| I'll paste here GP's question that we're discussing (emphasis mine): "No, the main question is are the highest paid workers getting that because of college, or did the most driven and smartest go to college, and would have been equally successful had no one gone to college?" There are a few interesting questions we could ask related to college attendance. The most common ones are: 1. From an individual student's perspective, does going to college have a positive ROI, in a world where the college and employment landscape exists as it does today. 2. If the answer to #1 is yes, how much of this is due to education, and how much is due to pure signalling ("sorting hat") effects? 3. If we were to eliminate all colleges, so that no one has a bachelors' degree, would that reduce the outputs and incomes of the most driven and smartest people. The papers you cited attempt to address #1 and #2. But neither of those are the question that GP asked (which is #3). You claim that they do address this question, but are asking me for evidence that they don't. I'm not sure what you're expecting me to do? Go through each and every paragraph in each paper and explain how it doesn't address #3? It might be easier for you point us to a sentence or paragraph in either paper that envisages a world where no one goes to college. |
The question of causality is in fact attempting to answer #3, and it seems like you’re failing to understand that. This is exactly what “true causality” means. The question being asked is whether the outputs and incomes of the smartest people are coming from the education, or from the environment where colleges exist. (Implicitly comparing to a world where no colleges exist.) The Fed study and others are trying to answer whether and how much of the outputs and incomes of the smartest people can be assigned to college, and implicitly calculating what the outcomes would be if colleges did not exist.
> It might be easier for you to point us to a sentence or paragraph in either paper that envisages a world where no one goes to college.
Ah, so you want a literal mention of no college. See this is where it becomes clear that you don’t understand the causality question and you didn’t understand the connection between what @jletienne asked and what @jedberg asked. They are not different questions. You think they are, but they aren’t.