Derek Magill

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College won’t make you earn more

I want to cross-pollinate this essay with a dialogue of sorts that I had on Facebook with a reader who argued that the current data shows that college graduates make more money than non-college graduates.

This is actually not something about which I disagree. I think the data does indeed show that college graduates make more money, but I think the interpretation of that data and the methodology of the studies is so flawed that we cannot conclude at all that graduating college generally causes you to make more money, only that it currently correlates to it.

What follows is a fairly short dialogue in which I make the case that claiming the data proves college helps you make more money is like claiming basketball helps you grow taller.

Derek: I’m not convinced there are wage premiums in general anyways. What they’re comparing now is apples to oranges. But regardless, yes only 54 percent graduate in 6 years or less, which is staggeringly dismal.

Protagoras: The literature among labor economics has been pretty clear about there being premiums. The the issues is that they have been flattening.

Derek: I think the data shows something else and their methodology is skewed.

Everybody who can read today is encouraged from a very early age to go to college. Over the last 20 or so years, most of the smartest people went to college whereas not going was often a pretty bad sign you had some issues.

It’s a difference of input and not output. People going to college were more likely to be successful before starting than people who didn’t.

An accurate study would have parallel universes where you take Derek A and put him through college and Derek B and have him not go. Then see what happens.

Protagoras: In other words “labor economics is wrong because I only accept facts in absolutes”.

Derek: It’s the total opposite. Data is open to interpretation. They’re making an absolutist claim from data that can have multiple valid interpretations.

All they’re measuring is “college grads vs non-college grads” If I strictly measured “basketball players vs non players” I could easily conclude basketball gives you a premium on height even though it doesn’t.

I also filmed a video version of this argument while I was in Poland last year.

Data-ism is not science

I think one of the unfortunate products of the Information Age is a sort of worship of data.

While data is indeed important, we fall into silly and often dangerous data-ism when we attempt to use data to make our case without reference to the methodology behind the collection of that data or an understanding of the important of the interpretive process. “Look at that data” becomes a cudgel to win an argument and not one tool among many to inform our understanding of the world around us.

Though my example in the dialogue — playing basketball makes you taller — is ridiculous, the data could suggest that until you interpret it for what it actually means, that taller people play basketball to begin with.

The studies about college graduate incomes that claim to “prove” they make more money are done with the exact same methodology as my fictional basketball study. We should be wary about concluding anything definitive that could inform our decisions about whether to go to college or not.

Does college cause you to make more money?

I don’t know whether college causes you to make more money or not, and nobody else does either. I do however think we can look at several points that suggest college does not have a serious impact on earnings, including the following:

  • Smarter people tend to go to college. Dumber people tend to not go to college. We all know this from experience.
  • It does not appear that most students show many measurable increases in learning or knowledge from their time college.
  • Surveys suggest the majority of employers regard their new hires as under qualified and in need of remedial training.
  • The data doesn’t take into account college debt and lost earnings of time in college (at least 6 years on average)
  • Skipping college gives you a 4-6 year head start on working, assuming other traits are equalized (a college-capable optout as opposed to a slacker or dummy who simply couldn’t get in)

Of course, I don’t think we can make a definitive conclusion, but I don’t think we need to.

Individuals, not averages

One of the things I realized when I was in college was that I didn’t care one way or another what the data ended up showing.

If you base your important life decisions around what “average people with average results” are doing, you’re probably going to end up average.

What proud defenders of the college income data are really doing is reducing individuals to statistic and arguing for being part of the middle, which is certainly better than being at the bottom, but it wasn’t enough for me.

And if being average isn’t enough for you, I suggest you stop obsessing over the data, stop following what everyone else is doing, and create your own path. Life is much more fun that way.

The Real Education Revolution

This is part 1 of a 2 part series on the future of higher education and career launch.

The real “revolution” in higher education is happening, but most of us are looking in the wrong direction at so-called “alternative” programs.

These “alternative” programs are popping up everywhere, often with a ton of media attention. Many of these are good, many not so good,  but none are revolutionary. The “programatic” model, the one that takes 1, 2, 4 years of your life, remains a carryover from the existing university system. They are at best halfway steps.

The real revolution is happening much more quietly. Rather than finding some other program to take the place of school, the people participating in this revolution are asking “why do I need a program at all? Why can’t I create my own program and build my own credential?”

They’re starting businesses, connecting with mentors, curating the best educational resources from all around the world, launching personal projects, getting apprenticeships, working for free, writing books, and developing themselves in novel ways at a much faster pace than a traditional university course or even one of these alternatives allows.

They aren’t shackled to one program, one community, and one syllabus. They have the whole world from which to choose. Instead of purchasing programs, they’re connecting directly directly to the people who are doing the kinds of things they want to do with their lives.

Not only are they getting a world class education at a fraction of the cost, but they’re accomplishing it at an earlier age than we’re typically taught is possible.

Programs of course will always exist, but they will become more and more a la carte over time as people wake up to the reality that they don’t need expensive, lengthy tracked systems to get where they want to go in life.

This is the real revolution and that’s what we’re creating at Pathly. Pathly wasn’t created as an “alternative” to college or any other program or credential.

We’re in an entirely different category altogether and don’t consider the other options “options” at all in most cases because they’re too similar to school.

Most people don’t need 1 or 2 years and a permission slip to start working nor do they need any other expensive and lengthy program that effectively serves as a gatekeeper.

They need highly specific advice and guidance at a few pivotal moments in their career and education, theory backed up by experience, and a creator’s mindset. Everything else is just some variant of the school model in better and worse degrees that costs more time and money than is necessary.

This is where the future of education and work is heading. Individuals, not programs. Don’t miss out.

I won a free mediterranean cruise

Hey this is Stefan James and I’m so excited to announce the winner of the Cryptocurrency Life Mastery Contest where one lucky winner will get a chance to win two tickets to the CoinsBank Cruise which is coming up here in September in the Mediterranean. So the lucky winner is Derek Magill. Derek Magill, congratulations my friend. Great job with the video that you posted on YouTube about how cryptocurrency has changed your life!

I almost can’t believe it but today the Stefan James from Project Life Mastery and the Bitcoin.com Team announced that I’ve won their contest for my video submission answering the question “how has cryptocurrency changed your life?”

I’ll be joining them on the CoinsBank Cruise in September for a few days of sailing through the Mediterranean with some of the most interesting people in Bitcoin (BCH).

I think there’s a good lesson here if you’re wondering why I got so lucky: don’t take yourself out of the running before you’ve entered.

The fact is, there won’t a whole lot of submissions at all! My odds were high because many who wanted to enter assumed they could never win and didn’t bother making a submission.

Anyways, thank you to the Bitcoin.com Team and Stefan James. I’m excited to see you all soon.

“But doctors need college degrees!”

Every time I write something about college, a reader will comment that “doctors, lawyers and certain types of engineers must have degrees.”

Enough is enough. I don’t think this is a good argument, but it’s so common that I want to address it once and for all.

Yes, doctors need degrees. They need degrees because the law says they need degrees. They need degrees because a politician who has not practiced medicine forces them to get the degree. I readily concede this fact, but it is not relevant to a general claim that college degrees are a waste of time.

Why the reductio ad doctorum falls flat

Here are the three main reasons I believe this sort of reductio ad doctorum is not useful in the college degree question:

  1. Most people do not want to be doctors. You cannot justify college degrees for everyone on the grounds that a small handful of positions require them. The conveyor-belt approach to life is a recipe for failure. People have different goals, competencies, and interests, and the idea that a broad tent could ever fit them all is ridiculous.
  2. Medicine is a legally protected industry. It is not relevant at all to discussing the majority of industries which do not have legal restrictions on employment. If I said that “you can leave your job whenever you want” it would be bad to reply “no! In the military, they would court-martial you.” The simple fact is that in general in the private sector, you are able to quit your job when you want.
  3. That doctors “need degrees” now is not evidence that the degree would be the only way to become a doctor in a free market for certification. We don’t have a free market now so we cannot make claims about the value of the degree as such, only that it is a legal requirement now. I actually look forward to the day where there are competing certification methods and business models in medicine. I suspect that will go a long way to reducing death by medical error.

Exception obsession

I think this kind of argument is a classic case of missing the broad point by searching desperately for one exception, which is not even really an exception at all as I showed in point number two.

Businesses in an open market do not literally require college degrees. There is a difference between expressed preferences like “we require a degree” and the revealed preference underneath which is “we want someone we trust who creates more value than they take out in salary.” All a would-be employee needs to do is demonstrate the latter and they’ve got the job.

And the exciting thing is that more and more companies are openly expressing now that they don’t require degrees. This is just the beginning of a long trend to come. Don’t miss out by obsessing over exceptions.

Practicing your creativity

Here’s a fun thing to do if you’re feeling uncreative.

Pick a panel from a comic book or a few paragraphs in a story or novel. What comes next? Write it out.

I could see a story built on this panel to the right by Steve Ditko about a modern Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde character who spends his days acting on reason, truth, and pursuing the good, and his nights in mystic, subjectivist, emotionalist revel that undos much of the good he did in the day.

The interesting thing about our character is that there is nothing physically or psychologically wrong with him that causes him to be this way.

His troubles come from holding mixed philosophical premises that were left unchallenged too long. He is like a man who is run by a computer whose print-outs he cannot read because of the unresolved contradictions in his mind.

And though he frantically wants a better life and has glimpses of it, he is unable to reject the ideas that are the cause of his split personality.

Maybe the panel we have here is a dream sequence — a nightmare where he sees the contradictions on a wall in front of him and panics — and he wakes up sweating in bed, his rational side in control…for now…

What would you write? Try it out for yourself with my image or one of your own.

No, there never was a college degree “requirement”

‘You see, but you do not observe.’ – Sherlock Holmes

Google, IBM and Apple have stopped listing college degree requirements on their job descriptions but everyone is missing the point when they say that this is some revolutionary, bold new direction in hiring. It’s not.

Companies have never had degree *requirements* and you just didn’t know it. [1] The great lie you’ve been told is that you need to buy a piece of paper to have permission to create value in the marketplace. You were told this because a lot of people have a lot at stake if you ever realized the truth.

And the truth is this: outside of government-backed cartels like law, academia, and medicine, no company has ever literally *required* a degree. The degree is just a signaling mechanism and if you can signal the traits it’s supposed to signal without it, you can sidestep any checkbox.

Companies just want to know you can create more value than you take out in salary and don’t give a damn what paper you have so long as you can prove it some other way. And in today’s world where college graduates frequently can’t read and students spend 4-6 years in a debt and alcohol fueled vacation from the real world, it’s embarrassingly easy to prove that.

As my friend Isaac Morehouse said in his 2016 speech at the Voice and Exit conference,

Compare “I graduated from college” to what you can now signal on your own. I can find out more Googling you in two minutes today than I could have found in two months with a private investigator in the past. Your degree is worth less than your Github profile, your LinkedIn profile, your personal website, your Quora answers, the projects you’ve created and the people you’ve worked with.

Companies have always known this — they could not succeed if they hired by paper instead of product —and Apple, IBM, and Google (and many more) are just acknowledging explicitly what they’ve done implicitly for years.

Those of us who realized this at an early age experienced a massively unfair advantage in our career because we got to start at 16, 17, 18 and 19 instead of 24, 25, and 26. While my friends were in school waiting for permission, I traveled, worked with all sorts of companies, spoke at universities around the world, took a startup from nothing to over a million in revenue, and started my own company.

I did all the things you’re told you need a degree for and nobody ever seemed to care at all whether I had permission from a government subsidized college. Imagine that…

It is a shame though that so many people racked up 1.6 trillion dollars in total US student debt to check off an imaginary box. They are paying the price of the passive-permission-based approach to life, but the people who fed them the tired nonsense that they needed college will pay soon too when the whole myth collapses inwards and they find themselves without customers.

Apple, IBM and Google are just the beginning.

[1] Of course it feels good to be vindicated. I already was, but now I when someone says “do you really think you don’t need a degree” I can just say “look around.”