And you are here why?

Kieran Healy brings the pain to Monsters University  by applying a dose of Infrastructure Management to Pixar's latest A sample  Classroom spaces also seem poorly equipped to address the needs of nontraditional monsters, especially giant monsters. Disturbingly, the two giant monsters we see are both depicted playing sports: a female giant monster is shown playing giant ultimate frisbee (or possibly ultimate giant frisbee), and a giant slug monster is evidently the key player on the football team. And yet all of the classrooms are tiny, or accessible only by very small doors that even a moderately-sized undergraduate would have trouble fitting through. One has to wonder whether Monsters University recruits these talented young giant monsters for anything other than their athletic ability. But this pales with the conclusion, which is inexorably evident from Economics, viz. Two expelled former students have gone on not only to rise to a level of occupational success that...

The point behind the title isn't So what? , but more of a Why do I say that? And the answer is - because thats what the data are showing. Jordan Weissmann at The Atlantic summarizes a couple of annual report s releases by the National Center for Education Statistics to come up with the following chart The key points from the above? Starting 1995, more women have graduated w/ Bachelor's degrees than men.  Or, to cast this slightly differently, this has been going on for the last 17 years (and counting) The trend lines have been dominated by women since 1975, i.e., At best , the increase in the percentage of men getting degrees is the same as for women (and its usually worse!) The bottom line here is that at some point in the future, a significant majority of the - educated - workforce will be women.  I suspect this may finally take care of the gender pay gap (23%!).

To paraphrase Tyler Cowen - "Markets in Education" courtesy of Kevin Drum .  He brings up an interesting point regarding the rising cost of education - basically describing this as an equilibrium where the Net Present Value of education is the same as the lifetime premium of the same education. Or, to put it differently -    The lifetime premium of going to college is roughly $1 Million (over the 40 years that you earn)    $1 Million over 40 years is pretty much the same as spending $300K today    That comes to around $75K per year    Which is the equilibrium position, i.e., what colleges *should* charge… Mind you, I'm not too sure about point 2 (it really depends on a bunch of assumptions, but broadly think 4% return over 40 years), but it is a good way of looking at things - if you ignore the whole Jeffersonian maxim of educating people to maximize national growth, etc.