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xwan on 24 September 2012
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HappySqurriel said:
xwan said:

U can use statistic to your advantage. here let me paraphrase the article a different way for you. "Half of them did not improve", which means half of them did improve. that's 50% that did, 1 out of 2. not bad. 45% did not show signification gain but that means 55% did showed an significant gain. Higher education is definately linked to higher scores in problem solving skills (this will be student dependent, if u dont' show up to class and go clubbing everyday, of course you won't improve). Like the guy above me majoring in Aerospace Engineering, who's going to build the next space shuttle if no one goes to college, I am quite sure street folks are less likely to understanding and problem solve aerospace engineering related problem.


Here's a hypothetical situation for you to better demonstrate my point ...

Suppose there is a school that argues that it teaches its students to read. (Roughly) 50% of the students who are enrolled in the school never graduate, 40% of the graduates didn't learn how to read at a higher level than when they entered the school, and 30% of people who never entered the school saw similar improvements in reading ability as the 60% of graduates who showed improvement in their reading ability. Tuition in this schools costs $20,000 per year and the program is 4 years long. To what extent does this school demonstrate value in improving their student's reading abilities?

Essentially, when you combine this study with typical drop/fail-out rates of colleges and universities, (roughly) 32% of students who enter college will graduate with a demonstrated improvement in critical thinking skills. We don't know what the improvement of critical thinking skills are of people who don't go to college after highschool, but there (most likely) will be a portion of this group that demonstrates improvement in critical thinking skills; and the value of the college education towards building critical thinking skills is only realized by the students who developed critical thinking skills they otherwise wouldn't have developed. As a rough guestimate, I wouldn't be surprised if this only represented 10% of students.


There is indeed some way to do this, but it would be kind of unethical. first you find 2 large groups of people (to give your study adequate power and a low P value so things are not due to chance); with similar baseline characteristics (economic, social, ethnicity, race, age, baseline IQ prior to study) to elimate selection bias; then you designed a double blinded randomized longitudinal study to look for changes. One of the group that you have randomized will be forced to go to college; the other group will be forced to not go to college. Then you come back in 10 years and you measure your outcomes.

The outcome you can choose, is it income? is it IQ? is it "happiness?" Maybe someone flipping burger is happier than the engineer or doctor; but then you have to come up with a scale for happiness (survey being the worst, but happiness is subjective, so I assume no objective way to measure it).

This is different then just looking at people who has already gone through college; because that would be retrospective study, does not always show causation in relationship; it does however, show associations.