I graduated with an information systems degree about a decade ago, and no employer has ever given me any amount of money for that degree. I have never gotten a bonus or higher pay because of it. Now, I’m seeing so many videos on TikTok and reels lately of students who graduated with a computer science degree costing them upwards of 90K, And they are all packed any huge room with like 20 employers who are hiring for like 300 jobs but there’s like thousands of them…
So basically if you want a digital piece of paper that says you’re “educated”, you can pay $40000 > $350,000. But you’ll never get any amount of money for it from employers, it won’t help you find a job. It’s a myth
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There is a trend on social media to dismiss college as wasteful and expensive. Article after article after data show college is worth it (for some) if planned right.
No, I don’t really want to entertain any suggestion that there is any conspiracy to drive people to college unnecessarily, however there is a LOT of marketing to get people to go. I have NEVER heard of an employer paying a random, off the street hire, for a degree. I have no idea where that came from. Some employers will pay you, or pay for, advancing your education while employed, but that’s rare.
Unfortunately, people don’t do the math that going to get a $150k degree for a job that starts at $39k/yr that doesn’t have a lot of career progression or very limited high-paying positions might not be a good idea.
Nobody cares which college you went to or how exclusive it was, unless you’re getting a job in a field that compares dicks over what school you went to like high finance, or maybe something like a lawyer or physician could open doors at more exclusive institutions. For the rest of us, finding the least expensive college that will offer a decent education should be the mark. After your first industry job, that’s all anyone cares about. Work experience. Same for going to a trade school - which is a perfectly valid choice if the field you’re interested would be better served by going to one.
Don’t just go to college because that’s magically supposed to make things better. It doesn’t. It needs to be a well planned decision with real possibility of career progression at a pace you can realistically hope to make decent money in to pay back any loans and have an improving lifestyle.
I’ll offer that my experience was going to college handily landed me my first two jobs in my industry, however it took over 20 years of working in my industry before I started making enough money to have anything remotely called a “lifestyle”. Unless you’re well-connected and well heeled headed into an industry with crazy starting pay, you’re not gonna just buy all the toys on day one. Most of us are going to take many years before getting comfortable or even treading water.
They have you advocating for the devil instead of wanting a better system.
Nobody should pay money for education. The government should finance schools directly as public services like most civilized countries.
It’s completely unreasonable to expect literal children to do future cost benefit analysis and gamble with their degrees. And it’s not really acceptable to hold individuals who made these choices as children responsible when systemic changes are required to fix the systemic issues.
Tying min wage to inflation would also fix these wage issues.
But tbh nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
I’m so thankful that I chose to only get an Associate’s. Paid in cash by going part time while working full-time in retail. Instead of paying student loans, I bought a house. The university path is useless in IT.
Question from a milleniold abroad: How do you set yourself up for an upper middle class+ job in the US today?
Where I live, the trades are a good alternative if you want to make money earlier in life, but there’s a pretty hard upper limit.
With a university education, you earn nothing for a lot longer, then it takes you at least 10-15 years to catch up, and many never do, but if you want the potential to break out of lower middle class, don’t come from generational wealth, and don’t strike it lucky with founding your own company, there’s no other way.If you want to go the college route, you need to be strategic.
Choose a degree program that has a high return on investment. A lot of universities report salaries. Also ask if there are internship programs and if they are paid; paid internship programs generally mark a higher salary field.
Network in college. Get to know your classmates. Get to know alumni. Build study groups with people who will make you a better student.
Practice leadership. Participate in clubs and student organizations. Learn how to lead groups by leading groups. Go to different events/parties.
That all sounds helpful, useful, and depressing as fuck.
I’m glad I don’t have to deal with all that shit anymore.It is what it is; just getting a college degree by itself isn’t as useful as it was before. Also, some degrees are better than others.
To address your criticism of your degree, it appears that tech, in general, has been undergoing a massive contraction that appears to be structural instead of cyclical.
First off, videos on tiktok aren’t really worth taking seriously. There’s just too much fake garbage on there.
But anyway, the cost of education is absolutely a huge problem. It should be free or very low cost.
That being said, it’s simply demonstrably false to claim that a degree is useless or doesn’t help you get a job. There are many fields where a degree is an absolutely a requirement, like medicine, law, engineering, etc. The specific degree does matter a lot, though, and there are other important job hunting skills that you need to develop in order to actually get a job.
Speaking from personal experience, every job I’ve had thus far (as a software engineer) has listed a 4 year degree as either a hard requirement or strongly preferred. I do not believe recruiters would have given me the time of day were it not for my degree, because they are looking to match as many requirements as possible and are filtering people out. And when applying for jobs, ATS programs routinely filter out job applications with resumes that don’t list a degree.
Job seeking is an extremely gameified system and you have to learn the game in order to beat it. It sucks big time and I loathe doing it, but it’s what you have to do if you want to get high-paying jobs. That, or know someone at a company that can get you a job.
And one thing people don’t really push is that college is meant to build your professional network in the future. A lot of people approach college as a technical education only when it was designed to be a lot more.
Oof. Soon every job is going to ask “HoW mAnY fOlLoWeRs Do YoU hAvE?”
No, but referrals are still going to be a thing. You’ll also have to maintain a reputation in your industry, especially for senior roles.
You get bad results when you expect that people can self certify what they are capable of doing. Word of mouth is still an effective way to see if someone is a good as they say, and that starts in college.
You laugh, but I got my current job through linked in. I started going through old contacts to see if they were in an interesting place with openings, and found one - a guy who had been my VP a few jobs ago was building a new org
Early in my career I knew people without degreees who had managed to get in - once you’re in, you’re in. However their limitations became clear pretty quickly and I don’t believe you could break into the field today without a degree
Even beyond the fact that this is a highly specialized field where a degree is important, it’s a matter of scale. Every opening we have gets literally hundreds of applicants, all of whom have college degrees. We have to begin focusing on the most likely candidates somehow, so yes, no degree and you’re not even in the pile I see
$350,000 is very high pay and is in the clouds. I don’t know what would pay that but somehow I think that those roles are looking for very experienced and niche people.
For my degree it is about $8,000 per semester (after scholarships it is only around 4-6k)
My plan is to get my degree without any dept and then to pickup a bottom rung job and work my way up. I already have a few years of experience so that probably will help a bit.
My son pays 1800€ per year for his IT education, and we as parents would have paid for it if nessecary but it is covered by our government through ‘study finance’. Also covered is his health insurance and public transport. He lives at home, so without the cost for rent and living he will get through without debt, maybe even some savings when he earns his degree, which is required for him to get a job at the American company my wife works.
This company won’t compensate your degree, (I don’t know of any that do anymore after the dot-com bubble), but they will give you courses and further training to give you career options with higher pay.
The big universities are built on lies honestly. The degree is about the same value regardless of how much it costs. (Unless you are coming out of MIT or something although I’ve been told that Ivy league people can be snobby)
They really aren’t, depending on your field. For some fields, connections are critical and certain universities do much better than others. Some fields have an unusual program that give you unique benefits.
But some fields are completely not. My older kid is going into teaching, and
- connections are not important but the state is - although you’ll get some connections from practicing
- you’ll never make a return on investment of an expensive school
- there are schools that specialize, and they’re not Ivy League
On the other hand my niece is going into film and there are literally a handful of universities whose connections are so far above anything else that it’s worth investing ridiculous amounts in that education
It’s more of a minimum requirement for many jobs. It sucks, but I think you’re viewing it wrong. It’s not going to get you anything except maybe keep your resume out of the trash.
I have a 4 year degree and it has never advantaged me, ever. These days you need a perfect resume to even get a call. Even then you’re treated like an expendable henchman in a crime syndicate.
I have a 4 year degree and it has never advantaged me, ever.
You didn’t learn anything at school?
I went to an engineering school, switched majors to biochemistry, and I work an IT job now. My education was invaluable despite being overwhelmingly inapplicable to my current field of work. I learned so much and was exposed to so many people of a similar mindset. Easily one of the most important things I’ve done in life, just from a life experience standpoint.
What advantage do you expect it to give you aside from what you learned and showing you can complete a bachelor’s program?
Have to chime in. I never completed my CS degree because it got too expensive, and I have natural aptitude for computers. I ended up having to work to survive before I could even get the degree. Literally if I hadn’t taken loans at the time I would have been on the streets. I’m sure it’s harder now than when I did it in 2006.
The degree may have kept me from better jobs, but I kept applying out of my league because I have experience (work) and knowledge (professional and self-taught) which you can’t fake. Someone eventually gave me a chance. Now I work there full time with benefits and I still never finished my degree. It was years of struggling. I even re-trained in medicine at the time and still had trouble getting PAID.
So my original like 40ishK is now 60K, and no degree. Cool! Right? That was only for 2-3 years of school. If it had actually been affordable instead of a pig slaughter for cash, I would have got the degree.
Hindsight, it was good experience learning in college. Not worth the cost though. Especially if you can’t finish. The majority of the money went to tuition, required multi-$100 books, gym fees (forced to every student), parking fee which didn’t guarantee parking availability, and many many other nickel-dime expenses they strong arm students over (fees). I didn’t have time to work as a full time student so whatever was left, went to rent. Food. Electric.
It’s very hard to do this without support from family, and inflation and everything else is worse today. So yeah.
Learn from my experiences if you can. Maybe it can all be worth it for me, if someone does just that. Bless you all and your journeys.
There are certain degree paths where it will net you a specific career path. The healthcare field is very particular about the specific degree/certification/licensure you have. In that regard, schooling makes sense for those.
Meanwhile I’ve been a professional software engineer for 9 years now with no college degree.
In tech, it pretty much is a scam, or at best a classist gatekeeping requirement that anybody interested in getting real work done will ignore or handwave away. At least till you get up to the level of having “publish x number of papers per year” as part of the job requirements.
The system has a lot of problems for sure, but IME as a senior software engineer, people without degrees are often lacking in core CS skills and are much less comfortable with the more conceptual aspects of the field like graph theory, systems design, DSLs, etc. Usually database skills aren’t quite as strong either due to not having studied relational algebra and other database concepts.
None of this is to say that someone without a degree can’t be a valuable part of the team, but at the higher levels of seniority, you do want people who have really strong foundations so you can ensure that you actually are building strong foundations. A degree doesn’t guarantee these qualities, but it certainly makes a person much more likely to have them. Not saying someone without a degree can’t possibly achieve this on their own, but it’s quite rare and requires much more self study than most actually do.
I would say that in most cases a person’s commitment to continuous education is more important than what they went to school a decade+ ago. There have been plenty of SWEs that I’ve run into with relevant degrees that never bothered to study since getting their degree and most of them were mediocre at best.
The problem with tech is that academia hasn’t really evolved bachelor’s software teaching from basic theory.
Same, but likely you can demonstrate knowledge and understanding. We have some support from India, and it’s like… really hit or miss. One guy might know a lot (then leaves to better paying job). Otherwise with the low salary the quality is barely acceptable. Difficulty communicating, and often simple computer tasks are still elusive. So if you have and can demonstrate good knowledge and experience of the technologies, you can get a foot in the door.
Never ever stop self-educating in your field.
What is your company looking for in your India resources? I’m convinced a lot of the problem is companies emphasizing low costs when outsourcing. You get what you pay for.
I’ve seen much more consistent results from colleagues in India when the company invests in them as a location with longer term outlook. When you’re not just looking for lowest costs, you can afford better engineers and when you treat them right you can attract better engineers
University in my country for CS cost me boutish US$250 per six months, and this included a nearly state wide ticket for public transport and heavily subsidized good at the student cafeteria.
How much of it was offset by state money? You will end up paying a lot more in taxes than someone in the US.
Of course we are paying more. But we live a way better overall life. Freedom to own guns or to do rampant racism does not feed or educate people, nor does it keep them healthy.
I learnt lots at university, and that has been useful at work, but the degree itself doesn’t seem to matter much. But I’m in tech, and Europe, and university was publicly funded
American universities keep raising the prices and people keep paying. There’s no reason for it to cost that much, beyond profits
On the one hand I can understand that a good professor probably wants to be paid competitively. On the other hand I can’t imagine paying the same cost as a small house per semester.
I think it might be a slightly wasteful system. I haven’t dug deep but this article seems to hint that it’s not all to pay better teachers. E.g:
A study found that the California State University system had 11,614 full-time faculty in 1973, and 12,019 in 2008. During that same time period, administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183, ending up with more administrators than faculty.
DO YOU WANT FRIES WITH THAT?
You are talking about the outcome being pointless, but I’d go further and say that the process of completing college is bullshit as well.
Forced to live in shoebox dorm room for the first year or more in many colleges, being given lectures that are quite simply shit the majority of the time - to the point that it was the norm to just stop attending lectures and basically just self-teach yourself the textbook - and often taking tests that fail to actually meaningfully test your comprehension of the subject. Then you leave, and quite often you completely forget a large portion of what you studied as you enter the job market and never have to apply that knowledge again.
College makes more sense when you look at a diploma as being able to conquer an ordeal instead of just learn topics in class.
But if it’s just about conquering an ordeal, then there should be more variety. I’d rather kill Madusa than sit through a 4 year degree.
It isn’t about conquering any kind of ordeal. College was designed to create leaders, not just teach academic subjects. A lot of people complaining here are focusing on the classwork when there are other skills that are supposed to be taught.
Maybe you suck at your job and don’t realize it.
Have you even seen the bullshit job listings in the USA?
5 years experience required for a programming language that had only even existed for 2 years comes to mind. Even the language developer wouldn’t qualify for the job. 🤦♂️
that’s so they can say they tried for the H1B visas
Oof, sounds about right ☹️
5 years experience required for a programming language that had only even existed for 2 years
If this is the level of bullshit on the job listing, do you actually want that job?
If yes: if they’re bullshitting, why don’t you?
I have soldering experience going back ~25 years. Why bullshit on a new language rather than just go in with examples of my soldering and electronics skills?
To me, that job listing is a red flag and I’d not want to have that job if the bullshit is starting before I even apply. It’s probably only going to get worse if that’s the start.
If I really did want the job, and I knew they were outright bullshitting, I’d not feel bad about bullshitting them back.
Even if so, does it justify some boomer parasite getting paid a wage for this “education”?
