Have Recent Studies Made Faulty Assumptions About Value of College?

By Julia Lawrence. With the price of college going up every year faster than inflation, more attention has recently been given to figuring out how students can make the best choices when it comes to picking their school and their major. So much so, that – according to The Atlantic – students now overrate the importance of both of these decisions.
As Andrew G. Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute and Abigail Haddad, a Ph.D. student at Pardee RAND Graduate School, write, it is no secret that conventional wisdom says that the surest way of achieving economic success is to enroll in college after graduating high school and majoring in a tech-related discipline. Several recent studies have been published supporting this point of view. Yet, there are reasons to question these findings because many of them are plagued with simple statistical errors, draw conclusions that the evidence doesn’t warrant, and – what is worse – encourage governments to introduce and pursue bad public policy. Read more...