{"id":2204,"date":"2014-04-04T11:25:51","date_gmt":"2014-04-04T15:25:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cedarsdigest.wordpress.com\/?p=2204"},"modified":"2014-04-04T11:25:51","modified_gmt":"2014-04-04T15:25:51","slug":"thumb-on-the-payscale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/riener.us\/WP\/education\/thumb-on-the-payscale\/","title":{"rendered":"Thumb on the PayScale"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my last post<\/a>, I took issue with the PayScale college rankings, as well as with\u00a0how economics\u00a0reporters\u00a0framed\u00a0these rankings, citing\u00a0their low calculated Return on Investment as evidence that these colleges “make” students poor. Jordan Weissmann has graciously responded<\/a> to my critique. The Senior Vice President from PayScale itself has also responded<\/a>\u00a0in a comment on my post, defending the rankings as useful to high school seniors who later tell him, “I wish I had known this before.” I’m glad for the dialogue, and I think this issue connects to a larger debate on the value of higher education in general, as well as the relative value of different colleges, so I am going to keep the conversation going with a more extensive response.<\/p>\n

Weissmann is not alone in his framing of\u00a0PayScale’s rankings.\u00a0While his headline at Slate reads “Which College Will Make You Poorest?<\/a>”\u00a0Derek Thompson at the Atlantic treads similar ground: “Which College\u2014and Which Major\u2014Will Make You Richest?<\/a>” and later, “These U.S. Colleges and Majors Are the Biggest Waste of Money<\/a>.” Walt Hickey goes with a more straightforward, but still uncritical view at 538: “Study Names Colleges with Best Return on Investment<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

My argument <\/a>was first that salaries from art schools and engineering schools are not directly comparable, since students are not often choosing between Harvey Mudd (#1) and Maryland Institute College of Art (#1301). Chris Chabris mentions this point in his post criticizing 538’s coverage of the rankings<\/a>. Second, I argued that PayScale and many\u00a0journalists who wrote about the rankings, are overstating the role of the college in shaping its students salaries and understating other factors in what determines a students future salary, such as the\u00a0role\u00a0of selective admissions, constraints in the labor market and choices of the\u00a0students themselves. Weissmann acknowledges various limitations (including\u00a0selection bias) of PayScale’s methodology, but he doesn’t see these as reason enough to avoid phrasing like: “Which college will make you poorest?” or “Yes,\u00a0the art school\u00a0really\u00a0is\u00a0making students poorer\u00a0if it delivers a negative ROI.”<\/p>\n

The subhead for Weissmann’s recent defense of ranking colleges based on graduate salaries reads: “Academics might not like it, but schools should be held accountable.” Since I am the only named academic in the article, and my quote is framed as “Like many in higher education…” I can assume that Weissmann sees my criticism as based on my identity as an\u00a0academic. True,\u00a0I am an academic. I do feel solidarity with my fellow providers of\u00a0higher education, whether they be at the University of Virginia (apparently THE best value! Wahoo!) or at arts schools like Maryland College of Art and Design, or Historically Black Colleges and Universities like Shaw<\/a> and Fayetteville State University<\/a>. However, my criticism of this particular set of rankings owes more to my training as a social scientist (and as a psychologist in particular) than to my allegiance with all institutions of higher education. Here’s why:<\/p>\n

Claim a Cause? You’ve Got to Earn It<\/h2>\n

All this writing about salaries reminds me of\u00a0another kind of earnings. When a scientist such as myself reads a headline with a claim that something causes something else, I ask whether the speaker\u00a0has earned the right to make that claim. \u00a0Can the data cash the check that the causal claim makes? A few examples: “Smoking causes cancer,” “miracle diet causes weight loss,” “stress causes ulcers<\/a>,” and “vaccines cause autism.” \u00a0While many educated people\u00a0may start with a skeptical “correlation does not equal causation,” most scientists (especially social scientists) know that not all correlations are created equal,\u00a0some studies are better than others. For a long time, the only good data on the harmful nature of smoking was epidemiological<\/a>: those who smoked tended to have worse health than those who didn’t. Notice the lack of a causal claim, a study might conclude that a heavy smoker is 50 times more likely to develop lung cancer than a non-smoker, but it is still possible that smokers in general lead more stressful lives, exercise less, and have less healthy diets. In this case, rather than causing cancer, smoking is merely another marker of an unhealthy lifestyle. More\u00a0recently studies have narrowed in on the biological mechanisms of smoking’s harmful effects on the body. What is it precisely that causes the harm? Is it the nicotine? the tar? What are the cellular mechanisms of the carninogens in cigarettes? These questions now\u00a0have much more specific\u00a0answers based on carefully controlled experiments, and even though there still seems to be some randomness to the overall pattern of carcinogens causing cancer (yes, some people can smoke for 60 years and not get cancer), we know a lot more about the biochemical effects\u00a0of smoking.<\/p>\n

But even without research into the cellular mechanisms, the epidemiological, correlational research was able to earn its causal claims. One landmark study<\/a> compared British male doctors who smoked with …. British male doctors who did not smoke, and followed them for over 40 years. Keeping many other variables constant, this study still finds incredibly harmful effects of smoking.<\/p>\n

A similar search has been conducted for a connection between vaccines and autism. Many children exhibit the first signs of autism spectrum disorders at around the same time they are vaccinated. Yet this is a misleading correlation. Epidemiological research would seem to be impossible. How can we compare levels of autism in\u00a0non-vaccinators and vaccinators if everyone vaccinates? Except now that the fear has spread, we can. Populations that don’t vaccinate their children have the same incidence of autism as those populations who do vaccinate.<\/a>\u00a0Amazingly enough,\u00a0however, populations who choose not to vaccinate DO\u00a0have higher risk of an outbreak of\u00a0whooping cough<\/a>. A long search has concluded that vaccines do not cause autism, through both epidemiological work, as well as the search for biological mechanisms of harm.<\/p>\n

Which brings us back to PayScale and the economics reporters. Have PayScale and these reporters earned their causal claims?\u00a0Are these rankings actually useful to high school seniors deciding where to go to college, as Barnaby Dornfman<\/a> comments on my previous post, or merely perceived to be?<\/p>\n

I remain deeply skeptical.<\/p>\n

The Median is not the Message*<\/h2>\n
*with apologies to Stephen Jay Gould<\/a><\/h6>\n

There are (at least) three classes\u00a0of factors that could predict\u00a0a high school student’s\u00a0future salary.\u00a0First, a student’s individual characteristics such as\u00a0preferences, abilities, motivation and even demographic variables such as race and gender affect their future salary.\u00a0Second, that person’s education and training of course influence what they earn. This is where college fits in, but it might also include high school preparation as well as out of school\u00a0preparation.\u00a0Third, students future salaries are dependent on the labor market they enter as they leave college. As many unemployed or underemployed PhD’s are now discovering, someone can have great achievements in the other two factors, but if there are few to no jobs, one’s salary is severely constrained. The PayScale rankings understate these factors in comparing salaries of graduates to the median salary for someone who has only a high school diploma.<\/p>\n

The reporters who have covered the rankings, and to a lesser degree, PayScale itself, make two critical errors that undermine their causal claims. First, they gloss over\u00a0the impact of student and labor market factors on salaries. Second, they also understate\u00a0how inseparable colleges are from the students who attend them. The rhetorical effect of the apparently\u00a0straightforward\u00a0reporting on these rankings are a pair of bold pronouncements “Get thee to a college that doth begin with H-A-R-V, and drink thy fill from the trough of increased economic outcomes<\/em>” and “But lo! if thy find thyself in Pellville Directional State University, fly fly away, and become a manager at Ye Olde Chipotle, for thy riches will grow\u00a0more from avoiding useless, expensive learning than from seeking it<\/em>.” The truth is a lot more complicated. Aggregate salaries depend far more on student characteristics present before they enter college and the labor market that they choose to compete in as they exit college, than what differentiates the colleges that choose to admit them.<\/p>\n

There are a few ways to see this in the rankings themselves. I’ll admit that I don’t know much about the Colorado School of Mines<\/a>, but what is making their students rich is not necessarily the school itself, but the students’ decision to become engineers in Colorado (or miners, maybe Clementine’s dad had it right after all!). When PayScale compares their salaries to what a median high school graduate makes, this isn’t the best\u00a0comparison, given that these students have already decided to become engineers, it seems with a focus on energy and environment.\u00a0Likewise, for the number 1 ranked school, (Harvey Mudd), before Harvey Mudd does any educating, it has selected certain students to admit, and some subset (approximately 30%) of those students have made a decision to attend a small engineering school in California. Of these students who choose to attend Harvey Mudd, 14% qualify for Federal Pell Grants and 46% qualify for any federal student loan aid<\/a>. For these students,\u00a0the average total federal student loan aid is around $6,400.\u00a0 I am certain that Harvey Mudd is a fantastic student experience, but I think it is fair to say that\u00a0they enroll a student body that is privileged, motivated, ambitious, and focused on a high salary occupation<\/a> from the moment they arrive on campus. These students have decided\u00a0to become scientists or engineers before they entered Harvey Mudd, and it doesn’t make much sense to compare their return on investment to what the median high school graduate makes.<\/p>\n

Perhaps to defenders of the value of these rankings, they are fine with the advice boiling down to: Want to make more money? Become an engineer, not an artist. Here is hard data on how poor you will be as an artist. Going to college won’t help you if you choose a low paying career.<\/em> As I said before, I am dubious of the value of such advice, although PayScale Senior Vice President Barnaby Dorfman has experienced sending the PayScale rankings to many people who say “I wish I had known!” However, for the I-wish-I-had-known camp to improve economic outcomes by going into engineering, we\u00a0need\u00a0enough engineering jobs to accommodate increased labor supply. But this is not the case.\u00a0There is\u00a0no STEM skills gap<\/a>. There is\u00a0no labor shortage for STEM jobs<\/a>. Perhaps a better way to improve outcomes would be to forgo college altogether, and, as Weissmann suggests, work in a Ford factory or manage a Chipotle. This assumes that the student choosing these jobs instead of college will make greater than the median salary of high school graduates, which Weissmann acknowledges may not be the case, due in part to “weaker skills.” Even though Weissmann and others briefly consider the other flaws in this model of salary prediction, I think it is worth it to drill down deeper.<\/p>\n

The Worst Performers<\/h2>\n

What if we do this kind of analysis for Derek Thompson’s so-called “biggest wastes of money?<\/a>” The students entering these colleges quite often already have a deck stacked against them, and not just in college choice. A student entering Shaw University<\/a>, the oldest historically black college in the South, located in Raleigh, North Carolina,\u00a0is making a hopeful investment in a college education. But comparing their future salary to the median high school graduate does not take into account the racial disparities in our current labor market<\/a>. Further, as Raj Chetty and colleagues have shown, economic mobility is constrained not just by demography of the individual, but by geography<\/a>\u00a0as well. In his testimony submitted<\/a> yesterday to the Senate Budget Committee, Chetty describes one pattern with\u00a0this lack of mobility: “The first pattern we document is that upward income mobility is significantly lower in areas\u00a0with larger African-American populations.” He also notes that if mobility is measured by a child’s\u00a0chances of moving from having parents with the lowest quintile in income (poorest 1\/5th of population) to themselves having upper quintile income, one of the “commuting zones” lowest in intergenerational\u00a0economic mobility? You guessed it, Raleigh, North Carolina with 5%, considerably lower than San Francisco, San Jose and San Diego, California,, all with odds more than twice that. See the map he created below:<\/p>\n

\"Chetty<\/a><\/p>\n

To connect\u00a0geographical mobility to higher education, we must understand how far students are likely to travel for college. \u00a0Most students stay close to home<\/a>. Look closely at this data<\/a> from the ACT. \u00a0The median distance to college (for those who took the ACT) is 51 miles. But if you separate groups by test scores, those who score lowest, stay closest to home. If you score between 1 and 15 on the ACT, the median distance to college is 18 miles. The same pattern can be seen depending on parental characteristics. For students whose\u00a0parents have no college education, the median distance they travel to go to college is 24 miles (parents with graduate degrees? median distance of 95 miles). Poor students are less physically mobile, which is influenced by, and contributes to, their lack of economic mobility.<\/p>\n

Take My Advice, Don’t Try it Twice, if You’ve Got but 50 Cents<\/h2>\n

So the PayScale rankings would have you believe that students should choose higher ranked colleges, instead of those that “make them poor,” like art schools and HBCUs. The advice is not “Don’t be black, because structural racism will still hurt your progress” or “Don’t be poor in the south, because intergenerational economic mobility there is very low” or “don’t find value in art, because your society doesn’t support that,” but rather: “Watch out for these schools, they waste your money!”<\/p>\n

Here is where I notice a difference between what I will call the neoliberal economic approach from a conservative one like Charles Murray’s<\/a>. \u00a0Neoliberals are often confident in the power of greater information to improve equality and efficiency, whereas conservatives are openly\u00a0pessimistic that all students are intellectually capable enough to complete college.\u00a0\u00a0Here’s Charles Murray:<\/a><\/p>\n

So even though college has been dumbed down, it is still too intellectually demanding for a large majority of students, in an age when about 50 percent of all high school graduates are heading to four-year colleges the next fall. The result is lots of failure.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Whereas Weissmann closes his original reporting of the PayScale rankings with this<\/a>:<\/p>\n

But it does reinforce why we so desperately need high-quality consumer information about higher education.\u00a0In the past, the higher-ed lobby has stood in the way of allowing the Department of Education to track college graduates over the long term to keep tabs on their lifetime earnings\u2014what\u2019s known as a \u201cunit-record system.\u201d And as a result, we have to rely on less complete government surveys, or less-than-ideal crowdsourced databases like Payscale’s. As a result, some students are going into college financially blind, and they could be ending up poorer for it\u2014literally<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Notice another causal claim: the lack of data is what is causing students to go into college financially blind. What goes unsaid here is that if better data existed, then students and their parents would view that data and incorporate it into their model of how college works. Then, armed with better financial vision, they would made better financial decisions. This same confidence underlies the concern about undermatching, in which high achieving poor students choose to attend lower status institutions, when they would apparently have better outcomes at a wealthier, more\u00a0prestigious college. This is a topic I have written about here<\/a> and here<\/a>.\u00a0Sara Mayeux makes some excellent points <\/a>about Yale’s tone-deaf and misguided efforts to address undermatching.<\/p>\n

A\u00a0common theme across the educational spectrum emerges. Yes,\u00a0economic inequality has grown<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>and\u00a0states continue to disinvest in higher education<\/a>, but a\u00a0cheap, easy and effective way of improving students’ economic\u00a0situation is through educating people who experience low workforce success\u00a0(i.e. poor people)\u00a0to help them make more informed decisions. The implication is clear:\u00a0Low performing schools (whether colleges or urban public schools) don’t need resources, they need to be held accountable. Low performing graduates and their parents don’t need better economic\u00a0opportunities<\/a>, they need better data. Graduates of HBCUs don’t need laws and policies to counteract the persistent effects of racist housing\u00a0programs<\/a>, racist tax policy<\/a>, racist hiring practices<\/a>, racist underfunding<\/a>\u00a0of public K-12\u00a0schools,\u00a0they need bourgious norms<\/a>, invigorating moral culture<\/a>,\u00a0and better salary data. Apparently these students should be informed that an HBCU, which may once have been a proud part of familial identity, a\u00a0cause of pride<\/a>\u00a0in black scholarship, a shining beacon of advancement through higher education<\/a>, well, now big data\u00a0science shows it\u00a0offers a low ROI. Prospective\u00a0students should be advised to go to a better school, or an engineering school, or work at a factory instead.<\/p>\n

I know that Weissmann, PayScale, and everyone involved in this debate wants a better system of higher education in these United States of America. We all should want, to paraphrase Lincoln, a higher education system\u00a0of the students, for the students, and chosen by the students. One that is accountable to the students. But in search of this goal, they are willing to forgive imperfections of their scale, convinced of the desperate need for accountability. But as a psychologist well versed\u00a0in some of the shameful consequences of imperfect scales<\/a> in psychology’s past, I am skeptical. Instead of progress and accountability, I see such rankings of colleges based on assumptions of\u00a0privilege and status,\u00a0devised by\u00a0privileged tech boom\u00a0MBA’s,<\/a> for the software and energy engineers. I see this scale as one that does not\u00a0encourage accountability, but merely reflects existing social inequities and\u00a0blames society’s economic losers, just as existing social\u00a0policies make their fates increasingly unavoidable. Don’t tell me you are holding colleges accountable<\/a>, while holding your thumb on the scale.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my last post, I took issue with the PayScale college rankings, as well as with\u00a0how economics\u00a0reporters\u00a0framed\u00a0these rankings, citing\u00a0their low calculated Return on Investment as evidence that these colleges “make” students poor. Jordan Weissmann has graciously responded to my critique. The Senior Vice President from PayScale itself has also responded\u00a0in a comment on my post,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,95,32,7],"tags":[46,119,5,120],"class_list":["post-2204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-highered-2","category-psychology","category-science","tag-college","tag-college-rankings","tag-highered","tag-payscale"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Pqh9-zy","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/riener.us\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/riener.us\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/riener.us\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riener.us\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riener.us\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/riener.us\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2204\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/riener.us\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riener.us\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riener.us\/WP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}