Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

I enjoy the repartee I have with IPEZone's Emmanuel. We often disagree, but the back-and-forth is always fun. I must protest, however, to his recent challenge. In an update at the bottom of this post, Emmanuel criticizes me for not being able to use data:

Now Kindred's a good kid, but he is wet behind the ears as he tends to put words in my mouth and gets embarrassed for it. Anyway, I decided to look up the numbers for myself instead of relying on other's charts. Below are the figures for US income for those 25 and up for the years 2000 to 2008 from US Census Bureau tables P-16 and P-18. It doesn't matter whether it's the mean or the median or if you're male or female; real annual income has been falling there since 2000. It doesn't matter either if you're a college graduate or have a higher educational attainment.

I guess the furriner is more familiar with US stats than the American. Also at grad school, you are taught not to compare apples and oranges, but he does so by quoting another data series and naively suggesting differences have something to do with using "mean" and not "median" data.

There's a lot of wrong in just a few sentences there. First things first, I haven't put any words in Emmanuel's mouth; I've quoted him directly. The purpose of his post is to counter the argument that a college education is a wise investment. That's why it is titled "The Knowledge Worker Myth vs Blue Collar Reality", not "A Handful of Skilled Blue Collar Jobs Are Hot Right Now, But College Still a Good Investment Overall". That's why he writes sentences like "So much for the college myth." He is claiming at least one of two things: the college wage premium is collapsing, or the real return to a college education is falling. I am claiming the opposite.

So which of us is right? I am, of course. The data I previously reported shows this quite clearly in a few easy-to-read graphs from BLS data. Emmanuel appears to prefer Census data, but as we will see that doesn't matter. Other than the mean/median distinction, the two sources appear to disagree because the time period Emmanuel selects is misleading. His starting date is the peak of the previous business cycle (2000), while his end date is the trough of the most recent one (2008). Tables P-16 and P-18 go back to 1991, so this must have been a deliberate choice on Emmanuel's part. The series I posted go back at least to 1991 as well. The longer series show an inflation-adjusted increase over the past two decades in the return to college education for both men and women, mean and median. Over the same period, inflation-adjusted median income of high school graduates declined by nearly 10%. (The same figure increased for women... from $16k to $18k.) Male and female college graduates made nearly double what those with only a high school education made across the time series. If you compare peak-to-peak, incomes for college graduates went up from 1999-2007 as well. The spread between the college-educated and those who are not also increased across the series, and those without degrees have seen especially nasty upticks in unemployment in the last two years or so.

I'd produce a nifty graph here but the Census data is a mess, it's late, and I'm tired. Please read the tables for yourself. A quick glance is good enough. Or look at the BLS data, which tells the same story. I'm not the one talking about apples and oranges. Whether you're looking at absolute or relative gains, means or medians, male or female, the pattern is clear: the more educated earn much more than the less educated, that disparity has increased over time, and job security (as well as non-wage benefits and compensation) is also much higher for the well educated. The "Knowledge Worker" is anything but a myth, which is probably why Emmanuel's pet countries like Singapore have emphasized higher educated so much.

The only way Emmanuel can reach any other conclusion is by tweaking starting dates in a pretty egregious way, and changing his argument midstream. As I say: lies, damn lies, and statistics. Whether it's intentional or not is not clear to me, but just as in a previous tangle (see comments), Emmanuel loves to make broad claims and then say "That's not what I meant" when questioned. As before, he meant what he insinuated, and what he insinuated was wrong.

Does Education Pay?

Emmanuel, striving for a "compelling narrative", implies that seeking higher education isn't worth it:

The white collar life was supposed to promise the land of milk and honey.

Certainly, academia has had an interest in propagating this story since it provides fodder for ensuring a steady stream of tuition-paying students in law, commerce, and business. Various American commentators like former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan have constructed an entire narrative out of "knowledge workers." In recent times, that has meant training to be a software engineer or some other lofty position that makes the most of conceptualizing abstract ideas and similarly high-faluting rhetoric. The truth, though, is much less compelling. Take America (please). Not only are there scores of unemployed college graduates there, but wages of college graduate have been on a downward trend since 2000. So much for the college myth.

As the graph above shows (via David Leonhardt), this is simply not true. (The data presented above contradicts that in the link in Emmanuel's quote, probably because the latter reports a mean while the former reports a median.) The college wage premium has expanded over time, and college graduates now make more than double what high school graduates make. Moreover, as the below chart from the BLS shows, more postgraduate education generates an additional, large, premium along with a pretty significant amount of job security.



The recent unemployment crisis has not changed this trend; it has exacerbated it, as less-educated workers have been hit especially badly:



So when you see breathless articles questioning the wisdom of pursuing higher education, or claiming that you can do nearly as well without it, remember the stats. A compelling narrative is no substitute for a few facts.

University Administration Jobs and Hiring Practices

This morning, UNC students and faculty awoke to an email from UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp notifying the university community that Dr. Bruce Carney, Samuel Baron Professor of Physics and Astronomy and the interim Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost at UNC, has been appointed the permanent Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost. I have absolutely no doubt that Dr. Carney deserves the job, will serve the university proudly and competently and will prove to be a very good hire in the years to come. Dr. Carney has been at UNC since 1980, starting off as a lowly assistant professor and working all the way up to his current endowed chair and serving as chair of the Physics department and both Senior Associate Dean and Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences along the way.

What was interesting to me when I read the email from Chancellor Thorp was that the university held a national search, brought in three external candidates for interviews, lectures and Q&A, and then hired the internal, interim position-holder that was not a candidate for the position. In the almost two years that I have now been associated with UNC, the university has hired at least a couple internal scholars/administrators for top university administrative positions, including Chancellor Thorp himself, who previously was Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Director of the Morehead Planetarium and Kenan Professor of Chemistry at UNC.

When I was at Marquette University during my undergrad years, a similar hiring process phenomenon occurred when Dr. John J. Pauly, the Dean of the College of Communication, a fantastic scholar and overall really nice guy, was hired as the university's Provost. A couple of data points at two different universities caused me to ask myself whether a university's reputation for hiring internal candidates for top positions reduces the quality of external applicants since external candidates may have a reasonable belief that certain universities are biased towards internal candidates. Additionally, could it be that universities target the hiring of high quality administrators, those who have the potential to become chancellors, provosts, university presidents, etc. earlier in their careers, grooming them for these top positions while acclimating them to the culture and internal workings of the university at a lesser position?

Drs. Thorp and Carney both spent the entirety of their careers at UNC before being appointed Chancellor and Provost, respectively. Were the applicant pools for the positions that they eventually received of lesser quality than they otherwise would have been because there was an expectation that an internal candidate would be chosen? I'm not arguing that either scholar would not have ultimately been chosen for each position, but rather asking about the relative quality of the applicant pool conditional on a given university's reputation. Dr. Pauly bounced around a good deal before arriving at Marquette, receiving various promotions along the way before becoming Dean of the College of Communications and then Provost. Was Dr. Pauly selected as Dean with an expectation of rising the ranks to Provost in the near future? The same question about the quality of external applicants and the expectation of the selection of an internal candidate would also apply.

If anyone knows any research that's been published engaging these questions (I'm guessing it'd come from Sociology, Economics or Business) I'd be quite interested in checking it out. If this research hasn't been previously done, well I hopefully just hooked up an undergrad or grad student in one of these fields with a master's thesis or dissertation topic. I better get a shout-out in the acknowledgements!

Religiosity and College Majors

From Inside Higher Ed: The NBER and four scholars at the University of Michigan, Miles S. Kimball, Colter M. Mitchell, Arland D. Thornton and Linda C. Young-Demarco, released a study yesterday detailing the impact of religion on the selection of college majors by students as well as the impact of religiosity on the decision to go to college.

Among the findings:

The odds of going to college increase for high school students who attend religious services more frequently or who view religion as more important in their lives. The researchers speculate that there may be a "nagging theory" in which fellow churchgoers encourage the students to attend college.

Being a humanities or a social science major has a statistically significant negative effect on religiosity -- measured by either religious attendance and how important students consider the importance of religion in their lives. The impact appears to be strongest in the social sciences.

Students in education and business show an increase in religiosity over their time at college.

Majoring in the biological or physical sciences does not affect religious attendance of students, but majoring in the physical sciences does negatively relate to the way students view the importance of religion in their lives.

Religious attendance is positively associated with staying in majors in the social sciences, biological sciences and business majors. For most vocational majors, the researchers found a negative relationship between religious attendance and staying in the same major. The researchers compare this finding to their data about how students who attend services are more likely to enroll in college in the first place: "In both cases, religious attendance encourages a shift toward a higher status path."