Is it profitable to go to university? Well, in some countries more than in others. For example, in the United States, the return on college education is very high, while the penalty for not completing secondary education is enormous. But, in addition to the countries, the profitability of education depends on the university where you study. In fact, the Obama administration, concerned about the high cost of many private universities of dubious quality, launched a scoreboard accessible on the Internet, with the cost of attending each center, its graduation rate and the average annual income that was obtained at the end of the studies.
But are there differences between good universities? A recently published study analyzes the effect of admission to the best private American universities: Ivy Leage (Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania, Brown and Dartmouth College) plus MIT, Stanford, Duke and Chicago. 0.5% of US students attend these universities, but their graduates hold 11.6% of Fortune 500 CEO positions, 41% of CEOs (since 1960), 71.4% of Supreme Court justices (since 1963) or 26.1% of journalists for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The authors of the study (Chetty, Deming and Friedman) have put together five huge databases that include income statements of parents and children, scholarships and credits received, entrance exam scores (SAT / ACT) and documentation on applications and admissions. The study confirms a well-known result: attending a highly selective private university has little impact on mean future earnings compared to a selective public one. However, students who decide to go to a highly selective private university, and are admitted, rather than go to a good public university, are much more likely to enter the top 1% of the income distribution and work in a prestigious company.
The most worrying part of the study is that, conditional on the same entrance mark, the probability of admission in the case of a high-income family is more than double (triple if they are in the top 1% of income) than if the family had a medium or low income. At the most selective public universities, the probability of admission is independent of family income. What explains this higher probability of admitting students from high-income families? 20% is due to the fact that, subject to the same entrance marks, students from high-income families request access to these universities in a greater proportion. 12% is explained by the greater probability of enrolling, once admitted, of students from high-income families. But the remaining 68% is explained by a higher admission rate of students from high-income families due to the application of criteria other than the access grade (being a descendant of a student, athlete or having non-academic credentials such as extracurricular activities, etc.) . The authors argue that eliminating these three criteria would generate a socioeconomic diversity similar to the effect of racial preference, recently called into question by the Supreme Court, on racial diversity. In addition, since the entrance marks are the most determinant for the average future income, this change in the admissions policy would produce an evident social benefit.
In the Spanish case the situation is very different. As in the United States, a large majority of students attend university with the aim of improving their employability and obtaining higher wages in the labor market. However, the return on college education is much lower than in the United States, and the penalty for not completing high school is lower. This is due to the substantial proportion of overqualified university graduates, the poor quality of jobs and the persistence of many students in selecting specialties with low labor demand, although not very demanding. In the last 20 years, enrollment in engineering has fallen by 8.7%, while in technological degrees it has fallen by 20.7%, and in experimental sciences, by 19%. The most selective Spanish universities are still the public ones, with some exceptions, and traditionally they have concentrated the vast majority of students. But the trends are clear. Since 2006, enrollment in public universities has fallen by 15% while in private ones it has increased by 49%, competing in the same markets. Graduates from private universities have higher employment rates and lower rates of unemployment and overqualification (ten points less than the public one).
Unfortunately, political representatives decided long ago that public universities were not a priority. Worse still: in the absence of funding, instead of reducing the huge subsidies that students from high-income families who attend public universities receive (about 7,000 euros per student/year), it was decided to increase the subsidy even more. . Even more harmful than the lack of financing is regulatory suffocation, which among other things prevents a quick reaction to new training needs, and the inability to substantially modify a governance that does not allow for modern institutional management. In this way, the ability of public universities to attract the best talent (professors and students), and to be able to compete with private universities, will gradually be diminished. I hope I'm wrong, but along this path in a few years someone will do a study explaining why the graduates of the most selective Spanish private centers occupy the best positions in companies and have much higher salaries. It will also explain why it is not the students with the best records who get into the best (private) universities. And it will account for the growing segregation of students from wealthy families in good and selective private universities, and low-income students in public, free and low-quality universities.
