One of the top players in college basketball this year was Texas freshman Kevin Durant, whose team lost over the weekend. Durant is 6’10”, and averaged something like 30 points a game from January on, so the automatic assumption is that he’s going to enter the NBA draft, where he would be one of the top couple of picks. Durant has made some comments that suggest he’s thinking about coming back next year for another run at the NCAA’s.
This has prompted the usual discussion about whether he should stay or go, with the usual suspects taking the usual sides. Some people speak of the wonders of being in college, and the value of an education, and insist that he should stay in school, while others urge him to go right into the draft, and take the flipping great wodges of cash that will come with a high position in the NBA draft.
This is always an interesting debate to watch, because it’s so completely artificial, as ordinary people don’t usually have that option. For most people with college degrees, the degree is a hard prerequisite for their chosen career, so leaving college early just isn’t a viable option. So, most of the discussion about what college players like Durant should do takes place between people who have absolutely no idea what it’s like to make that decision.
But let’s consider the hypothetical case for someone in science. Imagine you’re a college junior, and a giant research company comes to you and says “We’re starting a research facility that’s going to be the new Bell Labs, and we think you’d be a great fit. We want you to come work for us, and we’ll set you up with a lab, generous research funding, and a salary of $100,000 (US) per year, if you skip your final year of college, and come work for us right now. If you don’t take the job now, we’ll hire you next year, for $75,000 a year.”
Would you take it, or would you finish out your college career?
I’m trying to keep the hypothetical offer somewhat realistic, here. In the sports context, people always overplay the risk of injury, but really, there are very few examples of guys who stuck around for an extra year of college, and then suffered an injury that completely destroyed their pro careers, and tehre are plenty of examples of guys who suffered horrific looking injuries who went on to do fine in the pros (Willis McGahee, Kenyon Martin). The real offer isn’t “Millions of dollars right now, or nothing a year from now” but “Millions of dollars right now, or millions of dollars in a year or two, barring total disaster.”
That’s why I didn’t go with a bigger salary offer. Obviously, if some zillionaire offered you ten million dollars to leave school and do science, you should take it, ebcause nobody’s going to offer you ten million dollars to be a scientist after you graduate. But that’s not the offer that top-rank athletes really face– the money they’d get by going early is within a few factors of two of the money they’d get a year or two later. So, to be fair, the money offered to scientists in the hypothetical should be good, but not outlandish.
It’s a hard thing to picture for academic science, of course, because there’s a lot of credentialism in academia– if you don’t have a Ph.D., you won’t be taken seriously in some fields. That’s why it’s a Bell Labs sort of scenario– imagine a job that has all the perks of academia, but is outside the usual academic prestige structure.
It’s not a question many of us face directly, so it’s a tough call. There is a very rough analogue, though, and that’s early graduation. Many of the best college students out there enter with enough AP credits to be able to graduate a term or two early, or a full year early, if they take extra classes for a few semesters. How many of them actually take that deal?
I don’t have any numbers on that, but my vague impression is that it’s not that common. I’ve seen a fair number students come through our department who had enough credits to leave school early, and very few of them have actually done it. At somewhat greater remove, my alma mater offers a “3-2 program,” where students can earn a Physics BA in three years, and an engineering degree (a BS, I think) in two years at a different institution, but I’ve heard that only one student has actually done it in the last twenty-odd years. Lots of students come in asking about it, but for the most part, they end up enjoying college enough that when they’re faced with the idea of leaving school after three years, they mostly elect to stay.
The students I know who have graduated early mostly had a strong financial incentive to do so– getting out a year early saves them and their families a year’s worth of student loan debt, which is a large sum of money. Financial aid tends to limit the impact of that a bit, but even a good aid package still involves a lot of debt, and some people aren’t willing to incur that expense just for another year of hanging out in college.
Of course, you see some of the same thing in sports. This morning on the radio they were running down a list of high-profile players who chose to return to school when they could’ve come out early, and for the most part, they were people who are financially secure: Grant Hill and Peyton Manning both had fathers who played in the NFL, and Joakim Noah’s father is a professional tennis player– the guys who passed up the draft to do another year in college mostly didn’t need the money all that badly. And as I type this, John Elway is on the radio saying that he would adivse his son to stay in college rather than coming out early.
The only possible exceptions I can think of are Tim Duncan and Matt Leinart, and that’s mostly because I have no idea what their family backgrounds are like. I don’t think either of them is coming from an impoverished background, though.
Leaving early is a lot more common in sports than in elite colleges and universities, just because the financial equation is different. Athletes are more commonly drawn from the economic underclass, and as a result, can’t really afford to pass up the big bucks for fun in college. Students at elite private colleges, on the other hand, are more likely to come from more financially secure backgrounds, and thus aren’t under the same pressure to start making money right away.
So what would I do, in the hypothetical above? I’m not sure. I had a great time in my senior year in college, and on some level, I wouldn’t want to pass that up. But then again, the salary in my hypothetical is more than I’m making now, so…
In the end, I think I’m enough of a squishy academic type (a “liberal arts twink,” in Mike Kozlowski’s memorable phrase) that I’d probably take my chances with sticking around another year. But the hypothetical above is more money than I’m making now, so…
I think it probably comes down to whether you see education as a means to an end, or an end unto itself. I lean toward the latter, which is why I’m working at a small liberal arts college, so I’d probably stick around. It’s not that easy a decision, though.