I agree with a number of things you mentioned and honestly there are very few students who don’t put money as their number one motivation for college. Part of that is that our society (locally and internationally) values education (which is good) and those that have the credentials get paid more. Another point you mention that I often think about is how biased our classroom teaching can be some times. Biased in a way that we (the students at some point in out lives) just blindly follow what others say (some even do it now). Which raises the question for me is that are the teachers even aware of what they are instilling in their students? probably not. By the way good post : )

Hi, Kristen, you may find this website useful:
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Degree=Doctorate_(PhD)/Salary

Both you and Ken are right that we shouldn’t use salary as the only measurement on the return of education.

Hi ping, thanks for the post. I definitely can relate to this. Right now, I still have classmates complaining that they should have chosen Art instead of Science back then. The dominating idea of Science is so pressing that as 14- or 15-year-old kids, some don’t even have the courage to say no. I do see the importance of Art in all-round education. My major, Economics, requires a lot quantitative skills, however, it is a more and more important skill to tell a good story, which the math doesn’t really help. Only people with solid quantitative skill and inspiring way of telling a story can succeed in selling the paper to journals and also in teaching in class.

Ross, I totally understand your concern about whether education really prepared you for work. But I would ask a more broader question that we often fail to ask. Is our education preparing us for life? Is it teaching us how to face the ups and downs that life leads us to? Is it making us emotionally intelligent? Is is enabling us to raise voices against injustice and discrimination? Is it turning us into effective citizens? Is it empowering us to go against the institution that employs us if the later is indulging in an unethical practice? There are many more such questions in my mind but I guess you get the drift.

I think the day education starts preparing one for life, only then it can be called education in the true sense of the term. Otherwise, it just remains a way to prepare one to become a more productive worker or employee. And as you said, your education (and probably many others’ including mine) did not even do that well.

Yanliang, I think it is inappropriate to look at the value of one’s education in terms of the salary one gets after graduation. As you yourself mentioned there are some skills one learns in the educational process that cannot be measured easily. But one still does acquire those skills through education. Sometimes, a few of these skills may not directly translate into one’s salary but I do not think the aim of education is to earn more money. It is rather to develop effective citizenship in people. And as long as education helps people acquire effective citizenship and the ability to think critically and work for the good of all, I think it serves its purpose. While there is a huge opportunity cost in going to college to get educated, there is even a bigger cost in not getting educated. And I do not think everything in the world can be measured in terms of money.

Hi, Ken, I guess the only reason most of the research done on salary is because the accessibility of the data. And, yes, you are right that education is not just about salary. There are other non-monetary rewards associated to that.

Les déficits en vitamines se creusent au fil du temps, avec des conséquences bien visibles sur la peau,
les cheveux et les ongles.

While I myself enjoyed taking classes from the Humanities and Social Sciences classes during my undergrad in India in Electrical Engineering, I saw a lot of people devaluing Humanities and social sciences as academic disciplines. So, my education experience was not very different in terms of how STEM fields were given more importance. However, I now see how Humanities and social sciences are important for all the people irrespective of whether they are pursuing STEM or something else. People design systems or technologies for the society and the people living in t and hence they need to know different aspects of human life. Fortunately, people in engineering, at least, have started recognizing the value of liberal education. In fact, my PhD research somewhat overlaps with making engineering education more liberal.

Guided by Freire’s idea of critical pedagogy, I believe that education should be a tool that empowers students to be socially and politically aware, recognize authoritarian and dominant tendencies, and raise voices against them. Instead of teaching facts, education should enable students to interact with it and transform it.

I’ve run into Palmer’s issue a few times – I agree with your negative results argument as well. If I go into a social science study looking for correlations between two things, and I go in with the presumption that correlation exists, and yet find that it does not, that may be just as significant and deserving of attention/publication. No matter how objective publication or conference reviewers pretend or claim to be, they are judging our work as influenced by their own knowledge, experiences, areas of interest, influences, biases. Inescapable, frustrating.