大学仍是跻身中产阶级的门票

Is College Worth It? Clearly, New Data Say
大学仍是跻身中产阶级的门票

Some newly minted college graduates struggle to find work. Others accept jobs for which they feel overqualified. Student debt, meanwhile, has topped $1 trillion.

一些刚刚走出校门的大学毕业生很难找到工作。其他人则接受了他们觉得大材小用的工作。与此同时,学生债务已经突破1万亿美元大关。

It’s enough to create a wave of questions about whether a college education is still worth it.

这足以引发一波关于大学教育是否仍然值得的问题。

A new set of income statistics answers those questions quite clearly: Yes, college is worth it, and it’s not even close. For all the struggles that many young college graduates face, a four-year degree has probably never been more valuable.

一组新的收入统计数据非常清楚地回答了这些问题:是的,大学值得上,而且差别还不是一丁点。尽管许多年轻的大学毕业生面临种种困境,但一个四年制学位或许从来没有比现在更有价值。

The pay gap between college graduates and everyone else reached a record high last year, according to the new data, which is based on an analysis of Labor Department statistics by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Americans with four-year college degrees made 98 percent more an hour on average in 2013 than people without a degree. That’s up from 89 percent five years earlier, 85 percent a decade earlier and 64 percent in the early 1980s.

华盛顿经济政策研究所(Economic Policy Institute)根据劳工部统计数据所做的最新分析显示,大学毕业生和其他人的薪酬差距在去年达到历史最高。2013年,有四年制大学学位的美国人的平均时薪比没有学位的美国人足足高了98%。五年前、10年前和上世纪80年代初的薪酬差距分别是89%、85%和64%。

There is nothing inevitable about this trend. If there were more college graduates than the economy needed, the pay gap would shrink. The gap’s recent growth is especially notable because it has come after a rise in the number of college graduates, partly because many people went back to school during the Great Recession. That the pay gap has nonetheless continued growing means that we’re still not producing enough of them.

这种趋势并没有任何必然性。如果大学毕业生的人数超过经济需要,薪酬差距就会缩小。这种差距的最近一次增长尤为显著,因为它是在大学毕业生数量增长(其部分原因是,许多人在“大衰退”期间重返学校深造)之后出现的。薪酬差距仍然继续增长这一事实意味着,美国培养的大学生依然不够用。

“We have too few college graduates,” says David Autor, an M.I.T. economist, who was not involved in the Economic Policy Institute’s analysis. “We also have too few people who are prepared for college.”

“目前的大学毕业生太少了,”麻省理工学院(MIT)经济学家大卫·奥特尔(David Autor)说。“准备上大学的人也太少了。”奥特尔并未参与经济政策研究所的分析。

It’s important to emphasize these shortfalls because public discussion today — for which we in the news media deserve some responsibility — often focuses on the undeniable fact that a bachelor’s degree does not guarantee success. But of course it doesn’t. Nothing guarantees success, especially after 15 years of disappointing economic growth and rising inequality.

强调这些不足是非常重要的,因为如今的公开讨论(新闻媒体对此担有一定责任)通常聚焦于一个无可否认的事实:一个学士学位并不能确保成功。当然不能。没有什么东西能确保成功,特别是经过15年令人失望的经济增长和日益严重的不平等之后。

When experts and journalists spend so much time talking about the limitations of education, they almost certainly are discouraging some teenagers from going to college and some adults from going back to earn degrees. (Those same experts and journalists are sending their own children to college and often obsessing over which one.) The decision not to attend college for fear that it’s a bad deal is among the most economically irrational decisions anybody could make in 2014.

几乎可以肯定是,当专家和记者花费这么多时间谈论教育的局限性时,他们其实是在劝阻一些青少年不要上大学,成年人不要重返学校攻读学位。(与此同时,这些专家和记者正在送自己的子女上大学,而且经常为应该上哪所大学而困扰。)由于担心不划算而决定不上大学,是一个人在2014年有可能做出的最缺乏经济理性的决策之一。

The much-discussed cost of college doesn’t change this fact. According to a paper by Mr. Autor published Thursday in the journal Science, the true cost of a college degree is about negative $500,000. That’s right: Over the long run, college is cheaper than free. Not going to college will cost you about half a million dollars.

受到热烈讨论的上大学成本也无法改变这个事实。根据奥特尔上周四发表于《科学》杂志(Science)的一篇论文,大学学位的真实成本大约是负50万美元。这是正确的:从长远来看,大学教育比免费还便宜。不上大学将使你损失大约50万美元。

Mr. Autor’s paper — building on work by the economists Christopher Avery and Sarah Turner — arrives at that figure first by calculating the very real cost of tuition and fees. This amount is then subtracted from the lifetime gap between the earnings of college graduates and high school graduates. After adjusting for inflation and the time value of money, the net cost of college is negative $500,000, roughly double what it was three decades ago.

奥特尔这篇论文以经济学家克里斯托弗·艾利(Christopher Avery)和莎拉·特纳(Sarah Turner)的研究成果为基础。它首先通过计算大学学杂费的真实成本得出一个数字,随后用大学毕业生和高中毕业生的终生收入差距减去这个金额。剔除通货膨胀和货币时间价值因素后,上大学的净成本为负50万美元,几乎是30年前的两倍。

This calculation is necessarily imprecise, because it can’t control for any pre-existing differences between college graduates and nongraduates — differences that would exist regardless of schooling. Yet other research, comparing otherwise similar people who did and did not graduate from college, has also found that education brings a huge return.

这样计算肯定是不太精确的,因为它没有控制大学毕业生和非大学毕业生预先存在的差异,即无论上不上大学都会存在的差异。然而,还有一些研究在比较了其他方面类似的大学毕业生和非大学毕业生之后,也发现大学教育能够带来丰厚回报。

In a similar vein, the new Economic Policy Institute numbers show that the benefits of college don’t go just to graduates of elite colleges, who typically go on to to earn graduate degrees. The wage gap between people with only a bachelor’s degree and people without such a degree has also kept rising.

与此类似,经济政策研究所的新数据还显示,上大学的好处不仅仅属于通常会继续攻读研究生学位的名牌大学毕业生。只拥有学士学位的人和无学位人群的工资差距也在不断上升。

Tellingly, though, the wage premium for people who have attended college without earning a bachelor’s degree — a group that includes community-college graduates — has not been rising. The big economic returns go to people with four-year degrees. Those returns underscore the importance of efforts to reduce the college dropout rate, such as those at the University of Texas, which Paul Tough described in a recent Times Magazine article.

但引人注目的是,上过大学但未获得学士学位的人(这一群体还包括社区大学毕业生)的工资溢价并没有上涨。高经济回报属于那些有四年制大学学位的人。这些回报突显了减少大学辍学率的重要性——在《纽约时报杂志》(Times Magazine)最近一篇文章中,保罗·塔夫(Paul Tough)描述了得克萨斯大学(University of Texas)为减少辍学率所做的努力。

But what about all those alarming stories you hear about indebted, jobless college graduates?

但你肯定听说有不少大学生负债累累,而且还找不到工作,这些令人震惊的故事又该如何解释呢?

The anecdotes may be real, yet the conventional wisdom often exaggerates the problem. Among four-year college graduates who took out loans, average debt is about $25,000, a sum that is a tiny fraction of the economic benefits of college. (My own student debt, as it happens, was almost identical to this figure, in inflation-adjusted terms.) And the unemployment rate in April for people between 25 and 34 years old with a bachelor’s degree was a mere 3 percent.

这些轶事可能是真的,但传统思维往往夸大了这个问题。办理贷款的四年制大学毕业生人均负债约2.5万美元,与上大学的经济收益相比,这笔钱显得微乎其微。(扣除通胀因素后,我自己的学生债务几乎等同于这个数字。)拥有学士学位的25至34岁年轻人在4月份的失业率仅仅3%而已。

I find the data from the Economic Policy Institute especially telling because the institute — a left-leaning research group — makes a point of arguing that education is not the solution to all of the economy’s problems. That is important, too. College graduates, like almost everyone else, are suffering from the economy’s weak growth and from the disproportionate share of this growth flowing to the very richest households.

我发现经济政策研究所的数据特别耐人寻味。原因是,这家左翼研究机构特意强调,教育并非所有经济问题的解决方案。这也是很重要的。如同几乎所有其他人一样,大学毕业生也正在遭受经济增长乏力,增长收益不成比例地流向最富裕家庭等现象的负面影响。

The average hourly wage for college graduates has risen only 1 percent over the last decade, to about $32.60. The pay gap has grown mostly because the average wage for everyone else has fallen — 5 percent, to about $16.50. “To me, the picture is people in almost every kind of job not being able to see their wages grow,” Lawrence Mishel, the institute’s president, told me. “Wage growth essentially stopped in 2002.”

过去10年,大学毕业生的平均时薪仅上涨了1%,到大约32.60美元。薪酬差距增大的主要原因是,其他人的平均工资下降了——下降5%,降至大约16.50美元。“在我看来,整体现状是,几乎所有人的工资都没有增长,无论他或她从事何种工作,”该研究所所长劳伦斯·米舍尔(Lawrence Mishel)对我说。“工资的增长趋势在2002年就基本停止了。”

From the country’s perspective, education can be only part of the solution to our economic problems. We also need to find other means for lifting living standards — not to mention ways to provide good jobs for people without college degrees.

从整个国家的角度来看,教育只能解决美国经济的部分问题。我们还需要找到其他方式来提升生活水平——更不用说我们需要设法为没有大学学位的人提供好工作。

But from almost any individual’s perspective, college is a no-brainer. It’s the most reliable ticket to the middle class and beyond. Those who question the value of college tend to be those with the luxury of knowing their own children will be able to attend it.

但从几乎任何个体的角度来看,上大学是一个无需动脑就可以做出的决定。这是迈入中产阶级乃至更富裕阶层的最可靠的入场券。质疑大学教育价值的人往往是那些明知道自己的孩子将来会上大学的人。

Not so many decades ago, high school was considered the frontier of education. Some people even argued that it was a waste to encourage Americans from humble backgrounds to spend four years of life attending high school. Today, obviously, the notion that everyone should attend 13 years of school is indisputable.

就在几十年前,高中还被视为教育的前沿。有些人甚至认为,鼓励出身卑微的美国人花费四年光阴上高中是一种浪费。到了今天,每个人都应该接受13年学校教育这种观点显然是不容置疑的。

But there is nothing magical about 13 years of education. As the economy becomes more technologically complex, the amount of education that people need will rise. At some point, 15 years or 17 years of education will make more sense as a universal goal.

但大约13年的教育没有什么神奇之处。随着经济在技术层面变得更加复杂,人们需要接受教育的时间将会上升。在某个时点,15年或17年教育将成为一个更有意义的普遍目标。

That point, in fact, has already arrived.

这个时点,其实已经到来。


来源:纽约时报

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