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Will Mathematics Make You Richer?

November5

“Students who advance further in high school math have higher wages and are less likely to be unemployed, according to a new study from the Cleveland Fed. The study shows that advancing past Algebra II correlates strongly with finishing high school, graduating from college, and thriving in the workforce. Here’s the simplified result, with “low-math” students to the left and “high-math” students to the right:

market_math

The fact that advancing in math is tied to better labor outcomes could mean all sorts of things, including, but not limited to:

(1) It’s causation, plain and simple: Math totally makes you rich. Do you want to be rich? Study math. It will give you skills for which you will be rewarded with higher wages in practically every industry, because math skills are inherently valuable and having them make you more valuable.

(2) Relax, it’s just correlation: Taking lots of math is a sign that you’re a smart student, and smart students tend to earn more money, whether or not they love math. As Peter Coy, one of the study’s authors, says,

“It could be that people take more math in high school because they’re smarter than classmates who go equally far in their education, are harder working, or both. They succeed in their careers because of those qualities, not because they know that the derivative of cos(x) is -sin(x).”

(3) It’s a little bit of both: Within the pool of smart kids, those who take lots of math tend to want, or are eventually drawn to, the kind of jobs with high wages, and smart kids who take lots of English classes (e.g.) tend to want, or are eventually funneled toward, jobs with lower wages, even if they’re just as “smart.” 

This is the interpretation that maps onto my personal experience. Students who show an interest in math and related fields are often drawn into an orbit of higher-paying job opportunities, like finance and consulting. That means that, if you’re smart, it does matter whether you take advanced math courses, inasmuch as higher-paying jobs in finance, consulting, marketing, accounting (you know, business) require math skills, while other jobs in government, non-profits, and journalism, are populated by decently smart people who (a) aren’t trying to maximize their income and (b) wouldn’t have been helped much with math in their current jobs. In other words, the “math–>riches” equation is a little bit of causation and a little bit of correlation.”

from The Atlantic

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