Up to 25% of college grads would probably be better off not pursuing a degree, yet nobody actually thinks they’re going to be the ones for whom the investment doesn’t pay off.

There are a few caveats that should be mentioned, however. First, we don’t know for sure how much money this bottom quarter of degree-holding earners would have made without their college education. Furthermore, much of this could boil down to career choice: there are many jobs that require a degree but don’t pay very well. If someone earns a degree for reasons beyond making more money, it could be that the upfront investment is worthwhile regardless.

The bottom quarter of earners with a college degree don’t make more money than the average high school graduate.

There’s plenty of evidence that there are what economists call “spillover effects” from students educating themselves, that society as a whole benefits from higher education.

Of course, over the past 40 years, the cost of a degree has increased 12-fold, while a degree holder isn’t making more money at all

Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them.

being an intellectual is not the same as being smart

most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual

When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down?

In other words, students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State.

In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out.

When people say that students at elite schools have a strong sense of entitlement, they mean that those students think they deserve more than other people because their SAT scores are higher.

You learn to think of yourself in terms of those numbers. They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity; not only your identity, but your value.

an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth.

The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic.

I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.

The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you.

the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy.

Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,”

"It's too great a conflict of interest for schools that are essentially selling a product to be expected to be the ones who are going to be conservative financial counselors,"

Ms. Horn didn't have to borrow all that she did to earn a four-year degree, but she wanted to get far away from the small Texas town on the Louisiana border where she grew up.

Mr. Collinge published The Student Loan Scam, which blames lenders for using harsh collection tactics and failing to work with distressed borrowers

High student-loan debt, says Ms. Asher, "can ruin someone for life."

That same student now would have to borrow to get their education. A college degree is still a good investment, but the financial risk for the student has increased.

More often, the problem among students who go heavily into debt is that they are determined to attend their dream college, no matter the cost.

despite stories of a large number of students who face gargantuan debt, about a third of graduates leave college with no debt at all for their education

Student-loan borrowing that is threatening the financial future of today's college students.

To work is to solve problems.

In addition, Joe learned about budgets and management.

In the midst of all this, Joe learned more and more about the auto industry,

Still, for Joe the shop floor provided what school did not; it was like schooling, he said, a place where you’re constantly learning.

they have generally focused on the values such workers exhibit rather than on the thought their work requires

work requiring less schooling requires less intelligence

Intelligence is closely associated with formal education

It is the responsibility of colleges and universities to place students in environments

“For those of you who have come here in order to get a degree, congratulations, I have good news for you. I am giving you your degree today and you can go home now. For those who came to get an education, welcome to four great years of learning at this university.”

Yet most public discussion of higher ed today pretends that students simply receive their education from colleges the way a person walks out of Best Buy with a television.

The value of a degree depends more on the student’s input than on the college’s curriculum.

everyone now evaluates college in purely economic terms, thus reducing it to a commodity like a car or a house.

college replacing high school as the required ticket for a career

entered academia 52 years ago

In order to pay for that experience, students are taking out an average of about $30,000 in student loans. The overall student debt in the US has now surpassed $1tn.

Ivory Tower takes a look at universities and their transformation from providers of education to business ventures that strive to be the biggest and the best providers of the “college experience”.

Wages for workers with college or advanced degrees fell by 1.3% last year, while wages for those who dropped out or didn't go beyond high school held steady

a fifth of the working age population -- or 36 million Americans -- have started college and then dropped out.

two-thirds of all jobs in the country will require post-secondary education.

Gates explained that earning a degree not only helps graduates get more rewarding, higher-paying jobs, but it also helps the American economy as a whole.

"Although I dropped out of college and got lucky pursuing a career in software, getting a degree is a much surer path to success,"

What should happen to students at college? They should become more thoughtful and interesting people.

For students who want to spend four years in an atmosphere of pure learning, this is the place.

Tuition charges at both public and private colleges have more than doubled—in real dollars—compared with a generation ago.

Graduating with six figures' worth of debt is becoming increasingly common.

have lost track of their basic mission to challenge the minds of young people.

74% say their college education was very useful in helping them grow intellectually

Just under half of the public (47%) says the main purpose of a college education is to teach work-related skills and knowledge, while 39% say it is to help a student grow personally and intellectually

Nearly every parent surveyed (94%) says they expect their child to attend college

had an impact on their career choices (24%)

Adults who graduated from a four-year college believe that, on average, they are earning $20,000 more a year as a result of having gotten that degree. Adults who did not attend college believe that, on average, they are earning $20,000 a year less as a result. These matched estimates by the public are very close to the median gap in annual earnings between a high school and college graduate as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2010: $19,550.

A majority of Americans (57%) say the higher education system in the United States fails to provide students with good value for the money they and their families spend. An even larger majority—75%—says college is too expensive for most Americans to afford. At the same time, however, an overwhelming majority of college graduates—86%—say that college has been a good investment for them personally.

filtered the results to include only people who work in tech.

filtered the results to include responses only from people working in the finance industry

Respondents ranked "network" second, "brand value" third, "workplace skills" fourth, and "social experience" fifth.

everyone agreed that academics, not brand value or network

"What is the most valuable asset college provides?"

Those tuition bills have gone way up, and so too have our expectations for how much we think colleges should do to prepare students for the job market.

“The confidence that the economy offers enough opportunities has eroded,”

Freshmen now list getting a better job as the most important reason to go to college in an annual UCLA survey of first-year students.

Ronald Reagan, then the new Republican governor of California (which boasted the best system of public universities in the country), told reporters that taxpayers shouldn’t be “subsidizing intellectual curiosity.”

higher education has come under attack for its failure to make students job-ready

often seen as strange and even looked on with scorn

push for timely graduation

raising tuition costs and continually increasing expectations upon students

students care much more about getting an "A" and graduating with their degree on time.

Chemistry majors do not take art or music classes for fun. Philosophy majors don't try physics and mathematics courses for the sole purpose of gaining knowledge.

To educate people on a large-scale, the education community sacrifices some of what made education so powerful, by shifting the focus from true understanding to academic achievement.

Instead of making education a diverse and interactive environment where one challenges known assumptions, and probes mysterious realms of thought, it has become one where the same topics are taught repetitively every year, making students cynical and unconcerned about real learning.

did not design these centers of learning for the masses. Rather, they were made for the elite

Sally puts a marble in her basket and leaves the room. Anne takes the marble and hides it in her own box. Sally comes back and looks for her marble—where does she look? A normal 4-year-old child says that Sally will look for the marble where she left it, in her basket. The child may even giggle at the joke on Sally. A kid with Down's syndrome will get it right too. But autistic children don't get it right. They say Sally will look in Anne's box—because after all, that's where the marble really is. They have no notion, Baron-Cohen discovered, of where Sally might think the marble is.

In 19th-century England, he explains, Jenner’s smallpox vaccine was known to be effective. But despite the Compulsory Vaccination Act of 1853, many people still refused to take it, and thousands died unnecessarily.

a person could handle 100,000 vaccines — or up to 10,000 vaccines at once.

The government is still considering funding more research trials to look for a connection between vaccines and autism.

The result is that science must somehow prove a negative — that vaccines don’t cause autism — which is not how science typically works.

rotavirus, which each year kills about 600,000 children in poor countries and about 40 children in the US, probably saves hundreds of lives a day.

“We have seat belt rules,” he says. “Seat belts save lives. There was never a question about that. The data was absolutely clear. But people didn’t use them until they were required to use them.” Furthermore, the decision not to buckle up endangers only you. “Unless you fly through the window and hit somebody else,” he adds. “I believe in mandates. I do.”

The central message at these conferences boils down to this: “The medical establishment doesn’t care, but we do.”

The so-called epidemic, researchers assert, is the result of improved diagnosis, which has identified as autistic many kids who once might have been labeled mentally retarded or just plain slow.

there is no credible evidence to indicate that any of this is true. None.

children who appear to shut down and exhibit signs of autistic behavior immediately after being vaccinated — as proof. Autism One, like others, also points to rising rates of autism — what many parents call an epidemic — as evidence that vaccines are to blame. Finally, Autism One asserts that the condition is preventable and treatable, and that it is the toxins in vaccines and the sheer number of childhood vaccines (the CDC recommends 10 vaccines, in 26 doses, by the age of 2 — up from four vaccines in 1983) that combine to cause disease in certain sensitive children.

Thanks to the Internet, everyone can be their own medical investigator.

Some parents of autistic children noticed that their child’s condition began to appear shortly after a vaccination. The conclusion: “The vaccine must have caused the autism.”

the risks are minute in comparison to the alternative.

because the looming risk of childhood death is out of sight, it is also largely out of mind, leading a growing number of Americans to worry about what is in fact a much lesser risk: the ill effects of vaccines.

“I used to say that the tide would turn when children started to die. Well, children have started to die,” Offit says, frowning as he ticks off recent fatal cases of meningitis in unvaccinated children in Pennsylvania and Minnesota. “So now I’ve changed it to ‘when enough children start to die.’ Because obviously, we’re not there yet.”

A disease that vaccines made rare, in other words, is making a comeback.

10,000 kids, or about twice the number as in 1997), they tend to be clustered, disproportionately increasing the risk of an outbreak of such largely eradicated diseases as measles, mumps, and pertussis (whooping cough). The clustering means almost 10 percent of elementary schools statewide may already be at risk.

philosophical exemptions are available in about 20 states, including Pennsylvania, Texas, and much of the West

In certain parts of the US, vaccination rates have dropped so low that occurrences of some children’s diseases are approaching pre-vaccine levels for the first time ever.

“science alone isn’t enough … People are getting hurt. The parent who reads what Jenny McCarthy says and thinks, ‘Well, maybe I shouldn’t get this vaccine,’ and their child dies of Hib meningitis,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s such a fundamental failure on our part that we haven’t convinced that parent.”

Offit has become the main target of a grassroots movement that opposes the systematic vaccination of children and the laws that require it

He boldly states — in speeches, in journal articles, and in his 2008 book Autism’s False Prophets — that vaccines do not cause autism or autoimmune disease or any of the other chronic conditions that have been blamed on them.

Anewstereotypeofautisticpeopleasbrainiacs,endowedwithquirkysuperminds,isjustasmisguidedastheoldassumptionthatautisticpeoplearementallydisabled

LarshadalwaysenjoyedLegos,andtalkingtootherparents,Sonneheardstoriesabouthowthetoybricksbroughtoutremarkable,hiddenabilities.

Theconceptofsociallymandateddishonestywouldmystifyhim,

Modernofficeculture—withitsunwrittenrulesofbehavior,itsfluidandsociallydemandingworkspaces—canbehostileterritoryforautisticpeople,whodobetterinpredictableenvironmentsandwhotendtobeclumsyatshapingtheirprioritiesaroundotherpeople’srequirements.

In2009,scientistsatKing’sCollegeLondonconcludedthataboutathirdofautisticmaleshave“someformofoutstandingability.”

AteamofCanadianscientistspublishedapaperin2007showingthatmeasuresofintelligencevarywildly,dependingonwhattestisused.

triestoshieldthemfromtheusualstressesofofficework,

TheonlywayTDCcanbesureofcatchingthemistoloadthesoftwareontoaphoneandpunchthephonekeysoverandoveragain,followingalengthyscriptofatleast200instructions.

heslowlyconceivedabusinessplan:manycompaniesstruggletofindworkerswhocanperformspecific,oftentedioustasks,likedataentryorsoftwaretesting;someautisticpeoplewouldbeexceptionallygoodatthosetasks.

Heslidafingeralongtheatlas,movingfromboxtobox,comparingthesourcewithhisson’scopy.Everynumbermatched.Larshadreproducedtheentirespread,frommemory,withoutanerror.“Iwasstunned,absolutely,”Sonnetoldme.

LarsknewthetrainschedulesofallofDenmark’smajorroutes.

"You know," Baron-Cohen says, looking around his office for a ready example, "you and I just say, 'It's hot, we need a fan,' and turn it on. That isn't systemizing. A child with autism would look at the fan, and very likely would become fascinated by the rotation. What happens when light hits the blades, the kinds of reflections you get. So the child ends up staring at the fan for hours every day, because it is a form of mechanical motion that is systemizable—and that obsession gets described as purposeless. I actually think the child is doing something very intelligent."

way of helping autistic people through a computer program. On a CD-ROM, trained actors demonstrate the facial expressions and vocal inflections that correspond to 412 distinct emotions or mental states, arranged under 24 headings, such as "sneaky" or "happy." The idea is that people with autism can bone up on their mind-reading skills without the stress of having to attend a group-therapy session.

"A few drops more of this little chemical could affect your sociability or your language ability. I found it extraordinary."

how much testosterone a female fetus is exposed to—which is much less than a male fetus

the evidence for sex differences in behavior right back to the womb

Proving with scientific data that sex differences in behavior are innate is notoriously difficult.

that gap

Autism affects far more boys than girls. At the Asperger's end of the spectrum, the ratio is about 10 to 1

A rival theory,

why they do jigsaw puzzles without the picture: They just don't seek the pattern in a mass of details.

mindblindness

Autism is perfectly compatible with a high IQ—yet some degree of social disconnectedness, of extreme self-centeredness,

"We all have some autistic traits," he says. "It's just a matter of degree."

there are many more male ones: In Baron-Cohen's theory, autism is a case of the "extreme male brain."

The essential difference between men and women, according to Baron-Cohen, is that women are better at empathizing and men at systemizing

Baron-Cohen's theory of what characterizes autism.

Asperger's is a mild form of autism in which individuals are able to function normally, but have difficulty reading the emotions of others.)

systemizing may take the form of a seemingly purposeless obsession

"systemizing ability." They are lousy at understanding people but relatively good, he says, at making sense of the world.

surfeit

Autistic people, says Baron-Cohen, a psychologist who has studied and treated them for 20 years, lack empathy.

an autistic person would not have been able to see through my polite fib, put himself in my shoes and decipher my concerns.

Onecow,whosefaceiseeri-lyreminiscentofWinstonChurchill's,

Cowmanuresmellswonderful-s-warmandherbalandblame-less-butcowsthemselvesstinkinarichbioticway,ratherlikeawetboot.

TheHelpMeGrowprogram,whenyoudecocttherhetoric,isbasicallyastatewidecrisislineforover-the-edgeparentstocallandgettalkedoutofbeatinguptheirkids

Com,com,soy-beans,com,exitramp,com,andeveryfewmilesanoutpostwayoffonareachinthedistance-house,treewithtireswing,bam,satellitedish.Grainsilosaretheonlyskyline.