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Narratives

While generally agreeing with “Dubious” that it is easy to overstate the economic promise a degree confers, it is at least generally true that having a degree is very important today in a way it wasn’t 30 years ago when the manufacturing sector was still strong.

I think the bigger question I would have about the data is the impact of the west coast’s (and specifically Cali’s) non-traditional economy.

Moreso than in the white-collar swaths of the east (who are the ones sending their kids to Ivy League schools predominately), it’s not unusual for college educated folks in this region to be “creatively self-employed.” Working at another traditionally “liberal” public institution west of the rockies, we attract students whose parents aren’t working a 9-5 job and qualify for Pell, even in cases where we know the family has money.

Make jokes about the Humboldt County economy (even more after seeing the movie), or San Francisco artists all you like, but many of those parents are college educated and just are finding a way to get by without regular “income,” or certainly without income that gets reported to the IRS anyway. Many of them have trust funds to tap into when needed, some just are living lower-expense “alternative” lifestyles.

Young people in this category often get called “Trustafarians.” Parents of college-age students are perhaps just “aging hippies.”

Either way, you would need more data to show that this particular phenomenon challenges the saw about the value of higher ed. If anything, the data might support that there is something to the value of a higher education nationally, with just a large asterisk about California (and the rest of the west to a lesser extent).

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle — college has some value for many students. But talking about the median/mean/mode value of a degree does mislead many who haven’t thought farther down the road than just obtaining any degree they can get their hands on.

lcl, at 3:45 pm EDT on September 30, 2008