<p>I have no idea why anyone would really want to go the PhD route. I was making more money than most of my profs after one year on the job. I think it is a very unusual group.</p>
<p>Those links do not indicate what proportion of UM grads go to law and medical school, </p>
<p>However, the lsa page indicates 922 Um graduates admitted to Law School. This link
<a href="http://www.cpp.umich.edu/students/healthmedlaw/med/medappstats.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.cpp.umich.edu/students/healthmedlaw/med/medappstats.htm</a>
indicates 300 matriculated at medical school. </p>
<p>This link
<a href="http://sitemaker.umich.edu/obpinfo/files/umaa_cds2006.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://sitemaker.umich.edu/obpinfo/files/umaa_cds2006.pdf</a>
Indicates that UM granted 5,880 undergraduate degrees. 1/4 of 5,880 is 1,470. So, if 1,470 went to medical or law school, then there are 248 missing students. These figures indicate a percent more like 21%.</p>
<p>The LSA site includes this</p>
<p>Top 20 Law Schools Attended
University of Michigan Graduates - Fall 2005</p>
<p>This chart however shows you where UM applicants actually attended. Note the popularity of Michigan and Chicago law schools. Eight of the top twenty schools attended are different law schools from the highest volume applied. Thus options are important in the application process.
Name of School
UNIV OF MICHIGAN
WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY
MICHIGAN ST UNIV DETROIT COLL
UNIV OF DETROIT MERCY
THOMAS M.COOLEY LAW SCHOOL
BROOKLYN LAW SCHOOL
DE PAUL UNIVERSITY
GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
CHICAGO-KENT COLLEGE OF LAW
LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO
AMERICAN UNIVERSITY
JOHN MARSHALL LAW SCH CHICAGO
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
HARVARD LAW SCHOOL
LOYOLA LAW SCHOOL LOS ANGELES
UNIV OF MIAMI
AVE MARIA SCHOOL OF LAW
NEW YORK LAW SCHOOL
UNIV OF WISCONSIN
BOSTON UNIVERSITY
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY
CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIV
UNIV OF TOLEDO </p>
<p>and a table of yield for applicants admitted to these schools. Yield was 50% or higher at, inter alia, Brooklyn, Loyola, and U Maryland. But so what?</p>
<p>Why the insistence on bringing all this up? Michigan is a great school. For some people, the best school in the country. Does it compete head to head with HYPSM in enrolling the very top students? Do its graduates go on to the very top graduate and professional schools in the same numbers as those from these universities? Do they win major awards at the same rate? No, but so what? Does that in any way devalue the degrees of the graduates? Of course not.</p>
<p>Most people who get PhD's are not in it for the money. Rather for the intellectual stimulation. If money is you main concern, then most PhD's do not make sense.</p>
<p>afan,</p>
<p>
[quote]
Earning recognition in the Putnam is something very few people can do, even with all the coaching in the world. Those people tend to congregate at a small number of elite institutions. Those institutions are overwhelmingly private. These are facts.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>So that means schools don't "produce" but "collect" them who in turn represent the schools they are at. If the same group/coach move from Harvard to Michigan, they would achieve the same results. Whether the school itself is public or private doesn't matter. Like I said, preparation of Putnam has very little to do with what goes on in regular classes.</p>
<p>
[quote]
They want an undergraduate program that is likely to help them succeed in their graduate study. This tends to focus on a particular kind of scholarly emphasis. This type of emphasis is common at the elite schools. If you don't want a graduate or professional degree, then there is no reason to care. However, at the elite schools, most students will end up with an advanced degree.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I believe pursuing graduate study is a fuction of personal preference more than anything else. These days, master programs (except the professional ones) in even the top schools aren't all that selective. You just need to have money for the 1-yr or 2-yr tuition and your living expense without working after college graduation and private schools tend to have more of those kind of grads. As for PhDs...well, there's SHORTAGE of people studying PhDs, that's why this country needs to import so many foreign students! So if you are get GPA of 3.0 in one of the top-30 colleges and want to study PhDs, most schools will be more than happy to take you. It makes no difference if you went to private or public college. The PhDs programs in 2nd tiered schools aren't that selective. </p>
<p>The difference I see is more on the preprofessional (like premed/prelaw) advising, in which many privates tend to do better jobs with more supportive advising commitees or higher advisor-to-students ratio.</p>
<p>What are the best schools, per capita, for the Rhodes Scholarship? I doubt this number will vary significantly from the top schools in terms of how many national merit scholars attend, or average SAT scores, or WSJ feeder rates. Same with Truman, Marshall, or Udal scholarship (or a culmination of all four of the "big" scholarships for undergrads).</p>
<p>
[quote]
well, there's SHORTAGE of people studying PhDs
[/quote]
This is far from true. In fact, it is extremely difficult for most PhDs to find jobs once they graduate. There are many fewer available professorships than newly minted PhDs who want them</p>
<p>Afan, my arguement was never that Michigan compared to Harvard on a pound per pound basis. No university compares to Harvard. Michigan does not really compare to Princeton, Yale, MIT or Stanford either. Those are the big 5, and no university effectively competes with them when it comes to sheer numbers. </p>
<p>Also, comparing Michigan to Caltech or LACs is not what I had intended. Caltech is a think tank for incredibly gifted scientists and LACs attract a very different type of student. Schools like Brown, Dartmouth and Rice are probably more like LACs, as is Duke, although Duke is more like a research university. </p>
<p>We were debating whether or not some state universities, like Cal, Michigan, UVa etc...provide a quality of education comparable to that offered at elite private research universities like Columbia, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Penn etc...Those are the institutions I feel can compare to the elite state universities, whether it is from a purely academic point of view, or whether it is from a professional placement or award winning point of view.</p>
<p>PhD productivity is one of the few accurate ways to gauge a college's academic merit. Career prospects and rankings are completely vain compared to the power education has to change lives. A good school should ignite in a student a zest and zeal for the aquisition of knowledge. Education shouldn't yield to financial pursuits. There's nothing prestigious about a low admissions rate and a lousy education.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Sakky, you say "It's an indication of 2 factors. #1, those public schools simply don't have the student quality that the top privates do. And #2, those public schools just don't prepare their students well for competitions like the Rhodes. Sad but true.". I would say that publics simply do not encourage or attempt to produce Rhodes scholars as much as the academies and private schools. But as I said above, one should not judge the quality of an institution based on how many of their students win those one-in-a-million awards
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I agree with you that the publics do not encourage the production of awards like the Rhodes. But to me, that is one indication of the resources available at a school. While I can't speak for Michigan, I am fairly certain that a lot of people at Berkeley would have wanted to win the Rhodes Scholarship, and Berkeley could easily be producing many more Rhodes winners if it wanted to devote more resources to the process But Berkeley doesn't encourage the process the way that the top privates do. The net result is that some Berkeley students who could have won the Rhodes do not win it. </p>
<p>To give you an example - I don't understand why at least one of the 5 finalists every year for the Berkeley University Medal (which are basically Berkeley's 5 valedictorians) aren't winning or at least strongly contending for the Rhodes Scholarship every year. But the fact is, they aren't. The last Berkeley Rhodes was in 2003 with Luthra, and before him you have to go all the way back to 1989 to find another winner. Contrast that with Harvard which churns out 3-4 winners every year. The Berkeley University Medal finalists clearly have the top grades and a laundry list of achievements. But they don't win, and I have to conclude that that's because Berkeley doesn't really promote them to the Rhodes Scholarship committee. I'm sure a lot of them would have liked to win.</p>
<p>The other aspect is that obviously Berkeley (and every public school) has a long tail end of mediocre students who, not to be blunt, but they are never going to win any award. Public schools would clearly look better on a per-capita basis if they could eliminate that long tail end.</p>
<p>“PhD productivity is one of the few accurate ways to gauge a college's academic merit.”</p>
<p>-Ludicrous. </p>
<p>“Career prospects and rankings are completely vain compared to the power education has to change lives.”</p>
<p>-Subjectively ludicrous.</p>
<p>“A good school should ignite in a student a zest and zeal for the aquisition of knowledge. Education shouldn't yield to financial pursuits.”</p>
<p>-Subjectively and rhetorically ludicrous.</p>
<p>“There's nothing prestigious about a low admissions rate and a lousy education.”</p>
<p>-There’s nothing prestigious about a lousy education anywhere. It’s good to know your school has billions of dollars backing up its lousy education, though. :)</p>
<p>Okay. You're right, I'm wrong. College is just for lining up a high paying job. Inspired.</p>
<p>True or false: one whose zeal for knowledge has been ignited will always or at least usually pursue a PhD.</p>
<p>I think one can easily see the fallacy in this argument. </p>
<p>Many would love to pursue a PhD but cannot come close to being able to afford it, even on loans, with their future career prospects. Many need to start paying off college loans right away. I, for one, would love nothing more than to go into academia, but job prospects in my field are both extremely rare and rather lacklustre. I would effectively have to beg miserable schools in miserable locations to take me on as a part time adjunct while desperately trying to publish something worthy enough for better prospects to open up to me...</p>
<p>And woe be unto he who would suggest that institutions like Yale Law lack intellectual ardor and a passion for scholarship! Many simply have a passion for knowledge that can be fulfilled by means other than a Phd.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Size of library: More important than most people think. If you want to find an obscure tome on some New Guinea tribe for anthropology, you are better off looking for it in a library of 6 million books than in a library of 250,000.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I don't know how useful this is, because frankly, a plethora of materials are available to everybody via the Internet, and even if you're talking about some obscure book that you really need, you can often times buy it online for (usually) a nominal price, i.e. buying it used via Amazon. </p>
<p>However, even if we agree that library size is a useful indicator, I would say that the actual size of the actual library is not as important as the number of books you as a student have access to. For example, I know that speaking for myself, I get extremely frustrated when I go to a library looking for a book that the library database says that the library has, but when I actually go to the shelf in the stacks, the book is not there - most likely because somebody else had taken it away to read it, and didn't put it back. What's the point of a library having lots of books if you can't find the book you want? That's why I strongly prefer to "call" books - meaning that I tell the library which books I want, and then a librarian collects all of the books and keeps them reserved for me to pick up, so I don't have to waste time looking for books myself. Hence, it gets to a question of CALLABLE RESOURCES. </p>
<p>So why is that an important distinction? Simple. It's because a lot of libraries have callabe relationships with other libraries. Berkeley, for example, has a callable relationship with many Bay Area Schools, including Stanford. MIT has a callable relationship with BU, BC, Brandeis, Tufts, Northeastern, UMass, Wellesley, and several other Massachusetts libraries (but interestingly not Harvard). However, MIT DOES have a library-card-sharing arrangement with Harvard (but only for grad students), which is basically almost as good as a callable relationship, Harvard books can be called, but they just can't be called directly to MIT (you have to go to Harvard to pick them up). It also means that MIT grad students are able to enter Harvard's libraries (Harvard's libraries are normally closed to the public). Similarly, Berkeley and Stanford have card-sharing relationships, such that each can enter the other's libraries (which are also normally closed to the public). </p>
<p>The point is, it doesn't really matter if your college's library happens to be small if students have access to other large libraries via calling or card-sharing relationships. Such relationships mean that you, in effect, have access to a large 'virtual library'. </p>
<p>The other major issue is that the mere virtue of being geographically located in certain parts of the country may give you access to a wide range of public library resources. For example, any student at any school in New York City is going to have access to a stellar library system for the simple reason that living in New York gives you the right to the resources in the New York Public Library system, which is the largest library in the US and one of the largest in the world. Harvard University Libraries have 15 million volumes, but the NYPL has 19 million. Furthermore, as a NYC resident, you also have access to the Queens Borough Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library, which have an additional 8 and 7 million volumes respectively.</p>
<p>So by that measure, ANY student in ANY college in New York has better access to library resources than the students from Harvard do, even if you add in the 8 million volumes of the Boston Public Library. Sure, maybe your school library isn't that big. But who cares? As a student, all that matters to you is that you have access to library resources, and you don't particularly care which library it is. I know plenty of Harvard and MIT students who basically did almost all their reading and circulation through the Boston Public Library, hardly ever using their own school libraries. I'm sure there are plenty of students who go to New York colleges who never use their school libraries. Why do you need to, when the NYPL is right there?</p>
<p>Derek, the rate at which an undergraduate institution graduates students who eventuall go on to earn a PhD is indeed one of the gauges of the quality of an academic institution. But as I said above, with the exception of Harvard, Chicago, MIT, Caltech and several top LACs, most elite universities have anywhere from 5% and 10% PhD production rates, depending not on quality of education, but on the academic interests of the student body.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I have no idea why anyone would really want to go the PhD route. I was making more money than most of my profs after one year on the job. I think it is a very unusual group.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Simple - because you're not looking at it the right way. Professors don't make a lot of money in terms of straight salary. But the benefits that they can get are simply out of this world.</p>
<p>Let me enumerate just a few:</p>
<p>*Tenure - probably the biggest benefit of all. If you can get tenure, that means that, unless you are caugh committing a major offense like steal from the school or falsifying your research, you are UNFIREABLE. That's right - UNFIREABLE. Contrast that with the private sector where you can be fired at any time for any reason, or no reason at all. Most states are at-will states meaning that a private company doesn't need a reason to fire you. Furthermore, private sector layoffs occur all the time, when companies restructure. For example, Eastman Kodak has laid off about 27,000 workers in the last several years. Tenure means job security. Granted, it's not absolutely perfect job security (i.e. there are ways to pierce tenure), but it's far far more job security than most private sector employees could ever dream of. I'm sure that all of those laid-off Kodak workers wish they had tenure. </p>
<p>What tenure also means is that once you get it, you basically don't have to do anything more than the bare minimum to keep your job. As long as you teach the classes you are assigned to each, attend the committee meetings to which you are obligated, and otherwise complete the bare minimum of obligations, you are unfireable. You can put little effort into your teaching and do it very poorly, and it won't matter. You can attend to your committee obligations in a half-assed way, and it doesn't really matter. Again, contrast that to the private sector where you are highly aware of the fact that if you don't perform well, you will lose your job. {And even those who do their job well can still lose their job}. </p>
<p>*Low formal time commitments.</p>
<p>Another huge perk of the professorial lifestyle is that the academic school year is not that long. You get the whole summer off. You get a month off for winter break. You get the week of spring break off. You get all the Federal holidays off. Lawrence Summers, former President of Harvard, once stated that the Harvard academic school year is only about 28 weeks long. Furthermore, every 7 years, you get a sabbatical, which can last to 1/2 a year to a full year. That's huge!. </p>
<p>Now granted, most profs aren't just lounging around. Most of them don't really have 'time off', because time that is not spent on academic work is spent on their research. Hence, most profs are actually working extremely hard. For example, their sabbatical year is generally spent doing heavy research, i.e. writing a book. </p>
<p>But the point is, tied in with the first point, once you have tenure, you don't HAVE to do anything, if you don't want to. If you have tenure, and you want to lounge around and do absolutely nothing for your entire sabbatical year, you can do it. If you want to take your summers off to travel somewhere like Europe or Australia for months at a time, you are free to do it. If you have tenure, there's nothing to stop you from doing this. More seriously, I know a lot of tenured female professors who decide to have a baby during their sabbatical year - taking advantage of the fact that they have a whole paid year off, and are guaranteed to have their old job back when they return, essentially converting their sabbatical into maternity leave. Rarely can you find such generous maternity leave benefits in the US private sector. And like I said, even apart from the sabbatical, if you're a tenured professor who is also a new mother, and you want to shirk your academic responsibilities in order to spend more time with your baby, then, like I said, as long as you are doing the bare minimum, you will keep your tenure and thus your job. Contrast that with what happens in the private sector where mothers who spend too much time caring for their child at the expense of their job always risk getting fired. </p>
<p>*Fringe benefits.</p>
<p>Coupled with tenure and time-off, profs have access to a wide range of other benefits. For example, they almost always have access to the University gym/fitness centers for free. Access to university cultural events. Academic discounts to numerous outside events. A gold-plated pension plan and health-care plan. Etc. etc.</p>
<p>*Possibility of outside consulting. Granted, this tends to happen more commonly with disciplines such as business, engineering, economics, and the natural sciences. But every prof has at least some access to extremely lucrative outside consulting work, which can be done via all that time off.</p>
<p>To give you an example, I am convinced that there isn't a single tenured prof at Harvard Business School who couldn't become filthy rich via outside consulting. If they're not doing it, it's because they don't want to do it (i.e. they would rather do research). By that, I don't mean quitting their prof position to become a consultant or do other corporate work. I mean just doing extremely lucrative consulting work on their off-time, while keeping their prof job. To give you an example, David Yoffie, HBS professor, is, on the side, also a Board Director of both Intel and Charles Schwab. Most other profs at HBS have their own consulting side-business, which makes a tremendous amount of money. </p>
<p>But this is not just HBS-specific. Let me give you a snippet from the book High Stakes, No Prisoners. </p>
<p>"LECG (the Law and Economics Consulting Group) is the largest corporate antitrust consulting firm in the United states with revenues of more than $50 million [in 1999]...Rich Gilbert [Professor and current Chair of Economics at UCBerkeley] was a founder of LECG. When he entered the government [by taking a leave of absence from Berkeley to become senior Economist at the Department of Justice in 1993], he sold his LECG stock back to LECG, thus avoiding conflict of interest restrictions. Then, when he left Justice two years later, he repurchased it; his LECG stock is now worth more than $30 million. [Two other senior economists at the DoJ, Carl Shapiro and Dan Rubinfeld, were, not coincidentally, also Berkeley Professors of Economics, and were also members of LECG]. Carl Shapiro formed his own antitrust consulting firm with Michael Katz, another Berkeley professor who had just been the chief economist of the FCC. Their firm, the Tilden Group, was recently acquired by the other large corporate antitrust consulting firm, Charles River Associates. Katz and another Berkeley professor, Glenn Woroch, run a research project, the Consotium for Research on Telecommunications Policy, which is funded almost entirely by the Ameritech Foundation (now run by SBC/AT&T). Woroch also consults for BellSouth. Daniel Rubinfeld, the Justice chief economist until late 1998, owned more than $6 million in LECG stock while working for Justice, representing the overhwleming majority of his personal wealth. LECG's newest seniors partner is Laura Tyson, the [former] dean of UCBerkeley's business school [and now the dean of the London Business School], who is also a director of Ameritech and was the chairwoman of the National Economic Council in the first Clinton administration.</p>
<p>Berkeley is in no way unique. MIT's Jerry Hausman recently published a highly polemic paper in a Brookings volume, attacking the FCC for not giving the telephone monopolies more freedom in the Internet industry. What Hausman did not mention in the paper is that he has received millions of dollars from the telecommunications industry foe regulatory consulting and expert testimony. NYU's William Baumol, another famous economist and a past president of the American Economic Association, has a confidential consulting version of his curriculum vita containing a fifty-page supplement listing his expert witness engagements, for which he is paid more than one thousand dollars per hour...Peter Temin, former chair of the MIT Economics Department, has consulted for AT&T on antitrust and regulatory matters since the 1970's. Robert Crandall [former professor of economics at MIT, George Washington, and the University of Maryland and current Brookings fellow], consults for Bell Atlantic [now Verizon]."</p>
<p>-pages 346-347, "High Stakes, No Prisoners", Charles Ferguson.</p>
<p>The point is, if you are a prof who makes his name known in any field for which there is significant money involved, trust me, a lot of companies will pay you handsomely for your side-consulting. In fact, a lot of companies don't even really want consulting at all. They just want to SAY that they consulted with you, to impress investors and partners. It's like if I started a company, I would actually PAY Bill Gates to invest in my company, just so that I can SAY that Bill Gates is an investor because that will attract other investors. Similarly, I would pay HBS profs for consulting just so I can SAY that my company's business model has the HBS "stamp of approval". In other words, I'd simply be renting the Harvard Business School name. </p>
<p>Another thing you can do is start a company on the side. Plenty of engineering profs at MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley have become super-rich through the startups they created on the side. Amar Bose become a billionaire through his Bose Corporation while he was (and still is) a prof at MIT. </p>
<p>The overall point is, the prof lifestyle is pretty sweet, especially once you get tenure. Sure, you don't make much on your professorial salary. But that discounts all of the money you can make on your side work, as well as all the time off you get, and all your fringe benefits.</p>
<p>Wow, Ph.D being worthless? Maybe the United States is falling behind in the sciences these days because of the feeling that "you have to get a professional degree or else you'll be desperately poor." Maybe it doesn't pay particularly well initially, but...</p>
<p>Consider this for just a second people. There are a good number of people who aren't working their butts off in the world to become fantastically wealthly. Gasp, someone actually wants to contribute to a field of research??? Unfathomable.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Here's another statement. There is the possibility that someone actually might want to teach students for the fulfillment of doing so. Incredible eh?</p></li>
<li><p>There are even some people who want to gain positions of expertise at world class institutions, government agencies, zoos and aquariums, museums and more. </p></li>
</ul>
<p>'In reality, however, almost all the top research and development jobs (at least in technical areas such as physics, mathematics, materials, engineering, numerical analysis, etc.) in high-ranking universities, and increasingly investment banks hiring for financial modelling and industry, require a Ph.D. It is also a requirement for almost all tenure-track university positions. It is unlikely that someone will head their own research group in the defense or private research sectors unless they possess a Ph.D. Furthermore, a Ph.D. is a good way to make the transition from a masters project or undergraduate study to full-scale research.'</p>
<p>There you have it. The attitude in this country about what counts as 'success' has become so skewed it makes me wonder if imagination and dedication is really on the outs.</p>
<p>
[quote]
There you have it. The attitude in this country about what counts as 'success' has become so skewed it makes me wonder if imagination and dedication is really on the outs.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>In some sense, this is true. It's sad, but true. The attitudes in this country really are skewed, and mostly by economic incentives. To paraphrase Tom Friedman, in China, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In the US, Britney Spears is Britney Spears, and that's part of the problem. The sad truth is that the US economy really does reward untalented, uneducated people who are just backed by marketing hype (i.e. Britney Spears), and that causes Americans to disrespect talent and education. People see celebrities like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton making millions with no discernable talent or education whatsoever and they figure that if those people can become multi-millionares without any talent or education, then I can also make millions without needing to develop any talent or education. The whole US pop culture edifice basically chips away at American's respect for education and hard work.</p>
<p>Well, this is true to a degree, sakky.</p>
<p>However, the same market that rewards the occasional B. Spears also chops off at the knees thousands of Spears wannabees every year who decided to drop out of school and put on a halter top and extra makeup.</p>
<p>I recall that AP enrollments are at an all-time high in my state with concurrent record stats on FTIC kids. </p>
<p>All is not lost. :)</p>
<p>
[quote]
However, the same market that rewards the occasional B. Spears also chops off at the knees thousands of Spears wannabees every year who decided to drop out of school and put on a halter top and extra makeup.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Yeah, but consider the mathematics involved. Forbes Magazine has estimated that Britney Spears's net worth is over $200 million. And she's only 24 years old. There aren't that many 24 year olds who have even a $20,000 net worth. Heck, many 24 year olds actually have NEGATIVE net worth because they're still paying off their student loans. However, let's presume that the average 24-year-old really does have $20,000 to his/her name. Britney Spears beats that person by a 10,000:1 ratio. Hence, you would require more than 10,000 Spears wannabe's to get chopped off at the knees in order for the bet to be a bad one. A lottery ticket actually can become a smart bet as long as the winnings justify the odds. For example, even if the odds of you winning are 10 million-to-one, as long as the payout is more than 10 million dollars (in present dollars), then it actually is rational to buy lottery tickets. </p>
<p>Again, that's part of the problem. The kids really are behaving rationally (even if they don't know it), principally because the payout to becoming the next Britney Spears or Paris Hilton is so huge that it actually justifies the low odds of making it. Sad but true. By the same token, that's why so many American boys dream of becoming the next great basketball or baseball star - again, because the payouts to doing so are so huge that they actually somewhat justify the odds of making it. For example, the average player salary in the NBA is over $5 million. That's not the stars - that's the AVERAGE. You play one year as an average player in the NBA, and you and your family all the way down to your great grandkids are set for life. </p>
<p>It all gets down to market incentives. The higher the payout in certain fields, the more that people will want to enter those fields. If you want more kids to value education, then you have to increse the payouts for education. Right now, the average newly minted college graduate makes only about $35 a year to start. That's not much that much more than you could make, say, waiting tables right after high school. I don't think American kids are dumb. They're actually smart. They see all these college grads out there in crappy jobs, not making much money. And then they see the professional athletes and singers/movie stars making massive paydays. They also understand that it's extremely difficult to become a pro athlete or star singer/actor, but they see that if they do make it, they're set for life. </p>
<p>I am convinced that this is a big reason why so many American kids don't value education. They're acting rationally to the incentives placed before them. I wish it wasn't true. I wish that education paid more, and a celebrity lifestyle paid less. But, sadly, it is true.</p>
<p>Interesting analysis. Yes, it's true that a few, comparatively speaking, seek the golden nugget in pro sports or entertainment. Occasionally one makes it, to wide press and great fanfare. </p>
<p>I don't really see too much difference between this and the gold fever of the 1800s, however or similar wild goose chases over history. It's human nature to seek the path of least resistance or perhaps to be foolish to the point of destruction. Is this natural selection at work? It's still seemingly a waste and tragic. Like seeing the poor buy lottery tickets by the dozen. It's a free society; maybe this pursuit makes them happy? Do we have a better idea? Would those people like another's 'better' idea? </p>
<p>Yes - I agree that education should be more valued. The rewards should be greater. Virtually any celebrity is painfully human for all to see, thus making that way less attractive.</p>