Okay then, how about higher education as a fraction of GDP?
When I tried to calculate the equivalent thing for real estate and GDP for the 2008 financial crisis, as far as I can tell the fraction of GDP provided by real estate went up instead of down. The bubble bursting is clearly visible in the home price index, tho. So if someone creates a ‘degree value index’, that’s where I’d expect to see it; the closest approximations that I’m aware of are the wage premium and underemployment rate (this can point to a few things; I mean the “person with a degree working a job you don’t need a degree for” one instead of the “unemployed plus part-time seeking full-time work” one).
[Also I’m going to ping Bryan Caplan and see if he has a good operationalization.]
Bryan bets on the percentage of 18-24 year olds enrolled in 4-year degree-granting institutions (here’s 2000-2017 numbers). I’m sort of astounded that anyone would take the other side of the bet as he proposed it (a decline from 30% to 20% over the course of 10 years); in my mind a decline from 30% to 25% would be ‘substantial’.
For the more specific version that I have in mind (a ‘coming apart’ of “bachelor’s degrees” and “valuable bachelor’s degrees”), I think it has to show up in a change of enrollment statistics split out by major, which might be too hard to operationalize ahead of time.
When I tried to calculate the equivalent thing for real estate and GDP for the 2008 financial crisis, as far as I can tell the fraction of GDP provided by real estate went up instead of down. The bubble bursting is clearly visible in the home price index, tho. So if someone creates a ‘degree value index’, that’s where I’d expect to see it; the closest approximations that I’m aware of are the wage premium and underemployment rate (this can point to a few things; I mean the “person with a degree working a job you don’t need a degree for” one instead of the “unemployed plus part-time seeking full-time work” one).
[Also I’m going to ping Bryan Caplan and see if he has a good operationalization.]
Bryan bets on the percentage of 18-24 year olds enrolled in 4-year degree-granting institutions (here’s 2000-2017 numbers). I’m sort of astounded that anyone would take the other side of the bet as he proposed it (a decline from 30% to 20% over the course of 10 years); in my mind a decline from 30% to 25% would be ‘substantial’.
For the more specific version that I have in mind (a ‘coming apart’ of “bachelor’s degrees” and “valuable bachelor’s degrees”), I think it has to show up in a change of enrollment statistics split out by major, which might be too hard to operationalize ahead of time.