An interesting statement I've seen in a couple of books about IQ testing as an employment qualification is that at ALL levels of ability it is advantageous to seek a college degree if that degree makes the difference between being classified as an "engineer" rather than being classified as a "technician." Some technicians plainly are very smart and very economically useful to the organizations that employ them. Both technicians and engineers can be found at a variety of levels of ability. But for the individual job-seeker, whatever the level of ability, the expedient thing to do (in that category of occupations) is seek the college degree and become an engineer. Apparently, the job market treats even a lousy engineer who is barely able to do engineering work better than a technician who is matched by ability proxy (IQ score) before the degree was sought.
I offer no firm conclusion about why this is so. Perhaps engineering programs in colleges impart skills that are valued by the job market enough to boost an engineer's earnings over the long term. Or perhaps hiring and promotion procedures in many companies favor the social signal given by possessing a college degree. Or perhaps there is a lurking variable other than IQ that distinguishes persons who seek engineering degrees from persons who do not seek engineering degrees for technical occupations. It would take more data to tease out the causation of this phenomenon reported in the literature on job-candidate testing for employment, but meanwhile I would advise people near and dear to me who have such career aspirations to seek an engineering degree if at all possible, as that appears to offer positive economic returns for a person with a typical lifespan and labor force participation.
I have no comment on the usefulness of degrees in other subjects, which may vary quite a lot.
We have a service tech here who has been prototyping a pretty slick Android app that will be integrated into engineering. From my brief experience working with him, my estimation is he has a natural talent for this stuff that eclipses even the majority of our senior engineering staff. In his spare time he does robotics competitions.
Had another guy like that I worked with 6-7 years ago. No degree, learned everything on the job, then got a CS degree from night school over a couple years so he could be promoted to an actual engineer. Left after his first review, got a job as a sr. engineer at another startup, then was promoted to a director before he turned 30, leading a team of 12. The best engineer I ever worked with.
Now my experience is quite different from a good deal of folks on HN, but I went to a decent school (UCSD) and worked at 4 startups and 1 bigco here in San Diego, in agreggate about 100 engineers over the years.
I've worked as an engineer at HP for many years and have had the pleasure to work with some extraordinarily smart and talented technicians. Many of them got their degrees while employed and moved up to engineering positions here or elsewhere. However, many technicians prefer not to become engineers, even if they are fully aware of the fact that they are smarter and more productive than some of the engineers (a not-uncommon situation).
I think one of the reasons is that in a technician role your role and responsibilities are more clearly defined as a tech and project failure is generally blamed on the engineers. Also, there's less clerical overhead and more hands-on work when working as a tech.
The difference between a technician and an engineer is not a college degree; it is the nature of the job description, the importance and centrality of the role, and level of responsibility. Many engineers working for Google, for example, do not have college degrees and are self-taught. To point this out is not to denigrate education, nor ignore your other points-- just one of the premises.
CYA plays a large role. HR departments can always justify hiring an engineer. If the company takes a chance on a smart person without a degree and they screw up the company looks bad. OTOH if an supposedly educated engineer screws up the company had "no way of knowing".
I may be mistaken, but I believe a lot of engineers who work on physical projects like bridges must have an engineering degree and pass other tests to work legally. That would put the degree in higher demand.
Even in good times architecture is a crappy major (in the U.S.) from an economic standpoint - at least five years of university level education followed by at least three years of on the job training (misnamed as "internship" since there is no monitoring of employer behavior). There is also a series of comprehensive exams required after graduation and before licensure.
These days, the average newly licensed architect is more than ten years out of college - i.e. in her mid-thirties. Since in the U.S. a person cannot practice architecture without a license, a person without a license is not recognized as a professional and cannot work for themselves in general (small projects are exempt in most states, and state laws vary).
The high rate of unemployment for current graduates is hardly unusual because the industry is so cyclical. The S&L crisis of the late 1980's sent a large portion of that generation of graduates from the industry creating what is currently a succession gap in many firms due to a lack of mid-forties ownership track candidates to buy out retiring baby boomers.
Incidentally, many of that generation went into the newly emerging field of web-design.
I'm typically a very skeptical person but I have to admit I'm becoming somewhat bearish on the current cycle within our field. There are definitely some home runs out there but I always ask myself who are using all of these web services and apps. Honestly I feel like our field is becoming a lot more hits based almost like the music industry - a small minority hit it out of the park while the rest toil in obscurity. (I include myself in the toiling in obscurity group.)
Now Ill be the first to admit there are a lot of things that could be done better through the application of computing but sometimes I feel like everybody is trying to jump into the same boats when we should maybe be taking a broader view of the landscape. Sorry I know this a dreary comment but just my 2 cents.
Your analogy between the startup and music industries draws true. Not everything will be successful, but it's important that those involved can have a reasonable chance to be rewarded. Both of the above sectors are centered around firms designed to manage risk - VCs for startups, and labels for artists. VCs are generally fulfilling their purpose much better than music labels are.
I've seen some culturally literate Architecture grads move to Shanghai from the US after the completion of an Architecture program. This may change as the economic growth slows there over the coming years, but there are so many building projects being undertaken that it is far easier to have a bigger role in bigger projects at a younger age there.
I think the other huge benefit of college and something that is often not talked about is the social and networking aspect of being at a top-tier university.
The most meaningful things I got out of my 4 years as an undergrad and 2 as a grad student were meeting people that could truly help me in my career.
While I was in college I met people that:
1. Helped me land multiple book deals with O'Reilly
2. Got me to conferences I would not usually have been able to go to.
3. Got me a great job doing design/development for the University.
4. Introduced me to the founders of Slashdot--one of whom sat on my thesis committee.
5. Allowed me to make connections with faculty and staff that have led to business contracts and even an adjunct faculty position at MSU.
I would be nowhere if it wasn't for my college degree--but you have to do more than go to class--that's the easy part. Network and meet people, there will never be higher concentration of fucking brilliant and well-connected individuals as there are a major universities.
> there will never be higher concentration of fucking brilliant and well-connected individuals as there are a major universities.
The concentration is far greater on the internet. You have virtually everyone on the planet within arms reach. It is interesting how we've failed to really utilize the medium.
You and I have now made a connection. I could be the most important connection you ever make. You pobably don't care. (That goes both ways, of course)
This is interesting, but it doesn't prove college is "worth it". We know that at least 40% of the wage premium of attending college (and possibly considerably more) are due to ability bias - smarter people get paid more and smarter people go to college.
(I do suspect there is some individual benefit to college, from some mix of beneficial skill increases and socially harmful signalling. But the data in this article doesn't begin to address this question.)
Absolutely, correlation between college degree and employment does not show any causation between the two. Not only is intelligence a factor in going to school and getting a job, but so is parental income, responsibility, upbringing, etc. If only more journalists had taken a statistics class while they were at college we might not see these same fallacies repeated over and over in the media.
Keep in mind that this was during the boom, and the average department head made less than $100k a year - that would typically be someone with at least 10-15 years of specialized experience and willing to take on personal liability for architectural designs under their seal until the statute of repose (varies by state from seven years to forever).
I graduate with a B.Architecture in June but will likely be going into a mix web design/tech entrepreneurship. While the economy is relatively lousy at the moment I think the high unemployment rate is a mixture of both a decrease in jobs and the stubbornness/pride of architectural graduates. Many other professions you'd be glad to take most jobs in your field that offer a good pay, but I know of many firms I'd turn down on principal even if I was offered an attractive wage. Unfortunately the average pay for recent arch grads after 5 years tends to rest in the 35-45k/year range, so going into a different field where I could make more in less time is hard to turn down.
The pay for architecture grads is awful given how much in debt you'll be after going through architecture school. And it's even worse once you factor in the ridiculous hours and realize that if you calculate your hourly pay, it actually works out to less than minimum wage.
I was an architecture undergrad myself and immediately moved to the web upon graduating a few years ago. Thing is, I would still highly recommend it is as a major (...at least, the program I was in -- definitely varies school to school). My experience was of four years of mixed media problem solving through models, mylar, computer animation (Flash/Actionscript/Maya), etc. Definitely shaped how I think/approach everything I work on.
If I had a startup that was looking to hire innovative UX/design people right now, ex-Archs would be towards the top of my list.
I find it ironic (and a bit annoying) that the logic used in the article's title is the same logic that led to the high unemployment rate for architects: If a profession is in high demand today, it will still be in high demand four years from now. And conversely, if a profession is in low demand now, then it will remain so for the next four years (hence the title of the article).
If your are implying that an rise/spike in enrollment in architecture programs was because the students were counting on having a job (because of a building boom of some kind) after the end of the program, I beg to differ. (MArch here.)
Architecture is one of those passion fields that you enter knowing full well that the barrier to entry to becoming established is very high. It is also not a meritocratic field (like software). Everyone in my school (Columbia/GSAP) knew that at the end of the program, we were looking at n years of slavery for some big name architect (if lucky) and it was all together hugely competitive. After all, we had the example of our instructors (some of them highly regarded talents) who were mostly "paper architects" and pamphleteers.
Many of us elected not to go that route and branched out to computer graphics, modeling, and some like me ended up being software engineers, instead of spending the next few years drawing bathroom details for some commodity architectural firm, hoping for future glory. (Yes, ego is a big driver for architects, and possibly a job requirement.)
So regarding the current unemployed numbers, I would be curious to know what percentage are electing to remain unemployed due to perfectly reasonable reluctance to do banal work after having spent anywhere from 4 to 7 years pursuing their passion for excellence in design.
I've recently had the same worry for the current explosion in need for web front end engineers and designers.
In the next 5 years, perhaps we will see a great increase in the number of such skilled individuals coming out of colleges across the country. But what's going to happen to them if the current high times of the web industry suddenly takes a turn for the worse? The situation may be similar to what "architecture majors" are facing right now.
Interesting to note that computer/math degree holders don't fare far better than recent humanities and liberal arts graduates. Journalism majors perform even better.
For all the jokes about us English majors, we don't seem to be doing that badly
I wonder if this could be related to the job expectations of the different groups. CS majors (my experience, anecdotal) tend to have a few set ideas on the sorts of jobs they'll take or that are out there. Employers also seem to make assumptions about what roles they'll hire them into or that they can perform effectively. However, I've seen liberal arts majors in a much wider array of jobs: management, sales, HR, various sorts of assistants, PR, all in one enterprise setting.
>Interesting to note that computer/math degree holders don't fare far better than recent humanities and liberal arts graduates. Journalism majors perform even better.
...if you only look at the unemployment numbers. Scroll down and look at the earnings numbers and you will see a very different picture.
I would be very interested to see the standard deviations on these unemployment and earnings numbers. I'd be willing to bet that they are much larger for humanities/liberal arts/journalism majors than for the engineering/computer science/math majors.
A liberal arts degree is very much what you make of it: if you are smart, motivated, and disciplined, you can get an incredible education and emerge with a much sharper mind. On the other hand, if you are lazy, stupid, and/or unmotivated, you can carefully pick classes and profs that require minimal effort to get by, and graduate without developing yourself in any meaningful way. I went through college with both types of people. I knew one guy who chose English as his major because he thought it would be the easiest major. He was right, mostly because he made it true: every semester when it was time to sign up for classes in the next semester, he would build a matrix of all of the books on the reading lists of all of the available classes, and then figure out which combination of classes had the greatest amount of overlap. This saved him a lot of money on books, a lot of time on reading, and probably some effort on writing. At the end of four years he had a degree and a job, and that's all he really cared about. If he had put half as much effort into work as he put into avoiding work, he could have had himself a hell of an education.
A technical degree, on the other hand, doesn't allow for such a wide range of effort inputs: if you put in minimal effort you won't just waste your time, you will fail. I saw this happen as well. More commonly, I saw people realize, "Holy shit, this stuff is serious, I can't just cruise!" and switch majors to something where they could get away with minimal effort.
As Jtsummers pointed out, humanities/liberal arts majors seem to enter into a wider range of employment fields, including (as ghurlman pointed out) software. As yummyfajitas pointed out, ability bias accounts for a large portion of the college wage premium. However, over the last few decades the percent of people going to college has increased dramatically. Some of those new people most likely have suitable levels of ability to attend college, but a lot of them almost certainly do not. Those who do not either fail out or gravitate to programs that will allow them to graduate despite the fact that they are not getting a true college education, like the English major I mentioned above. I think that these people are pulling down the numbers for such majors. If you were somehow able to sort out the "serious" liberal arts graduates from the "slackers," I think that you would find that those individuals who put in the effort to truly benefit fromt their liberal arts educations have unemployment and earnings numbers at least comperable to people with technical degrees.
According to this (last updated Dec 02, 2011) the not-seasonally adjusted aggregate unemployment for anyone who holds a HS diploma (regardless of higher level education) is 20%.
Edit: I didn't mean to cause any confusion by aggregating the "non-hs-dropout" stats, so let me make it clearer:
Level of Education : Unemployment Rate
High School Dropout: 12.7%
High School Diploma: 8.4%
Some College/AA Deg: 7.4%
Bachelors or Higher: 4.2%
The primary problem with the argument of "is college worth it", or one component of it that I find more interesting, completely misses the potential opportunity cost of college. Someone who goes to high school and immediately joins the workforce with a high-school level job will often not continue to put forth school-level mental effort in that job or at home. Is that a school problem or a workplace problem? A more fair (or rather helpful and telling) comparison would be if the student undertook an effort that can rival the purpose of the university.
I would really like to see specifically Computer Science majors versus the rest of these majors, mostly because Math is not nearly as employable in comparison and is probably dragging down the numbers.
I'd like to see this because of how disparate my experience was when applying for jobs as compared to anyone in any other field, I being a recent CS graduate.
Basically, I can apply for 4 jobs and get 3 interviews and 2 offers. I can turn around from unemployed to gainfully working in an easy month. It's crazy, and I feel like there should be some numbers somewhere that show that.
Are these employment rates based on actually being employed in their field of study, or are we including arts majors who work full-time as baristas as "employed" people?
Wouldn't that be a really hard line to draw? The barista example is solid, but isn't the spectrum so broad that it'd be impossible to really say what is and is not their field of study [for many people/cases]?
This totally ignores the fact that people who go to college are more likely to be ambitious and career oriented / smarter. It totally skews all of these results..
[+] [-] tokenadult|14 years ago|reply
I offer no firm conclusion about why this is so. Perhaps engineering programs in colleges impart skills that are valued by the job market enough to boost an engineer's earnings over the long term. Or perhaps hiring and promotion procedures in many companies favor the social signal given by possessing a college degree. Or perhaps there is a lurking variable other than IQ that distinguishes persons who seek engineering degrees from persons who do not seek engineering degrees for technical occupations. It would take more data to tease out the causation of this phenomenon reported in the literature on job-candidate testing for employment, but meanwhile I would advise people near and dear to me who have such career aspirations to seek an engineering degree if at all possible, as that appears to offer positive economic returns for a person with a typical lifespan and labor force participation.
I have no comment on the usefulness of degrees in other subjects, which may vary quite a lot.
[+] [-] brandall10|14 years ago|reply
Had another guy like that I worked with 6-7 years ago. No degree, learned everything on the job, then got a CS degree from night school over a couple years so he could be promoted to an actual engineer. Left after his first review, got a job as a sr. engineer at another startup, then was promoted to a director before he turned 30, leading a team of 12. The best engineer I ever worked with.
Now my experience is quite different from a good deal of folks on HN, but I went to a decent school (UCSD) and worked at 4 startups and 1 bigco here in San Diego, in agreggate about 100 engineers over the years.
[+] [-] zwieback|14 years ago|reply
I think one of the reasons is that in a technician role your role and responsibilities are more clearly defined as a tech and project failure is generally blamed on the engineers. Also, there's less clerical overhead and more hands-on work when working as a tech.
[+] [-] wyclif|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nazgulnarsil|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wtvanhest|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brudgers|14 years ago|reply
These days, the average newly licensed architect is more than ten years out of college - i.e. in her mid-thirties. Since in the U.S. a person cannot practice architecture without a license, a person without a license is not recognized as a professional and cannot work for themselves in general (small projects are exempt in most states, and state laws vary).
Matt Arnold's research on architectural licensure may be read here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/51132717/Concerning-Licensure
The high rate of unemployment for current graduates is hardly unusual because the industry is so cyclical. The S&L crisis of the late 1980's sent a large portion of that generation of graduates from the industry creating what is currently a succession gap in many firms due to a lack of mid-forties ownership track candidates to buy out retiring baby boomers.
Incidentally, many of that generation went into the newly emerging field of web-design.
[+] [-] moocow01|14 years ago|reply
Now Ill be the first to admit there are a lot of things that could be done better through the application of computing but sometimes I feel like everybody is trying to jump into the same boats when we should maybe be taking a broader view of the landscape. Sorry I know this a dreary comment but just my 2 cents.
[+] [-] JamesPeterson|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ldayley|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iy56|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsiarto|14 years ago|reply
The most meaningful things I got out of my 4 years as an undergrad and 2 as a grad student were meeting people that could truly help me in my career.
While I was in college I met people that:
1. Helped me land multiple book deals with O'Reilly 2. Got me to conferences I would not usually have been able to go to. 3. Got me a great job doing design/development for the University. 4. Introduced me to the founders of Slashdot--one of whom sat on my thesis committee. 5. Allowed me to make connections with faculty and staff that have led to business contracts and even an adjunct faculty position at MSU.
I would be nowhere if it wasn't for my college degree--but you have to do more than go to class--that's the easy part. Network and meet people, there will never be higher concentration of fucking brilliant and well-connected individuals as there are a major universities.
[+] [-] randomdata|14 years ago|reply
The concentration is far greater on the internet. You have virtually everyone on the planet within arms reach. It is interesting how we've failed to really utilize the medium.
You and I have now made a connection. I could be the most important connection you ever make. You pobably don't care. (That goes both ways, of course)
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|14 years ago|reply
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/01/correcting_for.h...
(I do suspect there is some individual benefit to college, from some mix of beneficial skill increases and socially harmful signalling. But the data in this article doesn't begin to address this question.)
[+] [-] keypusher|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rmason|14 years ago|reply
My major where they predicted four jobs for every grad turned out to be four grads for every job.
So by contrarian thinking architecture is probably the best degree you could pursue.
[+] [-] moocow01|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brudgers|14 years ago|reply
http://www.daapspace.daap.uc.edu/~stedmabn/profprac-base/hot...
The 2008 synopsis is here: http://www.areforum.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=5...
Keep in mind that this was during the boom, and the average department head made less than $100k a year - that would typically be someone with at least 10-15 years of specialized experience and willing to take on personal liability for architectural designs under their seal until the statute of repose (varies by state from seven years to forever).
[+] [-] davux|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gobbs|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sshumaker|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itsmicks|14 years ago|reply
If I had a startup that was looking to hire innovative UX/design people right now, ex-Archs would be towards the top of my list.
[+] [-] gk1|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eternalban|14 years ago|reply
Architecture is one of those passion fields that you enter knowing full well that the barrier to entry to becoming established is very high. It is also not a meritocratic field (like software). Everyone in my school (Columbia/GSAP) knew that at the end of the program, we were looking at n years of slavery for some big name architect (if lucky) and it was all together hugely competitive. After all, we had the example of our instructors (some of them highly regarded talents) who were mostly "paper architects" and pamphleteers.
Many of us elected not to go that route and branched out to computer graphics, modeling, and some like me ended up being software engineers, instead of spending the next few years drawing bathroom details for some commodity architectural firm, hoping for future glory. (Yes, ego is a big driver for architects, and possibly a job requirement.)
So regarding the current unemployed numbers, I would be curious to know what percentage are electing to remain unemployed due to perfectly reasonable reluctance to do banal work after having spent anywhere from 4 to 7 years pursuing their passion for excellence in design.
[+] [-] hkmurakami|14 years ago|reply
In the next 5 years, perhaps we will see a great increase in the number of such skilled individuals coming out of colleges across the country. But what's going to happen to them if the current high times of the web industry suddenly takes a turn for the worse? The situation may be similar to what "architecture majors" are facing right now.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] puranjay|14 years ago|reply
For all the jokes about us English majors, we don't seem to be doing that badly
[+] [-] Jtsummers|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghurlman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucasjung|14 years ago|reply
...if you only look at the unemployment numbers. Scroll down and look at the earnings numbers and you will see a very different picture.
I would be very interested to see the standard deviations on these unemployment and earnings numbers. I'd be willing to bet that they are much larger for humanities/liberal arts/journalism majors than for the engineering/computer science/math majors.
A liberal arts degree is very much what you make of it: if you are smart, motivated, and disciplined, you can get an incredible education and emerge with a much sharper mind. On the other hand, if you are lazy, stupid, and/or unmotivated, you can carefully pick classes and profs that require minimal effort to get by, and graduate without developing yourself in any meaningful way. I went through college with both types of people. I knew one guy who chose English as his major because he thought it would be the easiest major. He was right, mostly because he made it true: every semester when it was time to sign up for classes in the next semester, he would build a matrix of all of the books on the reading lists of all of the available classes, and then figure out which combination of classes had the greatest amount of overlap. This saved him a lot of money on books, a lot of time on reading, and probably some effort on writing. At the end of four years he had a degree and a job, and that's all he really cared about. If he had put half as much effort into work as he put into avoiding work, he could have had himself a hell of an education.
A technical degree, on the other hand, doesn't allow for such a wide range of effort inputs: if you put in minimal effort you won't just waste your time, you will fail. I saw this happen as well. More commonly, I saw people realize, "Holy shit, this stuff is serious, I can't just cruise!" and switch majors to something where they could get away with minimal effort.
As Jtsummers pointed out, humanities/liberal arts majors seem to enter into a wider range of employment fields, including (as ghurlman pointed out) software. As yummyfajitas pointed out, ability bias accounts for a large portion of the college wage premium. However, over the last few decades the percent of people going to college has increased dramatically. Some of those new people most likely have suitable levels of ability to attend college, but a lot of them almost certainly do not. Those who do not either fail out or gravitate to programs that will allow them to graduate despite the fact that they are not getting a true college education, like the English major I mentioned above. I think that these people are pulling down the numbers for such majors. If you were somehow able to sort out the "serious" liberal arts graduates from the "slackers," I think that you would find that those individuals who put in the effort to truly benefit fromt their liberal arts educations have unemployment and earnings numbers at least comperable to people with technical degrees.
[+] [-] cmurphycode|14 years ago|reply
I couldn't find a source (beyond tons of articles echoing the study), and found several contrarian sources, including http://www.wiredacademic.com/2012/01/unemployment-data-most-...
[+] [-] tsantero|14 years ago|reply
The Bureau of Labor Statistics is always a great place to look.
Employment status of the civilian population 25 years and over by educational attainment: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm
According to this (last updated Dec 02, 2011) the not-seasonally adjusted aggregate unemployment for anyone who holds a HS diploma (regardless of higher level education) is 20%.
Edit: I didn't mean to cause any confusion by aggregating the "non-hs-dropout" stats, so let me make it clearer:
Level of Education : Unemployment Rate High School Dropout: 12.7% High School Diploma: 8.4% Some College/AA Deg: 7.4% Bachelors or Higher: 4.2%
[+] [-] aik|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digitallimit0|14 years ago|reply
I'd like to see this because of how disparate my experience was when applying for jobs as compared to anyone in any other field, I being a recent CS graduate.
Basically, I can apply for 4 jobs and get 3 interviews and 2 offers. I can turn around from unemployed to gainfully working in an easy month. It's crazy, and I feel like there should be some numbers somewhere that show that.
[+] [-] marknutter|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davux|14 years ago|reply
I'd sure like to see such numbers, though.
[+] [-] studentrob|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] md1515|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmurphycode|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]