Biggest Offender in Outsize Debt: Master’s Degrees

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/upshot/student-debt-big-culprit-graduate-school.html

by joker3 • 7 years ago

152 165 7 years ago

duxup7• 7 years ago

I wonder as far as education goes if graduating college, working, and then returning for a masters or similar things would be a better pattern. Or even graduating high school, working, college, working, college, or something else would be a better pattern.

I've worked with some folks with MBAs who have no clue about how to work with people / think they're just "the boss" and what they say goes because no reason at all. Worked with folks with CS degrees who I don't think really like to code / can't troubleshoot at all.

Front heavy education seems efficient on the surface, but I'm not sure makes sense without having a perspective on what life is like after that.

joker32• 7 years ago

I really don't like the idea that education is a thing you do once in your late teens/early twenties and then finish. There are good reasons to do something then, but there's no good reason to stop.

duxup7• 7 years ago

I changed careers via a bootcamp. I've got VERY mixed feelings on how that industry works...

But just the idea of going back to school to sort of "retool" or expand your toolset for 3 months full time, or 6 or something and get something worthwhile IMO could be the future. The question is if employers will support it.

Granted going back for a more traditional school experience could be a very legitimate route too.

thrower123• 7 years ago

Some sort of continuing education would be ideal, but once you settle into a career and the financial obligations of being an adult, stopping your income and ramping up your outgo to go back to school for a year or two becomes very untenable for most people. A master's degree isn't a particularly valuable credential, either, except in a few cases where it does directly unlock a higher pay grade.

A lot of the industries that do require continuing ed, it's often at best a rubber stamping process, or an excuse for junkets - at least from what I have seen from friends and family in education, law and medicine. What doctors do to get their continuing ed credits blows away even the fat old days of tech shows like Lotusphere.

With software, you can't just stop learning, but I'm not convinced that formal education is of much use. An RSS reader and a curated Twitter list would probably be a better investment of time.

AnimalMuppet• 7 years ago

Paying for education (and doing education full time) might well be things that you stop. They can be a good idea for a while without being a good idea forever.

maxxxxx• 7 years ago

Totally agree. A career should be a constant mix between learning and working. But only a few get the chance to learn on the job and going to school while working on a job (and making needed money) is very hard.

wil421• 7 years ago

Not by choice exactly I’ve done College -> Work -> Work/College -> Professional Job.

The first 6 months of my “real” career job in tech I learned almost as much as the first 2 years of college. I couldn’t imagine having a masters especially an MBA without having worked professionally, internships aside. I’m excluding the medical professions where the minimum to employment is a masters/doctorate. Even non-doctors have a lot of clinical/hospital experience before/during a masters.

I’m about to start looking at Masters or MBA programs in my area. I’ll have almost 10 years of experience by then and happy I didn’t do it straight after school.

lotsofpulp2• 7 years ago

The good MBA programs basically require professional work experience at a reputable firm. Generally, you graduate perhaps at age 21 to 23, then work for a few years, then go get an MBA, and finish around 26 to 28.

Edit: See Wharton class stats, shows a mean work experience of 5 years.

https://mba.wharton.upenn.edu/class-profile/

MIT/Harvard/Stanford show similar:

https://mitsloan.mit.edu/mba/admissions/class-2020-profile

https://www.hbs.edu/mba/admissions/class-profile/Pages/defau...

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/programs/mba/admission/class-pr...

PeterisP• 7 years ago

This is a quite solid concept. Especially regarding MBA's there's a lot of people management concepts where you can't really get the proper context without having seen in practice the environment in which they'd be applied, and you can't get that environment in a classroom. There are professional MBA programs which require a few years of work experience to join, and it makes quite a difference IMHO.

I'm not that certain about CS. If you're doing software engineering (or research on 'meta-SE' e.g. methodology, architecture, programming languages), then yes, it'd make all sense to get some industry experience between college and masters; however if you're going to grad school for theoretical CS or machine learning or cryptography or quantum algorithms or any other directions of primarily academic research, then industry experience is helpful but definitely isn't necessary.

raleigh_user• 7 years ago

I did school => work => now going back to school. Granted I didn’t study CS undergrad but taught myself a lot.

Since, I’ve learned and worked on some interesting problems. I want to work in big tech or in consulting. To do so, I need to be a lot better and/or have great grades.

So spending 2 years going back to school and improving seems worth it to me.

I have 0 student loans from undergrad and very minimal commitments as is.

rongenre2• 7 years ago

Grad school really needs to have a cost/benefit analysis applied. I'd have loved to go and really deepen my understanding, but it's pretty clear that both in terms of income lost and not a huge premium paid by the industry over my BS and experience it's not worth it.

It is something I may pursue if I get a windfall and am no longer concerned about retirement.

throwayEngineer2• 7 years ago

1 out of 10 masters classes changed my life. I imagine my peers had 0/10.

A masters degree doesn't pay in dollars, but experience that can set you apart in the future.

resoluteteeth2• 7 years ago

A masters degree doesn't pay in dollars, but experience that can set you apart in the future.

Surely "experience that can set you apart in the future" can be captured in calculations of lifetime earnings?

commandlinefan• 7 years ago

cost/benefit analysis

There's no benefit, so unless there’s no cost, don’t do it. I got a master’s degree that one of my former employers paid for, about 10 years ago. I enjoyed it, learned a lot, felt like I got out of it, but I have no reason to believe that it’s added even one dollar to my income: I’m certain I’m in exactly the same place, career-wise, that I would have been if I had just stopped with a four year degree (in fact, there are plenty of people who consider a master’s degree in CS an anti-indicator of competence: http://blog.alinelerner.com/how-different-is-a-b-s-in-comput...).

camjohnson26• 7 years ago

The benefit to me for my MS in comp sci was the networking. Whether you like the concept or not a lot of smart people end up going to these programs and I know people working at FAANG as a direct result. I also got exposed to concepts that no one talked about in undergrad, and it’s nice to have a theoretical focus instead of the practicalities that take over when you start working.

Work experience has been valuable in a different way, and lost income is a big concern. Personally I opted for a 15 month, 4 quarter program to minimize the debt and start earning as soon as possible.

duxup7• 7 years ago

I think maybe the only real way to know what the cost benefit might be for an individual is to just ... go work for a while and then see what you find in your experience and life.

Then you're making a much more educated calculation as far as what you think it might get you, and if you want to go back to school and that.

Just throwing that all on the front end while you're in school seems a bit like gambling.

rongenre2• 7 years ago

The only advantage I can see to going for an MS straight out of undergrad is that your lifestyle should be pretty low-rent.

But doing grad school because you're good at school and don't know what else to do is a trap lots of otherwise smart people fall into.

kurthr• 7 years ago

tldr

The Academy of Art (San Francisco) is just another place that figured out how to scam the loan system by labeling itself a Graduate School where the $limits are higher. Yale is substantially lower priced so it's not about quality or student degree choice... it's about scamming.

sct202• 7 years ago

Privately owned for-profit art school should be a giant warning to anyone thinking of enrolling.

kjs32• 7 years ago

Absolutely this. My stepson (quite talented visual artist) was looking at going to SCAD. We met with the counselor, realized very quickly that they were more than happy to pile him up with a debt load that based on the odds of his getting a job in-field and his earning prospects if he did would see him still paying off his loans should he be fortunate to live into his second century.

musicale• 7 years ago

No kidding. And foisting massive debt on art students just seems abusive.

anonuser123456• 7 years ago

"But I'm following my passion."

crsv4• 7 years ago

As someone who's hiring folks right now, a shocking trend is applicants who chained expensive middle tier private college expenses with middle to low tier private college masters programs - often times unrelated to the ultimately role they're applying to now.

These investments aren't setting them up to be compelling candidates against folks who have equal and sometimes lesser tier schools as their undergraduate education coupled with meaningful real world experience. This carries over to performance in interviews as it related to applied knowledge as well. I'd say when putting a risk lens to this, it doesn't bode well for the likelyhood of timely repayment of this debt at scale.

mediaman• 7 years ago

How much of what you see is people who had pursued master degrees during the economic downturn?

I heard that there was an enormous amount of people exiting the workforce to pursue education when there were few jobs available. Instead they likely got a pile of debt with no real furtherance of career goals as the economy recovered.

crsv4• 7 years ago

This is a great question. There may be some variability by role type, but for the last two hires where I started noticing this trend usually the masters was acquired 17-18 or 18-19 on the resume (2 year masters programs). These are also for mid-level roles as opposed to entry level or senior. Probably a lot of factors but I'd wonder if the readily available access to student loans was the biggest enabler. Just off the cuff I'd be curious if these decisions involved the perception of necessity for masters degrees or in how many cases they simply wanted to prolong the experience of undergrad (college is often a good time, I get it), and with the barrier being no more frictive than the student loan process they navigated for under grad, the decision just being the path of least resistance more than a calculated risk/reward decision.

joker32• 7 years ago

The relationship between the business cycle and demand for graduate school is complicated. Some programs have a very strong countercyclical component to their demand, and others don't. See http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.648... (and section 5 in particular).

vkou• 7 years ago

These investments aren't setting them up to be compelling candidates against folks who have equal and sometimes lesser tier schools as their undergraduate education coupled with meaningful real world experience.

It sounds like you're hiring juniors.

What about seniors? Where would you rank someone with an undergrad + 10 years work experience, versus a masters + 6 years work experience?

What about 20 vs 16?

crsv4• 7 years ago

Mid-levels mostly. Non-technical.

For senior level, and YMMV, but for non-technicals, as time goes on experience beats the education badge and I think as you go higher in the sophistication of the hire the more nuanced the process becomes to where at least at the first level evaluation, formal education becomes increasingly less compelling.

rolltiide2• 7 years ago

out of curious, what roles do you hire for?

in my world which is software engineering: lesser tier, middle tier and ivy league doesn't make a difference for actual wage work, with ivy league seeming to have outsized advantages in capital formation and being around capital in general.

for wage work, no degree + experience is the same as have any degree. completely obliterating the tier of school. people with no experience having the same conundrum whether they have a degree or not, but at least people with a degree can do coding interviews.

crsv4• 7 years ago

Currently mostly non-technical: Marketing, Sales, CX.

The topic of school tier is a messy one. Unless you're in a big org that's running really active recruiting efforts at the source of top tier schools, you may not have a real representative set of high tier applicants to ultimately check for differentiation. This topic also gets political and ideological really quick, but we do have some reasonably sound data that says for example that (and I'm speaking broadly here) people with MBA's from "division 1" style schools tend to annihilate (to put it lightly) lower tier MBA's in work simulation exercises involving business acumen related competencies.

ghobs913• 7 years ago

This is what happens when there's 0 pressure on universities to price their programs competitively. If the government is backing every loan, the schools get paid up front, and the risk is then transferred to the gov to collect, why WOULDN'T a university charge as high a tuition as possible and hop on the gravy train?

Their non-profit status hasn't even done much to keep costs low, as they can just keep hiring tons of redundant administrators and have never-ending construction, thereby justifying higher tuitions as "operating costs".

The dept of education needs to treat universities the same way Medicaid treats healthcare providers. Determine what it actually costs per student per year to run a university, and tell the schools "Accept $x or shove off". If they're going to benefit from gov backed loans, they should play by the govs rules.

Look no further than this chart (https://i.imgur.com/B3sVMjg.png), around 2010 was when the gov started fully backing and giving the loans directly, and conveniently it's when students needs for loans skyrocketed. It's so obvious that colleges took advantage of it.

Enough is enough, this college cost situation is entirely the fault of the gov for allowing it to happen, and it's a massive drag on our economy and the potential of our citizens.

freewilly10403• 7 years ago

This is why I'm so skeptical of the "free college" rhetoric from Elizabeth Warren and the like... The underlying problem is the giant wealth transfer to colleges, and the progressive fixes seem to be to transfer even more wealth to them.

dd362• 7 years ago

Or to do exactly as the OP said: this is what we’ll pay per student.

jimmaswell2• 7 years ago

Free college works just fine elsewhere.

thatfrenchguy• 7 years ago

Well when it’s free & the gov pays, they’ll make sure their budget is tight.

novok2• 7 years ago

State universities in other countries either supply control through very high entrance standards or keeping everything cheap (think the interior of the typical USPS post office).

geodel3• 7 years ago

Right. I do not see media attaching 'Populist' tag to her as they seem to do when they do not like a politician.

Shivetya• 7 years ago

if they want government to pay for college then government should decide what is worthy of being paid for and how much.

after all that is the attitude with regards to medical care.

However I feel a better solution is for the government to still do it as loans but set the rates and required classes for each degree type. simply put there are valueless degree programs out there which only enrich the schools. Colleges would still trip over themselves to offer class and degree programs to fit into these restrictions, those that don't could rely on the private market, endowments, and scholarship programs.

calhoun1374• 7 years ago

This is why I'm so skeptical of the "free college" rhetoric

I assume by "this" you are refering to the OP's statement that "This is what happens when there's 0 pressure on universities to price their programs competitively."

One of the idea's behind free public college is to apply market pressure to private college's, so that they have to price their programs competitively. In a risk free debt financed system, prices will rise, the same dynamic happens for both medical care and real estate.

I am not sure on what basis you think this kind of system would make the problems worse.

Also I am curious, are you in favor of abolishing public high school? What part of your argument against free college does not apply to free high schools? One of the many talking points behind the free college proposal is that in today's job market, a college degree has the some utility that a high school degree used to have.

sjg0072• 7 years ago

Most public colleges had significant funding guarantees in the State budget. A consequence of the 2008 financial crisis was that most State legislatures cut these obligations significantly. Accordingly, colleges had to raise tuition prices to compensate for the lost funding. I see student loans as basically a tax on the middle class. Get an education and a better job and pay an additional 6.5% tax on what you borrowed for 10 years. It would be better to have higher taxes on everyone but this is basically what we have now.

peteretep• 7 years ago

This is why I'm so skeptical of the "free college" rhetoric from Elizabeth Warren and the like...

ITT! American discovers something else almost all of the rich world is doing, claims it can't be done.

tw042• 7 years ago

Like the giant wealth transfer to elementary and high schools...?

As the child of a couple teachers, I can tell you they're both still waiting on this wealth transfer you speak of.

JackFr3• 7 years ago

The dept of education needs to treat universities the same way Medicaid treats healthcare providers. Determine what it actually costs per student per year to run a university, and tell the schools "Accept $x or shove off". If they're going to benefit from gov backed loans, they should play by the govs rules.

This.

Either eliminate Federal aid entirely, or if you want aid, here's the price you're gonna charge.

mertd• 7 years ago

How do you reckon that the government won't keep cutting the cost to make budget for the next shiny fighter jet?

secabeen2• 7 years ago

Their non-profit status hasn't even done much to keep costs low, as they can just keep hiring tons of redundant administrators and have never-ending construction, thereby justifying higher tuitions as "operating costs".

Is there any evidence of non-profit universities doing that? Here's the best expenditure data I have from the Department of Education. Per-student real expenditures are up about 20% over 17 years. That doesn't seem like "hop(ping) on the gravy train".

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_334.30.a...

ac29• 7 years ago

The data you linked to is for private non-profit universities.

At least in the state I went to public university at, its not so much that per-student expenses went up (though they did to some degree), its that the State started funding a far lower percentage of costs, leaving the student (and the student's ability to take loans) to pay for a larger share.

zamfi3• 7 years ago

The dept of education needs to treat universities the same way Medicaid treats healthcare providers. Determine what it actually costs per student per year to run a university, and tell the schools "Accept $x or shove off". If they're going to benefit from gov backed loans, they should play by the govs rules.

This sounds appealing, but healthcare and education are different in some fundamental ways.

People (generally) don't end up in the hospital, on Medicaid, by choice. So there is a moral argument to be made in regulating pricing to avoid the exploitation of sick people who need medical care to survive, by capping prices for that care.

But people do choose to attend Masters degree programs -- they aren't forced to by circumstances outside their own control. The moral argument for preventing exploitation by capping price is much weaker compared with other avenues: transparency about outcomes, truth in advertising, required financial projections, etc. -- give people more data about what a Masters' degree is actually worth, and hopefully they'll make better choices. When you're in the back of an ambulance unconscious you are not able to make any choices, justifying societal intervention.

In education, limiting the amount of loans available / backed by the government for a single individual would do just as much as artificially capping prices. (From the article: "there are no hard caps on how much someone can borrow for graduate school".)

Let the crappy Masters' programs that aren't worth it get exposed and lose enrollment. By capping prices you're implicitly also saying that every Masters' program that charges this much is worth this much, an implication that is very much false. The value of a degree is not really correlated with the cost to provide it -- why base the price on cost rather than value? (Plus, how would you even "determine what it actually costs per student per year to run a university"? This probably depends on a zillion factors like endowment, cost of living, faculty salaries -- and their alternative job prospects -- availability of land and housing, etc. Would you average it across the country? Good luck running a school in NYC or SFBA, then.)

Telling a university how much it can charge for a Masters degree is like telling Tesla how much it can charge for the Model 3.

ghobs913• 7 years ago

If all people were buying Teslas using government-backed loans that the gov was then responsible to collect, while Tesla got paid up front and claimed to be a non-profit, they would absolutely have the right to tell them what they could charge.

If a university is going to call itself non-profit, they should only be charging whatevers needed to cover costs of operating. Tuition has skyrocketed in the last 10-20 years, with no reasonable explanation for what aspect of operating costs has gone up enough to justify that.

ambicapter• 7 years ago

But people do choose to attend Masters degree programs -- they aren't forced to by circumstances outside their own control.

Really? You don't think the climbing housing and living prices and job hiring requirements have anything to do with more people pursuing a Master's degree?

tzs• 7 years ago

What's your evidence that government backed loans have anything to do with this? I haven't been able to find much historical tuition data, but what little I have found (e.g., Stanford going back about 100 years) shows a pretty steady tuition increase over time, at a rate quite a bit above the inflation rate of the time. This was happening before government backed loans became available, and continued happening about the same after they became available.

js2• 7 years ago

"Lessons from Chile’s transition to free college":

https://www.brookings.edu/research/lessons-from-chiles-trans...

HN discussion when it was introduced four years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9514404

An essay by By Andreas Schleicher, Deputy Director for Education and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the Secretary- General, OECD from 2013 that looks at free higher education and concludes that a combination of public/private financing seems best:

http://www.oecd.org/forum/education-for-all.htm

OECD data show that tertiary education creates large social benefits in the form of economic growth, social cohesion and citizenship values that justify public investment. Equally, in light of the very significant–and growing–private benefits of tertiary qualifications, individual graduates should be expected to bear some of the cost, too. The case for costsharing is strongest when tight public budgets would otherwise lead to cuts in the number of tertiary students, a decline in the quality of instruction, or a decrease in the resources available to support disadvantaged students. Cost-sharing allows systems to continue to expand with no apparent sacrifice of instructional quality, and makes institutions more responsive to student needs. Institutions also become less reliant on taxpayers’ money and are able, within certain limits, to raise their own funds. The savings from these kinds of arrangements can be used to broaden access to tertiary education by expanding student support systems.

All things in moderation, however. Countries that rely solely on the market to determine the cost of higher education, such as the United States, often see tuition fees rise to such stratospheric levels that higher education becomes inaccessible to many prospective students. And that, in turn, undermines these countries’ own intentions of raising the level of their populations’ educational attainment. Thus, there is a case to be made for fee-stabilisation policies that contain costs.

conanbatt5• 7 years ago

Countries that rely solely on the market to determine the cost of higher education, such as the United States,

This essay ends with a correlation but not causation conclusion. It is not the free market that makes private colleges expensive in the US.

leetcrew4• 7 years ago

Countries that rely solely on the market to determine the cost of higher education, such as the United States

is this a joke? it's true only in the extremely narrow sense that the US does not directly legislate the price of private college tuition.

belljustin95• 7 years ago

That chart illustrates federal student loans, not (federal + private) student loans. The total has been only been increasing linearly, as shown by this chart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_debt#/media/File:Stude...), while the percentage owned by the federal government has drastically increased.

JackFr3• 7 years ago

I'm not sure what societal purpose is being served by Federal student loans as a class for graduate school. Eliminate them entirely.

The primary effect will be to reduce the disconnect between the cost and the value. As an added benefit prices should come down, schools at the margin will fail.

elliekelly• 7 years ago

And number of graduate degrees conferred should come down. I'm not sure what purpose is being served by the vast majority of graduate degrees other than being a requirement to get your "foot in the door" because everyone else has one, too.

madengr2• 7 years ago

Who the hell pays for an MS?

At least back when I was in engineering grad school, everyone was covered by RA or TA grants, in addition to being paid by those.

Of course in-state tuition at KU in 1996 was under $100/credit-hour, so if I did pay, those 9 credits/semester would be under $1k total.

__full_pint3• 7 years ago

I’m confused as well, I’ve known a few MS CS students who didn’t do the RA TA Route, but were paying out of pocket. I never asked why because it seemed to be an infringement on their privacy.

bitcoinmoney2• 7 years ago

RA TA requires you are a slave of the professor. If you just want that degree by taking classes and doing a small project then you gotta pay up. Trafeoff

novok2• 7 years ago

There are 2 tiers of graduate studies. Ones paid by grants and are more PhD style and are mostly free as you said. They are selective and do not have a lot of slots.

And the 'free standing' ones that have a lot more slots, are not research focused and cost a lot more. Often seen for professionally licensed professions like psychology, law, or medicine.

Sometimes to a degree where it's a really bad idea. Like in psychology where private grad school costs 5-7 years of your life and $200-$400k of %6-%8 debt for a job that pays $100-150k/yr.

misiti37802• 7 years ago

or your company pays, which is how i got an MS in applied math.

madengr2• 7 years ago

That’s a double edged sword. The schools will charge exorbitant tuition if they know employers are paying for it. Did your employer reimburse you, or was it a direct payment? I took several classes after my MSEE, and employer reimbursed, with the downside that it was taxable.

permatech• 7 years ago

In engineering the quip was always "if you're paying for graduate school you're doing it wrong" ... to even get in the door for most hardware jobs fresh out of school you need a MS. A PhD may be preferred, and will start with a higher salary -- but put in ~5yrs instead of 2. As long as the tuition is covered and you make money as a TA or RA in a low-cost of living area you should come out ahead in the engineering field. Not sure how that translates to software.

Ocerge• 7 years ago

I did undergrad research in school (CS, moved on to industry after I got my BS) and I heard the same thing; all of the grad students I worked with (Masters as well as PhDs) were paid by grants and the like. I went to a large state university that was pretty good at CS but not elite, yet all the people I worked with managed to not go into debt to get their advanced degrees. It's anecdotal I know, but I thought it was a given to never go into debt as a CS/engineering grad student if you can help it.

bitcoinmoney2• 7 years ago

It’s not anecdotal. Some schools even don’t accept you if you don’t have a scholarship for a PhD.

iamatworknow• 7 years ago

In engineering the quip was always "if you're paying for graduate school you're doing it wrong"

This is what I faced pursuing graduate studies in physics as well. Problem was, I graduated from undergrad in 2009 and the only grad school willing to pay for me during the economic downturn had a new, very poorly run program. I (voluntarily) dropped out after a year.

verall• 7 years ago

HW is a bit like this but with some good internship experience and a bachelors at a (>=good public state tier) school companies are interested. Of 4 HW friends I know just getting their bachelors 2 are going to do verif in industry and 2 are planning on PHds.

F_J_H• 7 years ago

Something I've speculated on - being a student provides a person with an identity that is reasonably "high status", or certainly higher status than an entry level position one might be forced to take in absence of a finding a job in one's chosen field of study upon earning a Bachelor's degree. (Especially if it's a Master's program.) So, for some, continuing on with a master's degree is preferable, despite the questionable marginal return.

On the other hand, degree inflation is now a thing. In some fields, those you are competing with you for a job likely have master's degrees already, and you'll suffer by comparison.

*edit: typos

GcVmvNhBsU• 7 years ago

Mentioned in the article is a company called 2U. The Huffington post had an article not too long ago about how online program managers like 2U contribute to the high cost of programs, and how masters programs are specifically targeted because there are not reporting requirements on admissions.

https://www.huffpost.com/highline/article/capitalist-takeove...

prions4• 7 years ago

I went back for my masters in CS after being a civil engineer for two years and learning cs my free time.

These articles panning formal education don't fully grasp how difficult it is to get your foot in the door as a non-cs person whose also working full time.

I also wanted to do something more technical than just web dev, which most career changers seem to land up in. Being a grad student opened a lot of doors into more technical roles in companies that are _only_ reserved for grad students.

Grad school is expensive, but I went in with a solid plan. I mitigated some of this by going to an in-state school with a good CS program and commuting to class. I was very focused in my course choices and was a 4.0 student, which unlocked even more opportunities.

I was able to land two good internships (one in embedded development and one in machine learning) and used that experience to springboard into a high paying role in NYC. I have no problems living alone in the city, paying my loans, and still saving a significant amount of money per paycheck.

This is completely anecdotal but what I'm arguing is that grad school can be a good idea if you have a solid plan of how to get the most out of your education. The people I see who haven't gotten their money's worth came into school and just drifted through while assuming that opportunities would come to them just by virtue of being a grad student.

geodel3• 7 years ago

Well it is not news that it would work out fine for 1% motivated/extraordinary/well-off people. It's the rest who need more caution and be realistic about their prospects.

roymurdock3• 7 years ago

What kind of role are you in now? I'm curious as I work with a lot of embedded devs but see that most of the salary money is flowing towards AI (very unclear what many of these roles actually are) and its less sexy but more concrete counterpart of cloud devops

prions4• 7 years ago

The embedded work was just for an internship at Nokia/Bell Labs. I work at the place where I did my second internship; started doing ML engineering then pivoted to more data engineering work.

You're right about embedded though. Most telecom hardware is a race to the bottom and there were a lot of layoffs at Nokia when I was there.

overkill28• 7 years ago

From the article:

Master’s degrees in fields like computer engineering, education, English, history and math seem to have fewer outlier programs and lower borrowing amounts over all. It’s the less mainstream programs, where vague promises of a lucrative career are easier to make, that seem to encourage irrationally large debt.

iscrewyou3• 7 years ago

I’m a CE too and almost done with my PE. I want to stay engaged with learning after I’m done. And CS is definitely something I want to do afterwards but don’t really want to pursue a Master’s or any schooling. Can you recommend any CS books you loved? Anything iOS related would be great but I’ll take any recommendations from a fellow CE.

prions4• 7 years ago

One of my favorites when I was a CE and looking for interesting usecases for my job was Automate the Boring Stuff with Python. I was able to automate and speed up lot of slow, manual processes like signing and stamping shop drawings.

murphy214• 7 years ago

CE here with only FE (only 25) I taught myself programming in my free time as I work for a state DOT with a decent amount of free time. One of the cool things about CS (specifically data engineering/science) is it sort of is / will be permeating every technical field so you can sort of combine the two.

If your asking about the order I learned things I got pretty good with python for 2 years, tinkered with web stuff intermittently, then started programming in go and that is easily my favorite. I always always focused on geospatial programming which is at least tangentially related to CE.

The cool thing is you can start to see problems and build stuff to fix it in your free time, for example, this is something I built that gives mile points out in the field locally (no service needed), when normally a $800+ DMI is used to the same thing at a much hackier level.

TL:DR; Depending on what your wanting, I don't think you need to go to school to get competent at CS (although I'm sure I lack some fundamentals), just sort of hack on problems that interest you. Also I have had job offers for software / data engineering positions so I am employable in the field as well I guess.

JMTQp8lwXL• 7 years ago

If you have strong computer science fundamentals, you are not limited to just web development. You might start there, but it certainly isn't the be-all and end-all.

blockchainman2• 7 years ago

Excellent article by my hero Thomas Sowell:

http://thelawofentropy.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-scandal-of-c...

noodlesUK• 7 years ago

Every time the topic of universities comes up, I’m reminded of how the staffing makeup of my university has changed, even just in the past 5 years. It’s gone from the majority of staff being academic to a majority being non-academic. Whether this is a symptom or a cause is as yet unclear, but at least here in the UK, a trend towards the wastefulness I hear about in US institutions seems clear. Just this month we’ve started an academic restructure which adds an additional layer of administration staff across the university, replacing the few specifically departmental administrators with a much larger body of admin staff who have a much larger remit.

blockchainman2• 7 years ago

“To quote an official of the U.S. Department of Education, many colleges “choose to increase tuition because they can get away with it.” - The scandal of tuition by Thomas Sowell

dpflan• 7 years ago

I think a good example of good economic value are the growing offerings for M.S. in C.S., like Georgia Tech's OSMCS program which is offered completely online at a price less than $10K total.

""" Tuition & Fees for OMS CS: Tuition: $510 per 3-credit hour course (most OMS CS courses will be 3 credit hours) Fees: $301 per academic term of enrollment ($194 institutional fee + $107 technology fee). Fees are assessed only for those terms in which students are enrolled in courses. """

https://www.omscs.gatech.edu/program-info/cost-payment-sched...

There are other programs, like Data Analytics.

s1mon• 7 years ago

Academy of Art is a real estate company with an education problem. They have countless illegally modified buildings around SF (https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Academy-o...), with a ton of diesel buses spewing pollution to cart around wanna-be artists from all over the world. Note that these students didn't have to show any portfolio to get in, they just needed to come up with the $$$$$ somehow. The owners have a showroom for their classic car collection which isn't generally accessible to even the transportation design students (https://thebolditalic.com/just-how-much-is-academy-of-art-s-...).

diogenescynic• 7 years ago

This is a big reason I chose a cheap state university for my MBA and have paid for it in cash while taking classes part-time. I absolutely wasn’t willing to take out $165,000 at a 9% I test rate for some of the top tier programs and private schools.

heroHACK17• 7 years ago

One thing I wish the article touched on: Why aren't we asking ourselves how current tuition rates got so high in the first place? If the federal government allows public universities to get away with creating administrative roles like 'Director of Picking Blue or Yellow Gatorade for the Football Team', that demands close to six-figure salaries, there's no wonder students have to incur debt to go to school. They aren't paying for their degree, they are paying the salaries of ballooning administrative chaff.

Merrill• 7 years ago

A Master's Degree seems most useful in two cases: 1. to change field if you made a mistake with your Bachelor's, or 2. to enter the US after getting a Bachelor's in your home country.

deepakhj• 7 years ago

California already had free education. See the "California Master Plan for Higher Education." We had to stop because of prop 13.

"The State’s higher education and prison systems are a study in opposites. The prison system saw its state funding in dollars leap 436% between 1980 and 2011. Back then, spending on prisons was a mere 3% of California’s budget; it’s now 10%."

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/california-publ...

https://time.com/4276222/free-college/

https://senate.ucsf.edu/sites/default/files/2017-02/Reclaimi...

Stay_frostJebel• 7 years ago

Let's face it, most humans do not want to think about financial reality, look at Greece, look at a substantial number of the debtors owing that 1.5 Trillion in loans for 'education'. It's one thing to get a meaningful degree, and something entirely different to get a MFA at a school that didn't even review an application portfolio. We try to have some standards for mortgage borrowing, wouldn't it make sense to do the same for education borrowing?

techpop10• 7 years ago

What an idiotic story for the NYT.

OK, so you have a really awful Masters program for art at a for-profit school. So that damns all masters programs?

The problem isn't the school or the loan program... it's that someone would be so ignorant to think there is any sort of return on that kind of investment in education. It's not like the school is lying (that's not the allegation at least). There has got to be some level of personal accountability here. I'm assuming people incurring the debt at this school are adults with an undergraduate degree and I'm assuming if you've made it that far in life, you probably understand debt, the job market and how you might repay that debt.

Normally I'd say a Masters in Journalism is a waste of money but clearly this author might have benefited from learning some critical thinking.

Biggest Offender in Outsize Debt: Master’s Degrees

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