I returned to college at least 4 times. I tried and tried. I am a high performer when I'm motivated. But I have trouble sustaining momentum.
Entering college for the last time 5 years ago, my goals were: brush up on latest technology, earn CompTIA certifications. Mission accomplished. Pell Grant well-spent.
My parents are the types who don't understand non-traditional education. My father scoffs at anything that isn't accredited. But we're living in the future now. Education has been disrupted by technology and disrupted by culture.
I had straight As in grade school and a bright future. Unfortunately, my childhood wasn't as loving as I had always thought it was. I suffer from C-PTSD. I was homeless, penniless, jobless, all at once. I lost everything I owned. I've bounced back from all that, but I still visit the hospital too often.
I've worked at a steady job in the education industry for 3 years now. That's a new record for my tenure at anything. They don't require a degree. They don't even require the relevant certifications I've owned -- they make no difference in my paycheck, and they won't pay for me to earn or renew them. But we love each other, I've found a great team, I am in my niche. I'm here to stay. No degree necessary.
Same. I will say that after nearly 40 years in tech, my lack of a degree has only every hurt me during the application process and that has been only been in the last 10 years where HR bots pre-sort me out of the pile. I am at the end of my career and as such searching for new tech work isn’t a big issue because I expect my current gig to carry me through to retirement.
But because of the gatekeeping HR bots, I’d argue that folks who want to work in tech in the future should pursue and achieve a STEM degree. However outside of STEM careers, degrees are just expensive pieces of paper.
I obtained my BS from a state university, retired at 38, went to graduate school at a state university at 48, started another business, retired again 3 years later. I've hired ivy league graduates, graduates from MIT, but my best employees came from state schools.
Every Harvard graduate I've ever known has been arrested, committed fraud, or worse, murder (Lookup Luke Sweetser). The first thing that comes out of all of their mouths is they went to Harvard, and pretty much that is the extent of their ability.
The university system is in shambles in the United States. I've been consulting with several, but they're entrenched in this new ideology. Many top level engineering programs are suffering by putting diversity over qualified students. Diversity is a goal we should seek, but not at the expense of the student that is produced. They're setting up many for failure, and loading them up with debt they will never be able to repay.
Spend your money wisely. You will get out of any university what you put into it.
Similar experience. My MIT reports were largely average in terms of output, despite very strong "raw puzzle solving ability", if that makes sense. However, I had some amazing state school reports, they blended talent for unconventional solutions, strong work ethic, and the attitude of someone who doesn't think their lives are already figured out due to their college degree.
One problem is that there are plenty of really bad state school people too. The bottom line is that if you select carefully, and don't let fancy degrees bias you, you will find some of your best people from "boring" places.
Unsurprising, the degrees that prepare you for a professional career, e.g. STEM, medicine and law are shown to be good investments.
People who choose to pursue majors on the basis of passions and/or quest for knowledge in a specific area without concern for the market, would need to be aware of what they are signing up for. But when you are young and not yet worldly wise, it can be a problem. Perhaps, those degrees should come with a warning label.
At Caltech, everybody knew that an AY degree was useless for getting a job (there are only so many telescopes). So lots of students did a double major - EE for a job, AY for fun.
I can vouch for the fact that people who take a brutal AY major for fun are indeed some of the most interesting people you'll ever meet.
Asking this question generally has no value because everyone's experience is different. It's hard to a/b test this because it's impossible to control for everything else.
You'll see lots of personal stories in this thread. Some will say yes, some will say no, some will have no degree.
Some degrees are better than others. Some institutions are better than others.
There simply is no one-size-fits-all answer here.
Of course for someone contemplating a degree, some research and planning is a good idea. Maybe find people with your context, with your planned degree, and quiz them.
You are incorrect. Asking this question has great value when you do it regarding degrees because, while your statement is true about individual outcomes, outcomes of the population that completed a degree tell you quite a lot about the value of the degree, which is a large part of the input into choosing a degree for many people (and it certainly should be a huge part of deciding what degrees get subsidized and to what extent by the tax payer).
Yep, and even if it's (nearly) free (not the US) the opportunity costs of not working for a few years can be harsh. It depends, and I'm still not sure if I regret it, I keep telling myself that I learned enough interesting and useful things so that I recognize problems and can look up the solutions I once knew. In my case CS, and finished in 2010.
I studied electrical engineering because I was told I'd have a leg-up on software engineers, who don't understand how computers work. That knowledge turned out to be irrelevant in the Internet era. Then I doubled down by going to graduate school, where I specialized in the hot research field du jour and discovered it did not exist in industry. It is now dead as a research field too. So my entire higher education, I painfully realized, was worth jack. I did not get my degree either 'coz my advisor was denied tenure, got a breakdown, and I became depressed myself. After much moping and with marital support, I cut my losses and dumped electrical engineering for software engineering, and machine learning in particular. That was a fantastic career move but it took me a long time to get over the waste and suffering. I've always hated school, and I was a great student.
Fortunately I became proficient with computers well before I got "schooled" so I was able to eventually get a job. But employers always held my education against me, especially at startups. Why did you study that? Why did you go to graduate school?
That's interesting. I had a similar experience, where I was proficient with computers and programming before entering university, chose to get an EE degree instead of CS, and then immediately went into software engineering where I've never used my degree. I've long since forgotten pretty much everything EE-related that I learned in school, so my degree is also pretty worthless at this point.
But I never got advice encouraging me to get an EE degree as a way to get a "leg up" on SWEs. Most of the advice I got was that I was making a mistake, and should get a CS degree instead if I was interested in programming. I went ahead with the EE degree anyway, but it's never seemed to hurt me in the eyes of potential employers, at least not that I've noticed.
Can you say a little more about how employers held your education against you? I've also been asked questions about why I chose various aspects of my education and job history, but never assumed it was hurting me as long as I gave a reasonable response.
My degree was absolutely worth it, I paid a total of 2700 euros in tuition fee and got a master (French software engineering degree in 5 years @ 540 euros a year). By having a cursus to follow, I got a sense of direction of what to learn and ended up studying things that are useful to this day that I might not have learned otherwise. Even if I skipped a lot of classes, I spent a lot of time reading all the relevant textbooks to those classes and got all the theoretical foundation I wouldn't have otherwise as well as access to teachers who could answer my questions or point me in the right direction.
And finally, having a master degree has been extremely useful in getting visas allowing me to live in a lot of different countries over the years.
On the other hand, I was an exchange student at RIT for 6 months and I don't know if the very high tuition (40k per year nowadays? when I was there, I didn't pay the tuition, just the one in France) there would be worth it given the lower quality of education compared to what I had in France and the extremely high cost.
I probably wouldn't have found programming work without my CS degree, I needed some training. I do know programmers who were good, got jobs and who didn't have a degree, but they were the coding-since-8 types and I wasn't.
But I'm late 40s and now long term unemployed, wondering what I'm supposed to next. So that CS degree didn't go far. They seem to be mostly signalling now anyway, you have to have the right Brand Name attached to them for maximum effect, and I don't. And a lot of my jobs were a notch or two above garbage tier, so lacking that brand name seems kind of bad.
Actually I dont for a second regret my degree(s). I got to learn about so many broad things. I was never a good student - I hated exams, loved assignments, spent most of my time in the lab trying to build things based on what I was learning that week/quarter. Even though I did "part time" work in my field it came no where close to what I was learning at college. Naturally my grades suffered - but I did enough to pass. Do I use all that stuff today - not directly but I feel I dont lack in confidence in tackling any problem and knowing where the answer might lie (at the very least I know where to find the specialists and how to learn from them).
Now this doesnt mean that everything you do for passion will set you up for success and I just lucked out in having a passion for CS/Eng that it worked out eventually. Remember back in the 90s (and even 2000s?) in Australia Eng was a field was lower on the totem pole than even Accounting! But this question was whether my degree was worth it (for me) and Id do it all over again. In fact if i could go back Id try to stay a few more years in college and be more proactive about spotting trends.
A more interesting question would be: was the school from which you graduated worth the investment? It's one thing to get an MBA from "college of du (shopping) mall", and another from Northwestern University (in the US, evidently).
In my case (Genomics), yes. I studied it because I was interested in it and everyday I went to school with a sense of awe that I have seldom felt ever since.
Money-wise it's been ups and downs, overall good so I guess it was worth it in that sense as well.
One of the benefits of a public, state funded university system that I see very rarely mentioned is that it's really good at culling nonsensical degrees because the state has no incentive to keep paying for expensive, useless education.
In Germany tertiary education rate is almost half as high as in Britain yet productivity is vastly higher. The academic system should focus on creating researchers, job training is better provided in a vocational setting. Britain and the US where you have governments write basically blank checks to students which then fund vast university bureaucracies just seem like a tax payer hazard.
Mine wasn’t in terms of knowledge because it was all just a big joke: most teachers didn’t really read our essays and graded them using the “throw them on the stairs” technique. The knowledge imparted could be gotten in 1/2 or 1/3 of the time if a student was really interested in it and cared to look it up for themselves.
My year abroad was great on a personal level, but an even bigger joke on academic level: courses were ridiculously easy to pass and I got credits for courses like “American movies retrospective” where we basically watched classic American movies in class, or for taking a few French classes when my home university’s teaching language was French.
I was studying for a bachelor in business administration.
On a bureaucratic level however, it’s been very useful: I was able to get naturalized on the basis of having studied for a degree in that country, and in the country I live in now life is much easier administratively if you have a university degree.
But for the above, any bachelor would do. Of my whole bachelor program, I can maybe think of 4–5 actually useful pieces of information I learnt and remember. The rest was a waste of time, trying to figure out how to get a pass grade despite the terrible instructor.
The money I earned and career I built had nothing to do with my degree from day 1 after graduation. Luckily public university was cheap and I didn’t incur any debt, only opportunity cost.
Why are rising fees not driving students towards cheaper universities rather than just no university? I understand that a US degree has more value than a foreign one in the US, but given the number of foreigners with foreign degrees settling in the US each year, I would think that the gap is not necessarily that big, is it? Isn't a foreign degree better than no degree at all?
The article mentions France as being way cheaper, and digging the source a bit further[0], there are many other European countries that also seem to charge negligible amounts. Granted, that's for nationals, and this is likely higher for non-nationals, but I expect it to still be low enough to be worth it for US and UK citizens who'd have to pay increasingly high fees otherwise.
> Given the number of foreigners with foreign degrees settling in the US each year, I would think that the gap is not necessarily that big, is it?
This is a strong case of survivorship bias. You will see the 1,000 Indian engineers every year (let's say) moving to the US, but not the other 499,000 that doesn't or cannot.
A lot of those people with foreign degrees also entered US to get a higher degree (Masters or Ph.D.), which supersedes their undergraduate education from a relatively low-prestige institution when applying for a US job.
>> Isn't a foreign degree better than no degree at all?
It is. That is why the cost for international students was close to $10K per semester at my not so expensive university. Just for a master's, that is close to $40K over two years. This was ten years ago.
The costs at a high prestige university are double or triple that.
But only because I had a good enough grasp of IT/Computer Science before I went into University through a good high school. The job I have now is more generalist as opposed to specialised (e.g. programming).
Has my degree increased my opportunity to find and land the job I have now? Absolutely, as my job required a degree back then. Are employers in STEM areas now looking to employ people that don't have degrees? yes.
There is however a big challenge that Universities face, which is providing education that matches the skills required in the workforce. It can be seen as a waste to do 4 years in computer science or any other degree, to then land a job that was only relevant to a few of your courses taken.
Universities and higher education are looking to do more apprenticeship style courses when you are learning hands on during your education, like you do in a trade. Rather than doing a 4 year degree that covers a wide range of computer science/cyber/information security domains, you do a shorter course/degree that is highly focused to the jobs you want to apply for.
In the view of industry, part of what universities provide is job training. The other component is an expensive credentialing system. A degree from a prestigious university is worth more than one from a modest school, even if the course content is identical.
My bachelors degree was worth every penny. My Masters not so much. Going back to school with an eye towards cost and paying attention to what they actually taught me made me extremely cynical about the education system.
In particular, I was very turned off by the fact that so much of my education was done by adjunct faculty. Underpaid workers with the prospect of tenure being dangled in front of their faces for a decade. Many were very bright people, but then again, so were many of the people I worked with in industry prior to my education.
Potential students should also be aware that all of the information taught at university is available for free online. Online content also has the added benefit of being guaranteed unlike university courses, which have limited capacity. In short, don’t expect to be able to take any courses advertised in online catalogues (courses may be full or simply not taught anymore).
4 years of some of your most productive years of life (both physical and mental) is very very costly.
But in life, you compete with your peers. So you try and make as best a decision as possible to pick a career or trade for your life and in many cases, a degree helps you compete with your peers.
My B.S. C.S. was a fabulous deal. It's funding my retirement. I will be forever grateful to the State of California for the inexpensive solid education available to me.
I did not go to a fancy school but it was enough to get me into a fascinating and successful career. Could not be happier.
[+] [-] NoZebra120vClip|3 years ago|reply
I returned to college at least 4 times. I tried and tried. I am a high performer when I'm motivated. But I have trouble sustaining momentum.
Entering college for the last time 5 years ago, my goals were: brush up on latest technology, earn CompTIA certifications. Mission accomplished. Pell Grant well-spent.
My parents are the types who don't understand non-traditional education. My father scoffs at anything that isn't accredited. But we're living in the future now. Education has been disrupted by technology and disrupted by culture.
I had straight As in grade school and a bright future. Unfortunately, my childhood wasn't as loving as I had always thought it was. I suffer from C-PTSD. I was homeless, penniless, jobless, all at once. I lost everything I owned. I've bounced back from all that, but I still visit the hospital too often.
I've worked at a steady job in the education industry for 3 years now. That's a new record for my tenure at anything. They don't require a degree. They don't even require the relevant certifications I've owned -- they make no difference in my paycheck, and they won't pay for me to earn or renew them. But we love each other, I've found a great team, I am in my niche. I'm here to stay. No degree necessary.
[+] [-] kcplate|3 years ago|reply
Same. I will say that after nearly 40 years in tech, my lack of a degree has only every hurt me during the application process and that has been only been in the last 10 years where HR bots pre-sort me out of the pile. I am at the end of my career and as such searching for new tech work isn’t a big issue because I expect my current gig to carry me through to retirement.
But because of the gatekeeping HR bots, I’d argue that folks who want to work in tech in the future should pursue and achieve a STEM degree. However outside of STEM careers, degrees are just expensive pieces of paper.
[+] [-] deviantbit|3 years ago|reply
Every Harvard graduate I've ever known has been arrested, committed fraud, or worse, murder (Lookup Luke Sweetser). The first thing that comes out of all of their mouths is they went to Harvard, and pretty much that is the extent of their ability.
The university system is in shambles in the United States. I've been consulting with several, but they're entrenched in this new ideology. Many top level engineering programs are suffering by putting diversity over qualified students. Diversity is a goal we should seek, but not at the expense of the student that is produced. They're setting up many for failure, and loading them up with debt they will never be able to repay.
Spend your money wisely. You will get out of any university what you put into it.
[+] [-] danielrpa|3 years ago|reply
One problem is that there are plenty of really bad state school people too. The bottom line is that if you select carefully, and don't let fancy degrees bias you, you will find some of your best people from "boring" places.
[+] [-] belter|3 years ago|reply
"Harvard MBAs Keep Going To Prison So Why Do They Still Rule The World?" - https://www.inc.com/dustin-mckissen/harvard-mbas-keep-going-...
[+] [-] GianFabien|3 years ago|reply
People who choose to pursue majors on the basis of passions and/or quest for knowledge in a specific area without concern for the market, would need to be aware of what they are signing up for. But when you are young and not yet worldly wise, it can be a problem. Perhaps, those degrees should come with a warning label.
[+] [-] JellyBeanThief|3 years ago|reply
It would be nice if we had some sort of snappy aphorism. "Make your major your money and your minor your passion" or something.
[+] [-] WalterBright|3 years ago|reply
I can vouch for the fact that people who take a brutal AY major for fun are indeed some of the most interesting people you'll ever meet.
[+] [-] yathaid|3 years ago|reply
From the article:
>> Mr Biden also promises an official list of “low-financial value” courses.
[+] [-] bruce511|3 years ago|reply
You'll see lots of personal stories in this thread. Some will say yes, some will say no, some will have no degree.
Some degrees are better than others. Some institutions are better than others.
There simply is no one-size-fits-all answer here.
Of course for someone contemplating a degree, some research and planning is a good idea. Maybe find people with your context, with your planned degree, and quiz them.
[+] [-] snapplebobapple|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wink|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] esafak|3 years ago|reply
Fortunately I became proficient with computers well before I got "schooled" so I was able to eventually get a job. But employers always held my education against me, especially at startups. Why did you study that? Why did you go to graduate school?
[+] [-] bhaney|3 years ago|reply
But I never got advice encouraging me to get an EE degree as a way to get a "leg up" on SWEs. Most of the advice I got was that I was making a mistake, and should get a CS degree instead if I was interested in programming. I went ahead with the EE degree anyway, but it's never seemed to hurt me in the eyes of potential employers, at least not that I've noticed.
Can you say a little more about how employers held your education against you? I've also been asked questions about why I chose various aspects of my education and job history, but never assumed it was hurting me as long as I gave a reasonable response.
[+] [-] nicolas_t|3 years ago|reply
And finally, having a master degree has been extremely useful in getting visas allowing me to live in a lot of different countries over the years.
On the other hand, I was an exchange student at RIT for 6 months and I don't know if the very high tuition (40k per year nowadays? when I was there, I didn't pay the tuition, just the one in France) there would be worth it given the lower quality of education compared to what I had in France and the extremely high cost.
[+] [-] trashface|3 years ago|reply
But I'm late 40s and now long term unemployed, wondering what I'm supposed to next. So that CS degree didn't go far. They seem to be mostly signalling now anyway, you have to have the right Brand Name attached to them for maximum effect, and I don't. And a lot of my jobs were a notch or two above garbage tier, so lacking that brand name seems kind of bad.
[+] [-] traviswt|3 years ago|reply
We absolutely need to find a better model for STEM fields. Apprenticeships shouldn't just be for blue collar.
[+] [-] flashgordon|3 years ago|reply
Now this doesnt mean that everything you do for passion will set you up for success and I just lucked out in having a passion for CS/Eng that it worked out eventually. Remember back in the 90s (and even 2000s?) in Australia Eng was a field was lower on the totem pole than even Accounting! But this question was whether my degree was worth it (for me) and Id do it all over again. In fact if i could go back Id try to stay a few more years in college and be more proactive about spotting trends.
[+] [-] netfortius|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moralestapia|3 years ago|reply
Money-wise it's been ups and downs, overall good so I guess it was worth it in that sense as well.
[+] [-] Barrin92|3 years ago|reply
In Germany tertiary education rate is almost half as high as in Britain yet productivity is vastly higher. The academic system should focus on creating researchers, job training is better provided in a vocational setting. Britain and the US where you have governments write basically blank checks to students which then fund vast university bureaucracies just seem like a tax payer hazard.
[+] [-] ornornor|3 years ago|reply
My year abroad was great on a personal level, but an even bigger joke on academic level: courses were ridiculously easy to pass and I got credits for courses like “American movies retrospective” where we basically watched classic American movies in class, or for taking a few French classes when my home university’s teaching language was French.
I was studying for a bachelor in business administration.
On a bureaucratic level however, it’s been very useful: I was able to get naturalized on the basis of having studied for a degree in that country, and in the country I live in now life is much easier administratively if you have a university degree.
But for the above, any bachelor would do. Of my whole bachelor program, I can maybe think of 4–5 actually useful pieces of information I learnt and remember. The rest was a waste of time, trying to figure out how to get a pass grade despite the terrible instructor.
The money I earned and career I built had nothing to do with my degree from day 1 after graduation. Luckily public university was cheap and I didn’t incur any debt, only opportunity cost.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hiq|3 years ago|reply
The article mentions France as being way cheaper, and digging the source a bit further[0], there are many other European countries that also seem to charge negligible amounts. Granted, that's for nationals, and this is likely higher for non-nationals, but I expect it to still be low enough to be worth it for US and UK citizens who'd have to pay increasingly high fees otherwise.
0: the XLS in https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/annual-average-tuiti...
[+] [-] polygamous_bat|3 years ago|reply
This is a strong case of survivorship bias. You will see the 1,000 Indian engineers every year (let's say) moving to the US, but not the other 499,000 that doesn't or cannot.
A lot of those people with foreign degrees also entered US to get a higher degree (Masters or Ph.D.), which supersedes their undergraduate education from a relatively low-prestige institution when applying for a US job.
[+] [-] yathaid|3 years ago|reply
It is. That is why the cost for international students was close to $10K per semester at my not so expensive university. Just for a master's, that is close to $40K over two years. This was ten years ago.
The costs at a high prestige university are double or triple that.
[+] [-] NoPicklez|3 years ago|reply
But only because I had a good enough grasp of IT/Computer Science before I went into University through a good high school. The job I have now is more generalist as opposed to specialised (e.g. programming).
Has my degree increased my opportunity to find and land the job I have now? Absolutely, as my job required a degree back then. Are employers in STEM areas now looking to employ people that don't have degrees? yes.
There is however a big challenge that Universities face, which is providing education that matches the skills required in the workforce. It can be seen as a waste to do 4 years in computer science or any other degree, to then land a job that was only relevant to a few of your courses taken.
Universities and higher education are looking to do more apprenticeship style courses when you are learning hands on during your education, like you do in a trade. Rather than doing a 4 year degree that covers a wide range of computer science/cyber/information security domains, you do a shorter course/degree that is highly focused to the jobs you want to apply for.
[+] [-] janalsncm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] janalsncm|3 years ago|reply
In particular, I was very turned off by the fact that so much of my education was done by adjunct faculty. Underpaid workers with the prospect of tenure being dangled in front of their faces for a decade. Many were very bright people, but then again, so were many of the people I worked with in industry prior to my education.
Potential students should also be aware that all of the information taught at university is available for free online. Online content also has the added benefit of being guaranteed unlike university courses, which have limited capacity. In short, don’t expect to be able to take any courses advertised in online catalogues (courses may be full or simply not taught anymore).
[+] [-] jmathai|3 years ago|reply
But in life, you compete with your peers. So you try and make as best a decision as possible to pick a career or trade for your life and in many cases, a degree helps you compete with your peers.
It’s not only about what you learn.
[+] [-] justinclift|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cleandreams|3 years ago|reply
I did not go to a fancy school but it was enough to get me into a fascinating and successful career. Could not be happier.