Jenna,

Doesn’t the entire higher education establishment base its existence on a misunderstanding of correlation and causation?

We often hear that young people need a college education to succeed in life. Statistics show us that college graduates have much higher lifetime earnings ? on average ? than students with no higher education.

But that doesn’t mean that a college degree ? any college degree ? offers an automatic ticket to success. If you have a bachelor’s degree in psychology, you might have gained a great deal of insight into the operation of the human mind. Good luck trying to convince an employer that the degree actually qualifies you to do anything. 

A college education has value, but it’s often misrepresented as a necessary and sufficient condition for post-academic success. The misrepresentation works only because people confuse correlation for causation.