I assume the conclusions change considerably when you plug in non-American numbers?
My degrees were about 1/8th the price of many U.S. peers’, which made them more palatable given that my original career was looking at a lifetime ceiling of maybe $90k CAD.
I don't think it's a no-brainer. You spend a lot of time in college, and it would be interesting to see how much information/learnings you could ingest on your own time, compared to what they would give you in college.
Many people (but probably not everyone) would be better off not going to college at all, and start learning/working on their own, especially if they have specific interests instead of not knowing what they want to do.
In college you are not 'given' information/learnings, you actually have to do the work and selection to 'get' that yourself. At least, that is how it works here (EU). If you don't pro-actively do this, you simply won't succeed (and from a ROI perspective that would be a bad one).
The big difference between 'in' college and 'outside' or 'on your own' is context; the facilities, culture and exchange of ideas available to you in a college setting are very different from anything else. Especially when to take the sandbox element in to account.
And on top of that there is the difference between studied subjects and experienced subjects. There is no golden 'do this, get everything' path. Going to college or university doesn't mean there is nothing you need to learn in a work context. Same goes the other way: only learning things at work means you probably get a lot less abstract underpinnings and overarching context (or you might get none at all) which reduces understanding of your surroundings significantly.
The first iterations of school (in the first one or or two decades of life) are mostly "learning how to deal with people", "learning how to learn", "learning within a context" and after all that you get to "learn how to make use of what you have learned" in the real world. The earlier you stop, the fewer tools you'll have for the rest of your life.
There would be two avenues that are somewhat distinctive: academia which blends school-type context into work-type context at some point, and there is vocational training which reduces school-type context earlier and eliminates it before you're even "out of school". Neither are 'bad' or 'good', just different paths.
If had become say a plumber instead of going to university, had lived as cheap as a student with a plumber salary and invested the surplus 100 percent in the stock marked that would be a lot of money now many years later. I prefer not to calculate it.
I agree. I feel like there should be a credentialing system where you can 'test into' knowledge for specific course loads and however the person (at their own pace) arrives at that knowledge is considered secondary to whether they pass the test.
It's sensible to require one or two years of in-person study but requiring the whole 4 years seems like a potential waste of time due to the differences in maturity, social development, and focus among college aged students.
But is it easy to get in? Most English speaking Europeans you can talk to (barring the UK, etc) are in the above average category for their country. A lot of people may only speak their mothertongue or another European language that is not English.
I went to a college in a developing country and I regret it. I didn't lose money, but I wasted a lot of time and didn't really learn much (or rather, I did learn things during college, but not because of it). The lectures were unbearably boring and I didn't socialize much. More than anything, I hate the fact that I was too much of a coward to drop out once I realized how miserable I was doing all the fake and pointless work that was assigned to me. I forgot to say, I studied computer science.
You'd be surprised. Take Spain: College is very cheap, but in 2014, the median student that graduated was 27... and that was with a plain degree. This also didn't mean that most of their college degrees were on any topic that helped their job prospects. If you spend most of your 20s working hard on a course of study that doesn't lead to a career that pays much better than minimum wage, going to college sure isn't a no-brainer. This isn't purely a matter of motivation, but of the quality of their school, their interest in teaching, and setting sensible exams. My US college had plenty of Spanish engineering students which had gotten nowhere in their Spanish college, and were doing very well under the US system. Nothing like seeing engineers now at NASA that were unable to pass a single class in their first year in Madrid.
Salaries can also be quite different across borders. Studying computer science in the US isn't cheap, but the jobs available right when you are done are not paying anywhere near the same as those of the Spanish developer. You see American companies opening software shops in the least developed parts of Europe, and a big part of it is that you might be getting up to 5 developers for the price of one. I emigrated because I knew that the Spanish college route was far more dubious than a pretty average US college, even paying for the whole thing.
So a no-brainer? Hardly. And the life path that makes sense in 2010 might not make all that much sense in 2030. Just like someone that became a mining engineer, specializing in coal, had a very different career if he made his choice in the 1950s, vs doing the same in 2005.
From an ROI perspective, college in the US is not worth it for all but a few degree programs. The university I graduated from in the early 90's (on scholarship) was at the time the most expensive college in the US but now most public schools cost more than that.
Something not accounted for in these studies is financial aid in the form of grants, scholarships, and loans. That will radically change the ROI for individual students.
The paper shows that the ROI for college in the US is positive for many, but not all, majors and schools. It’s literally the entire point of the paper, complete with data, graphs and the rest.
Not as positive as some might think, and there are a significant number of losers, but only “a few degree programs” being positive is not supported by the data.
Yes it's just a coincidence that we can hear them talk. Almost nobody outside of China is going to read articles written in Chinese because we don't speak that language.
If your goal is to land a spouse with secure income, and/or a spouse from a family with secure income, I would say it is a very high ROI since your university friend network can be a valuable place to draw potential partners from for many years to come.
For men in the US at least, there is a book called "The Book of Numbers: Analyzing the ROI on the Pursuit of Women". It should make men at least consider how much time and money they put into dating.
Result aligns with my expecations today, but not my expectations in High School, which well...is why we have so many people in my age cohort (millennial) who think they got a raw deal.
The US government should require schools to divulge this information and make sure that students/parents applying for government-backed student loans are keenly aware of and agree to the financial risks implied by the statistics.
I've always thought you should have to get career and financial counseling before taking out student loans. How many people get Psychology degrees and then can't find employment? Would fewer people take on 6-digit student loan debt if they knew they'd still end up working at Starbucks for a hair over minimum wage afterwards?
If you want to go to college for the sole purpose of getting an education, then nobody should stop you. But you should at least be made aware of your future prospects vis-a-vis employment and debt.
I don’t see how this analysis identifies the causal factor. Do some college programs select students already on a trajectory to succeed? I would love to see an analysis comparing ACT/SAT scores and lifetime earnings for those that did and did not attend college. Still, I find the insights of this article important to the college debate
Indeed, even at the college level, the universities in my state give each incoming freshman a math exam, and the results of that exam are for all intents and purposes a "sorting hat" for whether you can even get into particular majors. This is even before the first day of classes.
I think that's basically every university. That being said, its just a way to test out of math reqs to hit minimums for starting certain major tracks. No reason someone couldn't take the math courses at university in a general ed. major and then transfer over.
I don't have a large personal sample size, but 1.) I'm pretty sure giving a math test to incoming students isn't standard in the US. In any case, they generally already have SAT/ACT scores. 2.) Furthermore, in many (though not all) cases, once you're enrolled you can major in whatever you want.
I'm only familiar with the University of Wisconsin system. They use the math test to slot you into levels ranging from calculus to a remedial math course. Don't know why they don't just use SAT/ACT.
As for majors, there are limited admissions into some programs such as engineering and business, where you are not formally admitted until after your first year, and have to make a certain GPA. Not all majors had such requirements.
Then there were some unique situations. Majoring in music performance required an audition, and the incoming students tended to be playing at a very high level.
You can’t establish causation in an observational study like this one. You’d have to conduct an experiment to do that, and people don’t usually want to leave their careers up to double-blind. There’s still value in measuring the correlation.
However, it accounts for things like dropout status, so I don’t think your hypothesis fits the data.
Sometimes it is possible to establish causation from only observational data, but in general, you are correct. Without the ability to conduct an experiment, the best we can do is use college acceptance criteria for screening candidates to compare populations that attend and do not attend. The best we can do is better than nothing
I can't seem to find it, but there was a report from a few years back that compared an income prediction based solely on incoming student demographics (using a regression model on things like parental income and education levels) with graduates' actual income a few years out. It still doesn't prove causality, but if there's a big difference between the two in the positive direction, it at least suggests the university is providing some kind of actual value-add, vs just passing through students who were already from a high socioeconomic background.
I use this framing quite a bit ("The best we can do is better than nothing"), but I don't really like it. A better framing is that it's not how much we can figure out, it's what we can we figure out.
Observational data is great for explaining things after the fact. It must be handled very carefully when used for predicting things before they happen. But if you can identify the most likely confounds and eliminate them, you may still be able to answer a lot of useful questions to a fair degree of certainty.
This is fair. I was familiar with methods of evaluating causality, but didn't think it applied here since it hadn't occurred to me to design the study that way. Yet another lesson in "just because I can't think of it doesn't mean it can't be done."
You could design an experiment that looks at people who were accepted into a program correlated to higher wages but went to a different program instead. (E.g., accepted to an engineering school but went to a psychology program).
Or, what about factoring in long-term and steady stability as being "worth it"?
There's definitely a bit of insurance and fallback with having higher education that isn't measurable simply by some ROI analysis.
There are a lot of jobs you will never be able to apply to if things go south simply by not meeting the minimum requirements. I was considering a dirt-cheap online MBA once simply for this reason if my biz stuff died (did not pursue).
Do some college programs select students already on a trajectory to succeed?
This is interesting and I know there was some studies performed, not on the program, but on the school. IIRC, the results were that it wasn't the school that contributed to success, but the person. Meaning, if you were accepted to a top-tier school but attended a lower-tier one, you had as much success as the people who attended the top-tier school. So, as you say, the schools were already selecting for those who were on a trajectory to succeed. There was a caveat that the school did provide more help if the person was from a low-socioeconomic background, and I've wondered if that is due to network effects.
I think it goes deeper than that, although you're making an incisive point.
The value is sort of in how the degrees are used as well. Increasingly, they're being seen as licenses of sort, even though that might not be the intent of the program or even reflect the actual experiences of the person in college. That is, the ROI is due as much to the marketplace as it is the degree itself. If HR departments decide that understanding of DL/AI requires a degree in comp sci, even if someone did an honors thesis on that as a psychology major, demonstrating a new proof-of-concept DL model, it doesn't matter what sort of talent is being recruited. Is it the degree holder, the degree, the program, or the employer?
I feel like college degrees have become this kind of signalling label, like much of the modern world, like clothing or something. That's not to discount the skills one obtains as part of a major, but it hurts the person who is going outside the box (in a good way). There's also something disingenuous then, about treating degrees as a resource to be obtained, when the value of that resource is entirely dependent on the way it is treated by others. That is, a hammer is more useful than a rotting stick, but if for whatever reasons there's rotting stick mania, the ROI will be greater for the latter. That doesn't mean the ROI analysis is wrong, but it might give a misleading impression about why.
I admit I didn't read this in enough detail, but I had other questions as well. For instance, in other similar analyses I've read in other outlets, they've explicitly ignored people who have graduate degrees, as it muddies interpretation. But isn't that important? What about the person who gets an undergrad degree in psychology, but then pursues symbolic logic programming and DL models in their master's program in comp sci? Or who goes on to medical school? Some of these degrees, like philosophy, are notorious for being pre-professional degrees, and comparing a BA-only philosophy grad to a BA-philosophy + JD is a little odd, both because it's unfair, but also because the person who gets a BA in philosophy and then stops is maybe different from the person who gets that degree as part of a longer-term plan that includes law school.
Does the study compare people with specific degrees, with the same demographic of people not getting degrees? For instance, a person who is capable of finishing an engineering degree and is inclined to do so, is already a "selected" person while still in high school, putting the term in quotes to avoid trying to define it precisely.
“ ROI must also consider counterfactual earnings, or what each student would have earned in a parallel universe where he or she did not attend college. Assessments of ROI often compare the earnings of college graduates to the earnings of the median high school graduate. However, this simple analysis is insufficient for an accurate estimate of ROI. People who choose to attend college are different from those who do not. The two groups have different earnings potential. The counterfactual earnings for a college graduate are likely to exceed the earnings of the median high school graduate.
The same principle applies to different majors. Does an engineering graduate have high earnings because of his degree, or because engineering tends to attract people with scientific minds who would earn high wages no matter what? If so, an engineering major might have different counterfactual earnings than an English major. What about students who attend public colleges versus private colleges? Private college students often come from wealthier families. Are high earnings for private-college graduates due to the school, or due to family background?”
I like how it shows 100% of drop outs have a negative ROI.
I guess dropping out before getting my computer science degree means I didn't get any benefit, or make any money writing software.
(Guessing the assumption here is maybe that I'd still have gotten the same career with no college education at all, but I don't think that's accurate in my case.)
Heaven forbid someone should study something for any reason other than money. I'm pretty sure humanities majors realize they're not maximizing their expected salary.
The article expressly says that there are other benefits besides financial, for going to college and choosing a major, and that those reasons make sense and are valuable. But that students should make that choice with their eyes wide open.
It does seem possible to audit many college courses without paying. Perhaps that would be a cheaper avenue for someone pursuing the knowledge rather than the degree.
After graduating I chose to audit 30 credits per semester for a year (for free, and while no longer being a student).
We're stuck on the market value of a major with no regard for the less tangible benefits to society a discipline may bring. Teaching someone X makes them better at producing business widget Y. But we can't put a monetary value on teaching someone Z to make them a better neighbor, a better voter, healthier, less polluting, etc.
The people who teach those things in schools, or run programs to encourage them, or inspire them in art, etc tend to be those who pursue those majors with lower ROI. Study of history, philosophy, psychology, civics, and the like helps us pass on qualities that aren't needed to make business widgets.
The links you posted have absolutely nothing to do with the assertion that “Study of history, philosophy, psychology, civics, and the like helps us pass on qualities that aren't needed to make business widgets.”
We need a term for the practice responding to requests for evidence by posting academic papers which do not contain the evidence.
I thought the question was, "Where is the evidence that people who study these things acquire [qualities that aren't needed to make business widgets] they didn’t already have?"
Your rewrite of the question misses out the “Do they?”, which links my question to the claim made by the poster I was replying to. That is the context of the question.
The links you posted don’t answer that question. They have nothing to do with the study of those subjects, only the generic act of getting a degree.
Indeed those papers show the converse of the OP’s claim - they show that you do not need to study those subjects to get those benefits - any degree will do.
Unfortunately in the U.S, it's not really an option if you want to have a high quality of life unless you have rich parents.
I've noticed that the majority of maintainers of a couple of high profile Linux distros are all European; the opportunity cost of doing so in the U.S. is just too high.
I'm fine with that so long as you can afford your education. If your salary won't pay of the loans, then it is a bad investment and you shouldn't get a loan. That doesn't means you shouldn't study humanities, only that you shouldn't study until you have enough saving to afford it. Or you can take a couple courses in humanities (which you are required to anyway as generals) while majoring in something that will give you a good income.
When you get a loan then financial concerns of is this a good investment should apply. If you don't have a loan - many people spend their money on all kinds off weird hobbies.
The issue I have with this, is there isn't a good solution currently. If you can afford it means that it's only for the wealthy, closing doors for people based on their parents income. That's not right.
> Students are increasingly placing a premium on the job-related benefits of going to college. The portion of incoming freshmen that cited "to be able to get a better job" as a very important reason for attending college reached an all-time high of 87.9 percent in 2012, an increase from 85.9 percent in 2011 and considerably higher than the low of 67.8 percent in 1976.
I feel like that's a chicken and egg issue, though. People who work in the humanities know they aren't going to make much, but they 100% will make more than if they try to get a job in the humanities without college. Most require a bachelor degree, at a minimum, regardless of salary.
> they 100% will make more than if they try to get a job in the humanities without college.
This is true, but is only part of the equation. You also need to factor in:
* The probability of them getting a humanities job.
* The cost of college.
If college is expensive and most humanities majors don't end up with humanities jobs, then your statement can be 100% but still a net loss for humanities majors in aggregate.
That is a fair assessment, and I would really, really like to see accurate data around that question.
Edit:
As a side note - the first person to make a billion dollars from educational data will figure out how to gather accurate, unbiased data from all schools/colleges for accurate comparison data. Not even interpret the data, just gather it.
Because right now, working in the belly of the higher ed beast for decades and decades, I can tell you that any data you see has been scrubbed and scrubbed and interpreted as to make it functionally useless to compare programs within institutions, let alone separate institutions.
> Almost all students cite getting a better job as a primary reason for attending college.
You're asking a bunch of teenagers about their life plans, or a bunch of 20-somethings to talk about something they put more energy into than they've ever put into anything in their entire short lives. Every adult in the room should realize that it's 80% bullshit rationalization.
What I've learned through many hobbies and non-academic classes across many disciplines is that there's a kernel of truth to the Kung Fu movie story arc. The instructor tells you what you need to hear right now, not the objective truth. Sometimes it's carrot, other times it's just keeping you from injury. You 'level up' every time the story changes, and you graduate when you see the training wheels and take them off. This 'rule' is just a guideline and you can break it in these situations.
What kids need to hear is that a few more years of hard work now will get them an easier life later on. They hear 'career' but college gets most of us out of whatever little bubble our parents and neighborhoods put us in. You are not in a little pond anymore and it doesn't matter how big of a fish you thought you were. It softens the blow when you graduate and discover the ocean.
If we didn't learn to build bridges in high school, we learned to build them in college. All of these things do help you in life, including your career, but typically it's indirectly. But you try telling a 16 year old who has just started looking at college pamphlets this and many just think it's more parental lecturing radio gaga.
What they believe is the bait. And hopefully by the time they see it for what it is, it's no big deal because they've got other motivations instead.
That's kinda the point of the article: people are choosing majors and universities based on false advertising that it will improve their career prospects, while in reality for some it worsens it.
The vast vast majority of Americans cannot afford their college educations and take out loans that they cannot discharge even in bankruptcy.
It's a very very very risky situation for most 18 year olds precisely due to the cost. If the cost wasn't so high, we wouldn't care about ROI of college degrees.
Colleges often market themselves/degrees as salary levers. Even if you aren’t trying to maximize your expected salary it is unexpected for programs to have negative ROIs. I also think the analysis is deliberately narrow in only discussing the financial aspects and not the many other benefits which are harder to measure. The headline is awful because it ignores these other things. I majored in humanities and consider my experience to have been remarkably valuable, but the fact that there were benefits along other dimensions doesn’t invalidate analysis of one dimension (one that is commonly held up in marketing materials).
This kind of ROI analysis -- along with rankings, management theory, and other woes that have befuddled the aims of a college education -- has really had an interesting effect. Fewer graduates of 4 year colleges are proficiently literate. Our entire education system is sacrificing its baseline purpose (to preserve and inculcate literacy) for really poor concepts like "job prospects."
The only definition I've ever seen of literacy is the ability to read/write, with no requirement that the writing be particularly eloquent. I don't know of any college that would accept illiterate students (with the possible exception of the truly blind, who might have accommodations to use audio for all tests). It would therefore be impossible for a graduate of a 4 year college to be illiterate.
I can't believe you find the concept of this even offensive, kids are taking out crippling loans to go to college in order to better their social standing and be self-sufficient adults by and large. Ignoring the ROI on college is a luxury that the vast majority of college students can't ignore.
Given the financial burden it now poses, you'd have to be insane to attend college without picking a major which will help you to pay off your student loans. I don't know whether you know anyone with $80,000 in student loans and a $25,000/year income... It's not pretty.
The studying is not the problem anyone is talking about. People should study anything and everything they desire. The problem being addressed is spending a lot of money and taking out massive loans in order to study.
If you want to study Art, by all means definitely study Art. Just do not borrow $100,000 to do it.
If only humanities majors didn't later request that their loans be cancelled and constantly rant on Facebook/Discord/... about how the society is "unfair" because they are poor. It all ends up being about dollar ROI in the end...
The ROI on college has been steadily going down since the 1970s. Colleges are in a position to extract the economic value they provide, so they increase price to keep a low ROI
The point of college isn't to learn. It's to get a white collar job. To get a white collar job you need a network and a diploma, private tutor gives you neither.
The problem with this oft trotted out theory is that:
• Extraverts don't need college to network - the skill is to innate they never need an expensive excuse
• Introverts won't learn to network even if put into an ideal environment for doing it - most people who claim university didn't enable networking are usually introverts
• This leaves people are in the middle of being extroverted or introverts who need just a nudge. That's less than 5% of the population - so the claim of "networking" is mostly only helping a tiny minority and doesn't benefit the majority.
I'm one of those middle people in the last group and quite honestly I didn't even benefit - I wasn't "ready" for the opportunity. Once I had a job in my industry, that's when it "all made sense" and tapped into my extrovert side to enormous advantage.
My current job primarily involves tapping into that post-university network for sales leads, collaboration partners, vendor opportunities, etc. I only recently got in touch with my university friends and most "weren't useful" to what I do today. One switched from EE to Gerontology. Another is still mentally in university (don't ask). Most aren't in fields I interact much with despite nominally being EE grads.
It is much easier to network in college, no matter how extraverted you are. Career fairs commonly require you to be a student to attend, so I'm not sure how being an extravert accomplishes anything for the most common way for students to network.
Anyway, the diploma is what's actually important. Most white collar jobs won't even look at you if you don't have one.
As you note, "networking" is often just having access to college career fairs, where companies go to hire for the internships which are required for later employment.
I had a stable, white collar job approximately midway through college. Some of the best engineers I've worked with in my career don't have a degree. This wasn't that long ago either.
The network reasoning for college is vastly overstated.
What... did that run per kid, roughly, if you don't mind my asking? Was this remote? Where did you find tutors? How much parental oversight is needed? How much time in management of tutors is required—are they consistently reliable, how much time looking for replacements when they change jobs or whatever, that kind of thing?
We've gone with a private school because we've got a couple elementary-aged kids who are far enough ahead that public schools were plainly holding them back and we were already starting to get early signs of "gifted kid who isn't challenged then crashes and burns later" syndrome, but if tutors are at least as effective, and cheaper, that'd be awesome.
Can you expand? If the collection of people known as society doesn’t value something, it makes sense that someone studying how do that thing does not end up being valued.
I agree it reflects society’s apparently expressed values. On that list, per the article, are “art, music, philosophy, religion, and psychology.” I’d argue a society that doesn’t value those things is a poorer society than one that does.
Our particular market we've created not valuing something very highly, and society not valuing something very highly, may have a lot of overlap, but it's not perfect.
Note that this is a narrow look based on salaries. Education levels correlate with a wide range of other things.
For example, from the CDC:
> Adults without a high school degree or equivalent had the highest self-reported obesity (38.8%), followed by adults with some college (34.1%) or high school graduates (34.0%), and then by college graduates (25.0%).
9 percentage points is a considerable difference. One in eleven people.
Obesity is linked with a host of health conditions, both chronic and acute. These incur higher medical costs.
Lower education levels also highly correlate with susceptibility to misinformation, watching more television, and lower self-reported life satisfaction.
Comparing salaries isn’t all that useful in measuring the impact of education.
Yea I really wish articles like this would include other factors too. Having a college degree lowers your chances of getting a significant amount of health problems
On the other hand, maybe people who can successfully graduate college are more conscientious, and are better able to maintain a healthy diet. Proper diet and exercise isn't rocket science, it's just hard to find the motivation to do it.
If people rely on motivation to have a proper diet and exercise, that sounds very painful. Motivation is a very fleeting feeling, something more sustained has to be in place. Instead I think it comes down to the habits that people have developed. Motivation does help in starting that ball rolling, but once you have developed a habit of doing something, it becomes a lot easier.
Motivation gets you started, discipline gets it done. Much the same with college. I was not good with math, but I busted my ass studying at the 'math lab' in college, so much so that the TAs said they were going to start charging me rent :^). The sort of person who's motivated and disciplined enough to get a college education is probably the sort that can stick with a diet and not buy that delicious looking strawberry cheesecake at the bakery (ummph).
The effectiveness of a college experience really depends on the type of person that is attending it.
College is indeed becoming overpriced.
If the person is seeking a party experience, it's a bad idea if they don't have rich parents that will support them and pay off loans later on.
If the person is a mature, informed, and energetic business go-getter, and they actually manage to start new ideas while they attend school, and then establish vital bonds with other go-getters they meet, they can potentially gain a lot from a college experience.
Once you join the working world, the diversity of ideas and ability to meet ambitious people regularly wanes a bit. Also as one ages, the energy and enthusiasm for change also decreases to an extent. Carpe Diem.
I also believe though, that some people can and have create(d) amazing and ambitious careers without a college education, or by dropping out early from the process. There are no rules...
I partially disagree. Assuming you are majoring in something that has some positive ROI and do enough to actually graduate, which isn’t hard at most colleges, the party experience can be very supportive of most people’s future careers.
The social skills, networks, and alumni connections you build at college are a large fraction of the benefit that college gives the average person to further their career.
Otherwise, I agree. College is a great time to take advantage of the time you have to change your network, generate new ideas and take risks. And I also agree that most there can be benefit (though highly unlikely) for some people to not attend college or to drop out.
I find it really funny how we talking about socialization like it's just for really young kids when we all have experience dealing with adults that never learned the skills.
College is expensive socialization to be sure, so make sure to go for other reasons as well -- but if you aren't going to parties, making friends, and doing stupid shit then you're missing out on part of the real tangible value provided by colleges which is community. (And to be clear this is something totally separate from professional networking.)
I have been in IT for 25 years. If the gang at work was going to a bar after work, I would go - just to enjoy myself, giving no thought to it furthering my career and so forth.
Despite going for purely to enjoy myself and giving no thought to work or my career, I would say an hour I've spent in a bar with my co-workers almost always does more for my career than spending twenty hours over a weekend getting some pull request finished so my product manager can check it off their list. I've found out information about my workplace that I really needed to know. Once it probably saved me from getting axed during a layoff once since I didn't interact much with outside the bar with the manager who put in a good word for me when they were cutting people.
> If the person is a mature, informed, and energetic business go-getter, and they actually manage to start new ideas while they attend school, and then establish vital bonds with other go-getters they meet, they can potentially gain a lot from a college experience.
A lot of that depends on the college you go to. Doesn't matter how much a "go getter" you are if you don't make connections with someone that can ultimately fund/execute your ideas. Even if they themselves are "go getters".
Further, hard to really judge if you are a "go getter" or a "So, it's like facebook, but for cats!" person.
And here's the real rub, likely the person seeking the party experience with rich parents IS the person that can fund/execute ideas. They don't need to be go getters, they just have to have deep pockets.
Of course, this is all talking about someone going to college primarily for entrepreneurial ideas.
This is the real and true value of ivy league/prestigious schools. It isn't the quality of the knowledge, it's the old deep pockets that also go there.
I was pretty lucky that the Internet came about right when I was attending college. Prior to that, mostly Lawyers and Doctors were the only college grads regularly breaking past 6 figures in jobs. I was also lucky to get through without 6 figure debt, and at low interest rates on Federal loans.
Private loans preyed on so many of my peers and other family members. Also schools quickly raised charges, while underpaying staff. It's really the influence of comerical industry that screws a lot of the benefeits of a college education up nowadays.
The student needs to be a special type of person to get through it, solve all the problems that arise, work out how to maximize their potential, and then quickly get to work on their future.
College is not only a learning process, it's also a huge personal test of character, dedication, and analytical skill. The GPA though really does not determine a person's full capacity though, and the classes are often not what teaches you the most important things.
Many people from non-ivy-league schools also go far beyond many other ivy league students in terms of lifetime accomplishment -- usually because of the type of character they have and people they are (and sometimes because they cheat), but for certain jobs in this world, Ivy League is often an unwritten "pre-requisite".
>If the person is a mature, informed, and energetic business go-getter, and they actually manage to start new ideas while they attend school, and then establish vital bonds with other go-getters they meet, they can potentially gain a lot from a college experience.
I could not disagree more. What this person gets out of college is nothing more than checking the "has 4yr degree" checkbox you need these days. College will do nothing for them other than check that box. Their own accomplishments will be what carries them through life.
"I also believe though, that some people can and have create(d) amazing and ambitious careers without a college education, or by dropping out early from the process. There are no rules..."
Absolutely true. Do you have any statistics on their rate of doing that?
Survivor bias: If the only thing you look at is success, success looks pretty easy.
Something the article doesn't take into is how the ROI would be exponentially increased by interest and investments. Not everyone invests, but for those who do, raw dollar values will translate to even greater earnings on interest, and typically jobs with high ROIs will provide benefits like 401k matching and better health insurance so the actual ROI is even higher.
Why are we still doing education the same way it was done in the 1880s? The best technology in the 1880s was books and classrooms led by a professor. Our universities today look identical to that.
Now we can build a university online where every lesson is taught by the absolute best teacher in that one narrow area. Every new lesson you do, maybe 5 to 10 per day, would be taught by the very best teacher for that one particular topic. A different teacher from who taught the lesson could even prepare the quizzes for that topic.
Alternatively, I have been working for the last 8 months on YouTube to give myself a university level education in the construction trades. I have watched hundreds of hours of educational content on dirt work, concrete pours, framing, drywall, roofing, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, tile work, and finish features. I have built a shed using basically residential framing, and I am working on a second one now. Following this I'm going to build a small residence with a large garage, then I'm going to build a large residence. I am just doing this for my own hobby basically, but anybody who wanted to become a home builder can now do so just with the content online.
> Individual financial returns to college are the paramount consideration for most students. Almost all students say access to a well-paying job is a primary reason for attending college.
First, I don't think financial return is the near-universal case asserted here. People go to college for many reasons and some programs (as noted) have a terrible ROI. Why then would these programs continue to survive?
Second, people have bought into this "follow your dream" meme and human ego is predisposed to thinking we're special and we'll be the exception so even with a terrible ROI, people don't think that'll be their fate. It's why people end up working as a barista after going $150,000 into debt to study theater arts at NYU.
Third, 18 year olds who are making these decisions, like many people much older, simply don't understand financial consequences.
I'm personally more interested in how much college ranking and/or debt affects ROI but I guess that's a separate question.
> Why then would these programs continue to survive?
Because the government provides no questions asked loans to anyone willing to attend these programs, and many people don't do their research or simply don't even consider the implications.
>Almost all students cite getting a better job as a primary reason for attending college.
I think it's interesting how the intent of college has changed from one of creating a philosophy of life to that of essentially a vocational school that may or may not teach the actual skills necessary for a job. From what I can tell this shift goes back as far as the Morrill Land Grant of 1890 in the U.S.
It's also interesting to me how much inertia the system has. When I talk to young students, many seem to go to college because "that's just what you do after high school" or pick a particular school simply because "everyone" has agreed that's a great school without being able to articulate why. Marry that to human resources who require degrees to filter applicants because that's the method "everyone uses" while not being able to articulate what relevant skills that particular degree confers to the job and you get a self-licking ice cream cone.
Well then it was more of a luxury for the gentry who didn't truly have to worry about money from the career itself in the same way. The classical university system wound up falling into aristocratic "disdain of the practical and worldly as base"
flaw. Part of what drove the industrial revolution in the United Kingdom were the colleges of the heterodox, largely scottish which ended up providing the more practical but still sophisticated engineering schools. They lead to the "new money" captains of industry and middle class.
The two types of schools blended along the way of course and in other contexts. Trade-college blending is a very slow process but happening some. Farming is the furthest alarm but arguably that was an "agronomy and automation coup" as the model changed and made farm work a niche job instead of the majority.
The current system is related to more eglatarian mutation from hard class gatekeeping. Frankly that a lot of positions are flat out about justifying your actions to others as the practical skill component of the "philosophy of life". It is about getting what they measure for.
It has changed! But it's changed because class mix of the people going to college has changed. Wealthy people used to make up a significant proportion of people going to college. People who didn't need to work for money. Now it is more lower and middle class people, with different needs.
I think the real question is whether college fulfills those different needs and, if so, if it does it at a reasonable price.
At many orgs I’ve worked at, I felt like there were a lot of people who could have done the same work from a two year apprenticeship. Even though many had engineering degrees, I don’t think most brought an engineering mindset/education to the problems they faced on a daily basis, with the exception of some PIs
It's not so much high schooler choice or HR's inability to properly assess candidates (although that is also a factor). It's the emotional and material "stock" put into degrees by degree holders that guarantees that this system will remain in place. Most people do not have the strength of character to extricate their personal identity and value from their level of education.
Post-secondary credentialism is the new form of feudalism. This book is a little too woke for my tastes but there's a significant amount of scholarship on this concept of education's rise as the new "cool guy" power structure, replacing politics and the church.
>It's not so much high schooler choice or HR's inability to properly assess candidates (although that is also a factor). It's the emotional and material "stock" put into degrees by degree holders that guarantees that this system will remain in place
I think this might be saying the same thing but you did it more clearly. I’m saying people can’t objectively articulate why one choice is more valuable than the other largely because they are making emotional decisions and not rational, objective ones. Unless of course the rationale is “this is the way the game is played, regardless if it makes objective sense.” The irony, as you point out, is that just entrenches a silly system
I think the only fix for this is to make it illegal for companies to list educational requirements in job postings.
Search for any entry level job in an office environment, how many list a college degree as a requirement? Anywhere north of 80% sends a message (Get a college degree or work for minimum wage).
This is my (maybe unpopular) take. I’m not sure many HR people can adequately assess the skills for a position, particularly technical ones. So they use education credentials as a lazy proxy. I’m not sure outlawing education requirements fixes this and may just result in some other lazy proxy like nepotism.
If they will still treat it as a de facto requirement, would lying on the job posting help anyone? I mean, in many professions there are a large number of applicants, and HR has to throw out many of the applications without interviewing anyway based on various not-that-strong signals.
It’s at best $500-600K during lifetime. Even if we are saying it’s $1M, the cost of college at $200-400K would make it absolutely not worth it.
But the real reason is this: there’s nothing you can’t learn outside of these institutions for 99.999% of the population. General knowledge is effectively free. So why pay this exorbitant amount of money? Who really benefits?
College only has two economic benefits: human capital improvement and signaling of values. My personal experience is my rate of learning in college was much less than on the job experiences. College honestly made me learn how to learn because the lecture model that colleges use does not work well for me. My college benefit was 25% human capital improvement and 75% signaling of values. Also, it was a lot of fun.
For myself college was absolutely not worth it. What they taught me in comp sci classes was horribly outdated or not representative of the jobs available. I had fun in college and made some good friends but my professional life hasn't been impacted positively in any way by going to college. I looked up my college and my department in their table and I'm making above what they estimate for 45 years old (I'm 30) and I beat the estimates for 25 by a healthy margin.
I dropped out my junior year after working for a full 40-hour week over spring break and realizing I was throwing away money to get a degree to.... get a job that I already had. Since then I've had absolutely no issues finding new jobs and moving up the pay scale. I'm not even sure if shorter (2 year) tech colleges are worth it if you want to go into software engineering, maybe some of the bootcamps are worth it but I'm not sure. I've learned more on the job that I ever learned in the classroom (as it relates to computer science) and if I had it to do again I think I would have paid a company to intern for a few months until my output exceeded any "drain" my lack of knowledge incurred. It would have been far cheaper, I wouldn't still be paying off college loans, and I'd have an extra 3 years of full time earnings/raises/bonuses/etc.
I don't think so. My first job hired me because I had done some java programing in high school and they needed updates to an existing java tool. I did that work and they offered me PHP work (which I had taught myself in high school, I even wrote a few programs for the school) and I've been doing a mix of web dev (front and back) and mobile work ever since. In college they only taught C and Perl and I've never used either since then. I asked the owner of the second company I worked for (the place I was working when I dropped out) if getting a degree would change anything and he told me he paid me based on what I could do, not some piece of paper. That discussion, plus a full-time week of work that I enjoyed, and my dislike of my college classes pushed me to drop out.
> What they taught me in comp sci classes was horribly outdated or not representative of the jobs available.
Lessons about automata and computability aren't exactly 'outdated' but their application to typical software work seems very indirect/abstract. In any case, that was my experience from a CS degree ~20 years ago, probably similar now if the curriculum is similar.
Dijkstra: "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
> Lessons about automata and computability aren't exactly 'outdated' but their application to typical software work seems very indirect/abstract
I hear this or similar things often but I don't really buy it. Sure, if you are doing super high stakes things and you need to optimize the hell out of something then you might be able to pull from concepts learned in college but I've seen new grads waste so much time on pre-optimization and honestly it's just not needed for so many things. Also I've had no issues learning concepts/algorithm/etc on the fly as-needed when performance was crucial. My college experience might be different than yours but having an EE teacher rail against and regularly make fun of web development as "not real development", losing 1 point on each answer of my database exam because I didn't put a semicolon at the end, and having to write a C program from scratch (headers and all) on paper for an exam are only a few examples of what turned me off the way my college taught computer science.
I feel the same way as you. In high-school I had a chance to do a "co-op" program (like being an intern for the American's) for a company. I did web development work there. I got offered a job there over the summer and continued to work there for 6 more summers while I went through University for software engineering.
The thing that is funny is that University didn't help me in that job at all. The vast majority of skills I used at the job were self-taught. A good chunk of those were self-taught before I even went to University.
University teaches a lot of theoretical and basically makes you teach yourself the practical. I started to realize that unless I planned to go the academia route and get more into the theoretical, then the degree was pretty useless to me. I ended up not completing the degree because it was just way too hard to stay motivated. It felt like I had to teach myself the important skills anyway, and then listen to stuff I could self-teach myself when I needed to know it.
When I had group projects a good chunk of classmates I worked with sucked at programming. Like they didn't know how to use git, sucked at object orientated program, etc... They would produce code that was just in one big massive single file. It was frustrating because the degree really just made a lot of people book smart, but they weren't actually that hirable.
I actually got to help with co-op hiring while I was in school for multiple years at the company I was with. When we would look at resumes the biggest thing I realized is that the degree wasn't really relevant. When almost every applicant has the identical degree it's not meaningful. What mattered was what kinds of things they did outside of school. What personal projects they had, what their github looked like, did they have their own website, were they involved in groups or starting their own sidegig websites, etc...
Our best candidates were the ones that did a lot of stuff outside of school. And the funny thing is that the majority of those candidates had bad grades. We got the transcripts with every co-op applicant.
Ignoring performance, if you're just doing business-specific behavior logic for whatever process needs to be assisted or automated by an IT system, so often you get complicated parts of that system logic that may get implemented as a tangled nest of if-statements but where the proper mental model actually is a finite state machine/automata - and if you see it that way, you can cover all the possible transitions and improve correctness.
Not knowing what post-secondary school you went to it's worth saying that not all universities and colleges are equal. Don't go to a bad school. Don't go to a mediocre school even.
If all you need is an overpriced piece of paper to get your resume past the HR drones then there is little difference in outcome between a good school and a bad school.
55% of degrees from for-profit schools have a negative ROI, compared to 24% from public schools.
Further,
"Attending a very elite school and choosing the right field often has a significant payoff. The best program anywhere in the United States is the computer science major at the California Institute of Technology. Graduates of this well-regarded program can expect an ROI of $4.41 million over the course of their careers. Not far behind is the finance major at the University of Pennsylvania’s famous Wharton School, where lifetime ROI is $4.35 million."
Certain schools will get your resume past the "HR drones" when other schools will not, even within the same field of study.
We can debate whether top schools actually teach any better or whether they're just skimming off top students out of high school, but there's a significant difference in groups outcomes between schools.
I had issues with my college curriculum as well, but the biggest thing college did for me was end discrimination.
Without a degree, employers had to make a snapshot judgement call on whether or not I was good enough. They didn't see me. They saw my disability. After I got a degree, it was like some sort of checkbox had magically been checked, and the man who had fixed modem drivers in his teens was suddenly good enough to hire. I will also say that there are companies to this day that will not hire someone without a college degree, and I think it's stupid.
> I had issues with my college curriculum as well, but the biggest thing college did for me was end discrimination.
This isn't what you are talking about but one thing college did that I haven't mentioned is expose me to different people, cultures, etc that I was not exposed to in the bubble I grew up in. That is something I do value and I think there are social aspects of college that are useful. I'll also say that as a white male in the US there are doors that were opened to me that were not open to everyone so I can absolutely believe that college might be necessary (if only for a stupid piece of paper) for some people because of a number of factors outside of their control. I hate that our system works that way.
> I will also say that there are companies to this day that will not hire someone without a college degree, and I think it's stupid.
100% agree it's stupid but I just use it as another flag to not work at a company that is that short-sighted or stuck in the past (same way anti-remote-work companies are immediately written off for me).
Hehe, are you me? Dropped out in my 2nd year too. I went to university in Europe though, and have no loans to pay back.
Being a student definitely helped me get my break though, mainly due to the tax status. I had been programming for a decade when I got my first job, but everyone's shit and a drain on resources for a couple months regardless. Accepting peanut pay (relatively) + tax benefits made getting that first job easy.
The amount I learned in my first couple of months does not compare in any way to university. You cannot just go and get personal tutoring with a professor when you are having problems designing something. Meanwhile, it's the job of the senior engineers to be your babysitter at the start (bless the patience of the ones who taught me). And the few times you do get an audience, it's very short (as they have to see 50 other students), and much too vague. There's too little "you idiot, you do that and in 6 months you'll be sorry the DB is deadlocking". More "hm, do you not think you could turn this O(n*log(n) into O(log(n))", which, at the end of the day, I could probably care less for but not by much.
> You cannot just go and get personal tutoring with a professor when you are having problems designing something.
My experience in the US was that you could do exactly that. Except for the week before midterms and the week before finals, the professor's office hours were often empty. I could show up and have at least a 1/4, if not better, chance of getting one-on-one talks with someone skilled in their field about what they are working on. That was worth more than anything else I got out of college (except maybe the magic piece of paper that means more companies will interview me).
> if I had it to do again I think I would have paid a company to intern for a few months until my output exceeded any "drain" my lack of knowledge incurred.
As a biology major who later had to turn to tech (sadly quite common as it turns out), I can sincerely empathize with this. Unfortunately, in the health sciences you cannot do this, even taking a low level lab position requires some level of college/university credit because of the samples you are dealing with (blood, tissue) and the requirements imposed by Law to ensure they gate-keep even though errors occur regardless of degree level in labs, which is why you take such large samples to begin with.
In my foray with tech I've made a career in fintech (co-founder then went to a Megacorp), after spending time in Supply Chain roles the auto Industry. In both of those fields you are encouraged to not follow the predecessor if you want to be successful and move up; it rewards you if can pull it off and bring something novel and add value to the Team/Operation. And that, more than anything I learned in University, stuck with me for reasons that I think you could understand.
After COVID derailed my Life, as it did others, I asked myself what I wanted to do and I decided to enroll into a BSc program in AI and Machine Learning, with the aspiration of doing what you just mentioned--getting a role before graduating by leveraging my existing skills and the new skills I'd learn with the brand of a University to back it up.
My entrepreneurial habits kicked in during the on-boarding process and I saw a need to create a payment processing system to pay for tuition as so many students (mainly international) at the University in question were forced to pay via a system which resulted in delays, missing deadlines and large fees to process if it were possible. Some students even had to resort to using Western Union to make the deadline!
This was at the time that Twitter had launched its Bitcoin tipping feature via iOS on it's platform, so a proof of concept/MVP could have been spun in short order.
Eventually the faculty sent out a memo condemning using any alternatives (they became aware of the conversations happeing in Slack chat) saying it would result in further delays (or inability to register at all) if they did, thus making it entirely moot to try and flesh anything out. It wouldn't be anything but a MVP, as being a middleman/clearing house doesn't serve any of my long term goals.
But what it could have done is disrupt the model and force progress to be made where it would otherwise remain stagnant.
With all that said, now that you're established in the Industry and you likely have Senior Dev status, how would you go about this: how could one pitch this in order to take you on for X sum of money and not have it fall on deaf ears?
I mean, I'm guessing YOU would be open to this given what you've said but how would your project managers react to this? I've held developer and consultant status at the aforementioned Megacorp and I had way more friction for more insipid things.
> With all that said, now that you're established in the Industry and you likely have Senior Dev status, how would you go about this: how could one pitch this in order to take you on for X sum of money and not have it fall on deaf ears?
This is something that I think about very often but I don't have a good answer to it. I started at $10/hr doing web dev work and in a short amount of time moved up to $15, $20, $25+ before moving to a salaried position. My best advice to other people is to teach yourself "enough to be dangerous" (online tutorials, code camps, etc) using a tech stack/framework that a local company uses and then apply at an intern-level. Then try to either work your way up at that company and/or pivot to another company after a year or so. For me it was Wordpress and Drupal, I found a local web dev/marketing shop and did that kind of work for them for about 3 years, during which I learned Laravel and Angular for personal and professional projects, before moving on to a product-based company and getting into more complex problems to solve. Personally I learn best by being forced to do something, as in "Build a site that does X, Y, Z" where I don't know how to accomplish X, Y, Z. I enjoy learning on the fly (Maybe I should call it JIT learning?) and having a goal I'm aiming for. Most of my comp sci education felt like "let's pour all these concepts into your head and hopefully you will remember them and they will be useful in the future", that kind of learning doesn't work well for me, I need to see it applied.
It's my goal to own my own company at some point and aside from figuring out a salary/pay structure that I'm comfortable with (something like ESOP) a big thing I'd want to do is offer an on-ramp for people who want to get into the industry. I've helped a friend go from an aborted CS education to working full time in the industry (I helped him learn enough Drupal to get hired at where I worked and then he took it from there) so I know it's possible and it's something I want to incorporate into a future company.
EDIT: As for project managers not buying in, I feel your pain, the sad thing is that it's such short-term thinking. Unfortunately they often don't have the political pull or desire to roll the dice on an unknown candidate and it only worked for me in past because I knew the candidate well, taught him myself, and vouched for him. That's not really sustainable IMHO and there needs to be a better way.
Around the time of the dot-com bust, I had been interning at a network equipment company. They went under; those without college degrees to much longer to get new jobs, even one person I know who had over a decade of experience in the workforce.
That piece of paper can be worth a significant chunk of change, particularly since the gap on the resume caused by fewer companies hiring non-college grads can cause companies to low-ball their offers to you.
Maybe the job market is different now, but, even if it is, maybe it will be that way again in 5-10 years. Predictions are hard and all.
Also, CS degrees are varied. Very little of what I learned was outdated given that most of what I learned was discrete math. The more practically focused classes were OS and networking and I've used both of those on the job.
> What they taught me in comp sci classes was horribly outdated or not representative of the jobs available.
That hints of an underdiscussed pitfall when choosing colleges in "practical" fields like engineering and apparently nursing - the theory:practice orientation of their curriculum.
A theory oriented one tends to give you a backing which not eternal or life long, shift far slower. We may not use linked lists as much as hash maps but the same complexity analysis applies. If you are savvy enough you can pick up the specifics as needed backed by theory.
The disadvantage of a too heavily theory oriented one is bootstrapping to the workplace is more difficult and it may fail to establish proper habits like say how to properly write commits for version control.
A more practice oriented one which is proper for the current is more relevant and avoids the starting pitfalls but leaves the alumni less equiped with theory to deal with shifts. An outdated practical oriented curriculum is the worst of both worlds really.
You shouldn't have been looking for specific technology training is the short answer. I'm not aware of any company that would allow you to pay for employment while you were a drain... sounds like you should have gone to a vocational institution like Devry.
I still remember the letter that went around UT Austin's CS department when I was in grad school, from an undergraduate complaining that the department didn't teach i386 assembly.
The answer is in the subtitle, or summary, or whatever the first line is called: Some degrees are worth millions, while others have no net financial value. The biggest factor is your major.
I'm pretty sure everyone already knew that. I distinctly remember friends joking about how their major was worthless 20 years ago, and now see the same people complain about how they got suckered into taking a student loan they can never repay.
Or people select those degrees for non-monetary reasons. I highly doubt anyone is getting a degree in religion for the earning potential. Similarly, there might be other non-monetary benefits, like social capital, for going into fields like art.
You're giving naive 17/18 year olds way too much of the benefit of the doubt. Your average education system doesn't wait until they're in the college prep high school to start drilling into them that going to college is their best option and that they need to start thinking about what they want to do for the rest of their lives even though they're not even legal adults. This shit happens so fucking fast that most kids don't even question it. You have your monthly meeting with your guidance councilor that barrages you with "so what major do you want to study? What schools have you looked at? Do you have a list of reach schools? Do you have your list of safety schools? Have you started any of this? Huh, huh, huh??????" and so you just go through the motions of it all and ultimately this is how we end up with only 1 in 4 kids actually finishing college.
His other books are also insightful though go against the grain of many who want to believe in fantasies, fairy tales and unicorns (but will inevitably be disappointed and too late).
And it's a very simple thing to prove: can you easily pay off the cost of your degree within 10 years or less? And is this generally true for most people with your degree? The answer is easily shown by thousands of news reports of liberal arts degree holders being stuck in debt into their 50s and losing ground.
The exceptions (STEM degree primarily and people who come from enough money that ROI doesn't matter) prove the rule.
No it doesn't. Its "counterfactual" earnings are an attempt to estimate the earnings of the same cohort of people had they not gone to college. Which is impossible to do without random assignment, but they are making a good-faith estimate.
First, even if that were true, it would not be a fatal flaw. Second the report makes no causal inference and even points out that such an inference is very difficult to make. Instead the study controls for a variety of factors such as family background, geographic location, demographics, health and age.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] threadMy degrees were about 1/8th the price of many U.S. peers’, which made them more palatable given that my original career was looking at a lifetime ceiling of maybe $90k CAD.
Many people (but probably not everyone) would be better off not going to college at all, and start learning/working on their own, especially if they have specific interests instead of not knowing what they want to do.
The big difference between 'in' college and 'outside' or 'on your own' is context; the facilities, culture and exchange of ideas available to you in a college setting are very different from anything else. Especially when to take the sandbox element in to account.
The first iterations of school (in the first one or or two decades of life) are mostly "learning how to deal with people", "learning how to learn", "learning within a context" and after all that you get to "learn how to make use of what you have learned" in the real world. The earlier you stop, the fewer tools you'll have for the rest of your life.
There would be two avenues that are somewhat distinctive: academia which blends school-type context into work-type context at some point, and there is vocational training which reduces school-type context earlier and eliminates it before you're even "out of school". Neither are 'bad' or 'good', just different paths.
If had become say a plumber instead of going to university, had lived as cheap as a student with a plumber salary and invested the surplus 100 percent in the stock marked that would be a lot of money now many years later. I prefer not to calculate it.
It's sensible to require one or two years of in-person study but requiring the whole 4 years seems like a potential waste of time due to the differences in maturity, social development, and focus among college aged students.
Salaries can also be quite different across borders. Studying computer science in the US isn't cheap, but the jobs available right when you are done are not paying anywhere near the same as those of the Spanish developer. You see American companies opening software shops in the least developed parts of Europe, and a big part of it is that you might be getting up to 5 developers for the price of one. I emigrated because I knew that the Spanish college route was far more dubious than a pretty average US college, even paying for the whole thing.
So a no-brainer? Hardly. And the life path that makes sense in 2010 might not make all that much sense in 2030. Just like someone that became a mining engineer, specializing in coal, had a very different career if he made his choice in the 1950s, vs doing the same in 2005.
If cost isn't an issue, I wonder what prevents more from getting degrees?
Something not accounted for in these studies is financial aid in the form of grants, scholarships, and loans. That will radically change the ROI for individual students.
Not as positive as some might think, and there are a significant number of losers, but only “a few degree programs” being positive is not supported by the data.
Got me wondering what the ROI for dating was.
Unless there is a non-financial investment which can’t be converted to a financial one or one which people are not redeeming for some reason.
Unless you mean that there are non-financial benefits to life. Like if you know your doctor and he checks you for free.
That is not included. No.
I've always thought you should have to get career and financial counseling before taking out student loans. How many people get Psychology degrees and then can't find employment? Would fewer people take on 6-digit student loan debt if they knew they'd still end up working at Starbucks for a hair over minimum wage afterwards?
If you want to go to college for the sole purpose of getting an education, then nobody should stop you. But you should at least be made aware of your future prospects vis-a-vis employment and debt.
As for majors, there are limited admissions into some programs such as engineering and business, where you are not formally admitted until after your first year, and have to make a certain GPA. Not all majors had such requirements.
Then there were some unique situations. Majoring in music performance required an audition, and the incoming students tended to be playing at a very high level.
However, it accounts for things like dropout status, so I don’t think your hypothesis fits the data.
Observational data is great for explaining things after the fact. It must be handled very carefully when used for predicting things before they happen. But if you can identify the most likely confounds and eliminate them, you may still be able to answer a lot of useful questions to a fair degree of certainty.
There's definitely a bit of insurance and fallback with having higher education that isn't measurable simply by some ROI analysis.
There are a lot of jobs you will never be able to apply to if things go south simply by not meeting the minimum requirements. I was considering a dirt-cheap online MBA once simply for this reason if my biz stuff died (did not pursue).
This is interesting and I know there was some studies performed, not on the program, but on the school. IIRC, the results were that it wasn't the school that contributed to success, but the person. Meaning, if you were accepted to a top-tier school but attended a lower-tier one, you had as much success as the people who attended the top-tier school. So, as you say, the schools were already selecting for those who were on a trajectory to succeed. There was a caveat that the school did provide more help if the person was from a low-socioeconomic background, and I've wondered if that is due to network effects.
The value is sort of in how the degrees are used as well. Increasingly, they're being seen as licenses of sort, even though that might not be the intent of the program or even reflect the actual experiences of the person in college. That is, the ROI is due as much to the marketplace as it is the degree itself. If HR departments decide that understanding of DL/AI requires a degree in comp sci, even if someone did an honors thesis on that as a psychology major, demonstrating a new proof-of-concept DL model, it doesn't matter what sort of talent is being recruited. Is it the degree holder, the degree, the program, or the employer?
I feel like college degrees have become this kind of signalling label, like much of the modern world, like clothing or something. That's not to discount the skills one obtains as part of a major, but it hurts the person who is going outside the box (in a good way). There's also something disingenuous then, about treating degrees as a resource to be obtained, when the value of that resource is entirely dependent on the way it is treated by others. That is, a hammer is more useful than a rotting stick, but if for whatever reasons there's rotting stick mania, the ROI will be greater for the latter. That doesn't mean the ROI analysis is wrong, but it might give a misleading impression about why.
I admit I didn't read this in enough detail, but I had other questions as well. For instance, in other similar analyses I've read in other outlets, they've explicitly ignored people who have graduate degrees, as it muddies interpretation. But isn't that important? What about the person who gets an undergrad degree in psychology, but then pursues symbolic logic programming and DL models in their master's program in comp sci? Or who goes on to medical school? Some of these degrees, like philosophy, are notorious for being pre-professional degrees, and comparing a BA-only philosophy grad to a BA-philosophy + JD is a little odd, both because it's unfair, but also because the person who gets a BA in philosophy and then stops is maybe different from the person who gets that degree as part of a longer-term plan that includes law school.
“ ROI must also consider counterfactual earnings, or what each student would have earned in a parallel universe where he or she did not attend college. Assessments of ROI often compare the earnings of college graduates to the earnings of the median high school graduate. However, this simple analysis is insufficient for an accurate estimate of ROI. People who choose to attend college are different from those who do not. The two groups have different earnings potential. The counterfactual earnings for a college graduate are likely to exceed the earnings of the median high school graduate.
The same principle applies to different majors. Does an engineering graduate have high earnings because of his degree, or because engineering tends to attract people with scientific minds who would earn high wages no matter what? If so, an engineering major might have different counterfactual earnings than an English major. What about students who attend public colleges versus private colleges? Private college students often come from wealthier families. Are high earnings for private-college graduates due to the school, or due to family background?”
I guess dropping out before getting my computer science degree means I didn't get any benefit, or make any money writing software.
(Guessing the assumption here is maybe that I'd still have gotten the same career with no college education at all, but I don't think that's accurate in my case.)
Heck I dropped out after 3 years because I ran out of useful classes.
Later completed with the wife of a VP who had a masters at same university for a position. I got the job.
I would like a degree, but it’s just pointless for me at this point.
Yeah, I was grossed out when I read this. Glad I wasn't alone.
So this complaint is a bit of a straw man.
Yeah, one sentence or so in an entire article almost entirely about money.
That's nothing but an alibi or some sort of decorative item, meant as distraction from the rest of the perversion.
After graduating I chose to audit 30 credits per semester for a year (for free, and while no longer being a student).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259912440_On_the_no...
* Health and life expectancy.
* Family life and marriage.
* Fertility and infant mortality.
* Intergenerational effects.
* Time allocation patterns.
* Asset management.
* Consumption behavior.
* Social cohesion.
* Adoption of new technologies.
* Crime reduction.
We need a term for the practice responding to requests for evidence by posting academic papers which do not contain the evidence.
The links you posted don’t answer that question. They have nothing to do with the study of those subjects, only the generic act of getting a degree.
Indeed those papers show the converse of the OP’s claim - they show that you do not need to study those subjects to get those benefits - any degree will do.
I've noticed that the majority of maintainers of a couple of high profile Linux distros are all European; the opportunity cost of doing so in the U.S. is just too high.
When you get a loan then financial concerns of is this a good investment should apply. If you don't have a loan - many people spend their money on all kinds off weird hobbies.
But it also shouldn't cost so damned much.
Money cannot buy everything, but it can solves a lot of problems.
> Almost all students cite getting a better job as a primary reason for attending college.
With a link to this study:
https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/heri-freshman-survey-2426...
Which says:
> Students are increasingly placing a premium on the job-related benefits of going to college. The portion of incoming freshmen that cited "to be able to get a better job" as a very important reason for attending college reached an all-time high of 87.9 percent in 2012, an increase from 85.9 percent in 2011 and considerably higher than the low of 67.8 percent in 1976.
So what's the solution there?
This is true, but is only part of the equation. You also need to factor in:
* The probability of them getting a humanities job.
* The cost of college.
If college is expensive and most humanities majors don't end up with humanities jobs, then your statement can be 100% but still a net loss for humanities majors in aggregate.
Edit:
As a side note - the first person to make a billion dollars from educational data will figure out how to gather accurate, unbiased data from all schools/colleges for accurate comparison data. Not even interpret the data, just gather it.
Because right now, working in the belly of the higher ed beast for decades and decades, I can tell you that any data you see has been scrubbed and scrubbed and interpreted as to make it functionally useless to compare programs within institutions, let alone separate institutions.
You're asking a bunch of teenagers about their life plans, or a bunch of 20-somethings to talk about something they put more energy into than they've ever put into anything in their entire short lives. Every adult in the room should realize that it's 80% bullshit rationalization.
What I've learned through many hobbies and non-academic classes across many disciplines is that there's a kernel of truth to the Kung Fu movie story arc. The instructor tells you what you need to hear right now, not the objective truth. Sometimes it's carrot, other times it's just keeping you from injury. You 'level up' every time the story changes, and you graduate when you see the training wheels and take them off. This 'rule' is just a guideline and you can break it in these situations.
What kids need to hear is that a few more years of hard work now will get them an easier life later on. They hear 'career' but college gets most of us out of whatever little bubble our parents and neighborhoods put us in. You are not in a little pond anymore and it doesn't matter how big of a fish you thought you were. It softens the blow when you graduate and discover the ocean.
If we didn't learn to build bridges in high school, we learned to build them in college. All of these things do help you in life, including your career, but typically it's indirectly. But you try telling a 16 year old who has just started looking at college pamphlets this and many just think it's more parental lecturing radio gaga.
What they believe is the bait. And hopefully by the time they see it for what it is, it's no big deal because they've got other motivations instead.
It's a very very very risky situation for most 18 year olds precisely due to the cost. If the cost wasn't so high, we wouldn't care about ROI of college degrees.
> Four in five engineering programs have ROI above $500,000, but the same is true for just 1% of psychology programs.
The only definition I've ever seen of literacy is the ability to read/write, with no requirement that the writing be particularly eloquent. I don't know of any college that would accept illiterate students (with the possible exception of the truly blind, who might have accommodations to use audio for all tests). It would therefore be impossible for a graduate of a 4 year college to be illiterate.
At some point anyone is going to acknowledge that the price isn't worth it. The ROI matters to absolutely everyone, without exception.
The studying is not the problem anyone is talking about. People should study anything and everything they desire. The problem being addressed is spending a lot of money and taking out massive loans in order to study.
If you want to study Art, by all means definitely study Art. Just do not borrow $100,000 to do it.
The ROI on college has been steadily going down since the 1970s. Colleges are in a position to extract the economic value they provide, so they increase price to keep a low ROI
During covid we made use of them for elementary age kids since they were falling behind on every subject.
The effectiveness was drastic. So much so that we stopped because they got so far ahead of the class.
Figure at 20,000 a year will cover a lot of private lessons with experts in most fields.
One wants to be a vet. So that will probably be more traditional.
• Extraverts don't need college to network - the skill is to innate they never need an expensive excuse
• Introverts won't learn to network even if put into an ideal environment for doing it - most people who claim university didn't enable networking are usually introverts
• This leaves people are in the middle of being extroverted or introverts who need just a nudge. That's less than 5% of the population - so the claim of "networking" is mostly only helping a tiny minority and doesn't benefit the majority.
I'm one of those middle people in the last group and quite honestly I didn't even benefit - I wasn't "ready" for the opportunity. Once I had a job in my industry, that's when it "all made sense" and tapped into my extrovert side to enormous advantage.
My current job primarily involves tapping into that post-university network for sales leads, collaboration partners, vendor opportunities, etc. I only recently got in touch with my university friends and most "weren't useful" to what I do today. One switched from EE to Gerontology. Another is still mentally in university (don't ask). Most aren't in fields I interact much with despite nominally being EE grads.
Anyway, the diploma is what's actually important. Most white collar jobs won't even look at you if you don't have one.
The network reasoning for college is vastly overstated.
We've gone with a private school because we've got a couple elementary-aged kids who are far enough ahead that public schools were plainly holding them back and we were already starting to get early signs of "gifted kid who isn't challenged then crashes and burns later" syndrome, but if tutors are at least as effective, and cheaper, that'd be awesome.
Local tutor.
Spent around 1000 a month between two kids at the most expensive month, depending on need. I handled math.
Both severe ADHD. So class room setting is hard on them.
Now that they are ahead and back in classroom they are doing fine.
> Both severe ADHD. So class room setting is hard on them.
We've dealt with a bit of that. No fun for any of the parties involved.
> Now that they are ahead and back in classroom they are doing fine.
Awesome. Always such a relief when kid-stuff goes the right way. Then you can rest up for when you're thrown the next curve-ball :-)
One starts to suspect might be a societal problem at root.
For example, from the CDC:
> Adults without a high school degree or equivalent had the highest self-reported obesity (38.8%), followed by adults with some college (34.1%) or high school graduates (34.0%), and then by college graduates (25.0%).
9 percentage points is a considerable difference. One in eleven people.
Obesity is linked with a host of health conditions, both chronic and acute. These incur higher medical costs.
Lower education levels also highly correlate with susceptibility to misinformation, watching more television, and lower self-reported life satisfaction.
Comparing salaries isn’t all that useful in measuring the impact of education.
College is indeed becoming overpriced.
If the person is seeking a party experience, it's a bad idea if they don't have rich parents that will support them and pay off loans later on.
If the person is a mature, informed, and energetic business go-getter, and they actually manage to start new ideas while they attend school, and then establish vital bonds with other go-getters they meet, they can potentially gain a lot from a college experience.
Once you join the working world, the diversity of ideas and ability to meet ambitious people regularly wanes a bit. Also as one ages, the energy and enthusiasm for change also decreases to an extent. Carpe Diem.
I also believe though, that some people can and have create(d) amazing and ambitious careers without a college education, or by dropping out early from the process. There are no rules...
The social skills, networks, and alumni connections you build at college are a large fraction of the benefit that college gives the average person to further their career.
Otherwise, I agree. College is a great time to take advantage of the time you have to change your network, generate new ideas and take risks. And I also agree that most there can be benefit (though highly unlikely) for some people to not attend college or to drop out.
College is expensive socialization to be sure, so make sure to go for other reasons as well -- but if you aren't going to parties, making friends, and doing stupid shit then you're missing out on part of the real tangible value provided by colleges which is community. (And to be clear this is something totally separate from professional networking.)
Despite going for purely to enjoy myself and giving no thought to work or my career, I would say an hour I've spent in a bar with my co-workers almost always does more for my career than spending twenty hours over a weekend getting some pull request finished so my product manager can check it off their list. I've found out information about my workplace that I really needed to know. Once it probably saved me from getting axed during a layoff once since I didn't interact much with outside the bar with the manager who put in a good word for me when they were cutting people.
A lot of that depends on the college you go to. Doesn't matter how much a "go getter" you are if you don't make connections with someone that can ultimately fund/execute your ideas. Even if they themselves are "go getters".
Further, hard to really judge if you are a "go getter" or a "So, it's like facebook, but for cats!" person.
And here's the real rub, likely the person seeking the party experience with rich parents IS the person that can fund/execute ideas. They don't need to be go getters, they just have to have deep pockets.
Of course, this is all talking about someone going to college primarily for entrepreneurial ideas.
This is the real and true value of ivy league/prestigious schools. It isn't the quality of the knowledge, it's the old deep pockets that also go there.
Private loans preyed on so many of my peers and other family members. Also schools quickly raised charges, while underpaying staff. It's really the influence of comerical industry that screws a lot of the benefeits of a college education up nowadays.
The student needs to be a special type of person to get through it, solve all the problems that arise, work out how to maximize their potential, and then quickly get to work on their future.
College is not only a learning process, it's also a huge personal test of character, dedication, and analytical skill. The GPA though really does not determine a person's full capacity though, and the classes are often not what teaches you the most important things.
Many people from non-ivy-league schools also go far beyond many other ivy league students in terms of lifetime accomplishment -- usually because of the type of character they have and people they are (and sometimes because they cheat), but for certain jobs in this world, Ivy League is often an unwritten "pre-requisite".
But by the time most people get to college, they're still immature and not very well informed.
I could not disagree more. What this person gets out of college is nothing more than checking the "has 4yr degree" checkbox you need these days. College will do nothing for them other than check that box. Their own accomplishments will be what carries them through life.
Absolutely true. Do you have any statistics on their rate of doing that?
Survivor bias: If the only thing you look at is success, success looks pretty easy.
Now we can build a university online where every lesson is taught by the absolute best teacher in that one narrow area. Every new lesson you do, maybe 5 to 10 per day, would be taught by the very best teacher for that one particular topic. A different teacher from who taught the lesson could even prepare the quizzes for that topic.
Alternatively, I have been working for the last 8 months on YouTube to give myself a university level education in the construction trades. I have watched hundreds of hours of educational content on dirt work, concrete pours, framing, drywall, roofing, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, tile work, and finish features. I have built a shed using basically residential framing, and I am working on a second one now. Following this I'm going to build a small residence with a large garage, then I'm going to build a large residence. I am just doing this for my own hobby basically, but anybody who wanted to become a home builder can now do so just with the content online.
> Individual financial returns to college are the paramount consideration for most students. Almost all students say access to a well-paying job is a primary reason for attending college.
First, I don't think financial return is the near-universal case asserted here. People go to college for many reasons and some programs (as noted) have a terrible ROI. Why then would these programs continue to survive?
Second, people have bought into this "follow your dream" meme and human ego is predisposed to thinking we're special and we'll be the exception so even with a terrible ROI, people don't think that'll be their fate. It's why people end up working as a barista after going $150,000 into debt to study theater arts at NYU.
Third, 18 year olds who are making these decisions, like many people much older, simply don't understand financial consequences.
I'm personally more interested in how much college ranking and/or debt affects ROI but I guess that's a separate question.
Because the government provides no questions asked loans to anyone willing to attend these programs, and many people don't do their research or simply don't even consider the implications.
I think it's interesting how the intent of college has changed from one of creating a philosophy of life to that of essentially a vocational school that may or may not teach the actual skills necessary for a job. From what I can tell this shift goes back as far as the Morrill Land Grant of 1890 in the U.S.
It's also interesting to me how much inertia the system has. When I talk to young students, many seem to go to college because "that's just what you do after high school" or pick a particular school simply because "everyone" has agreed that's a great school without being able to articulate why. Marry that to human resources who require degrees to filter applicants because that's the method "everyone uses" while not being able to articulate what relevant skills that particular degree confers to the job and you get a self-licking ice cream cone.
The two types of schools blended along the way of course and in other contexts. Trade-college blending is a very slow process but happening some. Farming is the furthest alarm but arguably that was an "agronomy and automation coup" as the model changed and made farm work a niche job instead of the majority.
The current system is related to more eglatarian mutation from hard class gatekeeping. Frankly that a lot of positions are flat out about justifying your actions to others as the practical skill component of the "philosophy of life". It is about getting what they measure for.
At many orgs I’ve worked at, I felt like there were a lot of people who could have done the same work from a two year apprenticeship. Even though many had engineering degrees, I don’t think most brought an engineering mindset/education to the problems they faced on a daily basis, with the exception of some PIs
Post-secondary credentialism is the new form of feudalism. This book is a little too woke for my tastes but there's a significant amount of scholarship on this concept of education's rise as the new "cool guy" power structure, replacing politics and the church.
https://books.google.ca/books/about/Beyond_Education.html?id...
I think this might be saying the same thing but you did it more clearly. I’m saying people can’t objectively articulate why one choice is more valuable than the other largely because they are making emotional decisions and not rational, objective ones. Unless of course the rationale is “this is the way the game is played, regardless if it makes objective sense.” The irony, as you point out, is that just entrenches a silly system
Interesting book suggestion, I’ll check it out.
[0] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-pr...
Search for any entry level job in an office environment, how many list a college degree as a requirement? Anywhere north of 80% sends a message (Get a college degree or work for minimum wage).
But the real reason is this: there’s nothing you can’t learn outside of these institutions for 99.999% of the population. General knowledge is effectively free. So why pay this exorbitant amount of money? Who really benefits?
I dropped out my junior year after working for a full 40-hour week over spring break and realizing I was throwing away money to get a degree to.... get a job that I already had. Since then I've had absolutely no issues finding new jobs and moving up the pay scale. I'm not even sure if shorter (2 year) tech colleges are worth it if you want to go into software engineering, maybe some of the bootcamps are worth it but I'm not sure. I've learned more on the job that I ever learned in the classroom (as it relates to computer science) and if I had it to do again I think I would have paid a company to intern for a few months until my output exceeded any "drain" my lack of knowledge incurred. It would have been far cheaper, I wouldn't still be paying off college loans, and I'd have an extra 3 years of full time earnings/raises/bonuses/etc.
Lessons about automata and computability aren't exactly 'outdated' but their application to typical software work seems very indirect/abstract. In any case, that was my experience from a CS degree ~20 years ago, probably similar now if the curriculum is similar.
Dijkstra: "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
I hear this or similar things often but I don't really buy it. Sure, if you are doing super high stakes things and you need to optimize the hell out of something then you might be able to pull from concepts learned in college but I've seen new grads waste so much time on pre-optimization and honestly it's just not needed for so many things. Also I've had no issues learning concepts/algorithm/etc on the fly as-needed when performance was crucial. My college experience might be different than yours but having an EE teacher rail against and regularly make fun of web development as "not real development", losing 1 point on each answer of my database exam because I didn't put a semicolon at the end, and having to write a C program from scratch (headers and all) on paper for an exam are only a few examples of what turned me off the way my college taught computer science.
The thing that is funny is that University didn't help me in that job at all. The vast majority of skills I used at the job were self-taught. A good chunk of those were self-taught before I even went to University.
University teaches a lot of theoretical and basically makes you teach yourself the practical. I started to realize that unless I planned to go the academia route and get more into the theoretical, then the degree was pretty useless to me. I ended up not completing the degree because it was just way too hard to stay motivated. It felt like I had to teach myself the important skills anyway, and then listen to stuff I could self-teach myself when I needed to know it.
When I had group projects a good chunk of classmates I worked with sucked at programming. Like they didn't know how to use git, sucked at object orientated program, etc... They would produce code that was just in one big massive single file. It was frustrating because the degree really just made a lot of people book smart, but they weren't actually that hirable.
I actually got to help with co-op hiring while I was in school for multiple years at the company I was with. When we would look at resumes the biggest thing I realized is that the degree wasn't really relevant. When almost every applicant has the identical degree it's not meaningful. What mattered was what kinds of things they did outside of school. What personal projects they had, what their github looked like, did they have their own website, were they involved in groups or starting their own sidegig websites, etc...
Our best candidates were the ones that did a lot of stuff outside of school. And the funny thing is that the majority of those candidates had bad grades. We got the transcripts with every co-op applicant.
Further,
"Attending a very elite school and choosing the right field often has a significant payoff. The best program anywhere in the United States is the computer science major at the California Institute of Technology. Graduates of this well-regarded program can expect an ROI of $4.41 million over the course of their careers. Not far behind is the finance major at the University of Pennsylvania’s famous Wharton School, where lifetime ROI is $4.35 million."
We can debate whether top schools actually teach any better or whether they're just skimming off top students out of high school, but there's a significant difference in groups outcomes between schools.
Without a degree, employers had to make a snapshot judgement call on whether or not I was good enough. They didn't see me. They saw my disability. After I got a degree, it was like some sort of checkbox had magically been checked, and the man who had fixed modem drivers in his teens was suddenly good enough to hire. I will also say that there are companies to this day that will not hire someone without a college degree, and I think it's stupid.
This isn't what you are talking about but one thing college did that I haven't mentioned is expose me to different people, cultures, etc that I was not exposed to in the bubble I grew up in. That is something I do value and I think there are social aspects of college that are useful. I'll also say that as a white male in the US there are doors that were opened to me that were not open to everyone so I can absolutely believe that college might be necessary (if only for a stupid piece of paper) for some people because of a number of factors outside of their control. I hate that our system works that way.
> I will also say that there are companies to this day that will not hire someone without a college degree, and I think it's stupid.
100% agree it's stupid but I just use it as another flag to not work at a company that is that short-sighted or stuck in the past (same way anti-remote-work companies are immediately written off for me).
Being a student definitely helped me get my break though, mainly due to the tax status. I had been programming for a decade when I got my first job, but everyone's shit and a drain on resources for a couple months regardless. Accepting peanut pay (relatively) + tax benefits made getting that first job easy.
The amount I learned in my first couple of months does not compare in any way to university. You cannot just go and get personal tutoring with a professor when you are having problems designing something. Meanwhile, it's the job of the senior engineers to be your babysitter at the start (bless the patience of the ones who taught me). And the few times you do get an audience, it's very short (as they have to see 50 other students), and much too vague. There's too little "you idiot, you do that and in 6 months you'll be sorry the DB is deadlocking". More "hm, do you not think you could turn this O(n*log(n) into O(log(n))", which, at the end of the day, I could probably care less for but not by much.
My experience in the US was that you could do exactly that. Except for the week before midterms and the week before finals, the professor's office hours were often empty. I could show up and have at least a 1/4, if not better, chance of getting one-on-one talks with someone skilled in their field about what they are working on. That was worth more than anything else I got out of college (except maybe the magic piece of paper that means more companies will interview me).
As a biology major who later had to turn to tech (sadly quite common as it turns out), I can sincerely empathize with this. Unfortunately, in the health sciences you cannot do this, even taking a low level lab position requires some level of college/university credit because of the samples you are dealing with (blood, tissue) and the requirements imposed by Law to ensure they gate-keep even though errors occur regardless of degree level in labs, which is why you take such large samples to begin with.
In my foray with tech I've made a career in fintech (co-founder then went to a Megacorp), after spending time in Supply Chain roles the auto Industry. In both of those fields you are encouraged to not follow the predecessor if you want to be successful and move up; it rewards you if can pull it off and bring something novel and add value to the Team/Operation. And that, more than anything I learned in University, stuck with me for reasons that I think you could understand.
After COVID derailed my Life, as it did others, I asked myself what I wanted to do and I decided to enroll into a BSc program in AI and Machine Learning, with the aspiration of doing what you just mentioned--getting a role before graduating by leveraging my existing skills and the new skills I'd learn with the brand of a University to back it up.
My entrepreneurial habits kicked in during the on-boarding process and I saw a need to create a payment processing system to pay for tuition as so many students (mainly international) at the University in question were forced to pay via a system which resulted in delays, missing deadlines and large fees to process if it were possible. Some students even had to resort to using Western Union to make the deadline!
This was at the time that Twitter had launched its Bitcoin tipping feature via iOS on it's platform, so a proof of concept/MVP could have been spun in short order.
Eventually the faculty sent out a memo condemning using any alternatives (they became aware of the conversations happeing in Slack chat) saying it would result in further delays (or inability to register at all) if they did, thus making it entirely moot to try and flesh anything out. It wouldn't be anything but a MVP, as being a middleman/clearing house doesn't serve any of my long term goals.
But what it could have done is disrupt the model and force progress to be made where it would otherwise remain stagnant.
With all that said, now that you're established in the Industry and you likely have Senior Dev status, how would you go about this: how could one pitch this in order to take you on for X sum of money and not have it fall on deaf ears?
I mean, I'm guessing YOU would be open to this given what you've said but how would your project managers react to this? I've held developer and consultant status at the aforementioned Megacorp and I had way more friction for more insipid things.
This is something that I think about very often but I don't have a good answer to it. I started at $10/hr doing web dev work and in a short amount of time moved up to $15, $20, $25+ before moving to a salaried position. My best advice to other people is to teach yourself "enough to be dangerous" (online tutorials, code camps, etc) using a tech stack/framework that a local company uses and then apply at an intern-level. Then try to either work your way up at that company and/or pivot to another company after a year or so. For me it was Wordpress and Drupal, I found a local web dev/marketing shop and did that kind of work for them for about 3 years, during which I learned Laravel and Angular for personal and professional projects, before moving on to a product-based company and getting into more complex problems to solve. Personally I learn best by being forced to do something, as in "Build a site that does X, Y, Z" where I don't know how to accomplish X, Y, Z. I enjoy learning on the fly (Maybe I should call it JIT learning?) and having a goal I'm aiming for. Most of my comp sci education felt like "let's pour all these concepts into your head and hopefully you will remember them and they will be useful in the future", that kind of learning doesn't work well for me, I need to see it applied.
It's my goal to own my own company at some point and aside from figuring out a salary/pay structure that I'm comfortable with (something like ESOP) a big thing I'd want to do is offer an on-ramp for people who want to get into the industry. I've helped a friend go from an aborted CS education to working full time in the industry (I helped him learn enough Drupal to get hired at where I worked and then he took it from there) so I know it's possible and it's something I want to incorporate into a future company.
EDIT: As for project managers not buying in, I feel your pain, the sad thing is that it's such short-term thinking. Unfortunately they often don't have the political pull or desire to roll the dice on an unknown candidate and it only worked for me in past because I knew the candidate well, taught him myself, and vouched for him. That's not really sustainable IMHO and there needs to be a better way.
That piece of paper can be worth a significant chunk of change, particularly since the gap on the resume caused by fewer companies hiring non-college grads can cause companies to low-ball their offers to you.
Maybe the job market is different now, but, even if it is, maybe it will be that way again in 5-10 years. Predictions are hard and all.
Also, CS degrees are varied. Very little of what I learned was outdated given that most of what I learned was discrete math. The more practically focused classes were OS and networking and I've used both of those on the job.
That hints of an underdiscussed pitfall when choosing colleges in "practical" fields like engineering and apparently nursing - the theory:practice orientation of their curriculum.
A theory oriented one tends to give you a backing which not eternal or life long, shift far slower. We may not use linked lists as much as hash maps but the same complexity analysis applies. If you are savvy enough you can pick up the specifics as needed backed by theory.
The disadvantage of a too heavily theory oriented one is bootstrapping to the workplace is more difficult and it may fail to establish proper habits like say how to properly write commits for version control.
A more practice oriented one which is proper for the current is more relevant and avoids the starting pitfalls but leaves the alumni less equiped with theory to deal with shifts. An outdated practical oriented curriculum is the worst of both worlds really.
I'm pretty sure everyone already knew that. I distinctly remember friends joking about how their major was worthless 20 years ago, and now see the same people complain about how they got suckered into taking a student loan they can never repay.
They are mostly lemmings told to run off the cliff and they gladly fulfill their personal financial doom!!
https://www.amazon.com/Aaron-Clarey/e/B00J1ZC350%3Fref=dbs_a...
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006N0THIM/ref=dbs_a_def_r...
His other books are also insightful though go against the grain of many who want to believe in fantasies, fairy tales and unicorns (but will inevitably be disappointed and too late).
And it's a very simple thing to prove: can you easily pay off the cost of your degree within 10 years or less? And is this generally true for most people with your degree? The answer is easily shown by thousands of news reports of liberal arts degree holders being stuck in debt into their 50s and losing ground.
The exceptions (STEM degree primarily and people who come from enough money that ROI doesn't matter) prove the rule.