Unsurprising, the degrees that prepare you for a professional career, e.g. STEM, medicine and law are shown to be good investments.
People who choose to pursue majors on the basis of passions and/or quest for knowledge in a specific area without concern for the market, would need to be aware of what they are signing up for. But when you are young and not yet worldly wise, it can be a problem. Perhaps, those degrees should come with a warning label.
CS in the classroom is not remotely similar to CS in the field. From my own experience, I definitely lacked the maturity and vision to look that far ahead. Interested to know how you made this determination and which parts you would actually grow to hate.
At Caltech, everybody knew that an AY degree was useless for getting a job (there are only so many telescopes). So lots of students did a double major - EE for a job, AY for fun.
I can vouch for the fact that people who take a brutal AY major for fun are indeed some of the most interesting people you'll ever meet.
A more interesting question would be: was the school from which you graduated worth the investment? It's one thing to get an MBA from "college of du (shopping) mall", and another from Northwestern University (in the US, evidently).
4 years of some of your most productive years of life (both physical and mental) is very very costly.
But in life, you compete with your peers. So you try and make as best a decision as possible to pick a career or trade for your life and in many cases, a degree helps you compete with your peers.
In my case (Genomics), yes. I studied it because I was interested in it and everyday I went to school with a sense of awe that I have seldom felt ever since.
Money-wise it's been ups and downs, overall good so I guess it was worth it in that sense as well.
Yes, And sales/marketing, and just about anyone who are naturally agreeable
Another way to look at it is that, because of natural inclination and compiler training, it seems that many people in software are inclined to avoid the usually useful architectural practice of "receiver makes right" and instead find comfort in unnecessary precision and quibbling.
Actually I dont for a second regret my degree(s). I got to learn about so many broad things. I was never a good student - I hated exams, loved assignments, spent most of my time in the lab trying to build things based on what I was learning that week/quarter. Even though I did "part time" work in my field it came no where close to what I was learning at college. Naturally my grades suffered - but I did enough to pass. Do I use all that stuff today - not directly but I feel I dont lack in confidence in tackling any problem and knowing where the answer might lie (at the very least I know where to find the specialists and how to learn from them).
Now this doesnt mean that everything you do for passion will set you up for success and I just lucked out in having a passion for CS/Eng that it worked out eventually. Remember back in the 90s (and even 2000s?) in Australia Eng was a field was lower on the totem pole than even Accounting! But this question was whether my degree was worth it (for me) and Id do it all over again. In fact if i could go back Id try to stay a few more years in college and be more proactive about spotting trends.
Degrees were never about a financial return. Their original purpose was to indicate a license to teach. It's not supposed to get you a good job. Some jobs require a degree, but that doesn't mean the degree is for getting a job.
I would love for degrees to be about “learning how to learn”. However if that’s what their purpose is, and not to guarantee with high likelihood an ability to earn an income, then the price of these degrees has to fall. Or at least taxpayers need to stop letting 18 year olds borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars for them.
I think academics put the blinders on, as everyone does when their own livelihood is at stake, by telling themselves, “well the degree isn’t supposed to lead to anything concrete, we are teaching how to learn, and that’s priceless.” Unfortunately when such a credential costs $200k+, this reverts the university system back to what it was originally - a finishing school for the elite, where they make connections with similar types on their way to careers in business, law, and politics.
Education is not the expensive part in higher education. The real expense is the American college experience. College is a separate phase of life between childhood and adulthood, universities compete for students by providing all kinds of unnecessary amenities, and the campuses look more like towns than universities.
This is only true if you accept what schools say they are and ignore how education functions in modern society. Yes, some jobs require a degree. Which ones? All of the most high paying jobs.
If that weren’t the case, if degrees actually weren’t about financial return, schools would find it impossible to command the huge tuitions that they do.
If the present-day purpose of bachelor’s degrees had anything to do with teaching you wouldn’t see 40% of millennials getting college degrees. Perhaps in some semantic sense college is not “for” getting a job but only in the same sense that it’s not “for” building a social network for example. And that doesn’t change the fact that for the vast majority of people a positive financial return is exactly their calculation.
My degree was absolutely worth it, I paid a total of 2700 euros in tuition fee and got a master (French software engineering degree in 5 years @ 540 euros a year). By having a cursus to follow, I got a sense of direction of what to learn and ended up studying things that are useful to this day that I might not have learned otherwise. Even if I skipped a lot of classes, I spent a lot of time reading all the relevant textbooks to those classes and got all the theoretical foundation I wouldn't have otherwise as well as access to teachers who could answer my questions or point me in the right direction.
And finally, having a master degree has been extremely useful in getting visas allowing me to live in a lot of different countries over the years.
On the other hand, I was an exchange student at RIT for 6 months and I don't know if the very high tuition (40k per year nowadays? when I was there, I didn't pay the tuition, just the one in France) there would be worth it given the lower quality of education compared to what I had in France and the extremely high cost.
But only because I had a good enough grasp of IT/Computer Science before I went into University through a good high school. The job I have now is more generalist as opposed to specialised (e.g. programming).
Has my degree increased my opportunity to find and land the job I have now? Absolutely, as my job required a degree back then. Are employers in STEM areas now looking to employ people that don't have degrees? yes.
There is however a big challenge that Universities face, which is providing education that matches the skills required in the workforce. It can be seen as a waste to do 4 years in computer science or any other degree, to then land a job that was only relevant to a few of your courses taken.
Universities and higher education are looking to do more apprenticeship style courses when you are learning hands on during your education, like you do in a trade. Rather than doing a 4 year degree that covers a wide range of computer science/cyber/information security domains, you do a shorter course/degree that is highly focused to the jobs you want to apply for.
In the view of industry, part of what universities provide is job training. The other component is an expensive credentialing system. A degree from a prestigious university is worth more than one from a modest school, even if the course content is identical.
I happened to be born in country where CS degree was free, I even was paid by govt to study. After a time I was happy to discover that FAANG didn’t really care how large were my student debts as long as I can code well
I returned to college at least 4 times. I tried and tried. I am a high performer when I'm motivated. But I have trouble sustaining momentum.
Entering college for the last time 5 years ago, my goals were: brush up on latest technology, earn CompTIA certifications. Mission accomplished. Pell Grant well-spent.
My parents are the types who don't understand non-traditional education. My father scoffs at anything that isn't accredited. But we're living in the future now. Education has been disrupted by technology and disrupted by culture.
I had straight As in grade school and a bright future. Unfortunately, my childhood wasn't as loving as I had always thought it was. I suffer from C-PTSD. I was homeless, penniless, jobless, all at once. I lost everything I owned. I've bounced back from all that, but I still visit the hospital too often.
I've worked at a steady job in the education industry for 3 years now. That's a new record for my tenure at anything. They don't require a degree. They don't even require the relevant certifications I've owned -- they make no difference in my paycheck, and they won't pay for me to earn or renew them. But we love each other, I've found a great team, I am in my niche. I'm here to stay. No degree necessary.
Same. I will say that after nearly 40 years in tech, my lack of a degree has only every hurt me during the application process and that has been only been in the last 10 years where HR bots pre-sort me out of the pile. I am at the end of my career and as such searching for new tech work isn’t a big issue because I expect my current gig to carry me through to retirement.
But because of the gatekeeping HR bots, I’d argue that folks who want to work in tech in the future should pursue and achieve a STEM degree. However outside of STEM careers, degrees are just expensive pieces of paper.
I didn't know what I wanted to do, and left college freshman year. I couldn't justify going into debt when I couldn't didn't even know what I was going into debt for.
Absolutely worth it, no regrets. I've still done well for myself.
I don't think I've ever looked back and wished I spent more time working and less time learning. That said, since I was in school tuitions have increased as well as (exploitative) adjunct professor hiring, so students spending more and teachers are paid less. Makes sense people are upset with the system.
I probably wouldn't have found programming work without my CS degree, I needed some training. I do know programmers who were good, got jobs and who didn't have a degree, but they were the coding-since-8 types and I wasn't.
But I'm late 40s and now long term unemployed, wondering what I'm supposed to next. So that CS degree didn't go far. They seem to be mostly signalling now anyway, you have to have the right Brand Name attached to them for maximum effect, and I don't. And a lot of my jobs were a notch or two above garbage tier, so lacking that brand name seems kind of bad.
We tend to clump all degrees together as if they are all equal. Trust me, a computer science degree from my backwater country of Moldova (which I don't have) is significantly more useless than a degree from MIT (which I also don't have).
On top of that even useless degrees may occasionally help (e.g. when deciding to get certain types of job visas in the US that look at the applicant's education levels)
OTOH, I have been so impressed by Moldovan colleagues, either directly out of University or with serious industrial experience that I will seriously consider people with this background for interview.
Prestigious qualification people are much more miss than hit in my experience, unless they’ve got the experience and maybe more interestingly, the connections, that we want.
No degree and earning more than my colleagues with Masters/Doctorates due to having far more experience than them and having had a head start due to not spending years on a degree.
One of the benefits of a public, state funded university system that I see very rarely mentioned is that it's really good at culling nonsensical degrees because the state has no incentive to keep paying for expensive, useless education.
In Germany tertiary education rate is almost half as high as in Britain yet productivity is vastly higher. The academic system should focus on creating researchers, job training is better provided in a vocational setting. Britain and the US where you have governments write basically blank checks to students which then fund vast university bureaucracies just seem like a tax payer hazard.
I have a Masters in Computer Science and Engineering. Most jobs in my country requires either a Bachelors or a PhD so it is more of a stepping stone for a PhD which I have no interest in pursuing. My current job is the only one that requires my highest degree. My previous jobs all require a lower qualification. In fact, most of the things I learned in my 2 years of acquiring the degree are not that useful in all the jobs I've had so far. Was it worth it? Well, I got the degree from a prestigious institute and that seems to matter more to interviewers than the degree itself. Maybe the real degree is the friends we find along the way \s
Asking this question generally has no value because everyone's experience is different. It's hard to a/b test this because it's impossible to control for everything else.
You'll see lots of personal stories in this thread. Some will say yes, some will say no, some will have no degree.
Some degrees are better than others. Some institutions are better than others.
There simply is no one-size-fits-all answer here.
Of course for someone contemplating a degree, some research and planning is a good idea. Maybe find people with your context, with your planned degree, and quiz them.
Yep, and even if it's (nearly) free (not the US) the opportunity costs of not working for a few years can be harsh. It depends, and I'm still not sure if I regret it, I keep telling myself that I learned enough interesting and useful things so that I recognize problems and can look up the solutions I once knew. In my case CS, and finished in 2010.
You are incorrect. Asking this question has great value when you do it regarding degrees because, while your statement is true about individual outcomes, outcomes of the population that completed a degree tell you quite a lot about the value of the degree, which is a large part of the input into choosing a degree for many people (and it certainly should be a huge part of deciding what degrees get subsidized and to what extent by the tax payer).
I studied electrical engineering because I was told I'd have a leg-up on software engineers, who don't understand how computers work. That knowledge turned out to be irrelevant in the Internet era. Then I doubled down by going to graduate school, where I specialized in the hot research field du jour and discovered it did not exist in industry. It is now dead as a research field too. So my entire higher education, I painfully realized, was worth jack. I did not get my degree either 'coz my advisor was denied tenure, got a breakdown, and I became depressed myself. After much moping and with marital support, I cut my losses and dumped electrical engineering for software engineering, and machine learning in particular. That was a fantastic career move but it took me a long time to get over the waste and suffering. I've always hated school, and I was a great student.
Fortunately I became proficient with computers well before I got "schooled" so I was able to eventually get a job. But employers always held my education against me, especially at startups. Why did you study that? Why did you go to graduate school?
That's interesting. I had a similar experience, where I was proficient with computers and programming before entering university, chose to get an EE degree instead of CS, and then immediately went into software engineering where I've never used my degree. I've long since forgotten pretty much everything EE-related that I learned in school, so my degree is also pretty worthless at this point.
But I never got advice encouraging me to get an EE degree as a way to get a "leg up" on SWEs. Most of the advice I got was that I was making a mistake, and should get a CS degree instead if I was interested in programming. I went ahead with the EE degree anyway, but it's never seemed to hurt me in the eyes of potential employers, at least not that I've noticed.
Can you say a little more about how employers held your education against you? I've also been asked questions about why I chose various aspects of my education and job history, but never assumed it was hurting me as long as I gave a reasonable response.
My advice came from academic EEs. In my youthful ignorance, I failed to consider the potential for biased advice. From people with no industrial experience.
As for employers, some interviewers grilled me about my education. Others I deduced by de-emphasizing my education in my resume.
66 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadPeople who choose to pursue majors on the basis of passions and/or quest for knowledge in a specific area without concern for the market, would need to be aware of what they are signing up for. But when you are young and not yet worldly wise, it can be a problem. Perhaps, those degrees should come with a warning label.
It would be nice if we had some sort of snappy aphorism. "Make your major your money and your minor your passion" or something.
I can vouch for the fact that people who take a brutal AY major for fun are indeed some of the most interesting people you'll ever meet.
From the article:
>> Mr Biden also promises an official list of “low-financial value” courses.
We absolutely need to find a better model for STEM fields. Apprenticeships shouldn't just be for blue collar.
But in life, you compete with your peers. So you try and make as best a decision as possible to pick a career or trade for your life and in many cases, a degree helps you compete with your peers.
It’s not only about what you learn.
Money-wise it's been ups and downs, overall good so I guess it was worth it in that sense as well.
Find some Yes And people and hang on for dear life
Another way to look at it is that, because of natural inclination and compiler training, it seems that many people in software are inclined to avoid the usually useful architectural practice of "receiver makes right" and instead find comfort in unnecessary precision and quibbling.
Now this doesnt mean that everything you do for passion will set you up for success and I just lucked out in having a passion for CS/Eng that it worked out eventually. Remember back in the 90s (and even 2000s?) in Australia Eng was a field was lower on the totem pole than even Accounting! But this question was whether my degree was worth it (for me) and Id do it all over again. In fact if i could go back Id try to stay a few more years in college and be more proactive about spotting trends.
I think academics put the blinders on, as everyone does when their own livelihood is at stake, by telling themselves, “well the degree isn’t supposed to lead to anything concrete, we are teaching how to learn, and that’s priceless.” Unfortunately when such a credential costs $200k+, this reverts the university system back to what it was originally - a finishing school for the elite, where they make connections with similar types on their way to careers in business, law, and politics.
If that weren’t the case, if degrees actually weren’t about financial return, schools would find it impossible to command the huge tuitions that they do.
If the present-day purpose of bachelor’s degrees had anything to do with teaching you wouldn’t see 40% of millennials getting college degrees. Perhaps in some semantic sense college is not “for” getting a job but only in the same sense that it’s not “for” building a social network for example. And that doesn’t change the fact that for the vast majority of people a positive financial return is exactly their calculation.
And finally, having a master degree has been extremely useful in getting visas allowing me to live in a lot of different countries over the years.
On the other hand, I was an exchange student at RIT for 6 months and I don't know if the very high tuition (40k per year nowadays? when I was there, I didn't pay the tuition, just the one in France) there would be worth it given the lower quality of education compared to what I had in France and the extremely high cost.
But only because I had a good enough grasp of IT/Computer Science before I went into University through a good high school. The job I have now is more generalist as opposed to specialised (e.g. programming).
Has my degree increased my opportunity to find and land the job I have now? Absolutely, as my job required a degree back then. Are employers in STEM areas now looking to employ people that don't have degrees? yes.
There is however a big challenge that Universities face, which is providing education that matches the skills required in the workforce. It can be seen as a waste to do 4 years in computer science or any other degree, to then land a job that was only relevant to a few of your courses taken.
Universities and higher education are looking to do more apprenticeship style courses when you are learning hands on during your education, like you do in a trade. Rather than doing a 4 year degree that covers a wide range of computer science/cyber/information security domains, you do a shorter course/degree that is highly focused to the jobs you want to apply for.
I returned to college at least 4 times. I tried and tried. I am a high performer when I'm motivated. But I have trouble sustaining momentum.
Entering college for the last time 5 years ago, my goals were: brush up on latest technology, earn CompTIA certifications. Mission accomplished. Pell Grant well-spent.
My parents are the types who don't understand non-traditional education. My father scoffs at anything that isn't accredited. But we're living in the future now. Education has been disrupted by technology and disrupted by culture.
I had straight As in grade school and a bright future. Unfortunately, my childhood wasn't as loving as I had always thought it was. I suffer from C-PTSD. I was homeless, penniless, jobless, all at once. I lost everything I owned. I've bounced back from all that, but I still visit the hospital too often.
I've worked at a steady job in the education industry for 3 years now. That's a new record for my tenure at anything. They don't require a degree. They don't even require the relevant certifications I've owned -- they make no difference in my paycheck, and they won't pay for me to earn or renew them. But we love each other, I've found a great team, I am in my niche. I'm here to stay. No degree necessary.
Same. I will say that after nearly 40 years in tech, my lack of a degree has only every hurt me during the application process and that has been only been in the last 10 years where HR bots pre-sort me out of the pile. I am at the end of my career and as such searching for new tech work isn’t a big issue because I expect my current gig to carry me through to retirement.
But because of the gatekeeping HR bots, I’d argue that folks who want to work in tech in the future should pursue and achieve a STEM degree. However outside of STEM careers, degrees are just expensive pieces of paper.
Absolutely worth it, no regrets. I've still done well for myself.
But I'm late 40s and now long term unemployed, wondering what I'm supposed to next. So that CS degree didn't go far. They seem to be mostly signalling now anyway, you have to have the right Brand Name attached to them for maximum effect, and I don't. And a lot of my jobs were a notch or two above garbage tier, so lacking that brand name seems kind of bad.
On top of that even useless degrees may occasionally help (e.g. when deciding to get certain types of job visas in the US that look at the applicant's education levels)
Prestigious qualification people are much more miss than hit in my experience, unless they’ve got the experience and maybe more interestingly, the connections, that we want.
In Germany tertiary education rate is almost half as high as in Britain yet productivity is vastly higher. The academic system should focus on creating researchers, job training is better provided in a vocational setting. Britain and the US where you have governments write basically blank checks to students which then fund vast university bureaucracies just seem like a tax payer hazard.
Was it worth it?
Hell yes. And I thoroughly enjoyed the 4 years getting it. The payoff was big for me, well beyond financial returns.
You'll see lots of personal stories in this thread. Some will say yes, some will say no, some will have no degree.
Some degrees are better than others. Some institutions are better than others.
There simply is no one-size-fits-all answer here.
Of course for someone contemplating a degree, some research and planning is a good idea. Maybe find people with your context, with your planned degree, and quiz them.
Fortunately I became proficient with computers well before I got "schooled" so I was able to eventually get a job. But employers always held my education against me, especially at startups. Why did you study that? Why did you go to graduate school?
But I never got advice encouraging me to get an EE degree as a way to get a "leg up" on SWEs. Most of the advice I got was that I was making a mistake, and should get a CS degree instead if I was interested in programming. I went ahead with the EE degree anyway, but it's never seemed to hurt me in the eyes of potential employers, at least not that I've noticed.
Can you say a little more about how employers held your education against you? I've also been asked questions about why I chose various aspects of my education and job history, but never assumed it was hurting me as long as I gave a reasonable response.
As for employers, some interviewers grilled me about my education. Others I deduced by de-emphasizing my education in my resume.