Fun with Excel: College Subsidies II

I have already shared a spreadsheet that shows a quick display of how credentialism can provide both benefits and detriments. Now, I'm going to hit right at the heart of the point that I'm trying to make. I'm going to leave some of the explaining to next time, but feel free to look at my latest spreadsheet. It can be found at: College Subsidies II.xlsx

For readability, new values in this spreadsheet were all multiplied by one billion.

The Per Person benefit in this spreadsheet shows a rough display of how much a state would benefit from investing in subsidized college if the harm is not considered. To do this, I divided the benefit by population in that state. Predictably, this number is constant between all states. This is because of how the calculations were designed.

The per person harm roughly shows the harm that these benefits could cause nationwide. The idea behind this is that the benefits are primarily targeted at the state level while harm is spread throughout the country. Higher populations mean there are more people who can potentially benefit, but there are also more people contributing to credential inflation and other forms of harm. I divided the total harm I previously associated with each state and divided by the total population.

I also included a column for per person net. This shows the benefits compared with the harm at the state level. If every state implemented certain credentialist policies one by one such as subsidized college, each state would appear to benefit. That's because the benefits stay primarily in the state while harm is spread out nationally.

There's something else I wanted to point out. Compare the size of the per person benefits to the per person harm. Because the harm is spread out, the numbers are much smaller even though there is more harm overall. In the real world, this means that the benefits are easier to see.

I think I'm going to create just one more spreadsheet in this series. This final spreadsheet will try to tie up some loose ends and help me make the point that I have been pursuing.