Eric Schmidt on Critics Who Say College Isn’t Worth It

http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/16/googles-eric-schmidt-on-critics-who-say-college-isnt-worth-it-theyre-just-wrong/

by ugwigr • 12 years ago

48 88 12 years ago

Aqueous• 12 years ago

Thankfully we have another, wiser tech giant to push back against the bad advice of Thiel and Altucher, who seem to think that what happened to them - effectively, winning the lottery, even if they are talented - ought to happen to everybody.

gress2• 12 years ago

The argument against college is that it too has become a lottery rather than an investment, one with an unacceptably high ticket price.

I'd like to see the distinction made between the historical increase in earnings resulting from a college degree, and the projected increase.

snowwrestler5• 12 years ago

I don't know of any data indicating that college "has become a lottery."

Life is a lottery; no one is guaranteed health, let alone financial stability or success. College is part of life so it can't guarantee success either.

But in every study I've seen, people who complete college are more likely to achieve financial stability than those who do not. So, if it is a lottery, it's one that is biased toward the student.

commandar• 12 years ago

This is where it falls apart, in my opinion:

Schmidt vehemently disagrees. “The economic return to higher education over a lifetime produces significant compound greater earnings.” It’s true, on average, economists find that college raises wages by about 15-30 percent. Despite the debt, it’s a wise investment for many students.
When asked about the difficulty in paying for college, Schmidt was adamant: “I appreciate it’s expensive and we need to fix that,” he said, but “figure out a way to do it.”

College is expensive because we tell kids that it's going to be this huge windfall so people "figure out a way to do it." The problem is that it's a correlation/causation argument that's turned into an out-of-control feedback loop.

College graduates traditionally earned far more because fields that needed a degree were higher-earning. College degrees are absolutely useful for some fields, and, in fact, I lean toward the argument against college being weaker for the more technical fields like typically get discussed here.

But the real problem is that we've been telling kids that the only way to do anything with your life is by going to get a four year degree, and as a result we have more graduates and employers are starting to require four year degrees for jobs that have traditionally -- and should be -- vocational in nature.

As a society, I think it's absolutely insane to expect these sorts of jobs to suddenly begin creating more value, and thus have higher compensation, simply because the person working it has more outside education.

My stance is that we need to sort this out now before it gets any worse. We need to destigmatize vocational education. We need to realize that while some form of higher education is almost always a good thing, a four year degree is complete overkill for many.

srl• 12 years ago

We need to destigmatize vocational education.

This is a little off-topic, but back in high school, there was a vocational education program clearly considered to be somewhat remedial, tailored for those who had no hope of going to college or otherwise having much success. (Poor minorities, in other words.) Students would spend about half their time in this program, and half their time with the rest of the school. I was not in it, but I eventually learned that the brightest students in many of my classes were in this program. Stigmatized as it was, it worked, and quite well. In fact, it was probably better preparation for college than the regular-track courses (which were actually meant for people who might go to college).

I don't pay much attention to education policy (one can't spend time on everything), so I'm not too sure what lessons ought to be drawn from this.

danielweber3• 12 years ago

Schmidt really needs to segment out that "average" rise of 15 to 30 percent.

1. A few fields clearly need education, like medicine or law. Break those out separately.

2. Getting admitted and graduating from college is a strong signal of your employability. Even if college adds absolutely nothing to your skillset, it can increase your value. (Think of getting a perfect score on the SAT.)

3. Being able to put off earning for 4 years is partly a signal of your socioeconomic status.

4. It ignores the people who try to attend college and fail. They are left with debt, the opportunity cost of wages for their time in, and no degree to show to employers.

This is separate from the fact that as we have pushed more people to get better degrees, employers have simply increased their job requirements, so you need a college degree to be an office manager. A credential race is a zero-sum game for society as a whole.

dreamdu5t2• 12 years ago

I didn't graduate high school or college. I make plenty of money and have a great career. I just got lucky, huh? Rolled the dice and had my life created for me. Did school teach you this false dichotomy?

res0nat0r2• 12 years ago

The point is, on average you will fare better with a college degree than without. If you pick 18th century Russian literature as your degree, well that's a different story...

glesica5• 12 years ago

So you have a sample size of one and you think you can draw conclusions from that? Sounds like maybe you should have gone college, or at least taken a stats class on Coursera... ;)

Literally no one reasonable is saying that it is impossible to be successful without college, that is clearly false. What they are saying is that it is more likely that someone will be successful if they attend college. For every Gates or Zuckerberg there are 100,000 kids who didn't, or couldn't, go to college and regretted it.

And yes, I am quite certain that you did get lucky. That is not to say that you didn't work your ass off, or that you aren't extremely smart and clever, but you almost certainly also got lucky in some ways, just like the rest of us.

randomdata2• 12 years ago

Something else to consider: I'm not sure about the data from the USA, but in Canada, the university enrolment rate is 50%, but the graduation rate is closer to 25%. It is clear you can push large segments of the population into college, but that doesn't mean they will be successful at it. Is that still a gain for the individual and society?

knappador• 12 years ago

If you want to use Google scholar to its fullest, go to college campus.

RexRollman• 12 years ago

The problem isn't that college isn't worth doing, it's just too fucking expensive. The amount of debt we are asking people to assume is simply too great.

bane4• 12 years ago

College isn't all that expensive. Private and out of state college is. There's a prejudice that you have to go to Stanford or Harvard or whatever to do well in life, and places like Google have perpetuated this problem for a long time by not only just hiring people who went to the more expensive options, they've only done job fairs and hiring outreach at these places. It's a vicious cycle.

So people who could be spending $40k on their local state university are spending $200k just to get a crack at a place like Google. $40k over 4 years is not that much, and the earning potential of people after that more than makes up for it.

And then guess what? Google, in a moment of stark reflection, looks at the data and realizes that the performance of the few folks who went to the cheaper school and still managed to get hired is about the same as the folks who sold a kidney to get through <preferred tier-1 school>.

This image, that you need to get into a top-20 school to make it in life perpetuates all the way down into high school and it needs to stop. Kids need to focus on just getting into college, not getting into an Ivy League school, and companies need to start hiring from the local state universities, not just the approved list of top schools the founders went to.

jiggy20113• 12 years ago

But if the founders/companies are selecting for people from top schools, regardless of whether or not that is rational in itself then it still makes sense for students to try and go to top schools.

mjn2• 12 years ago

I agree with your general point, but Stanford and Harvard in particular aren't great examples, because for many people they're considerably cheaper than public universities, if you can get in. Both schools have pretty generous tuition reductions, all the way down to fully waiving tuition plus paying you a stipend for living expenses, if your family makes below about the 60th percentile of household incomes. Even up to about the 80th percentile they may still come out cheaper than a public university. Harvard has a sliding scale between 60th-90th percentile, where 60th percentile pays nothing, and 90th percentile ($150k/yr) pays the full "sticker price" tuition.

The schools that are really expensive for people from the middle-ish of the income distribution are the private schools that don't have as lavish endowments as Stanford and Harvard do, who therefore offer much less generous reductions, generally only need-based aid to considerably poorer people, not circa-median-income people.

wudf• 12 years ago

On the spectrum of college students, the lower economic end is where the viability of such expensive higher education comes into question. Statistics describing the entire population do not support an argument relating to this subset. Not only that, but the closing strawman of "all you care about" is unrealistic. If only it were as simple as deciding to "Go to college" then I don't think this discussion would be taking place. Eric Schmidt's words are great for those who do have a choice, but to everyone else, he's out of touch.

mbrameld• 12 years ago

Are there any studies available on the difference in career earnings of grads vs non-grads in the same career? I don't doubt that a random college graduate earns 30% more over their lifetime than a random non-college graduate, but what about a random software developer with a degree vs one without?

svenkatesh• 12 years ago

what about a random software developer with a degree vs one without?

Maybe I'm misinterpreting your question, but the way you phrased it, there's already some survivorship bias -- the ones who don't have a degree but got a job have been through some sort of selection filter; this ignores people who don't have a degree but want to get a job in programming.

randomdata2• 12 years ago

Degrees come with their own survivorship bias. Every level of the education system seeks to filter out those who are less capable in certain areas. This makes the "college graduates earn 30% more" meaningless, because most people are not capable of succeeding in college in the first place, and whatever causes that probably also prevents them from succeeding in the workplace, statistically speaking.

I think where the parent was going is, if you took two people who are equal in every single way, except for one acquiring a college degree, how would their lifetime earnings differ?

toomuchtodo3• 12 years ago

the ones who don't have a degree but got a job have been through some sort of selection filter

Very true. Its all about signaling (hence "or equivalent experience" although I believe that to be bullshit; each year of experience should count as 2-3 years in school).

I have no college education, and dropped out of high school in 1999/2000 to pursue my career. I had to sell myself hard to get in the door, but once there, I've never been asked for a degree after my first job (junior admin->senior admin->built/sold webhosting company->managed hosting division for consulting company->data taking for LHC->director of technology->news network startup).

I don't think I'll see it in my lifetime where companies value experience more than a piece of paper when the amount of experience is <5 years. The whole education process, at least for the technology field, should be revamped towards apprenticeship.

mgkimsal• 12 years ago

Would be interesting to see one, but my own view is that geography may play a bigger role.

I know people without any college degree at all making > $80k in software (in lower COL areas), and others with degrees making anywhere from $50k - > $100k.

There are probably some correlations, but income seems pretty decoupled from college degree in the software field (moreso than in other fields). Pure anecdotal observations though.

snowwrestler5• 12 years ago

What makes you think people will hold the same career their entire lives? Or that that is even a desirable goal?

A major advantage of college is that it teaches people how to learn, analyze, and reason generally--skills which make it easier for them to change careers later in life.

hooda• 12 years ago

Eric might think that college is worth it but the guys who are running those colleges (Deans) think otherwise.

=> UC Berkeley B-School Dean:"Half of the business schools in this country could be out of business in 10 years - or five. Source: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-03-14/online-progr...

Problems with college is not only HIGH college tuition fees but also number of years wasted in the institution. If you are 'self motivated learner' then you can learn on web. This is especially true for software courses. Other courses like electrical and mechanical engineering might -still- need college education as colleges have requisite infrastructure for those fields.

leoc3• 12 years ago

Postgraduate courses like (US) law school and business school are much further gone though; undergraduate ones aren't as bad, yet at least. If Eric Schmidt had said that law school was worth it I think his audience might have been incapacitated with laughter.

jokoon2• 12 years ago

The real answer is not so simple.

Overall, for society, it's always better to have an education.

But if the price goes up, it means you won't get the education you might want, so you'll get something less expensive, but if you go for it, it's hard to say that might suit you, and if it doesn't, you will lose interest and drop out.

It's always better to keep on, but if you get an education because of economic pressure, it has its ups and downs. It fulfills the concept of supply and demand, but not your dreams.

I don't think education, like healthcare, should be applied the principles of a market. And again, education is a very tricky social problem to solve.

You want it, but it's not distributed in the best fashion.

nilved• 12 years ago

Education and college aren't synonymous. People are learning to avoid college because it's just one inefficient method of education: it requires a large investment of time, a monumental investment of cash, and very often doesn't provide satisfactory instruction. You're not asking me, but I would say that contemporary colleges are less about education and more about unloading debt on students.

adamors• 12 years ago

Education and college aren't synonymous

Especially now, when you can cover a lot of ground on your own. As a programmer at least. And I'm not even talking about MOOCs, but other resources that are available to a lot of people for either free or for a fraction of the price.

jokoon2• 12 years ago

So I guess the root problem is that we need more skills in our society, so we need college to teach those things.

That's becoming truer in the last decades.

sunseb• 12 years ago

More and more colleges provide MOOCs : massive open online courses. It could be a good free alternative to college : just pick courses you are interested to and build a portfolio of certifications.

https://www.coursera.org/ https://www.edx.org/ http://moocs.epfl.ch/ (here we can find a good Scala course, the teacher is the language creator himself)

dragonwriter• 12 years ago

More and more colleges provide MOOCs : massive open online courses. It could be a good free alternative to college : just pick courses you are interested to and build a portfolio of certifications.

Except actual certifications attached to MOOCs generally aren't free.

gkoberger3• 12 years ago

I once spoke at a conference for teens, where I was literally the only pro-college speaker. My original talk wasn't even about college; I made up a talk on the spot after hearing how anti-college everyone else was. Some speakers were even advocating dropping out of High School (!?!?) to work on your startup.

Sure, Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg/etc didn't graduate college. However, you have to remember three important facts: they all at least started college, they all stayed until they had an insane success on their hands and they all met (or at least worked with) their cofounders in college.

College isn't for everyone, and it's definitely a broken system. However, it's about more than just about the classes -- spending 4 years on a campus with thousands of other young people who are all there to learn and explore is transformative. You don't get that once you hit the real world.

zavi• 12 years ago

spending 4 years on a campus with thousands of other young people who are all there to learn and explore is transformative. You don't get that once you hit the real world.

It depends on the school. Most colleges aren't exactly an intellectual environment where people talk about singularity and high tech over lunch. I'll have much better luck finding a qualified cofounder just living in the Bay Area and going to meetups than at your average college that's not Harvard or Stanford.

gkoberger3• 12 years ago

In that case, it's not that college isn't right for you, it's that you're not at the right college.

I live in the Bay Area now and have gone to many meetups, and I have to unequivocally disagree that it's better than college for meeting people.

michaelochurch• 12 years ago

your average college that's not Harvard or Stanford

I don't know why you think the intellectual tenor would be different at those colleges. My respect for Stanford took a major hit when I saw this: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1907908-stanford-band-for...

There are pockets of intellectualism at any college, but the truth is that American culture is just not very intellectual, and among the business elite there's a pronounced antiintellectualism. You're going to find more philistines than intellectuals at any college in the U.S. and, yes, that includes the top ones. Technology people aren't an exception to this. The old Silicon Valley nerds had at least an interest in history and literature and art. They weren't experts, but they agreed that it was important. The new business-oriented pseudonerds? Narrowly specialized in one technical field ("social graph logistics") and complete ignoramuses about everything else.

Does that mean one shouldn't go to Harvard or Stanford? Of course not. It's great for the resume and there are a lot of connections to be made. But if you think that you're going to be discussing high intellectual concepts with most people meet-- or that the people bringing the connections and the people with high intellectual interests will have any overlap whatsoever-- you'll be disappointed.

Curmudgel• 12 years ago

Bill Gates is not a good example of a college dropout. In his own words:

"I didn’t leave college because it wasn’t suited to me. I left college because I thought I had to move quickly on the Microsoft opportunity. I had already finished three years and if I had used my AP credits properly I would have graduated,” recalled Gates, “I am as fake a dropout as you can get.”"

http://www.forbes.com/sites/luisakroll/2013/01/31/bill-gates...

_delirium3• 12 years ago

Some speakers were even advocating dropping out of High School (!?!?) to work on your startup.

Huh, I hadn't heard that one before.

I do think there's a particular subset of the startup sector, mostly focusing on web, MVPs, and business-model innovation, which has a negative view of academic-anything, whether it's formal education, academic research, even CS as a subject. But it's also worth noting that that isn't the whole of the technology business! Plenty of startup founders not only graduated from college, but even went to grad school (graduating from grad school seems less important than spending a few years there). A number of high-profile startups were formed by grad students or professors as spinoffs of their academic research. A few technologies that were either developed in academia, or are direct derivatives of stuff the founders developed in academia, include PageRank, Mathematica, SPARC, PostgreSQL, Matlab, etc.

gkoberger3• 12 years ago

To be fair, the drop-out-of-HS talk was from a High Schooler with a "startup", who had dropped out for a well-known (but not YC) incubator. So, he was biased (and unexperienced).

yodsanklai• 12 years ago

"Sure, Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg/etc didn't graduate college." I think their paths are so extraordinary that they shouldn't be mentioned in a career conference! it would be very naive to use them as an example for one's own career choices.

etler2• 12 years ago

And they still went, and they still benefited. If anything, that's just an argument to still go to college, do something amazing while you're there, and drop out when it becomes a huge success, which I don't think anyone would disagree with.

If anything that's a great argument for college. College was so helpful for them and provided such a great environment, that they didn't even need to stay there for the whole 4 years.

etler2• 12 years ago

Why do people keep on using Zuckerberg as an example? Facebook was a social network for college students. If he hadn't gone to college, why would he, and how could he make a website for college students?

chimeracoder2• 12 years ago

Sure, Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg/etc didn't graduate college. However, you have to remember three important facts: they all at least started college, they all stayed until they had an insane success on their hands and they all met (or at least worked with) their cofounders in college.

Zuckerberg is not an example of why one should go to college. He is an example of the difference between college as-an-experience[0] and the diploma that one gets after graduating. In some fields, a diploma is important if not required, similar to a certification, and in others it isn't. If you want to go to college, it's important to know exactly what you want to get out of it, if the diploma itself has little value in se in your field.

Unfortunately, I think these two points are oftentimes conflated, to the point where some people completely write college off as having no value, when a more appropriate conclusion may be that college has value whether or not you receive a diploma.

[0] both a learning experience and cultural one

leoc3• 12 years ago

The problem is that increasing costs mean that college-as-an-experience on its own, without also picking up a diploma that employers value sufficiently (and which you will quickly put to use to get a better job), is somewhere between "not worth it on balance" and "financial suicide" for an increasing proportion of US students.

_delirium3• 12 years ago

Zuckerberg is also an awkward case because he effectively did do a very traditional liberal-arts degree, complete with learning to read and write Greek and Latin, and extensive study of classical poetry. He just did it earlier in life, because he went to a famous private boarding school, the Phillips Exeter Academy, which followed that model of education. He's definitely not the product of some kind of modern technically-focused vocational education: Phillips Exeter is not exactly a "learn-to-code camp" place.

rohanpai• 12 years ago

Google, please make up your mind

http://qz.com/180247/why-google-doesnt-care-about-hiring-top...

johnkpush• 12 years ago

Nowhere in this article does it say "Don't go to college".

dalek2point3• 12 years ago

Its interesting to note that even a ton of the Thiel fellows, while dropped out of college, came from prestigious colleges before they accepted the fellowship. I have a friend here at MIT who accepted the Thiel fellowship, and I dont see how she would've ended up getting access to cutting edge biological research if she wasnt here, and being at MIT was certainly a plus for the fellowship application, a pure signalling effect.

snowwrestler5• 12 years ago

Zuckerberg and Gates did not skip college, they dropped out of college. Big difference. Even Steve Jobs, who I'm not sure ever actually matriculated anywhere, spoke glowingly of a college calligraphy course he audited--and was a huge proponent of education, including college.

leoc3• 12 years ago

Jobs did matriculate at Reed. He was allowed to hang about and audit on campus for quite a long time after he formally dropped out, though.

The problem, though, is that increasing US college costs increasingly rule out going to college to find yourself and maybe leaving without a degree. An increasing proportion of undergraduates must graduate in a timely fashion, with a degree that employers care for, or else they'll be crushed by undischargeable college debt for the foreseeable future. Obviously this wasn't a risk for Gates or el Zuck, but they're increasingly less typical in this.

shmerl• 12 years ago

Such pricing on higher education is not a scam, it's a rip off. No matter what Eric Schmidt says, these prices are just crazy. People should not go in debt to gain education.

throwwit• 12 years ago

Funny... just read this article today: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/ca... with the notable quote, "...recounting an exchange with one software CEO who avoids hiring candidates with advanced software engineering degrees since they are likely to expect higher wages."

And anecdotally from what I've seen... there seems to be a push lately to crowd the potential pool of job applicants in a couple of fields.

Eric Schmidt on Critics Who Say College Isn’t Worth It

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