Sure, but personally I would argue that it almost always makes more financial sense to do a combined Masters-PhD (i.e. a research degree), especially in fields with plentiful funding.
That was the case for me in Ireland when I did my doctorate.
Definitely not psychology, which is what my doctorate's in.
Generally, more hard-sciencey type fields tend to have better funding (physics, engineering that sort of thing). They also have less PhD students, because there are more opportunities in industry so less competition for places.
It seems like CS is one of those disciplines also, tbh.
In engineering a MS pays best, at least historically. Lately PhD's are becoming very common and much more product-oriented I'd say (as opposed to long-term high-risk research). So may be a better ticket to the upper ranks of technical tracks at large tech companies.
Historically, with professional degrees you are totally correct. I think that's more because there's a professional organisation ensuring that people get rewarded for better qualifications.
I mean, PhD's are great if you want to learn how to structure and finish a long-term project, and learn how to research. I definitely don't regret mine, but I remember looking the the cost structure of masters vs PhD's and concluding that masters were for suckers as you could always just finish a PhD in 18 months with a research masters.
Was gonna say. My Master’s program paid for itself by the time I graduated and absolutely helped land me my dream job which turned into a dream career.
I can only speak from myself (Economics, in Portugal).
In employability terms, my master's degree was not a good investment, and these degrees are cheap here compared to the US (I payed 5k for two years).
I do however feel I developed plenty of resillience due to the amount of studying I had to do, a real understanding of what academic life is like by doing my thesis (we are not very exposed to papers in the undergrad), and most importantly, a strong and useful framework and intuition for thinking about the world - but I think that might just be a combination of my degree and innate inclinations.
It does. One goes through a separate, advanced degree, pool for the h1b lottery. If one is not selected on that pool, then one enters the regular one.
Also, a STEM masters allows one to do three years of OPT, which is basically a work permit.
A masters was a great choice for me. I did my engineering undergrad abroad, got a very good education for not much money. Doing a masters in the US allowed me to specialize and enter the US market.
Comparatively, the price of a technical masters in the US was on part with that of an MBA on my country of origin. After crunching the numbers, it was an easy decision.
I am happy with the education I got, and the opportunities it opened for me.
I got my PhD in a field where you nonchalantly get a masters along the way (because masters degrees have an in-field glass ceiling).
A terminal masters program was started by my program while I was in attendance. If you needed the education, it was billed as a professional degree and I think is put to good use. But if you had an undergraduate degree in the field and were not pursuing a PhD then it was just window dressing.
Haha I knew you were talking about Econ when I read the post. It seemed pretty clear it was PhD or gtfo when I did Econ undergrad. Masters seems like an actual scam.
Economics is one of the undergrad degrees that is often sort of generic--i.e. you don't really work in the field with just a BA/BS. And you need a PhD to actually be an economist so a Masters probably doesn't buy you much. (Not 100% true of course, but close enough.)
Yes, but many of the partners at those firms who are "economists" probably have PhDs.
I imagine it's also fairly common for banks, trading firms, and the like to have economists on staff but my point is that they're likely not mostly undergrad (or even Masters) economics majors.
It’s pretty ridiculous, but there are a bunch of fields gate keeped by these terminal masters programs regardless of undergraduate background or work experience.
E.g. most industrial fields that include scientist in the title. DS/AS roles in tech, Product management roles etc.
I guess they are paying $300k for the connections and access to the elites who go to these universities but whats the point of paying if the 'elite university experience' is not only virtual, but anyone can go and get a MS degree online for cheap access? (Obviously for some courses)
Still the pandemic has made it glaringly obvious that depending on the course you study, in this case, history, media, drama and film studies, a Masters Degree in either of those fields is a complete scam if the probabilities in getting a high earning job is that small as I have said before. [0]
As for a PhD in especially in either of those fields. Well... Just don't take my word for it and just look at the responses right here and you can make your own decision to see if it is worth it. [1]
In the case of J-School, mentioned in the article, even back when journalism was not such a beleaguered profession, a lot of people were pretty skeptical that it was a better option than, you know, being a journalist.
I know a lot of working journalists and very few of them went to J-School. (Many worked on undergrad newspapers and some colleges have undergrad elective classes.)
One of the key issues I see is that we don’t place a high enough value on adult education. A philosophy professor of mine told me the word “andragogy”, which is the theory of adult education. It’s different from “pedagogy” which means the education of children.
I always thought that learning is learning. It never occurred to me that there’s a difference between how and why children learn and that it could be different from adults.
As an adult, who considers myself a life long learner, I see the differences. The education system hasn’t adapted to adult learning. Most masters classes are simply just repackaged versions of undergraduate classes, maybe with a little more depth.
The schedules haven’t changed either. As the article points out almost all the bad practices are online classes. It’s hard for adults to juggle family, kids, and work while being a student. People feel it’s necessary to further their schooling but don’t have many options. They can’t just take off two days of the week to attend a class. Few schools
offer nights and weekend classes. Online becomes the only option.
In Denmark and some neighboring countries there's this concept of a school you can go to just to learn stuff later in life, as an ongoing thing. There's a whole bunch of themes (sports, history, etc), and often you can book yourself in for whatever amount of time makes sense for you.
This certainly depends on local rules. For example, in the UK I believe dental businesses can only be opened by a qualified dentist. I was surprised when I learnt this earlier this year.
This source [0] says “non-dentists cannot set up or buy dental practices as an individual or partnership but they are permitted to be shareholders of a limited company which owns the practice” and “the majority of directors of that limited company cannot be non-dentists”.
I believe this is the case with law firms, and probably some other professional firms, in the US as well. AFAIK a law firm is a partnership of lawyers.
That said, this isn't what most people are talking about when they are talking about starting a business.
Depends on the trade, you can't make electrical work without some form of recognition I believe. And beyond that I mostly asked regarding customers, you want something to back your claims and prices.
Those are called “trade schools” in the US, and most community colleges have programs for trades. For example, a lot of community colleges have programs in auto repair and heating/cooling.
It gets more complicated in the US because of unions. In many places, you can’t become a plumber or electrician without an apprenticeship, which is controlled by the trade unions. Therefore, community colleges might offer classes on plumbing or electrical, but there’s no equivalent to a certification program, because it’s not possible to become a professional just by going to school.
Right so the employees providing the actual services may need qualifications. The person opening the business doesn't. I've never seen anywhere where opening a business needs a degree or qualification.
That's the point. Most people want adult education so they have comfortable lives. Learning about history is a luxury pursuit really for people who are already comfortable and have spare time.
So you really need education that leads to recognised qualifications.
We have community colleges in America that serve the exact same function. My parents love taking the astronomy courses because they come with an observatory. They have also some some criminal justice classes and a lot of art classes like pottery. They are very old. You also don’t get a degree for taking these courses but they are much cheaper than the classes are for degree track students.
I have a bachelors in computer engineering but I've taken drawing and painting classes at my local community college. It was a fun and we met once a week at night for 3 months. I think it was $120 for the entire 3 months but we did have to buy our own supplies.
I have a programmer friend that took welding and car repair classes at the community college. He just wanted to learn.
I'd like to point out that Extension schools also allow minors to take full credit college courses. I basically had my math bachelor's degree complete by the time I was officially accepted to my university.
If you are a parent, let your children know about these extension college courses if they are interested!
ROTFL. This is called "Volkshochschule" in Germany. Hochschule can be translated to University. One guy from former Yugoslavia took an accounting course there, got a certificate and had this translated (to Serbian, Croatian or whatever). The translater did indeed translate Volkshochschule to Peoples University and the guy managed to secure a Professor position with it at a University. Of cause later this caused a scandal...
> In Denmark and some neighboring countries there's this concept of a school you can go to just to learn stuff later in life, as an ongoing thing
We have those in the US; we don't have a general collective name for them, but there are both private for-profit ones with a variety of (mostly narrow) specialities, either standalone or as adjuncts to other related businesses (selling, e.g., products in the field that it teaches people to act in), plus community colleges, public libraries, public parks and rec departments, and museums tend to also have programs that serve this function, despite it not being their sole or primary function.
My whole life, I've heard of those places as either "FunEd" or "The Learning Annex" and I didn't realize until well into adulthood that those were proper nouns, not the generic name for "classes you take as a grownup just for interest."
Very interesting to know there was a term for that already.
Slight anecdote, I gave a few geometry lessons to a teen. And witnessing his brain operate was quite staggering. Teen operate at high frequency low depth it seems. He didn't want to grasp the rule or symmetry but ran in many intuitions very rapidly (honestly my brain froze at his pace of change, so vibrant) only to feel defeated or confused. Made me think adult and kids really need different approaches. Our emotions facing a new topic are so different.
Love this story because this has been my experience as well when teaching youth. Children in a classroom scarcely need a teacher explaining things to them. Give them the materials and leave the room for an hour. I guarantee you they'll know what to do and how to to do it when you return. However, they won't have any particular depth of knowledge of the topic. And thats because they usually move onto their own ideas of how to use the new knowledge. They're not interested in how I use that knowledge. So different approaches for youth vs adults has always been something I needed to train either. One approach doesn't really work for the other.
I wish schools got audited for that very thing. Schools are extremely discriminatory against adults not at application time, but when they offer classes. Not only do they not accommodate either, a lot of professors still pull BS where you need to hand in assignments at the end of class! There is absolutely nothing in the education system today that requires you to hand in something with such a short term time table.
I say this as a mid 20s return college student. My experience going back to college without the "stars in my eyes" so to speak, has really left me embittered by the system altogether. Schools act like autocratic bureaucracies that when they make a mistake all you get is an "oops sorry. Now deal with it lol." Also student employment is not only predatory (cause the pay is just garbage), but it's like they don't even train students either. If you want any answers, you have to wait to talk to one of the few people who has actually been hired on as an employee.
Higher education is structured for students going from high school to their institutions. They also assume students don't have full time employment or a family. So basically if you have either of those, the school doesn't care at all about your plight. They know your gonna pay off your loans and complete your degree. They prefer younger impressionable kids who are gonna waste a lot of time and money there instead.
There are schools that are much more oriented (or have programs that are much more oriented) towards people who are working or are otherwise not attending school full time. I'm not sure I can really fault the average undergrad program for orienting things towards the 95% case situation. (Some schools are also much more commuter-oriented than others are.)
You are absolutely right and that definitely makes sense. But, and I have to preface this has been my experience, there are virtually no accommodations. School is your job when you go back to a university and colleges believe that is what you should be doing.
Now to the legalities. The Age Discrimination Act mandates any institution receiving federal funding from preventing someone from being able to participate[0]. So like a physical disability, if you only make stairs because "99% of people can walk" but cannot accommodate for someone in a wheelchair, you would be in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Same thing with making a website accessible to the blind. By making your courses only available during business hours, you essentially are telling working adults "we are preventing you from participating in mandatory courses because you cannot be at work during the class." Work, mind you, that will pay their bills, support their family, and keep them out of absurd debt bondage upon graduation.
When you make class at 8AM for 1.5 hours, Monday-Wednesday-Friday, you are discriminating against working adults. It doesn't matter if the discrimination is intentional. Your very allowance of not offering a course wholly online without a mandatory attended lecture or just a night class is pure evidence that you do not want non-traditional students. How can an college believe that someone who works full time can make that work? Night classes are at least an accommodation and can work.
What I've found is technical colleges, since they're catered toward people going back to school, they do a much better job all around. Also since they are city funded and not a state run university through tax payers, they can hire real employees. So when I ask an administrative question that is very important, I don't get "uh I'm not sure, let me ask a staff member since I'm only a student employee! Can you hold for 10 minutes?"
It may be discrimination towards people with jobs, but it's not based on age. Legally, employees are not a protected class. Also, the protected class for age is "people over 40", who are not necessarily more likely to work full time than people under 40.
If you intentionally create an environment that is hostile toward people of differing ages, you are discriminating. My college required me upon sign up to put in for my housing "My parent/guardians contact information." Universally everyone is an adult when they enter college (the people who don't are so rare I'm ignoring them). I could not leave the page unless I entered any data so I just put my name and contact info. Guess what else? All the events are catered toward young students and target them specifically that way. If someone really wanted to, they could easily have an age discrimination case against almost every school. Culturally however, people don't because they don't want to associate with lesser experienced and more incredibly arrogant individuals.
>Higher education is structured for students going from high school to their institutions. They also assume students don't have full time employment or a family. So basically if you have either of
In the US, Depending on your state this might not be true. Many of the 'Elite' schools are absolutely as you describe, but many of the state schools do cater to adult learners. This is particularly true in states which separate their Research Universities from their more teaching oriented Universities. Most of the latter do have night classes and other offerings aimed at adult learners. But the private universities with dreams of grandeur are looking mostly for the "traditional college student"
'Andragogy' is not a great name for a theory which tries to describe how all adults, not just men, learn. However, it is a really telling name about the kinds of assumptions baked into the theory [1].
I work in adult education; I don't use the word 'andragogy' to describe what I do, and it's a bit of a warning sign if someone else does.
As an adult, I don't really have much interest in a complete degree with a certification. (With the exception of very bounded industry-specific things.) So in that respect adult education certainly is different.
I have known people who got PhDs as adults and I think they mostly didn't care for the experience. I know I have zero interest in getting another degree. Even a couple of decades ago, it would have zero value for my professional development and would, in fact, have been mostly a distraction.
However, there are a ton of educational opportunities often oriented to working adults. Community colleges, extension programs, online learning of all sorts...
> Most masters classes are simply just repackaged versions of undergraduate classes, maybe with a little more depth.
Depends on the country. Masters degrees can be research which are the first year of a Ph.D. or they can be taught degrees. In the latter they are usually called "conversion" courses where there's intensive focus on filling in gaps in education for somebody moving to the field. E.g. moving from an Economics B.Sc. to a Computer Science degree.
Where I was educated the Computing Science undergraduate degree is the equivalent of any Masters degree in the same subject. There is nothing in the subject matter that would be of value as another degree as it isn't advancement. It would be merely repackaged undergraduate courses like you suggest.
> In the latter they are usually called "conversion" courses where there's intensive focus on filling in gaps in education for somebody moving to the field.
Well, or they are first professional degrees (e.g., the MBA, MFA, etc.)
In the US, those gaps are usually noted and you fill them with upper division courses and if necessary, lower division. Actual graduate courses are quite different from undergraduate even covering the same subject matter.
Lower division is problem sets.
Upper division is problem sets + project.
Graduate is project + research paper.
I understand GP's point, education can vary widely depending on the country.
For example, in my home country an undergraduate degree in engineering is normally 5 years where
- first 2 years are very standard undergraduate courses (your lower division)
- last 3rd and 4th years are the upper division you describe
- 5th year is a graduation
project that can be 50 to 100 pages long (almost a thesis) + upper division courses and maybe a research paper (depends if you had a scholarship of sorts)
So when a person goes to do a master in this country, the experience is almost one of a PhD, while the PhD experience is very intense.
I did a hybrid masters in CS - half the year was taught and half the year was research. Of the 6 classes I was taught 2 of them were undergrad level (and they were 3rd/final year level at that), and the rest were definitely a level above undergrad. Most were actively learning about the state of the art in their areas, or very close to it. Of the 15 or so students, 5 of us had our names on papers from the research we did for the second period. My experience may be atypical, but I definitely believe there is a range available, and it's unfortunately up to a student to try to discern the two.
And ones that are solely or mostly classroom courses can even be taken by people who majored in the field undergrad. I know someone who did one years ago at a top school. Which surprised me a bit at the time because, although I did have classes in my Master's program, the real value was in my thesis, some additional related research, and an unrelated project.
I'm a life long learner myself. I have to agree that the traditional education system is lacking and is very poorly set up at catering for people like us. If you want to take classes as a working adult, you're pretty much limited to night school. Which, for reasons I will never understand, seems to be mostly limited to languages (and oddly specific things like TIG welding). Although some universities seem to be offering philosophy courses on an evening schedule as well.
I get that you need a big enough audience in order to set up any class, and supply/demand is definitely an issue. But I think the demand is much higher than what the supply side seems to cater for.
Things like Khan Academy are great, but they've begun to scale down their offering in favour of university prep. The Open University has some truly great content, but it's prohibitively expensive. MOOCs seem very hit or miss, and often lack a good mechanism for feedback. And quite frankly, I enjoy being in a classroom full of motivated people.
Having lived in a fairly rural area of the US, and having parents who live in a different, very rural area of the US, that the rural areas do not have much of a value for education. Particularly the type of Christians who are the 6-day creation types, although I also haven't found as many 6-day creation believers in urban areas.
(This isn't meant as a dig at those, just an observation. If your worldview places "belief in the Bible" as a high value and your interpretation requires a literal reading, then what would an institution full of people who preach evolution and old-earth have to offer? I have a friend who teaches physics part-time at a local college in one of these rural areas, but he is 6-day creation. I said that you'd have to believe that the scientists are incompetent at their jobs, and he said that of course they were. I was stunned because while I could imagine other people saying that, I didn't imagine that he would. I can't fathom how you can believe that people who have worked years to figure out how to most accurately date something would be so incompetent as to mistake days for thousands or millions of years. Especially when it's physics that underlies all the carbon dating... And to be fair, there are plenty of Christians who think 6-day creation is a rather silly abuse of a poetic account.)
I have lived in a very rural part of the US as well. Typically there's a rundown part of a small town (or for very small towns, the entire town) that has people caught in it that may not appreciate education, but generally my experience is everyone does recognize the value of education but may resent the fact they have no access to it. They are also not usually overly religious.
Farmers especially respect education a great deal because the states pay professionals to go out and tell them how to make as much money as possible.
Where I went (MIT Media Lab) our classes were unique and only graduate level. In fact masters and PhD took the same classes, PhD just took more of them. There were no undergrads, and the knowledge assumptions, type of classes, and speed were very much more advanced than undergraduate. During my undergraduate (UCSD) I took a few masters classes — they were definitely harder and assumed a lot more knowledge with less hand holding. YMMV.
When are we going to learn that encouraging everyone to get more education is a waste of resources? All it leads to is lowered standards and devalued degrees. Your credential is only worth something because someone else doesn't have it.
> Your credential is only worth something because someone else doesn't have it.
This is an unbelievably cynical take on the world. Society and the economy are not zero-sum, and having better education and better skills make someone better off without taking away an equal amount of opportunity from others.
Better skills are not zero sum, but credentials are. Having a doctorate is only impressive if everybody else doesn't also have one.then you would have to have two doctorates.
What? Doctorate implies you've learned some skills.
If everyone suddenly everyone got better at maths and critical thinking. Overall the economy would be more productive, and everyone would be better off.
There isn't a fixed amount wealth, to be divided up between people. If you increase skill levels, total level of wealth can increase.
I would say this depends strongly on the field. In the field I'm most experienced in, electrical engineering, I tell people considering a Master's is that it's a possible short cut to the pay of someone with 3 years of experience. So if you can get it fast enough, and the math works out, then do it. Otherwise skip it.
When very few people had college degrees, they were of high value because the programs were more likely to be rigorous.
As US society said "higher education is the best path to success", it drove up demand where people who never would have considered college otherwise were pushed that way by teachers, guidance counselors, and parents. The high school system adjusted to launch more students in better ways.
Along the way, that morphed into "higher education is the only path to success" and suddenly anyone who didn't go was considered a failure and the entire high school system dumbed down to the point where more and more otherwise normal courses were deemed "college prep."
Unfortunately, it put students who would be below college standards or even just borderline a generation ago in a bad spot where they were underprepared. But colleges get massive cashflow so they introduced more remedial courses in the first year and the average student is graduating in 5 or 6 years. They've steadily devalued themselves and are looking more and more like high school 2.0 but longer with a massive price tag.
(Background: Have a college age kid just going through this personally and watching his friends struggle as some hit these walls. It's sad and ugly and didn't have to be this way.)
As a mid 20s returning college student, its definitely high school 2.0. I've talked to and tried to hit on many girls only to come to actually stop because their priorities are just way out of wack. Guys seem more mellow than in high school at least. But for the most part I encounter the "know it all" arrogance more from men. A lot of them just never failed hard in their lives before so they often think they can beat the system or what have you.
I think it's never a waste to get more education. But getting an advanced degree from a mediocre school for the sake of career advancement probably doesn't worth it.
A few exceptions:
1) You want to learn something but doesn't want to go through the 90-credit undergraduate. In my university they give you access to a CS graduate diploma that consists of 10 core CS courses under the requirement that you already have an undergraduate degree (non-CS) and pass the entry CS course about programming (usually a Java 101 course). IMO it's a LOT better than a 90-credit second undergraduate degree on CS.
The other exception is that you want to do the research but I'd argue it still doesn't worth it unless it's a prestigious school like top 20 in North America (MIT, Stanford, CMU, Waterloo, those top schools).
In Europe a Master's degree is a necessity for the (better) starter jobs in industry, but usually in the more common (traditional) fields like economics, law, engineering, or science.
But in these cases aren't undergraduate degrees normally three years, and a master's degree one? So that's four years total, which is what Americans do anyway.
An American undergraduate plus masters is six years, which is absolutely insane.
Let alone their PhDs, which mean you could easily end up 29 before you graduate.
I had a friend in Europe who finished their PhD with top-tier publications in two years - much less mucking around than in the US.
And in some countries it's more common to do 5 years straight to Masters (for example it was the system in Poland when I graduated but it became more popular to do 3+2 since then).
At any rate - I wouldn't say it's a scam in countries with free university education. It's actually cheap to teach people and it improves the society. Win-win.
University system in US is a scam for the same reason that healthcare system in US is a scam - because it has bad incentives and no taxpayers control over them.
> for example it was the system in Poland when I graduated but it became more popular to do 3+2 since then
In France, there is the "3+2" system, but that's just on paper. Basically, there are two types of bachelor's: a practical one that's supposed to be the last in line, and another, more "theoretical" one that's supposed to be followed with a Master's.
Students have to choose between the two fairly early, so if your goal is a Master's, you'll take the bachelor that's supposed to be followed by the Master. You do get a piece of paper at the three-year mark saying you've got a Bachelor's, but that's unusable if you want to get a job (as in no-one will hire you).
You technically can go to a Master's after the practical one, but there are extra steps, and it's not as easy.
> But in these cases aren't undergraduate degrees normally three years, and a master's degree one?
It's usually three years + two years.
At least in France there used to be a degree at four years, before the Master's (at five) but I don't think that exists anymore since they introduced the EU-wide new system (Bachelor's — Master's — PhD).
I think academically the first year of an US undergraduate degree is probably more on the level of the last year of a European "high school" (lycee, gymnasium etc).
The typical structure is 3 years for the bachelor's degree and 2 years for the master's degree. In many countries, master's is the primary undergraduate degree, while bachelor's is considered a glorified dropout.
American undergraduate degrees often have plenty of classes unrelated to the major/minor subjects, while European degrees tend to be more focused. In some countries, those breadth requirements are considered a part of secondary education. While an American nominally starts a four-year degree at 18, a European may start a three-year degree at 19.
As for PhDs, they were traditionally considered more like certifications than degrees. You could graduate quickly if you managed to finish your thesis, but it was far more common to continue working on it well into your 30s. This has changed in the past decade or two, as universities started favoring short "American-style" PhDs, with the ideal to graduate before 30. (The British with their short PhDs were always an exception to this.)
I think that was the case when Universities offered only 5year Master's degree programs but it changed after the Bologna process and you have Bachelor's 3years (3.5 for engineering) + 2years (1.5 eng) Master's.
Bachelor's degree is often enough for a starter job in industry and I don't think it matters that much if it's Master's or Bachelor's even later in your career (at least in software dev), PhD is definitely regarded much higher
The base problem is the idea that a given academic degree gives you access to some career. It's messy, because clearly some do work that way. With the film degree it should have been clear that there's only so many relevant jobs going each year, and thus your chance as a graduate is going to be minimal. It would certainly be in everyone's interest to have transparency about the destinations. Master's degrees are also often the kind of thing people do if they did an unspecifically directed undergrad (eg English, History) and then want to get their door in somewhere (eg law conversion), so it's important that people understand what they're buying.
If you look at most things though, there's no connection between what you do at work and what you studied. At best studying some subject means you are interested in some broad area, and you are conscientious enough to have done all the exercises, so employers should perhaps hire you in the hope that you can learn how the online advertising industry works, or how the plastic supply chain works, etc.
Looking back at my degree, it was really a bunch of indexing interesting things in science and math for potential further investigation. And then an exercise in flaneuring: wandering about, coming upon something interesting, and then being able to focus on figuring out that thing as opportunities arise.
Film is actually interesting because I think you'll find that many of the most respected directors, editors, cinematographers, etc. in Hollywood didn't go to film school.
This is why I prefer PhD or research degrees to Masters as the "curriculum" is more modular (i.e. I can quickly change my focus if something wasn't working out or learn new things without needing permission).
US/Europe govt should pay people to do research degrees for 12-15 months with some screening as to ability. Run it like a library and/or makespace and remove bloated universities out of the equation. This plus some sort of machine rental or access service (e.g. pay per use) for scientific/fab equipment and open methods for peer review publication would revolutionise adult education in the sciences and engineering.
I had a friend who was wanting to get a master's degree in poetry, and it cost about 45k a year, back in early 2000s. I strongly advised against it, my friend did not take well to my advice. Hope it all turned out well.
I have no problem with people getting degrees in the arts. My spouse has a Master's in fine arts, from a university in Europe. But she didn't acquire any debt from that degree, while I did in the US with my CS Master's.
But living with enormous debt--debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy (in the US)--is such a burden, and the degree itself may really not offer that much in terms of job prospects (though we shouldn't discount the value of humanities degrees--turns out they often do pretty well in life).
It is hard to see why a poetry program should cost so much.
That said about federal student loans, it is a low interest unsecured type of debt. At a bank an unsecured loan is at least 11-16% depending on the amount.
So if you as a student do have some of that debt leftover, it is much smarter to use that toward a car down payment or a deposit on an apartment. I feel like most college kids don't have even the slightest grasp on budgeting and how all transactions affect the accounting equation honestly.
I think the debt problem is one of a predatory nature. I love music and history, but I came from a family that pretty much only got by because of welfare. I didn't have the time or money to waste getting a degree in something that had zero job prospects after school.
You show a $50k a year degree to an 18 year old from a more middle to upper middle class family, though, and they're not going to understand how much money that actually is. They're going to see one big party that they don't need to pay for until they're done.
I also remember when I was in high school, all the boomer teachers and parents were saying university is a gateway to easy money after. We were sold something that hasn't held true, and I think a lot of people are very bitter about that.
> We were sold something that hasn't held true, and I think a lot of people are very bitter about that.
In what way has it not held true? 33% of Americans have at least a four year degree and earn an average of $1m more than their peers without over their lifetimes.
By all measures, university is a gateway to easy money after. So long as you finish.
I bet Ferrari owners earn even more than that compared to people without Ferraris.
I don’t think that means we should tell young people to take out loans to buy a Ferrari because it’s a ticket to easy money.
When the only kids going to college were either rich or highly motivated then having a degree made you stand out and could open doors. When everyone gets a degree it doesn’t make you stand out any more. Instead, not having a degree makes you look bad. (And unlike high school, which anyone can attend for free, most kids in the US need to take on a lot of debt just so the don’t get left behind.)
>When everyone gets a degree it doesn’t make you stand out any more.
Then let’s talk when we get closer to everyone having a degree. 33% is not everyone and “a degree” is not a single product that can be compared 1:1 across each instance.
> most kids in the US need to take on a lot of debt just so the don’t get left behind
The average student loan debt for undergraduate degrees is $28,950. This is not “a lot of debt.”
According to the valuation analysts at Kelley Blue Book, the estimated average transaction price for a light vehicle in the United States was $37,876 in 2020.
That is to say, on average, students are taking on the debt for a 4 year education, that sets them up on average to earn a million dollars more in their lifetime than their peers who don’t, for less than the average transaction price for a light vehicle — an asset that depreciates ~20% when you take it off the lot.
And you get the keep the credentials a lot longer.
On the other hand, degrees are "free" in Europe, and I don't want my tax money spent on people doing masters degrees on "poetry".
The fact that you have to pay for your degree out of pocket may mean that more people will choose to do degrees that are worth something, which is a great thing for society overall. Having said that the prices of degrees in the US are outrageous. A middle ground should be found.
How bleak are our prospects as a civilisation when we reduce the value of a higher education in the arts, such as literature, to something as rudimentary as a waste of tax money. It is short sighted to think that since a "degree in poetry" won't yield a substantial dollar-value return economically, that it therefore has no value. Especially when several of recent history's social and political movements were in fact born of literature, writing and the kind of written articulation that characterises such academic fields.
And to your point about "free" education in Europe. The act of decoupling the pursuit of education and knowledge, from a high financial cost, is a crucial mechanism to ensure that institutions retain the freedom to pursue knowledge for its own sake, and to not be (solely) steered by the industrial interests of the status quo.
That's a very romantic view of society, but a graduate on poetry will most likely spend the rest of her days writing copy for a marketing agency, selling burgers, or cleaning latrines. And that's ignoring the fact that you really don't need to study "poetry" for four years to be able to write poems.
I did my MFA in poetry in the US. Tuition and living expenses were completely covered by fellowships and a TA position. I think this is the norm. While expensive on paper, no one really pays that. Most programs are not predatory like those described in article.
MFA programs in creative writing are the most worthless. In my experience as an editor, writers with MFAs were not as a class better than those without.
At least with some graduate programs—in areas of actually value—you might qualify for an RA or TA subsidy. But it’s not worth paying full freight.
> For colleges and universities, master’s degrees have essentially become an enormous moneymaking scheme, wherein the line between for-profit and nonprofit education has been utterly blurred. There are, of course, good programs as well as bad ones, but when you scope out, there is clearly a systemic problem.
Cool. Now do the higher education system as a whole.
- It's not a legally qualifying degree like studying medicine
- It's academic in the sense that you can use it to gain entrance to a phd, and has academic content that isn't just "how to code".
- And yet you learn a fair bit about how to code. You'll in all likelihood come across actual tools, not toys, that real coders use, eg Git. You might also do some specialist stuff that is directly applicable to an employer, rather than just demonstrating interest. Eg if you do a systems programming course, you might actually understand systems in a way that's useful from the start.
It's probably generally true of engineering degrees. While there's obviously an opportunity cost, there's usually not a big out of pocket expense other than living expenses. In my case, it wasn't so much that I really used a lot of specific things I learned getting the Master's but I still think it was a useful supplement to what I learned undergrad--the thesis in particular.
The same applies to some degree of the sciences in general but, there, you probably have to get to a PhD for the opportunities to be significantly elevated relative to a BS.
In any case, this meme about Master's degree scams is mostly directed at high-cost degrees in journalism and the like where the career opportunities aren't great with or without the degree.
Conversely, I don't even have a bachelor's degree in CS, and I haven't suffered at all because of it. I got a job offer before graduating, and decided my time was better spent earning money than learning stuff I would probably never have any use for.
Rather than focusing on degrees, I think it's a lot more important to focus on learning, however you don't know what's important to learn until you actually start working on real problems.
Funny how those of us who didn't spend more than a couple years in school think the rest of the years are probably a waste, and those that did spend a lot of time and money in school think it was useful.
I have a BS in computer science. I felt like less than 25% of it actually made me a better programmer. At least 25% of it was a total waste of time. The rest was stuff that was maybe academically relevant or interesting to me at least, but of dubious value given the time and financial costs.
I have a degree. It will go down as the biggest regret of my life and my life has changed drastically simply because I thought getting an education was good for society.
I spent 6 years in undergrad (3 for MechE, 3 for Econ). I think it was a waste in terms of my career (which is SWE). I enjoyed college from a social perspective, but there were way cooler things I could've done with $15,000/yr
I had a BA in business and wanted to get into tech field (no idea what, at the time). Decided to get MS in Information Science. That helped me get an internship which enabled me to add some tech-related experience to my resume which was a jumping off point that launched my tech career. My feeling about getting a MS at this point is that it was gatekeeping. I could have done that job pre-masters and everything I've learned about programming has been on-the-job training or self-directed.
I spent the first ten years of my programming career without a degree, like you. I got a SoftEng MSc at 30. It was worth it. Sometimes we just don't know what we don't know.
I think formal cs education would make me a better engineer than I am now, but at the same time I have never seen an instance where education has mattered more than intelligence.
Instead those around you, with a degree, suffered. Having to deal with bricklayers that reinvent the wheel simply because they cant grasp cs topics is annoying.
In my experience, a degree doesn't matter much whether someone is able to 'grasp cs topics'; a willingness to learn on the job is vastly more important.
If others suffered because of me, it would be because I was once a junior developer with no practical experience -- which applies to everyone, regardless of whether they have a degree or not.
> learning stuff I would probably never have any use for.
I hear this so much, and I used to be one of the people saying it. Until I actually 1) learned that stuff and 2) realized I don't want to just write glue code. I like writing compilers. I like writing efficient data structures. I use my CS education a lot.
Also Computer Science but from a much less prestigious state school.
It was also in a region with a much smaller tech sector.
It's actually hard to say how much of the career boost was from moving to Boston and how much from the degree. I did make some very useful connections during the degree as well as actually learning quite a lot in some of the classes.
My CS masters was also no cost to me. Working as a half-time teaching and research assistant covered my tuition. I finished in twice the usual time with no debt and valuable work experience.
It's also worth considering the opportunity cost. Usually for more junior candidates, time in school is treated equivalently to work experience. You just get paid more for working those years.
I think this really depends on your undergrad, the value of masters degree seems to diminish with the following factors:
- A well taught undergrad degree in CS (Masters fill gaps caused by bad classes or different fields)
- Graduated with undergrad degree recently (getting a Masters degree after being out of school for 10 years can be a good refresher and update on how the field has evolved/changed)
- Masters degree classes in an area of CS you are familiar with (Masters degree is a great opportunity to take classes in areas that you care about but don't know well, if you are a great Rails webdev with 7 years experience, then taking a Masters degree class in Rail WebDev is just wasting your time.)
The article is poorly titled - it's mostly about non-tech degrees or online programs.
In engineering, an MS in CS has the least value to employers. However, in other areas of engineering, it has a pretty high value. Many big companies will not let you do EE design work with just a BS, for example.
Similar experience here. I did a BA in 'Information Technology'. It wasn't until after I graduated that I taught myself to program through Stanford lectures on YT. The MSE in CS was incredibly beneficial for me.
it's been a long, long time for me, but graduate school (for Master's) was where I actually learnt a lot. I was too swamped under a load of undergraduate coursework to deeply absorb anything. Lighter coursework and deeper dives into subjects were so much better for my brain during my Master's.
It might have helped that I was too young and stupid to have any well-considered career goals and enjoyed learning for the sake of it.
This was engineering/CS though, and the article seems to be about MFAs.
I went to a top-tier IT engineering school in France.
Despite programming (in GWBasic) since 7 years old, the IT school didn’t transform me into a good developer. In fact most of my colleagues became managers. It’s only 4 years AFTER school that I landed in a famous startup, where I learnt to recompile open-source and use Maven properly and understand the underlying concepts, what to study, what to look into.
And immediately, I created my startup which is now successful.
This whole beginning of career / engineering school has been a terrible waste of youth energy, along with stressing me out because I knew something wasn’t right, and making me intensely depressed. I’m enraged that studying is so hard, and yet, you’re left with absolutely no time to program on your own and discover the scroll of truth.
and inability to declare bankruptcy so as to include student loans. Bankruptcy says that the _lender_ has responsibility to not enslave people with debt -- or rather the _lender_ may only enslave a borrower for a limited amount of time, after which it is ultimately the lenders problem that they gave that person too much money and that they should have known that the borrower would have never been able to repay. Debt is a useful tool, but the ability to enslave people with debt should be limited by the law.
Just wondering, as someone currently preparing for SAT - why is it so easy to drastically improve one's performance on standardized tests if they predict IQ? My score was pretty mediocre (due to a year of slacking off during COVID) but after some practice I improved it significantly - does that mean my IQ is greatly increasing as well?
I know of some very, very clever people who do not perform well, and the opposite too.
Do you mean teenagers? I took the SAT at around 12 and at 16, for instance, and scored considerably higher the second time, with no special test prep (just a couple of sample tests from a booklet from the library a few days before that second test). I think that did help a little, but already doing a third one would've been in the region of diminishing returns. The difference really was just the time, and high school classes.
I'd be surprised to see this pattern in someone a decade older.
"SAT scores are predictive of IQ" is not the same as saying "if an individual gets a higher SAT score than another person they have a higher IQ than that person". If however you had a group of 100 people that had a fairly higher score, it is very likely they would have a higher mean IQ than a group of 100 people with a lower score. Nor is it the same as saying "the SAT is a perfect IQ test". A perfect IQ test, one that gives an individual the same score every time, and ranks everyone along an unquestioned scale, is likely
impossible.
Because bachelors don't know shit, and you don't need a degree to do bachelor stuff.
Ie you need to gauge people based on their skill not their degree for bachelor level stuff anyways so instead of some mid degree that's useless we should get rid of it and push people to actually complete something useful, like a master's degree.
"We can’t just rely on the market to provide all of the quality discipline that master’s programs need."
It seems like if the federal government stopped lending for master's degrees, and allowed students to file for bankruptcy to get out of private loans, then the market might very well sort everything out.
Yes, having government involved always creates inflation. It's no coincidence that the two areas with most government involvement, education and health care, are the things that have outpaced every other measure of inflation significantly.
And let's not forget housing. (Our government) making large loans more available and cheaper drives up demand for the intended goods/services. That, naturally, drives up price.
It's difficult to understand why so many people advocate for even more government "intervention" (i.e., do more to increase the availability and cost of loans).
Here in the UK we have some the cheapest healthcare in the western world with a nationalised system.
I actually agree that the US government often causes inflation. But that's because everyone in the states seems to love government subsidies and no one in the states likes regulation, price control, etc. Whether you're a government or not, subsidising X without regulating consumption or controlling the prices of X will lead to inflation...
An example of what I'm talking about is American high school. State schools have much lower prices per kid than private. Because the state starts with a fixed budget and works from there. Imagine if instead government required "education insurance" like health insurance. And insurers were required to pay for anything the teacher decided was required...
> Yes, having government involved always creates inflation.
No it doesn't.
> It's no coincidence that the two areas with most government involvement, education and health care, are the things that have outpaced every other measure of inflation significantly.
The government is less (EDIT: more) involved (proportionate to total expenditures in the domain) in healthcare lots of places outside the US without equal, much less greater, healthcare inflation.
It is the manner, not the mere fact of government involvement that produces inflation.
It sounds like you’re saying that places with less government involvement have less healthcare inflation - isn’t what the comment you are replying to is arguing?
The success of the more socialized approaches to healthcare relative to the partially-private US approach suggest we need more government involvement in healthcare. Much cheaper, better outcomes, more people covered.
The problem is that "government involvement" in the US is synonymous with "throw money at the problem." It's a easy way to get results in the short term, so which gets you political approval, but in the long term, it just creates a money black hole.
Poor people who choose degrees with good career prospects will get a loan. Poor people who want a degree with bad career prospects may not have the chance to waste a year or more of their life pursuing one.
Surely no one will get a loan because as soon as you pay your last fee, you can declare bankruptcy? That way you don't have to pay back that money and there is nothing to be repo'd. And if no one pays back loans, lends don't lend.
Isn't this the broad logic behind student loans not be dischargable already?
I don't think the current US system is correct. But I think there needs to be some balance rather than just never being dischargable.
Some of the "equity" based models offered by a few places (where you pay a percentage of income for X years) seem better to me. Or at least suitable in some cases.
> Surely no one will get a loan because as soon as you pay your last fee, you can declare bankruptcy?
Well, no because there are lots of incentives for the people who could pay to not declare bankruptcy, because bankruptcy has adverse impacts on employability, housing, etc. And with income contingent repayment available on federal loans, pretty much everyone can stay in good standing with them (people don't, but that's mostly servicers trying to get people not to take available income contingent plans.)
Also, the main lender is the federal government (since other , who lends because that's what the law says they do. The already narrow space of private student loans might narrow a bit further with easier dischargeability, but that’s about it.
> Isn't this the broad logic behind student loans not be dischargable already?
IIRC, private, non-federally-guaranteed student lending was trending upward, with no graduate-and-declare-bankruptcy trend when limited dischargeability for such loans was adopted, so, to the extent it was the justification it wasn’t factually justified, just an excuse for a financial services industry subsidy. (IIRC, it was later displaced somewhat by expanded federally-guaranteed lensing then hit a sharp cliff around the 2009 financial crisis.)
And for federally-guaranteed loans, private lenders have been excluded for many years, as private federally-guaranteed loans have been replaced with exclusively direct federal loans, and when therr was private lending they had federal guarantees, so encouraging lenders isn't a factor in that space, either.
> Some of the "equity" based models offered by a few places (where you pay a percentage of income for X years) seem better to me.
Those seem to a strictly-worse variation of the income-based plans already available for federal loans.
I think immigration laws play a big role too, a lot of people seem to use a masters as a way of getting a visa - I believe having a masters improves the chances of getting an H1-B, and also being in school in the US makes it much easier to apply to US companies.
Post Secondary Institutions have put undergraduate education on the back burner. It's all about graduate degrees now. More money, grants, and cheap student labour.
I can't comment on the American education system (which this article is about) but here and in other parts of Europe, the bachelors vs masters distinction is a quite recent addition (30-40 years ago, I think?) Before then, higher education took at least five, maybe six years versus the 4+2 or 3+2 system that has replaced it. An artifical split was added after three or four years (depending on the level of education) to align with the foreign bachelor/master system and make our degrees easier to use in foreign countries.
Nowadays, people consider the bachelor enough of an education to join the workforce. And power to them, if they can get their jobs done with only their bachelors', they have no need for more education.
However, it does imply that less knowledge has been transferred to those students than to the students who followed the old system. The vocational education has also shaped itself more to that form, at least here, which is detrimental for the quality of education those people receive.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] threadThat was the case for me in Ireland when I did my doctorate.
Generally, more hard-sciencey type fields tend to have better funding (physics, engineering that sort of thing). They also have less PhD students, because there are more opportunities in industry so less competition for places.
It seems like CS is one of those disciplines also, tbh.
I mean, PhD's are great if you want to learn how to structure and finish a long-term project, and learn how to research. I definitely don't regret mine, but I remember looking the the cost structure of masters vs PhD's and concluding that masters were for suckers as you could always just finish a PhD in 18 months with a research masters.
In employability terms, my master's degree was not a good investment, and these degrees are cheap here compared to the US (I payed 5k for two years).
I do however feel I developed plenty of resillience due to the amount of studying I had to do, a real understanding of what academic life is like by doing my thesis (we are not very exposed to papers in the undergrad), and most importantly, a strong and useful framework and intuition for thinking about the world - but I think that might just be a combination of my degree and innate inclinations.
or the diff between bachelor/engineering degree is barely significant
Also, a STEM masters allows one to do three years of OPT, which is basically a work permit.
A masters was a great choice for me. I did my engineering undergrad abroad, got a very good education for not much money. Doing a masters in the US allowed me to specialize and enter the US market.
Comparatively, the price of a technical masters in the US was on part with that of an MBA on my country of origin. After crunching the numbers, it was an easy decision.
I am happy with the education I got, and the opportunities it opened for me.
A terminal masters program was started by my program while I was in attendance. If you needed the education, it was billed as a professional degree and I think is put to good use. But if you had an undergraduate degree in the field and were not pursuing a PhD then it was just window dressing.
I imagine it's also fairly common for banks, trading firms, and the like to have economists on staff but my point is that they're likely not mostly undergrad (or even Masters) economics majors.
Banks surprisingly hire few economists outside of information/trading groups and, for the more quant heavy, risk groups.
E.g. most industrial fields that include scientist in the title. DS/AS roles in tech, Product management roles etc.
Still the pandemic has made it glaringly obvious that depending on the course you study, in this case, history, media, drama and film studies, a Masters Degree in either of those fields is a complete scam if the probabilities in getting a high earning job is that small as I have said before. [0]
As for a PhD in especially in either of those fields. Well... Just don't take my word for it and just look at the responses right here and you can make your own decision to see if it is worth it. [1]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27620695
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27580605
Can you expand on what you mean by "access to elites"
Why not ask Paul Graham (pg) and Patrick Collison (pc)?
Maybe you can ask Peter Thiel and the Thiel fellowship recipients?
I know a lot of working journalists and very few of them went to J-School. (Many worked on undergrad newspapers and some colleges have undergrad elective classes.)
I always thought that learning is learning. It never occurred to me that there’s a difference between how and why children learn and that it could be different from adults.
As an adult, who considers myself a life long learner, I see the differences. The education system hasn’t adapted to adult learning. Most masters classes are simply just repackaged versions of undergraduate classes, maybe with a little more depth.
The schedules haven’t changed either. As the article points out almost all the bad practices are online classes. It’s hard for adults to juggle family, kids, and work while being a student. People feel it’s necessary to further their schooling but don’t have many options. They can’t just take off two days of the week to attend a class. Few schools offer nights and weekend classes. Online becomes the only option.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andragogy
In Denmark and some neighboring countries there's this concept of a school you can go to just to learn stuff later in life, as an ongoing thing. There's a whole bunch of themes (sports, history, etc), and often you can book yourself in for whatever amount of time makes sense for you.
This source [0] says “non-dentists cannot set up or buy dental practices as an individual or partnership but they are permitted to be shareholders of a limited company which owns the practice” and “the majority of directors of that limited company cannot be non-dentists”.
[0]: https://www.plutopartners.co.uk/post/who-can-own-a-dental-bu...
That said, this isn't what most people are talking about when they are talking about starting a business.
It gets more complicated in the US because of unions. In many places, you can’t become a plumber or electrician without an apprenticeship, which is controlled by the trade unions. Therefore, community colleges might offer classes on plumbing or electrical, but there’s no equivalent to a certification program, because it’s not possible to become a professional just by going to school.
Socially, I’d say that it is respected and regarded as a sign of dedication to ones interests.
Where do you need a degree to open a business?
So getting these qualifications are required for reskilling.
Reality is most people wanting to retrain are going to do it as a single person business as a plumber, hair dresser or similar.
Daycare center, hairstyling and financial advisor are others that require qualifications / lic
People aren't learning these professions at folk high school are they?
So you really need education that leads to recognised qualifications.
I have a programmer friend that took welding and car repair classes at the community college. He just wanted to learn.
If you are a parent, let your children know about these extension college courses if they are interested!
We have those in the US; we don't have a general collective name for them, but there are both private for-profit ones with a variety of (mostly narrow) specialities, either standalone or as adjuncts to other related businesses (selling, e.g., products in the field that it teaches people to act in), plus community colleges, public libraries, public parks and rec departments, and museums tend to also have programs that serve this function, despite it not being their sole or primary function.
Slight anecdote, I gave a few geometry lessons to a teen. And witnessing his brain operate was quite staggering. Teen operate at high frequency low depth it seems. He didn't want to grasp the rule or symmetry but ran in many intuitions very rapidly (honestly my brain froze at his pace of change, so vibrant) only to feel defeated or confused. Made me think adult and kids really need different approaches. Our emotions facing a new topic are so different.
I say this as a mid 20s return college student. My experience going back to college without the "stars in my eyes" so to speak, has really left me embittered by the system altogether. Schools act like autocratic bureaucracies that when they make a mistake all you get is an "oops sorry. Now deal with it lol." Also student employment is not only predatory (cause the pay is just garbage), but it's like they don't even train students either. If you want any answers, you have to wait to talk to one of the few people who has actually been hired on as an employee.
Higher education is structured for students going from high school to their institutions. They also assume students don't have full time employment or a family. So basically if you have either of those, the school doesn't care at all about your plight. They know your gonna pay off your loans and complete your degree. They prefer younger impressionable kids who are gonna waste a lot of time and money there instead.
Now to the legalities. The Age Discrimination Act mandates any institution receiving federal funding from preventing someone from being able to participate[0]. So like a physical disability, if you only make stairs because "99% of people can walk" but cannot accommodate for someone in a wheelchair, you would be in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Same thing with making a website accessible to the blind. By making your courses only available during business hours, you essentially are telling working adults "we are preventing you from participating in mandatory courses because you cannot be at work during the class." Work, mind you, that will pay their bills, support their family, and keep them out of absurd debt bondage upon graduation.
When you make class at 8AM for 1.5 hours, Monday-Wednesday-Friday, you are discriminating against working adults. It doesn't matter if the discrimination is intentional. Your very allowance of not offering a course wholly online without a mandatory attended lecture or just a night class is pure evidence that you do not want non-traditional students. How can an college believe that someone who works full time can make that work? Night classes are at least an accommodation and can work.
What I've found is technical colleges, since they're catered toward people going back to school, they do a much better job all around. Also since they are city funded and not a state run university through tax payers, they can hire real employees. So when I ask an administrative question that is very important, I don't get "uh I'm not sure, let me ask a staff member since I'm only a student employee! Can you hold for 10 minutes?"
https://www2.ed.gov/policy/rights/guid/ocr/ageoverview.html
In the US, Depending on your state this might not be true. Many of the 'Elite' schools are absolutely as you describe, but many of the state schools do cater to adult learners. This is particularly true in states which separate their Research Universities from their more teaching oriented Universities. Most of the latter do have night classes and other offerings aimed at adult learners. But the private universities with dreams of grandeur are looking mostly for the "traditional college student"
'Andragogy' is not a great name for a theory which tries to describe how all adults, not just men, learn. However, it is a really telling name about the kinds of assumptions baked into the theory [1].
I work in adult education; I don't use the word 'andragogy' to describe what I do, and it's a bit of a warning sign if someone else does.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0260691793...
As an adult, I don't really have much interest in a complete degree with a certification. (With the exception of very bounded industry-specific things.) So in that respect adult education certainly is different.
I have known people who got PhDs as adults and I think they mostly didn't care for the experience. I know I have zero interest in getting another degree. Even a couple of decades ago, it would have zero value for my professional development and would, in fact, have been mostly a distraction.
However, there are a ton of educational opportunities often oriented to working adults. Community colleges, extension programs, online learning of all sorts...
Depends on the country. Masters degrees can be research which are the first year of a Ph.D. or they can be taught degrees. In the latter they are usually called "conversion" courses where there's intensive focus on filling in gaps in education for somebody moving to the field. E.g. moving from an Economics B.Sc. to a Computer Science degree.
Where I was educated the Computing Science undergraduate degree is the equivalent of any Masters degree in the same subject. There is nothing in the subject matter that would be of value as another degree as it isn't advancement. It would be merely repackaged undergraduate courses like you suggest.
Well, or they are first professional degrees (e.g., the MBA, MFA, etc.)
For example, in my home country an undergraduate degree in engineering is normally 5 years where
- first 2 years are very standard undergraduate courses (your lower division)
- last 3rd and 4th years are the upper division you describe
- 5th year is a graduation project that can be 50 to 100 pages long (almost a thesis) + upper division courses and maybe a research paper (depends if you had a scholarship of sorts)
So when a person goes to do a master in this country, the experience is almost one of a PhD, while the PhD experience is very intense.
I get that you need a big enough audience in order to set up any class, and supply/demand is definitely an issue. But I think the demand is much higher than what the supply side seems to cater for.
Things like Khan Academy are great, but they've begun to scale down their offering in favour of university prep. The Open University has some truly great content, but it's prohibitively expensive. MOOCs seem very hit or miss, and often lack a good mechanism for feedback. And quite frankly, I enjoy being in a classroom full of motivated people.
(This isn't meant as a dig at those, just an observation. If your worldview places "belief in the Bible" as a high value and your interpretation requires a literal reading, then what would an institution full of people who preach evolution and old-earth have to offer? I have a friend who teaches physics part-time at a local college in one of these rural areas, but he is 6-day creation. I said that you'd have to believe that the scientists are incompetent at their jobs, and he said that of course they were. I was stunned because while I could imagine other people saying that, I didn't imagine that he would. I can't fathom how you can believe that people who have worked years to figure out how to most accurately date something would be so incompetent as to mistake days for thousands or millions of years. Especially when it's physics that underlies all the carbon dating... And to be fair, there are plenty of Christians who think 6-day creation is a rather silly abuse of a poetic account.)
Farmers especially respect education a great deal because the states pay professionals to go out and tell them how to make as much money as possible.
That would be true only if all the jobs requiring these credentials were already filled and none were to be created in the future.
To them, "college is good" is an unquestionable truth, and the systems they build will always give more resources to colleges.
This is an unbelievably cynical take on the world. Society and the economy are not zero-sum, and having better education and better skills make someone better off without taking away an equal amount of opportunity from others.
If everyone suddenly everyone got better at maths and critical thinking. Overall the economy would be more productive, and everyone would be better off.
There isn't a fixed amount wealth, to be divided up between people. If you increase skill levels, total level of wealth can increase.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2018/05/30/book-rev...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education
There's an ongoing weakening of the signal for people with degrees who can actually do design engineering.
Lowered standards and devalued degrees is probably a thing though.
When very few people had college degrees, they were of high value because the programs were more likely to be rigorous.
As US society said "higher education is the best path to success", it drove up demand where people who never would have considered college otherwise were pushed that way by teachers, guidance counselors, and parents. The high school system adjusted to launch more students in better ways.
Along the way, that morphed into "higher education is the only path to success" and suddenly anyone who didn't go was considered a failure and the entire high school system dumbed down to the point where more and more otherwise normal courses were deemed "college prep."
Unfortunately, it put students who would be below college standards or even just borderline a generation ago in a bad spot where they were underprepared. But colleges get massive cashflow so they introduced more remedial courses in the first year and the average student is graduating in 5 or 6 years. They've steadily devalued themselves and are looking more and more like high school 2.0 but longer with a massive price tag.
(Background: Have a college age kid just going through this personally and watching his friends struggle as some hit these walls. It's sad and ugly and didn't have to be this way.)
A few exceptions:
1) You want to learn something but doesn't want to go through the 90-credit undergraduate. In my university they give you access to a CS graduate diploma that consists of 10 core CS courses under the requirement that you already have an undergraduate degree (non-CS) and pass the entry CS course about programming (usually a Java 101 course). IMO it's a LOT better than a 90-credit second undergraduate degree on CS.
The other exception is that you want to do the research but I'd argue it still doesn't worth it unless it's a prestigious school like top 20 in North America (MIT, Stanford, CMU, Waterloo, those top schools).
An American undergraduate plus masters is six years, which is absolutely insane.
Let alone their PhDs, which mean you could easily end up 29 before you graduate.
I had a friend in Europe who finished their PhD with top-tier publications in two years - much less mucking around than in the US.
At any rate - I wouldn't say it's a scam in countries with free university education. It's actually cheap to teach people and it improves the society. Win-win.
University system in US is a scam for the same reason that healthcare system in US is a scam - because it has bad incentives and no taxpayers control over them.
In France, there is the "3+2" system, but that's just on paper. Basically, there are two types of bachelor's: a practical one that's supposed to be the last in line, and another, more "theoretical" one that's supposed to be followed with a Master's.
Students have to choose between the two fairly early, so if your goal is a Master's, you'll take the bachelor that's supposed to be followed by the Master. You do get a piece of paper at the three-year mark saying you've got a Bachelor's, but that's unusable if you want to get a job (as in no-one will hire you).
You technically can go to a Master's after the practical one, but there are extra steps, and it's not as easy.
Eg I got a Master's 4 years after high school in the UK.
It's usually three years + two years.
At least in France there used to be a degree at four years, before the Master's (at five) but I don't think that exists anymore since they introduced the EU-wide new system (Bachelor's — Master's — PhD).
American undergraduate degrees often have plenty of classes unrelated to the major/minor subjects, while European degrees tend to be more focused. In some countries, those breadth requirements are considered a part of secondary education. While an American nominally starts a four-year degree at 18, a European may start a three-year degree at 19.
As for PhDs, they were traditionally considered more like certifications than degrees. You could graduate quickly if you managed to finish your thesis, but it was far more common to continue working on it well into your 30s. This has changed in the past decade or two, as universities started favoring short "American-style" PhDs, with the ideal to graduate before 30. (The British with their short PhDs were always an exception to this.)
Mostly in softer fields like marketing and (English) language.
They have all communicated the same thing - it's a necessity for starter jobs.
Bachelor's degree is often enough for a starter job in industry and I don't think it matters that much if it's Master's or Bachelor's even later in your career (at least in software dev), PhD is definitely regarded much higher
If you look at most things though, there's no connection between what you do at work and what you studied. At best studying some subject means you are interested in some broad area, and you are conscientious enough to have done all the exercises, so employers should perhaps hire you in the hope that you can learn how the online advertising industry works, or how the plastic supply chain works, etc.
Looking back at my degree, it was really a bunch of indexing interesting things in science and math for potential further investigation. And then an exercise in flaneuring: wandering about, coming upon something interesting, and then being able to focus on figuring out that thing as opportunities arise.
US/Europe govt should pay people to do research degrees for 12-15 months with some screening as to ability. Run it like a library and/or makespace and remove bloated universities out of the equation. This plus some sort of machine rental or access service (e.g. pay per use) for scientific/fab equipment and open methods for peer review publication would revolutionise adult education in the sciences and engineering.
I have no problem with people getting degrees in the arts. My spouse has a Master's in fine arts, from a university in Europe. But she didn't acquire any debt from that degree, while I did in the US with my CS Master's.
But living with enormous debt--debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy (in the US)--is such a burden, and the degree itself may really not offer that much in terms of job prospects (though we shouldn't discount the value of humanities degrees--turns out they often do pretty well in life).
It is hard to see why a poetry program should cost so much.
So if you as a student do have some of that debt leftover, it is much smarter to use that toward a car down payment or a deposit on an apartment. I feel like most college kids don't have even the slightest grasp on budgeting and how all transactions affect the accounting equation honestly.
You show a $50k a year degree to an 18 year old from a more middle to upper middle class family, though, and they're not going to understand how much money that actually is. They're going to see one big party that they don't need to pay for until they're done.
I also remember when I was in high school, all the boomer teachers and parents were saying university is a gateway to easy money after. We were sold something that hasn't held true, and I think a lot of people are very bitter about that.
In what way has it not held true? 33% of Americans have at least a four year degree and earn an average of $1m more than their peers without over their lifetimes.
By all measures, university is a gateway to easy money after. So long as you finish.
I don’t think that means we should tell young people to take out loans to buy a Ferrari because it’s a ticket to easy money.
When the only kids going to college were either rich or highly motivated then having a degree made you stand out and could open doors. When everyone gets a degree it doesn’t make you stand out any more. Instead, not having a degree makes you look bad. (And unlike high school, which anyone can attend for free, most kids in the US need to take on a lot of debt just so the don’t get left behind.)
Then let’s talk when we get closer to everyone having a degree. 33% is not everyone and “a degree” is not a single product that can be compared 1:1 across each instance.
> most kids in the US need to take on a lot of debt just so the don’t get left behind
The average student loan debt for undergraduate degrees is $28,950. This is not “a lot of debt.”
According to the valuation analysts at Kelley Blue Book, the estimated average transaction price for a light vehicle in the United States was $37,876 in 2020.
That is to say, on average, students are taking on the debt for a 4 year education, that sets them up on average to earn a million dollars more in their lifetime than their peers who don’t, for less than the average transaction price for a light vehicle — an asset that depreciates ~20% when you take it off the lot.
And you get the keep the credentials a lot longer.
The fact that you have to pay for your degree out of pocket may mean that more people will choose to do degrees that are worth something, which is a great thing for society overall. Having said that the prices of degrees in the US are outrageous. A middle ground should be found.
And to your point about "free" education in Europe. The act of decoupling the pursuit of education and knowledge, from a high financial cost, is a crucial mechanism to ensure that institutions retain the freedom to pursue knowledge for its own sake, and to not be (solely) steered by the industrial interests of the status quo.
At least with some graduate programs—in areas of actually value—you might qualify for an RA or TA subsidy. But it’s not worth paying full freight.
> For colleges and universities, master’s degrees have essentially become an enormous moneymaking scheme, wherein the line between for-profit and nonprofit education has been utterly blurred. There are, of course, good programs as well as bad ones, but when you scope out, there is clearly a systemic problem.
Cool. Now do the higher education system as a whole.
It filled in a lot of gaps that my undergraduate education left, and significantly raised my profile amongst recruiters.
CS might be the exception to the rule about Masters degrees though.
- It's not a legally qualifying degree like studying medicine
- It's academic in the sense that you can use it to gain entrance to a phd, and has academic content that isn't just "how to code".
- And yet you learn a fair bit about how to code. You'll in all likelihood come across actual tools, not toys, that real coders use, eg Git. You might also do some specialist stuff that is directly applicable to an employer, rather than just demonstrating interest. Eg if you do a systems programming course, you might actually understand systems in a way that's useful from the start.
The same applies to some degree of the sciences in general but, there, you probably have to get to a PhD for the opportunities to be significantly elevated relative to a BS.
In any case, this meme about Master's degree scams is mostly directed at high-cost degrees in journalism and the like where the career opportunities aren't great with or without the degree.
Rather than focusing on degrees, I think it's a lot more important to focus on learning, however you don't know what's important to learn until you actually start working on real problems.
It might be because education is free in my country, but I loved my Uni years and am glad I got 5 of them no matter the use for my career.
If others suffered because of me, it would be because I was once a junior developer with no practical experience -- which applies to everyone, regardless of whether they have a degree or not.
I hear this so much, and I used to be one of the people saying it. Until I actually 1) learned that stuff and 2) realized I don't want to just write glue code. I like writing compilers. I like writing efficient data structures. I use my CS education a lot.
It was also in a region with a much smaller tech sector.
It's actually hard to say how much of the career boost was from moving to Boston and how much from the degree. I did make some very useful connections during the degree as well as actually learning quite a lot in some of the classes.
- A well taught undergrad degree in CS (Masters fill gaps caused by bad classes or different fields)
- Graduated with undergrad degree recently (getting a Masters degree after being out of school for 10 years can be a good refresher and update on how the field has evolved/changed)
- Masters degree classes in an area of CS you are familiar with (Masters degree is a great opportunity to take classes in areas that you care about but don't know well, if you are a great Rails webdev with 7 years experience, then taking a Masters degree class in Rail WebDev is just wasting your time.)
In engineering, an MS in CS has the least value to employers. However, in other areas of engineering, it has a pretty high value. Many big companies will not let you do EE design work with just a BS, for example.
It might have helped that I was too young and stupid to have any well-considered career goals and enjoyed learning for the sake of it.
This was engineering/CS though, and the article seems to be about MFAs.
Despite programming (in GWBasic) since 7 years old, the IT school didn’t transform me into a good developer. In fact most of my colleagues became managers. It’s only 4 years AFTER school that I landed in a famous startup, where I learnt to recompile open-source and use Maven properly and understand the underlying concepts, what to study, what to look into.
And immediately, I created my startup which is now successful.
This whole beginning of career / engineering school has been a terrible waste of youth energy, along with stressing me out because I knew something wasn’t right, and making me intensely depressed. I’m enraged that studying is so hard, and yet, you’re left with absolutely no time to program on your own and discover the scroll of truth.
Credentialism the worship of credentials throughout many industries when other cheaper metrics are available, but may be illegal (like testing for IQ in USA) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credentialism_and_educational_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
and inability to declare bankruptcy so as to include student loans. Bankruptcy says that the _lender_ has responsibility to not enslave people with debt -- or rather the _lender_ may only enslave a borrower for a limited amount of time, after which it is ultimately the lenders problem that they gave that person too much money and that they should have known that the borrower would have never been able to repay. Debt is a useful tool, but the ability to enslave people with debt should be limited by the law.
I’m not sure any of this helps, though, since it would only prove you’re good at the test.
I know of some very, very clever people who do not perform well, and the opposite too.
I'm going to guess you're gains plateau or you get to a near-perfect score pretty quickly. The gains you're seeing are just familiarity with the test.
I'd be surprised to see this pattern in someone a decade older.
I also took a marketing class that changed my life. If you buy products from Nintendo, Apple, or Jeep, a marketing class will make you disgusted/woke.
Ie you need to gauge people based on their skill not their degree for bachelor level stuff anyways so instead of some mid degree that's useless we should get rid of it and push people to actually complete something useful, like a master's degree.
I learned new interesting things, but I could also have boring stuff I would never use anywhere later.
It seems like if the federal government stopped lending for master's degrees, and allowed students to file for bankruptcy to get out of private loans, then the market might very well sort everything out.
Found a per-year table, appears to depend on what degree topic https://student.unsw.edu.au/fees-student-contribution-rates
A 4year engineering degree (likely what the HN crowd is interested in) is about A$32k / US$24k
Whereas law/commerce/medicine is A$60k
It's difficult to understand why so many people advocate for even more government "intervention" (i.e., do more to increase the availability and cost of loans).
Here in the UK we have some the cheapest healthcare in the western world with a nationalised system.
I actually agree that the US government often causes inflation. But that's because everyone in the states seems to love government subsidies and no one in the states likes regulation, price control, etc. Whether you're a government or not, subsidising X without regulating consumption or controlling the prices of X will lead to inflation...
An example of what I'm talking about is American high school. State schools have much lower prices per kid than private. Because the state starts with a fixed budget and works from there. Imagine if instead government required "education insurance" like health insurance. And insurers were required to pay for anything the teacher decided was required...
No it doesn't.
> It's no coincidence that the two areas with most government involvement, education and health care, are the things that have outpaced every other measure of inflation significantly.
The government is less (EDIT: more) involved (proportionate to total expenditures in the domain) in healthcare lots of places outside the US without equal, much less greater, healthcare inflation.
It is the manner, not the mere fact of government involvement that produces inflation.
Yeah, it did; that was an error.
Maybe markets have a difference concept of efficiency than society...
Isn't this the broad logic behind student loans not be dischargable already?
I don't think the current US system is correct. But I think there needs to be some balance rather than just never being dischargable.
Some of the "equity" based models offered by a few places (where you pay a percentage of income for X years) seem better to me. Or at least suitable in some cases.
Well, no because there are lots of incentives for the people who could pay to not declare bankruptcy, because bankruptcy has adverse impacts on employability, housing, etc. And with income contingent repayment available on federal loans, pretty much everyone can stay in good standing with them (people don't, but that's mostly servicers trying to get people not to take available income contingent plans.)
Also, the main lender is the federal government (since other , who lends because that's what the law says they do. The already narrow space of private student loans might narrow a bit further with easier dischargeability, but that’s about it.
> Isn't this the broad logic behind student loans not be dischargable already?
IIRC, private, non-federally-guaranteed student lending was trending upward, with no graduate-and-declare-bankruptcy trend when limited dischargeability for such loans was adopted, so, to the extent it was the justification it wasn’t factually justified, just an excuse for a financial services industry subsidy. (IIRC, it was later displaced somewhat by expanded federally-guaranteed lensing then hit a sharp cliff around the 2009 financial crisis.)
And for federally-guaranteed loans, private lenders have been excluded for many years, as private federally-guaranteed loans have been replaced with exclusively direct federal loans, and when therr was private lending they had federal guarantees, so encouraging lenders isn't a factor in that space, either.
> Some of the "equity" based models offered by a few places (where you pay a percentage of income for X years) seem better to me.
Those seem to a strictly-worse variation of the income-based plans already available for federal loans.
Nowadays, people consider the bachelor enough of an education to join the workforce. And power to them, if they can get their jobs done with only their bachelors', they have no need for more education.
However, it does imply that less knowledge has been transferred to those students than to the students who followed the old system. The vocational education has also shaped itself more to that form, at least here, which is detrimental for the quality of education those people receive.