America's Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor's Degree

http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=wWwv6kBkcTbYktwbjrJkskjtdhknjqvf

by pchivers • 18 years ago

25 25 18 years ago

dougp• 18 years ago

This article boggles my mind. If you don't think the degree is worth the money then don't go to college. The worst thing that can happen is schools start teaching students to pass some government mandated generic career readiness test.

yummyfajitas4• 18 years ago

I think the point is that thanks to deceptive marketing, most people don't properly evaluate whether it is worthwhile to go.

As for a "generic career readiness test", that's probably pointless. On the other hand, some sort of standardized testing would be useful.

Take a student who got a B in calculus at Rutgers, and a similar student who got a B in calculus at NYU. Are they equally skilled at calculus (Hint: definitely not)? Given a standardized calculus test we could tell the difference.

scott_s• 18 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRE_Mathematics_Test

Although I don't know what we would gain by making every graduate taking the exam, even if they didn't want to continue on to graduate school.

silencio• 18 years ago

There already are exams if you want to go on (e.g. that GRE link). But having all graduates take it regardless is quite useless, especially as a method to determine how "good" one program/class/graduate is to another.

We've already had to deal with standardized testing BS thanks to NCLB before college, and look at the mess now. Teachers only teach to the exam and that is really not a good thing.

hobbs• 18 years ago

In IT, I've found that the degree only has any influence on your first job. After that, future employers only care about your work history - no one cares anymore about your degree, your GPA, or the school. So if instead of going to college, you can find an employer who's willing to hire a high school grad, you may be 4 years (and many $$$) ahead of the game.

Does anyone know if this is the case in other industries? Does the degree make a difference to a prospective accounting clerk if she already has 5 years of work experience?

boredguy8• 18 years ago

My experience has been that those who have a problem with me not having a BS are generally the type of...limited individuals I wouldn't want to work with, anyway.

donw3• 18 years ago

That is an incredibly patronizing attitude to have. They are 'limited' because they use a very sensible method to screen applicants?

It is very true that not having a degree shouldn't be a bar to employment, but the process of getting that piece of paper does display a level of discipline that is very important when it comes to getting things done. I know that someone with a baccalaureate in mathematics or any of the sciences has had to work very, very hard in order to get that degree, and that they have needed to do a number of things which they considered obvious and boring, because those things were essential to getting the job done.

I know there are people who don't have degrees who have that sort of dedication; in fact, one of my friends fits the bill perfectly. These people will demonstrate their value in other ways, but the majority of people who blow off college are, frankly, lazy and disorganized, and often think that they are much more skilled than they really are. This goes double for programmers, who already have a natural habit of overestimating their abilities.

From the perspective of an employer, I would think very carefully about hiring someone without a degree. I would probably not even consider hiring someone without some college experience, unless they had a stellar work record and about a mile of ironclad references.

dnaquin3• 18 years ago

It's amazing what doors having attended a good university can open. I'm on my second job after graduation, and I could obviously tell that the university I attended had a much larger impact on my hiring than the last years' worth of work experience.

aantix• 18 years ago

Have you been applying to large financial institutions because they seem to be the only ones who care anymore these days.

10 or 15 years into your career no one is going to care if you went to Harvard, MIT, Carnegie Mellon or any other school.

You reach a point where the general studies that you took are just assumed and people will begin to want to know the particular niche skills that you have experience with (e.g., you've worked developing an automated trading system or you've worked developing some sort of image processing app).

If I'm interviewing an engineer of 10 years and he mentions more than once where he went to school I am going to hammer him with technical questions. "OK Mr. MIT, let's see if that education really paid off."

aswanson2• 18 years ago

In straight up engineering jobs, nobody seems to give a damn about the school after your first gig. This may be due to the fact that you are generally being recruited for specific skill set and competence that the employer needs to derive measurable value from.

The signaling type jobs (law, finance, hedge funds) require the big name schools, but not a specific skill set. Which tends to make me think that they are full of shit.

geebee• 18 years ago

This article mainly seems to focus on the outcome for the bottom tier of high school students going to college. Top tier students may do much better.

A top student who goes to a top law, med, or business school is probably getting a trememdous ROI on education.

Interestingly, neither category describes the startup crowd. Hackers represents an unusual group - people who are able to study the hardest subjects in college and grad school, but who choose to work in such an unregulated and loose culture that nobody strictly needs a degree at all.

Law or Medicine require a grad degree - and as a result, the grad degree is very valuable (it's a gateway into the cartel that controls these services). Nursing also requires a degree.

Programming doesn't require a degree, but can't be done in any innovative way by someone who isn't smart enough to get a math/science/or engineering degree. It leads to an interesting kind of distain for formal education in a group that often has impressive formal credentials.

donw3• 18 years ago

I think the disdain for academia comes from having to participate in the cesspool which 'liberal arts' have become. The words 'liberal arts' used to describe someone who was skilled in both the sciences and the humanities; now it just identifies people who hated real work so much that they opted for the degree program that had 'Finger Painting' listed as an upper-division course.

Ok, maybe I'm being a bit hard on the Liberal Arts people, but when you busting your tail to finish classes that are actually hard, watching people coast through in easy degree programs can be very, very demoralizing; in fact, I was quite bitter towards academia for a few years because of it.

This almost caused me to give up on wanting to get a graduate degree, even though I love the subject, because I never wanted to become one of 'those' people, and the only thing that kept me going is that grad school is a really, really good time to try and start a company.

nostrademons2• 18 years ago

I went to a liberal arts college. "Liberal arts" still describes someone skilled in both sciences and humanites...sort of. What tends to happen is that the folks who major in hard sciences at liberal arts colleges become those people, while those who major in the liberal arts become basically unemployable. My fellow math/physics/CS majors (there were only about 10 of us per department per year, so we all sorta combined socially...) used to comment ironically that 50% of Amherst students never take any math or hard science course, yet it is impossible for a science major to avoid taking any humanities or social science courses.

Two things you need to remember about this:

1.) The folks who major in English and take only easy courses will get their comeuppance in the job market, which now basically requires quantitative skills.

2.) Many of those folks go to liberal arts colleges because they have a particular career track they know they want to do, and they're fully willing to make the financial sacrifices for that. For example, one of my friends wanted to be a professor of English, specializing in poetry, from the day he got to college. Another wanted to be a librarian. They're willing to live like grad students until they're in their 40s to do so, and to take the financial hit afterwards that comes with their chosen professions. I can respect that.

justindz• 18 years ago

When I was earning my CS degree, my program was transitioning away from the "liberal arts" college towards the "engineering" college. I came in on the tail end which still had more diversified course requirements. As a consequence, I picked up a minor in philosophy and ended up I think three hours short of a minor in creative writing.

I've been very well served by this educational approach. I absolutely do NOT use my philosophy of quantum physics topical material at work. However, I do outperform some of my peers by having competent technical skills, competent people skills and the ability to work through very complex and abstract problems that have lead to generations of prior teams throwing up their hands in defeat. These are things I attribute to a diverse education.

The people that coast through on a liberal arts degree, as you describe, are generally either coasting towards an entirely different type of life, enrolled in the wrong program (of their choosing) or the type of people that will end up succeeding regardless because they are talented, motivated, curious people. All of which is to say that I think you are hitting too hard on liberal arts, but not to blame you for that because the program you've experienced might have just been crappy and not a good one from which to generalize the argument.

donw3• 18 years ago

Having read the article, I think the problem isn't that having a college degree is overrated, just that some people aren't cut out for school, and that this is okay, because there are plenty of good jobs that don't (or shouldn't) require a college education.

What boggles my mind is the guy in the article who spent eight years and over a hundred grand, all to end up forty-five units (three semesters) short of a degree? I can understand taking eight years -- that's how long it took me to finish up both of my degrees, because I worked, so that I could finish school with no debt.

Mr. Sob Story wasn't going to college. He partied for eight years, washed out, and now wishes he had made better use of his time. Rather than admitting this and learning from it, he makes the university system the scapegoat for his own lack of self-discipline.

subwindow• 18 years ago

It was an easy choice for me. I got paid to go to college. In Georgia, the HOPE scholarship paid for 100% of my tuition and fees, and the Pell grant paid for a decent portion of my living costs.

That said, education is one of the most valuable things in the world. If you're thinking of it as a risk/reward based on how much you pay versus how much you could earn, you're doing it wrong.

America's Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor's Degree

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