I'm not sure how surprising it is that academics are defending academia. Plummer's response is sensible--yes, it's a rigged experiment. On the other hand, if you genuinely think college is a bad deal, paying people to go to college is perverse. Thiel isn't so much making a bet as helping people act as if his bet has already paid off.
Katsouleas just makes a lame rhetorical point. Surely he can do better.
Eisenstein speaks the truth: college is not always the best option. "Getting an engineering degree reduces the variance in your career outcomes. You might not get the billions, but you also won’t get into poverty." That's the best way to understand it. In most financial contexts, cutting your variance also reduces your expected outcome--and levering up to buy low-variance assets is a good way to gear yourself for negative outcomes, whether those assets are degrees or CDOs.
Is there any point more boring than noting that two people who finished school a decade or two ago now think that school isn't such a good deal? It would be pretty craven for Thiel and Arrington to believe the things they believe but lie about it because they'd gone to Stanford, so I'm not sure Wadhwa has a point.
Katsouleas just makes a lame rhetorical point. Surely he can do better.
Eisenstein speaks the truth: college is not always the best option. "Getting an engineering degree reduces the variance in your career outcomes. You might not get the billions, but you also won’t get into poverty." That's the best way to understand it. In most financial contexts, cutting your variance also reduces your expected outcome--and levering up to buy low-variance assets is a good way to gear yourself for negative outcomes, whether those assets are degrees or CDOs.
Is there any point more boring than noting that two people who finished school a decade or two ago now think that school isn't such a good deal? It would be pretty craven for Thiel and Arrington to believe the things they believe but lie about it because they'd gone to Stanford, so I'm not sure Wadhwa has a point.