I am claiming that highly motivated people don't need college to be successful. I don't think I need data to accept that. The business world is full of such people.
I am not an economist (thank god), but I don't need to prove the opposite, that college is bad.
The threshold is on the people (economists) who make the claim that college is generally "a good investment".
If I can find a fault in their study (which I did), then their hypothesis is invalid.
Too many economists feel the need to publish papers that fit a simple narrative or correlation.
You did no such thing. "Return to education" is number one topic in labor economics, and labor economists work hard to remove bias. The issue you raised is called "ability bias". Ability bias exists, and is important. But you didn't prove ability bias completely offset measured return to education.
Here is one example study trying to control ability bias. Given the same motivation, if you live closer to college, you are more likely to go to college. So you can use distance to college to erase the effect of motivation.
This is the kind of stuffs economists publish papers about. It is not about fitting a simple narrative. If you could show ability bias completely offsets measured return to education, you would be famous in no time.
If you have an example of a study that removes ability AND motivation bias from it's assessment of whether a college education is worth it, then I would love to look at it.
Until then, I am highly skeptical of a "correlation" between college degrees and success/wealth.
Like I said before, I don't have to prove anything. The economists have to prove there is a correlation, I am assuming that there isn't a correlation until there is a study that takes out these biases.
The sad part is that economists have published so many bad studies about this "correlation" that the media narrative is that a college education is almost always worth the price.
You mean as in studying genetically identical twins raised in the same family?
It would maybe be a step in the right direction, but motivation is going to be different between twins, often vastly different.
And I know how difficult it is to quantify "motivation", but really, I don't know a way around it.
But getting back to the issue: Is a college education worth the time, money and opportunity cost that we put into it?
And is it possible to design a study that could confirm or deny it?
The problem is that almost all motivated and/or smart 18 year olds go to college.
Is there a sample size large enough to find the ones that don't?
And even if you did, you would run into the opposite effect, motivated and smart 18 year olds that don't go college usually are outliers that have something else to do, like getting into a special program, a good job or being a professional chess player.
So, when you find these people, they would be the opposite sort of bias. Their circumstances would be so unique that they would prejudice the study against college.
Right now, college is the default option for people who can get in, so by its very nature, it biases the population.
I don't see a way around it, but I am open to ideas.
Curious if you have an data/research to back this up.
I presume trying to get defintion & then sample of "highly motivated" people & the opposite of them- would be quite a challenging task.