[jreimers]

So 11% of people who attended public universities are "thriving", and 4% of people who attended private universities are thriving. That means somewhere between 89 and 96 percent of people who attended university are not thriving. This paints a pretty dismal picture of the utility of a university degree for those who want to thrive, white middle class kids or otherwise.

[jws]

That 4% number is private, for profit. Private, non-profit is still 11%.

[imgabe]

It doesn't tell you anything about whether people who didn't go to college are thriving, though.

[VLM]

It did carefully not discuss the trades.

[colechristensen]

This is a really shitty statistic and bad journalism.

> It asked graduates how they were doing across five different metrics, including financially, physically and socially. Eleven percent of graduates of public universities and private universities said they were "thriving" across all five. Twelve percent of graduates of U.S. News & World Report's top 100 schools were thriving, essentially the same as the rest.

It seems designed specifically to say negative things about the college experience. The article mentions three of five categories (does two extra words in a list really require that much more effort?). Relying on self-reporting of ambiguous self-determined "thriving" and making the strong implication that you have to think you're doing so across the board is just foolish.

[PhantomGremlin]

> This is a really shitty statistic and bad journalism.

I think part of the explanation can be found at the end:

   Max Ehrenfreund is a blogger
   on the Financial desk

I'm not really sure what standards the Washington Post applies to "bloggers" as opposed to their more mainstream news articles. But IMO at some other sites (Forbes comes to mind) bloggers aren't held to very high standards at all.

[ghaff]

Sure they are. They need to bring in pageviews :-)