Many university degrees produce a negative return on investment, according to a report out this week. Data from the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity shows that the cost of many college degrees is not offset by increases in lifetime earnings.
This prompted me to take a look at some separate Mississippi-specific data from the State Workforce Investment Board on graduate earnings. I discovered an extraordinary variance in the future earning potential of different degrees.
Here are the earning averages for fifteen different degree types for Mississippi public universities:
So what?
Demand for engineers and insurance professionals is far greater than for actors and anthropologists. Some degrees require more rigor than others.
But then I took a look at data on what happens to Mississippi high schoolers.
Approximately 6 in 10 of those that do complete public high school in Mississippi fail to either start any form of college education, or start but fail to complete any kind of college education.
Of those public high school graduates that do go into any kind of post-secondary education, about 1 in 3 drop out.
Pointing out awkward facts about education in Mississippi can be a sensitive subject. Much has been said about the relative improvements in Mississippi’s reading and writing scores in recent years. To be fair, our state is no longer 49th out of 50, but 30-something-or-other.
Great, but the data also shows that only 31 percent of 4th graders were at or above proficiency in reading in 2022. In other words, more than two in three Mississippi 4th graders were not proficient in reading.
The data also shows that a mere 32 percent of 4th graders were at or above math proficiency in 2022.
Forgive me if I don’t rush to celebrate a system that fails to produce proficiency for two thirds of public school 4th graders.
In the worst school districts, a student has the odds of achieving proficiency overwhelmingly stacked against them.
But even in the best performing school districts – the ones they keep telling us are good – nearly 4 in 10 students are not proficient.
These are the hard facts about public education in our state, and facts do not care about politicians’ feelings. Neither should you if you want to improve the life chances of young people in our state.
Poor proficiency rates in primary education help explain why one in three public high school graduates are dropping out of college education later on.
The underperformance of our education system helps explain the low rate of workforce participation in our state. Unless we acknowledge the underperformance of our education system and address it, we will see our state held back.
If our private school system was producing these kind of outcomes, I suspect politicians would have acted yesterday. Instead, the inconvenient facts are brushed under the carpet.
If we are to change Mississippi for the better, this has to change.
Policy makers must not keep going along to get along. That is a recipe for yet more mediocrity.
The time for taking false comfort in marginal improvements is over. The implementation of phonics reading in primary schools might indeed have raised reading standards, but on its own, it is not the strategic change in education we need.
If we want an education system that prepares young people for the life they might live, we need action to ensure:
• Higher standards in the classroom – which means more parent power.
• Ensure more of our high school graduates complete a useful education after high school.
• Allow students to take degrees with better returns on investment, both for the individual student and the state as a whole.
This post was authored and sponsored by Douglas Carswell, President of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
25 comments:
MSU architects earning $60K+ three years after graduation is total BS. Most are not even licensed by then. And the UM 5-year CPA's I know are making nearly six figures. Liberal Arts looks about right...
Excellent. Lots of inconvenient truth. Anyone who points these facts out would likely be called a racist by the left in our Legislature, and maybe Bennie.
Denial is not a river in Egypt.
Interesting point. But the data he used is worthless. The State Workforce Investment Board? Ha. Yeah, I'd trust that data. Off the top of my head, accountants are starting off in the mid-$60's. If they go to Dallas or Atlanta, high-$70's.
I get his point and somewhat agree with it, but he doesn't help his case with such unreliable data.
Even in MS you need to increase these figures 25% as paying for decent employees is much higher. Decent are those that show up, try and stay off their phones.
Yet, even after how even the prominent public schools behaved during Covid and the students as a whole vastly underperform private schooled kids on education metrics, folks still drive their 90k suburbans and F-250s instead of sending their kids to private schools.
"Data" is plural and requires a plural verb. "Datum" is the singular form of "data." Sniff. Sniff.
How do you account for most of the highest salaries earned by Mississippi's college graduates are earned working in another state because they permanantly fled to another state?
Is that a net plus?
I know for a fact the accounting salaries in this "study" are about 50% lower than what graduates are getting, but like somebody pointed out, this may just be for the graduates with a C average who stay in Mississippi and go work for the government. Nation-wide we are graduating 25% fewer accounting majors and the big firms are paying top dollar.
This article is skewed for sure.
weird. my wife doesnt have a degree and earns nearly $70k in the insurance industry.
How long before AI dominates the labor market?
AI will completely eliminate so many of these roles.
3:18, people have been terrified of progress and technology since the Industrial Revolution. AI will free up labor to do more important things.
Accounting graduates making slightly over 40k three years after graduating is ridiculous. Many accounting firms require their employees to work extremely long hours. If you figure the hourly rate it is minuscule.
No one said anything about being terrified of AI. It seems that you're doing a little projecting on this subject.
As 3:55 said, AI will completely eliminate many of those roles, maybe even yours.
Parent power? Read your own article.
Shad was right...
Lots of folks waiting tables after graduating college. Only a few degree paths lead to assured employment in a given field.
I like to ask 1:45 the source of the data that indicates private school students perform better. I’m skeptical so show me the proof.
There are some really bad private schools in this state but I'm not aware of any long term studies on student outcomes for private school students in this state. I'd love a link to the data.
Although it would be a qualitative observation that could pretty easily be quantified, what private school students general "perform" better at is more important than ACT scores, etc. Namely: discipline, manners, working well with others, and respect for authority.
All the brains in the world doesn't guarantee anything if you can't/don't practice the former virtues mentioned.
Education isn't a financial investment! It's an investment in life skills. It helps you learn how to deal with life's challenges and how to find factual information to help you make good decisions.
You may make a friend in college who becomes a celebrity or inventor and invites you along for the ride.
So no one should be a teacher because it doesn't pay enough? Society doesn't need any smart people to progress. We didn't really need cars or electricity. A doctor should never go into research as it won't pay off to be in a lab at a university or drug company unless he also can benefit from a new discovery. Jonas Salk would be considered an idiot by this reasoning. He could have made a fortune from the polio vaccine if he'd just started his own pharmaceutical business instead.
The problem is that a college education is now ridiculously expensive. Once upon a time, in 1965.a student could live on campus with meals and laundry for $500 a semester plus books. Student loans were regulated by the university and had a low set interest rate.
By letting student loans become a moneymaking new "business", we legalized loan sharking. It's like these payday loans which also used to be loan sharking.
You don't like regulations and rules...this idiocy is what you get when success is defined by money and winning and celebrity instead of contribution to society.
You really think a President, any President can get Kroger to lower their prices and pay their executives less and lower the dividends to their stockholders or see their stock price go down?
You don't "get" that things are still at Covid prices because businesses aren't keeping the difference in between greater supply and lower shipping costs? If your lettuce is now still $1.10 and was $.90 pre-Covid, you don't think the " bean counters" at Kroger's executive offices can multiply $.20 x 100000 sold x 12 months and know that becomes a nice chunk of change?
If you go to a college or university, you might want to be sure to take economics and government and more math, so you aren't suckered into giving your money away.
"Data from the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity"
Really? How closely is this group aligned with the ACLU? Drill down and find out who funds them.
My guess is we will see many stories and posts like this throughout the year. No surprise since some special interests are pushing school choice. They believe public school is broken and cannot or should not be fixed. They’ll even tear down the good school districts as this article does. The goal is to go all in on private schools, no matter the cost.
@8.47 AM
Kroger's gross margins for the three years prior to COVID, COVID and the three years since:
2017 22.0%
2018 21.7%
2019 22.1%
2020 23.3%
2021 22.0%
2022 21.4%
2023 22.2%
Kroger may have been screwing us during COVID, when their margins crept up to 23%, but those margins went back to pre-COVID levels afterward.
"How do you account for most of the highest salaries earned by Mississippi's college graduates are earned working in another state because they permanantly fled to another state?"
Except that it's Shad's hocus pocus datanometry. There ARE no reliable data that shows who, in which occupational fields, left this state or which, if any makes what salary. (much less what this knucklehead labels as 'those who fled this state')
Nobody and no agency tracks that. If Shad has evidence to the contrary, why has he never cited it? Post-card follow-up contacts sent by college clerical staff do not count as reliable data collection.
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