 4 years. Teaching oneself the theoretical foundations online is still harder than with a professor but the former was never intended to be a direct alternative so the comparison seems as meaningless as it is obvious. Considering someone with 4 years industry experience almost certainly fares far better on an engineering team than most undergraduate CS majors with a summer internship, the economics of the "in-person experience" just doesn't add up. As someone who left school, the reason I only dabble in online education rather than take it as seriously as a student might is because I have more important shit to do.
  - aet 13y ago
    $60k out of high school? Guess the recession is over. (Median household income in the U.S. is roughly $50k)

dustcoin 13y ago

I was expecting something along the lines of this data: http://www.payscale.com/college-education-value-2013 http://www.payscale.com/college-education-value-2013 College continues to provide good value to anyone who anyone who is careful selecting a school and major.

EpicEng 13y ago
I'd like to see a list like that broken down by major. Using averages is such a bad metric, the standard deviation is almost certainly huge.
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  Median would be a lot more interesting.
- winslow 13y ago
  You can view the data broken down my major per school once you click on the school.
nimble 13y ago
Under methodology: """ Return from Attending College: The main financial benefit of attending college is the gain in income received by a college graduate over a high school graduate. However, by choosing to attend college, one is giving up 4-6 years of income one could have received if one went straight to work after high school. Therefore, we calculate the gain in median pay over a high school graduate (Earnings Differential) as the difference between the 30 Year Median Pay for a 2012 Bachelor's Graduate and Weighted 34-36 Year Median Pay for a High School. """ Unfortunately, they fail to take into account that the people who go to college probably would have been more successful anyway.
- EpicEng 13y ago
  Unfortunately, they fail to take into account that the people who go to college probably would have been more successful anyway. Eh... I don't know about that. We hammer the "you must go to college to be successful" mentality into every kid these days. A lot of people are going to college these days, and many of those people would be better served pursuing a career in skilled trade IMO.

gojomo 13y ago

Private-university Professor Dan Ariely.

achompas 13y ago
Downvoting because this comment adds zero. Read the article. He also teaches a MOOC and has a much more nuanced view than "college is worth it b/c it pays my bills."
- gojomo 13y ago
  Adds nothing? The article doesn't directly mention Ariely's academic appointments at high-tuition universities Duke and MIT! He's just "behavioral psychologist and good friend of Making Sense" and someone who's taught a MOOC. That selective reporting could make a casual reader think his assessment is being offered against-financial-interest. "Pay for college, not the MOOCs like I've taught!" But quite to the contrary, suggesting people spend $61K/year on a prestigious university is strongly aligned with Ariely's unmentioned (although easy to find and well-known) professional affiliations and paychecks. I don't think this disqualifies his analysis – he's got obvious expertise as both as a MOOC teacher and part of the university system, and I've enjoyed his writing and research. But it's definitely relevant, when it's left out of the story/headline. When delivering a pro-high-tuition-college message, in addition to whatever other insight he brings, he's also a pitchman for the institutions that employ him. Or for comparison, if someone reported, "popular author reports that Apple iOS devices are definitely worth the price premium", wouldn't the fact that the author also worked for Apple be a relevant thing to know?
  - robotresearcher 13y ago
    Is this the same Duke and MIT that are vastly oversubscribed? And he has tenure? There is almost nothing he can say in this context that affects his compensation, his status at the university, or the demand for Duke degrees. That's what tenure is for, and that's a key benefit of elite universities. Faculty can speak very freely. However cynical your stance, there is a real difference between the Apple employee and tenured Duke professor. If this were not the case, people like Noam Chomsky would not survive to contribute as they do.

omarkatzen 13y ago

College is like white horses or expensive sports or boats. It's a positional good into which the wealthy will sink endless resources. The essential cost of a college education is not very high. However, increasing the price of the degree can also increase the perceived value of it, since what people really want (they won't say it, it's not socially acceptable) is access to a higher social class.

klochner 13y ago
If you read the article, he argues that the essential cost is high given the services provided: housing, healthcare, education, etc. Imagine you're going on vacation for four years. How much would that cost? Right, if you compare that to college, you would say college really is quite cheap. Now, it's an educated vacation; you get lots of things, but the amount of stuff that you're getting is really quite incredible, so the experience is amazing. I don't think it's expensive for what you're getting.
- robobro 13y ago
  But college shouldn't be going on vacation for four years. It should be lectures, essays, reading, and exams. All this is not too expensive to supply. I'm sure you think the high prices on textbooks and medicine are well deserved too?

auctiontheory 13y ago

Dan's MOOC class was outstanding - better than most classes I took at Berkeley or Yale. I do think that he tends to idealize and romanticize the "traditional" 4-year US college experience, which he did not himself have.

dpweb 13y ago

The important question is not if the real live college experience is much more valuable than an online course (it is), or if a college graduate income over their lifetime is higher than a non-grad (it is). Pretending that college-grad income levels compared to non-grads is a meaningful measurement (obviously a number of factors goes into ones income, most of them psychological) - over the last 20 years - what has happened to the ratio of college expense to increased income over a lifetime. That trend line is one important measure of opportunity. So in this regard the student of 20 years ago was better off. The costs have skyrocketed in the US in a truly immoral way. Combine that with the current practice of mortgaging your entire future with ridiculous loan amounts, it is an absolute disgrace.

Jormundir 13y ago

Dan's arguments aren't very meaningful to me, precisely because I went to college and my experience was not the one he promotes college to be. The vast majority of the classes I took were taught by GTFs (Graduate Teaching Fellows -- graduate students) rather than any kind of professor, adjunct professor, associate professor, or teacher. They followed a strict curriculum and "deep conversations" were a very rare occurrence. I was actually only taught by a full professor in 2 classes. The majority of the classes I took were required general education fulfillers, again taught by graduate students, and not subjects I was interested in (read: homework grind). There were tons and tons of facilities, athletics, teams, etc. I participated in a lot of teams and loved them, but I probably only took part in 1% of what the college as a whole offered. At the college I went, the average professor makes $91,000 a year. The average administrator salary was $286,000. I agree with Dan that college provides enormous value, but It also comes with enormous waste. When people talk about the outrageous cost of higher education, it is because so little of the tuition money goes towards the actual education, and the few activities a student participates in, and a huge amount goes towards giant administrative fees, unnecessary facility fees, research employees who do not benefit undergraduate students, etc. Is college extremely valuable? Of course. Is the already high and increasing price justified? I don't think so at all. Are MOOCs the answer? Not with the experience and engagement level they currently have. I see college as not worth the cost due to problems of bureaucracy and financial models. MOOCs have a much better model of precision education -- you get to learn what you want to learn, and don't have to support the stuff you don't use. Though they are certainly grappling with huge problems of engagement, and the experience is terribly incomplete due to the lack of physical peers and extra-curricular activities.

encoderer 13y ago
"When people talk about the outrageous cost of higher education, it is because so little of the tuition money goes towards the actual education, and the few activities a student participates in, and a huge amount goes towards giant administrative fees, unnecessary facility fees, research employees who do not benefit undergraduate students, " ...Wondering if this is actually true or just something you can say because it seems right enough. Have you done any actual research into this?

cgarvis 13y ago

"Of a million MOOC users, the study found that only an average of half of those registered for a course ever viewed an online lecture for that course. And only 4 percent ever completed the course." I wish I could get 4% of all my visitors to convert!

jacalata 13y ago
That's not 4% of visitors, that's 4% of people who went through your signup process.

squirejons 13y ago

insanity...but I guess it is not without precedent. In decades past the elite used propaganda to convince young men to go to war and lay down their lives for nothing. I guess it is easier to convince young people today to go into heavy debt for a degree that has little worth. At least it is easier than convincing them to die for nothing.

hawkharris 13y ago

Many other HN users have raised this point about similar articles, but it bears repeating: We can't put too much emphasis on completion rates as a metric for evaluating online courses. After all, the cost of entry (in terms of time and energy as well as money) is usually significantly lower than that of registering for an in-person college course. For as long as this is the case, online courses will have a significantly lower completion rate. I'm not saying they don't have other serious problems — only that completion rates shouldn't be at the forefront of our criticism.

Jormundir 13y ago
Exactly. It's comparing apples and oranges. Investment in going to college: 12-14 years of school getting good grades along the way, SATs and then $20,000-$70,000 a year. Investment in a MOOC: one button click.

stefan_kendall 13y ago

Most of my graduated friends have service jobs, or at best, low paying career related jobs. Learning to weld is more valuable than college for many people. The most valuable thing I did in college was work on my own projects and work an internship. I had my degree delivered to my parents house. It's in a drawer somewhere for their sentimental value. It represents lost years of my life.