There are many students who have a choice between a state school and a private school, or an Ivy League school and a top school near their home, or an engineering degree and an arts degree.
I think a detailed study of career outcomes and cost of schooling is incredibly valuable. Your suit analogy is flawed. Students invest in a program and later earn money in their chosen career. In your suit example, the ignoramus already has a job and then chooses to buy an unnecessary suit.
There are many subtleties to an analysis like this. You mention choice of work experience. I would add that the calculation of lifetime earnings is also suspect since far fewer people went to college 30 years ago than today. But please don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. We should look at studies like this.
Well i think you misunderstood the analogy. let me try to explain a bit.
What he means to say is that a Suit is one thing most high earning people HAVE. But they are not necessarily earning high BECAUSE of the suit. "The suit doesn't make the man". But if hypothetically people were ingrained with the idea that it's the SUIT that sets your value! Then of course things would get out of hand like he said.
Now let's look at college. Most really talented and smart people go to college. And then later they excel in their careers. So what is really the COLLEGE due to which they were awesome? Or just like the suits, was it simply a matter of Highly talented people going to college? Now since all of us have been taught that it's the COLLEGE that makes who you are, the education industry in this weird state.
>Students invest in a program and later earn money in their chosen career
And also they invest in a suit and later earn money when they show up at work wearing it. There are definitely professions in which nobody will take them seriously without a nice business suit. Conversely, I think we can agree that many if not most classes taken in college have little bearing on the eventual job.
I dunno, I would say my web programming, data structures, and algorithms classes have direct application to what I'm doing now. Compilers/software engineering also taught me quite a few design patterns. Graphics taught me about the idiosyncrasies of display systems and using coordinate systems in a complicated way to create complex images or systems of graphical entities. I could go on, but I think most STEM classes have direct application to work in those fields.
I think a detailed study of career outcomes and cost of schooling is incredibly valuable. Your suit analogy is flawed. Students invest in a program and later earn money in their chosen career. In your suit example, the ignoramus already has a job and then chooses to buy an unnecessary suit.
There are many subtleties to an analysis like this. You mention choice of work experience. I would add that the calculation of lifetime earnings is also suspect since far fewer people went to college 30 years ago than today. But please don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. We should look at studies like this.