QTRS Oct 17, 2024
Graphs and interesting content for the curious
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Is college worth it?
The article Does College Pay Off? A Comprehensive Return On Investment Analysis (5/8/2024) has detailed estimates of the return on investment (ROI) of college. There are great interactive graphs where you can drill down to the level of specific majors. Before I say more, note that this is one calculation, although detailed and carefully explained, and not necessarily a definitive result. Here is the big picture result:
I was surprised by the high chance of a negative ROI for a master’s degree. Focusing on a bachelor’s degree, nearly 25% of students lose money by attending college. I don’t think ROI is the only reason to go to college, but I do think it is worth knowing the long-term costs of the decision. Colleges themselves have talked about ROI, and as I’ve said before, this isn’t a good path to go down. Colleges already have an enrollment problem, and this is an argument that maybe 23% of the students should be there.
There is one quote I want to highlight from the article:
The worst outcome, though, is starting college but not finishing. Because they must pay for one or more years’ tuition and spend time out of the labor force, dropouts almost always see negative ROI from college. Dropouts also start their careers later than they would have if they had never gone to college, depriving them of critical labor market experience. I estimate that for dropouts, ROI for the median bachelor’s degree program is negative $99,000.
I think college bare a lot of responsibility here. In the effort to fill classes, acceptances to college have increased, and colleges are accepting students that maybe they shouldn’t. Worse, they often do little to nothing to help less prepared students get up to speed and have a chance. This is further compounded by allowing students to continue, “giving them a 2nd or 3rd, etc. chance,” when it would be better financially for the student to cut their losses.
Beyond the dropout issues, colleges are doing all they can to retain students, quite often by lowering standards. I would expect that the ROI for college to get worse and not better. Anyway, if you like data about college ROI, check out the article.
LOC image of the data
The Library of Congress (LOC) blog posts great picture. I’m a big fan of these nature paintings.
They also provide some ideas for using these in a classroom.
Show students this painting from Merian’s book of European insects and invite them to look closely. What do they see? Do they recognize the plant or any of the insects? What questions do they have? Guide students to notice that Merian included all four stages of the moth’s life cycle (egg, pupa, larvae, adult), although it is not essential that they know or use the correct scientific terminology.
AI and your investments
The last few years have seen a jump in algorithmic trading patents with AI elements. (10/15/2024). Don’t worry, Skynet will take care of us.
These new innovations will likely further AI's ability to quickly rebalance investment portfolios, which will in turn lead to higher trading volumes. Market participants we surveyed concur that high-frequency, AI-driven trading is expected to become more prevalent, particularly in liquid asset classes like equities, government bonds, and listed derivatives. They foresee greater integration of sophisticated AI in investment and trading decisions within three to five years, although a “human in the loop” approach is expected to persist, especially for large capital allocation decisions.
Gallup should know better
The subheading of the Gallup article Daily Loneliness Afflicts One in Five in U.S. (10/15/2025) is: Loneliness rate edges up to 20%, highest level in two years. Wow, that seems like it might be serious. Let’s look at the chart:
It makes sense that reported loneliness was higher coming out of COVID. But we have hit 20% three other times, starting in September 2021. Data rule: Noise isn’t news. Normal fluctuations in polling data or any data isn’t important, and it isn’t news. The 20% here seems more like noise than anything to report about. Minimally, we’d have to get above 20% to be newsworthy. I’ll note that the subheading of the article is technically correct but implies something—increased loneliness—that isn’t true. At least not yet.
The NIH should know better
The NIH reports Childhood obesity linked to limited food options. (10/1/2024) Here are their two key points that they list:
Children living in neighborhoods with low access to grocery stores early in life, even before birth, were at increased risk for obesity later.
The findings hint that improving early access to healthy foods might help to reduce the risk of childhood obesity.
The first point is, as far as I can tell, perfectly valid, but it should be taken as causation, which the second point implies. Why do some neighborhoods have low access to grocery stores? I would argue that if a grocery store could make a profit in these places, it would. So, is it that the surrounding people in the neighborhood can’t afford healthier food, don’t want healthier food, don’t know how to cook with healthier food, don’t have time to cook, etc. Simply providing access, such as putting in a grocery store, isn’t necessarily going to fix the problem. Somehow, none of this comes up in the short article. In fact, years ago I read that in some food desserts, places without grocery stores and healthier food choices, CVS (I think) tried selling some fresh produce. It didn’t sell, and so they stopped. Access isn’t the key issue.
Port of Baltimore back up to speed
The EIA reports that coal is moving through the Port of Baltimore as it has in the past. It took no more than 2 months to recover from the bridge collapse. There is a lot of money in coal, so this shouldn’t be a surprise.
Graph of the week
This one comes from the paper Association between temperature and occupational injuries in Spain: The role of contextual factors in workers’ adaptation. (Oct 2024)
Fig. 2 depicts the percentage increase in risk of occupational injuries of different groups, by sub-period, for the 1st (cold effects) and the 99th (heat effects) percentiles of temperatures. Both women and men reduced their risk of work-injury to extreme heat from 1989 to 1993 to 2015–2019 (from 18 % to 14 % for men, and from 15 % to 8 % for women).
Despite warming temperatures, work-related death due to heat have gone down. The purple intervals are for 2015 to 2019, and they are not the rightmost intervals on the middle graph. Cold-related work injuries are also down. Despite climate change, it seems we are learning how to adapt and carry on.
The spinning CD
An interesting fusion of styles here.
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Please point out if you think something was expressed wrongly or misinterpreted. I'd rather know the truth and understand the world than be correct. I welcome comments and disagreement. We should all be forced to express our opinions and change our minds, but we should also know how to respectfully disagree and move on. Send me article ideas, feedback, or other thoughts at briefedbydata@substack.com.
Bio
I am a tenured mathematics professor at Ithaca College (PhD Math: Stochastic Processes, MS Applied Statistics, MS Math, BS Math, BS Exercise Science), and I consider myself an accidental academic (opinions are my own). I'm a gardener, drummer, rower, runner, inline skater, 46er, and R user. I’ve written the textbooks R for College Mathematics and Statistics and Applied Calculus with R. I welcome any collaborations.