Tech Training May Provide Fatter Paychecks Than 4-Year Degrees, Study Finds

I find the result dubious, because they took only starting salaries as the comparison point.  Do the following years leave those with shallower education “stuck in the shallow end”?  But the point quoted below is clearly right — we need to know more about the downstream salaries.  I’m not sure that we don’t have the data to answer the question.  Aren’t there salary surveys in the Tech industry all the time?  Doesn’t the BLS know about salaries?

The College Measures study makes the case for looking at the short-term gain. It found that, one year after graduation, those with two-year technical degrees earned, on average, more than $50,000, about $11,000 more than graduates with bachelor’s degrees. And compared with graduates of two-year colleges who had focused on academic subjects, those with technical degrees were making about $30,000 more.

Those who went on to receive master’s degrees earned, on average, $63,340, or $24,000 more than the median first-year earnings of those who stopped with a bachelor’s degree.

Mark Schneider, president of College Measures and a vice president of the American Institutes for Research, acknowledged in an interview on Thursday that the salary someone makes one year after graduation doesn’t necessarily reflect a person’s lifetime earnings potential. Many educators point out that, with rapidly changing work-force needs, students who complete narrowly focused technical degrees or certificates might land lucrative jobs right away but struggle to move on if those jobs dry up.

“We’ve all heard about the philosophy majors who start out as baristas at Starbucks and go on to become barristers, and the person with a technical degree who’s going to be replaced by robots,” Mr. Schneider said. But when it comes to tracking salaries 10 years down the road, “the truth is, we don’t know.”

via Tech Training May Provide Fatter Paychecks Than 4-Year Degrees, Study Finds – Students – The Chronicle of Higher Education.