That fact that there's a correlation between education and employment doesn't tell us if there's a causation. What's very likely is that the kind of people who will prioritise getting a degree is also the kind of people who can and will adjust and pivot to a new type of employment environment.
If you're trying to decide to go to college, you're already very likely to be employable. Telling a 50 year unemployed old blue collar worker that he should have gone to college is a "let them eat cake" response.
Ok the typical correlation/causation argument doesn't apply here. There have been MANY studies on degree vs. employment and the results always look like this.
Second, stop using the word pivot when it doesn't apply. Not only is it a stupid buzzword, people aren't even using it correctly!
> That fact that there's a correlation between education and employment doesn't tell us if there's a causation.
Agreed, but there very well might be, and there probably is, the question I think is not 'if' but 'how much'.
> What's very likely is that the kind of people who will prioritise getting a degree is also the kind of people who can and will adjust and pivot to a new type of employment environment.
Yes, there is a certain flexibility involved there, it's hard to re-train someone whose industry has just been outsourced from under them, all their domain specific knowledge has just turned worthless.
Knowledge workers have it a bit easier in that sense, they still have the problem but they might be able to adapt quicker than 'skill' based workers.
> If you're trying to decide to go to college, you're already very likely to be employable.
Yes, most likely.
> Telling a 50 year unemployed old blue collar worker that he should have gone to college is a "let them eat cake" response.
Telling someone what they should have done in the past is totally dumb, it didn't happen that way so it's completely pointless.
But for the people you outlined above, the ones trying to decide to go to college or not might do well to realize that one day they too will be 50, and if they're in the possession of a college degree then it might be to their advantage.
Notice that's a might, the article does not do much to explain the background of the graph, and I think that it has some truth to it but that is not evident from the presentation.
I think that HN actually has a higher average education level than most fora, and that people like you (and me) are the exception, not the rule. And I do have some understanding of statistics, not enough to read a typical stats paper but I know a median from an average (that seems to be the deciding factor ;) ).
The graph to me indicates that there is some correlation between education and unemployment (especially given the fact that the graph is showing a continuous trend) but does nothing to explain that correlation in a way that you could conclude 'if you get a degree your chances of being unemployed are smaller'. That might be true, but is not a valid conclusion.
Another thing that the graph does not tell you (but general statistics does) is that you can't say anything about individuals, only about populations.
But it's an interesting graph nonetheless and I think that it would be good to take it in to account while researching this sort of thing further.
A background in statistics is useful, even if you only get the basics, but I think that even that is not a requirement to understand what the graph says and which caveats you should be aware of.
