[A] majority of people holding student debt have moderate incomes and low balances. Many have no degree, having dropped out of a public college or for-profit vocational school after a few semesters. They carry little debt, but they also do not get the benefit of a college degree to help them pay off that debt.Defaults and financial distress are concentrated among the millions of students who drop out without a degree. The financial prospects for college dropouts are poor; they earn little more than do workers with no college education. Dropouts account for much of the increase in financial distress among student borrowers since the Great Recession.And dropout is not at all rare. A bit less than half of college students don’t earn a bachelor’s degree. Some people earn a shorter, two-year associate degree. But more than a quarter of those who start college hoping to earn a degree drop out with no credential. A full 30 percent of first-generation freshmen drop out of four-year colleges within three years. That’s three times the dropout rate of students whose parents graduated from college.
From Susan Dynarski, writing in the NYT (emphasis mine).
I would quibble with the language in bold, however. People with "some college" do have earnings and unemployment rates significantly better than those who never attended college, although a lot of that is attributable to sorting effects, with people who don't attend college at all doing so because they are even less academically able.
"A bit less than half of college students "
ReplyDeleteshould be "A bit less than half [sic] of college students" as the correct word is fewer unless you put the students into a blender and emulsified them.
@DavesBarnes
ReplyDeleteWell, I didn't write that one (it's quoted). That was a tenured professor at Harvard University. Maybe you need to complain to their hiring committee about Harvard's declining hiring standards.
I know it is a quote. Which is why you should have added the [sic[.
ReplyDeleteDavid, as a retired English teacher, I often have to bite my tongue. The less/fewer distinction is dead. I see that error in academic writing and hear it on the TV and radio from well-educated speakers.
ReplyDeleteI do a fair bit of proofreading of novels, some by fairly well-known writers in my niche of SF/fantasy. Accept/except errors abound, as do less/fewer, errors of singular/plural in complex sentences. Life goes on anyway. An Amazon reviewer complained about grammar errors in my own novel. I had to laugh. I am pretty good at it, but an old-school English teacher would rap my knuckles regularly.