8 ms·

'My degree is next to worthless'

37 points by simonhamp 11y ago

Someone1234 11y ago
This is interesting: > A majority of graduates in the UK are getting jobs where they do not need a degree, according to a report. But I have to say the three examples are not. Two of the three degrees are jobless anyway, and the one that isn't ("town planning") is extremely specific, and as the article said the dude just got unlucky. Please list off what jobs are available for "conservation biology" and "politics and philosophy" which ARE degree specific. If it is true that the "majority of graduates" aren't getting jobs where their degree applies, that is genuinely interesting, and something worth discussing. The rest of the article is just "I did a stupid degree and didn't get a job!"
- sanxiyn 11y ago
  Re: conservation biology, Google sent me to Society for Conservation Biology Career Center: http://careers.conbio.org/ http://careers.conbio.org/
  - pjc50 11y ago
    The only UK place it seems to be aware of is London, where there is exactly one job within 100 miles.
- saint_fiasco 11y ago
  >Two of the three degrees are jobless anyway >The rest of the article is just "I did a stupid degree and didn't get a job!" This is interesting in itself. Why do people spend so much time and money on something like that? The town planner was unlucky. Not much can be done about that. The 'politics and philosophy guy' says he was misled. He does not say his age, but I bet he was young and immature when he chose his mayor. The conservation biologist says she wanted to work in something that helps people and not just make money. If she had given half of the money she used to study biology to whichever organization she hoped would hire her, she would have saved money, time, and would have helped more. The article doesn't really give an answer, but it raises an important question.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    Note that UK degrees don't have "majors": you pick a subject at about 17 before you're doing your final "high school"-level exams. The whole thing is probably fallout from the Blairite changes to the system. It used to be that degrees were free and scarce - limited by academic admissions criteria. They have been changed to widespread and loan-based. People expect them to have the door-opening prestige of the old system and haven't really adapted to them becoming an expensive trade school for the middle class.
    - tonyedgecombe 11y ago
      The problem isn't so much that they are no longer door-opening, it's rather that not having a degree has become door-closing.
      - saint_fiasco 11y ago
        I wonder if that's really true. I understand that nobody wants to do the experiment with their own lives, but if you can realize that there are competent people who aren't getting hired because they lack college degrees, surely employers will realize that too. Would they leave money on the table like that?
  - NullCharacter 11y ago
    > Why do people spend so much time and money on something like that? Probably because it makes them feel unique and special. It's a badge they can wear that sets them apart. Nobody really advertises that they're getting a History/Literature or CompSci/Engineering (or some other dime-a-dozen major) degree without being prompted, but I guarantee you that girl that's studying "Oriental Medicine and Horticulture" or that guy that's majoring in "Fermentation Sciences" are going to tell everyone they meet.
- tomwphillips 11y ago
  >The rest of the article is just "I did a stupid degree and didn't get a job!" I agree that the examples in the article aren't great. I think "I did a stupid degree and didn't get a job!" is a bit unfair. In my state-run sixth form college (age 16-18 in the UK) all students were encouraged to go to university. But unfortunately, and I think wrongly, many were encouraged to study subjects which required both exceptional talent and luck to end up working in the field, e.g. music technology, fine art, and photography. Fair enough if they want to do it for personal reasons, but a lot of people were sold university courses (by further and higher ed institutions) as a way into a careers that don't really exist or very few in number.
- frobozz 11y ago
  It isn't just about specific relevant degrees, but a question of job level. In the 1990s and earlier, one would undertake a degree, possibly in a strictly academic discipline such as history or philosophy, and, if one didn't then enter academia, one might (for example) join a Graduate Training Programme at a big company or the Civil Service, and become a management consultant, strategic analyst, policy advisor, or some other such position that is considered to require the kind of intellectual rigour that is supposed to be evidenced by achieving a degree. i.e. a "graduate level" position. Politics and Philosophy is exactly the kind of degree that such positions used to crave. Now, such people are becoming bartenders, receptionists and estate agents, jobs that would historically have been occupied by those with little or no post-16 education. I have no idea of the ratio of graduates of vocational vs academic degrees, but given the number of non-vocational degrees available, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of graduates have "jobless" degrees. Also, given that the banking sector seems to be hoovering up graduates in numerate disciplines, and that a PhD is now often the entry requirement for Bench Science jobs. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of (e.g) Chemistry graduates are going into finance for big bucks now, instead of taking on a further 3-4 years of low wages to get the qualifications to start a relevant career. I find the level of scorn that is nowadays placed on non-STEM pure academic degrees interesting, as though anything other than vocational education is a waste of time. When I was an undergraduate, it was shortly after all the polytechnics became universities. At that time scorn was mostly heaped upon all the new vocational degrees.
  - netcan 11y ago
    On one hand, I do think that graduates entering long term employment as bartenders have good reason to feel cheated. But, I'm not entirely sure how to think about this on the macro level. One way is that in the 90s most bartenders were high school educated. We as a society and they spent a lot of time and money educating them to University level for no reason. Bartending demands haven't change much. Taking that further though, a generation prior most bartenders were primary educated and that worked too. If we keep rolling back to illiterate bartenders we probably hit a point where the education is actually useful. You're better off to a literate bartender, but it seems like the 0-marginal-return-on-education for a bartender line was crossed before University. If everyone is to be University educated (the trend leads here), then we'll either have no bartenders or university educated bartenders. ^Obviously, there was always a mix of education levels among bartenders. I'm talking about trends and volume.
stillsut 11y ago
Here's one job that might be open: Photographer for the BBC. Article features one corny stock image + 3 webcam myspace shots?
- nine_k 11y ago
  Maybe this is exactly because the job is not open, and isn't going to be? Everyone need to cut costs.
pjc50 11y ago
A key point here is that surveying the job market before embarking on your degree is not sufficient: there's a four year lag. The guy with the master's in town planning is an obvious victim of this. A more subtle point is that the more specific the degree is the more vulnerable it is to obsolescence or changing market conditions. People keep saying "we need more STEM graduates", but without being more specific about exactly what degrees people should do it's just going to result in more of this kind of problem.
- nine_k 11y ago
  I suspect that a "non-specific" degree in STEM is more valuable than a narrowly specific one. The very point of university education is to produce an individual with a broad spectrum of knowledge, who in the future can adapt to various specific conditions, probably not known or not existing by the moment of graduation. If a four-year lag has any chance to eat your job, what's the point of getting a degree for it? A degree should land you jobs for several decades to be worth the investment.
- hackerboos 11y ago
  The data is not always that good. For example, the BBC ranked Computer Science as one of the worst degrees to have when looking for a job: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7549106.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7549106.stm I've also seen it on the top 10: http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/these-are-the-10-best-degree-subjects-for-landing-a-job-after-university--ekxmpyJMZZ http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/these-are-the-10-best-... Although there's a 5 year difference.
  - Yhippa 11y ago
    When I went to university in the late 90's we saw the same thing. CS degrees were so hot that they rationed entry into the program where I went. Fast forward to 2001 and you have the dot-com bust. At that moment in time I'm sure there were a ton of statistics like this discouraging people from going into that major.
  - simonh 11y ago
digitalengineer 11y ago
Book idea: "Worthless: The Young Person's Indispensable Guide to Choosing the Right Major" http://www.amazon.com/Worthless-Young-Persons-Indispensable-Choosing/dp/1467978302 http://www.amazon.com/Worthless-Young-Persons-Indispensable-...
sanxiyn 11y ago
Maybe things are changing, but in average, this is not true. OECD Education Indicators in Focus: What are the returns on higher education for individuals and countries? http://www.oecd.org/edu/skills-beyond-school/Education%20Indicators%20in%20Focus%206%20June%202012.pdf http://www.oecd.org/edu/skills-beyond-school/Education%20Ind...
iamthepieman 11y ago
College/University has been a glorified and lengthy job prep center so that HR managers can quickly filter/find candidates to fill another seat. Big institutions like universities don't change fast so the current higher education system we are seeing now is probably one best suited for the business and economic environment of 15 to 20 (or longer) years ago.
mtalantikite 11y ago
We need to stop thinking about an undergraduate university degree as job training, because it's not. Those years are supposed to expose the student to many different topics they wouldn't otherwise encounter. The best thing I learned in undergrad was how to study in a meaningful way and to synthesize concepts from various fields. What people really are looking for is vocational education, which is not what an undergraduate institution is good at doing.
- netcan 11y ago
  The reason people feel societal pressure to get degrees is jobs. It's how universities market themselves and often the only way to justify the cost, in either a public-pays or a user-pays system. So, it's rather disingenuous to turn around and say, well… it's really more of a general education thing. Whether the method is specific career training or general education, a very big part of the end goal is employability. Otherwise we're talking about a completely different (probably much smaller and certainly worse funded) tertiary education system to the one that exists today. Employability is important to people. That's reasonable. People are going to universities for this reason. They are taking loans for this reason. They are being funded by States for this reason. Unemployable graduates is a failure for Universities. I think comments about general enrichment are moving the goal posts. That type of University is an extreme luxury item that only a few can afford.
  - angdis 11y ago
    If that's really the case, then perhaps universities should just dump all their humanities departments, fire the faculty, and re-purpose the buildings, along with any other department that doesn't produce "outcomes". And how do you measure "outcomes"? If you measure it by the first job students get out of college, that's very sad and short-sighted. To really understand the outcomes of education on careers, you need to look at the entire arc of a career-- NOT just the starting point. Employ-ability is really up to the students themselves, NOT their university, and definitely NOT the particular department.
    - netcan 11y ago
lordnacho 11y ago
There needs to be a distinction between "my degree is as if I hadn't done a degree at all" and "my specific degree could have been any other degree". Especially in the UK, your ordinary desk job can be a guy who studied anything, as long as he studied something.
Yhippa 11y ago
One conclusion from this is that okay, since degrees don't seem to help with job prospects then just do an apprenticeship or other program straight to industry. I kind of like that idea but I am worried that people are still looking for people who get their degree as a signal that they could do all the things required to get that degree.

37 points by simonhamp 11y ago

This is interesting: > A majority of graduates in the UK are getting jobs where they do not need a degree, according to a report. But I have to say the three examples are not. Two of the three degrees are jobless anyway, and the one that isn't ("town planning") is extremely specific, and as the article said the dude just got unlucky. Please list off what jobs are available for "conservation biology" and "politics and philosophy" which ARE degree specific. If it is true that the "majority of graduates" aren't getting jobs where their degree applies, that is genuinely interesting, and something worth discussing. The rest of the article is just "I did a stupid degree and didn't get a job!"

sanxiyn 11y ago
Re: conservation biology, Google sent me to Society for Conservation Biology Career Center: http://careers.conbio.org/ http://careers.conbio.org/
- pjc50 11y ago
  The only UK place it seems to be aware of is London, where there is exactly one job within 100 miles.
saint_fiasco 11y ago
>Two of the three degrees are jobless anyway >The rest of the article is just "I did a stupid degree and didn't get a job!" This is interesting in itself. Why do people spend so much time and money on something like that? The town planner was unlucky. Not much can be done about that. The 'politics and philosophy guy' says he was misled. He does not say his age, but I bet he was young and immature when he chose his mayor. The conservation biologist says she wanted to work in something that helps people and not just make money. If she had given half of the money she used to study biology to whichever organization she hoped would hire her, she would have saved money, time, and would have helped more. The article doesn't really give an answer, but it raises an important question.
- pjc50 11y ago
  Note that UK degrees don't have "majors": you pick a subject at about 17 before you're doing your final "high school"-level exams. The whole thing is probably fallout from the Blairite changes to the system. It used to be that degrees were free and scarce - limited by academic admissions criteria. They have been changed to widespread and loan-based. People expect them to have the door-opening prestige of the old system and haven't really adapted to them becoming an expensive trade school for the middle class.
  - tonyedgecombe 11y ago
    The problem isn't so much that they are no longer door-opening, it's rather that not having a degree has become door-closing.
    - saint_fiasco 11y ago
      I wonder if that's really true. I understand that nobody wants to do the experiment with their own lives, but if you can realize that there are competent people who aren't getting hired because they lack college degrees, surely employers will realize that too. Would they leave money on the table like that?
- NullCharacter 11y ago
  > Why do people spend so much time and money on something like that? Probably because it makes them feel unique and special. It's a badge they can wear that sets them apart. Nobody really advertises that they're getting a History/Literature or CompSci/Engineering (or some other dime-a-dozen major) degree without being prompted, but I guarantee you that girl that's studying "Oriental Medicine and Horticulture" or that guy that's majoring in "Fermentation Sciences" are going to tell everyone they meet.
tomwphillips 11y ago
>The rest of the article is just "I did a stupid degree and didn't get a job!" I agree that the examples in the article aren't great. I think "I did a stupid degree and didn't get a job!" is a bit unfair. In my state-run sixth form college (age 16-18 in the UK) all students were encouraged to go to university. But unfortunately, and I think wrongly, many were encouraged to study subjects which required both exceptional talent and luck to end up working in the field, e.g. music technology, fine art, and photography. Fair enough if they want to do it for personal reasons, but a lot of people were sold university courses (by further and higher ed institutions) as a way into a careers that don't really exist or very few in number.
frobozz 11y ago
It isn't just about specific relevant degrees, but a question of job level. In the 1990s and earlier, one would undertake a degree, possibly in a strictly academic discipline such as history or philosophy, and, if one didn't then enter academia, one might (for example) join a Graduate Training Programme at a big company or the Civil Service, and become a management consultant, strategic analyst, policy advisor, or some other such position that is considered to require the kind of intellectual rigour that is supposed to be evidenced by achieving a degree. i.e. a "graduate level" position. Politics and Philosophy is exactly the kind of degree that such positions used to crave. Now, such people are becoming bartenders, receptionists and estate agents, jobs that would historically have been occupied by those with little or no post-16 education. I have no idea of the ratio of graduates of vocational vs academic degrees, but given the number of non-vocational degrees available, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of graduates have "jobless" degrees. Also, given that the banking sector seems to be hoovering up graduates in numerate disciplines, and that a PhD is now often the entry requirement for Bench Science jobs. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of (e.g) Chemistry graduates are going into finance for big bucks now, instead of taking on a further 3-4 years of low wages to get the qualifications to start a relevant career. I find the level of scorn that is nowadays placed on non-STEM pure academic degrees interesting, as though anything other than vocational education is a waste of time. When I was an undergraduate, it was shortly after all the polytechnics became universities. At that time scorn was mostly heaped upon all the new vocational degrees.
- netcan 11y ago
  On one hand, I do think that graduates entering long term employment as bartenders have good reason to feel cheated. But, I'm not entirely sure how to think about this on the macro level. One way is that in the 90s most bartenders were high school educated. We as a society and they spent a lot of time and money educating them to University level for no reason. Bartending demands haven't change much. Taking that further though, a generation prior most bartenders were primary educated and that worked too. If we keep rolling back to illiterate bartenders we probably hit a point where the education is actually useful. You're better off to a literate bartender, but it seems like the 0-marginal-return-on-education for a bartender line was crossed before University. If everyone is to be University educated (the trend leads here), then we'll either have no bartenders or university educated bartenders. ^Obviously, there was always a mix of education levels among bartenders. I'm talking about trends and volume.

stillsut 11y ago

Here's one job that might be open: Photographer for the BBC. Article features one corny stock image + 3 webcam myspace shots?

nine_k 11y ago
Maybe this is exactly because the job is not open, and isn't going to be? Everyone need to cut costs.

pjc50 11y ago

A key point here is that surveying the job market before embarking on your degree is not sufficient: there's a four year lag. The guy with the master's in town planning is an obvious victim of this. A more subtle point is that the more specific the degree is the more vulnerable it is to obsolescence or changing market conditions. People keep saying "we need more STEM graduates", but without being more specific about exactly what degrees people should do it's just going to result in more of this kind of problem.

nine_k 11y ago
I suspect that a "non-specific" degree in STEM is more valuable than a narrowly specific one. The very point of university education is to produce an individual with a broad spectrum of knowledge, who in the future can adapt to various specific conditions, probably not known or not existing by the moment of graduation. If a four-year lag has any chance to eat your job, what's the point of getting a degree for it? A degree should land you jobs for several decades to be worth the investment.
hackerboos 11y ago
The data is not always that good. For example, the BBC ranked Computer Science as one of the worst degrees to have when looking for a job: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7549106.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7549106.stm I've also seen it on the top 10: http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/these-are-the-10-best-degree-subjects-for-landing-a-job-after-university--ekxmpyJMZZ http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/these-are-the-10-best-... Although there's a 5 year difference.
- Yhippa 11y ago
  When I went to university in the late 90's we saw the same thing. CS degrees were so hot that they rationed entry into the program where I went. Fast forward to 2001 and you have the dot-com bust. At that moment in time I'm sure there were a ton of statistics like this discouraging people from going into that major.
- simonh 11y ago

digitalengineer 11y ago

Book idea: "Worthless: The Young Person's Indispensable Guide to Choosing the Right Major" http://www.amazon.com/Worthless-Young-Persons-Indispensable-Choosing/dp/1467978302 http://www.amazon.com/Worthless-Young-Persons-Indispensable-...

sanxiyn 11y ago

Maybe things are changing, but in average, this is not true. OECD Education Indicators in Focus: What are the returns on higher education for individuals and countries? http://www.oecd.org/edu/skills-beyond-school/Education%20Indicators%20in%20Focus%206%20June%202012.pdf http://www.oecd.org/edu/skills-beyond-school/Education%20Ind...

iamthepieman 11y ago

College/University has been a glorified and lengthy job prep center so that HR managers can quickly filter/find candidates to fill another seat. Big institutions like universities don't change fast so the current higher education system we are seeing now is probably one best suited for the business and economic environment of 15 to 20 (or longer) years ago.

mtalantikite 11y ago

We need to stop thinking about an undergraduate university degree as job training, because it's not. Those years are supposed to expose the student to many different topics they wouldn't otherwise encounter. The best thing I learned in undergrad was how to study in a meaningful way and to synthesize concepts from various fields. What people really are looking for is vocational education, which is not what an undergraduate institution is good at doing.

netcan 11y ago
The reason people feel societal pressure to get degrees is jobs. It's how universities market themselves and often the only way to justify the cost, in either a public-pays or a user-pays system. So, it's rather disingenuous to turn around and say, well… it's really more of a general education thing. Whether the method is specific career training or general education, a very big part of the end goal is employability. Otherwise we're talking about a completely different (probably much smaller and certainly worse funded) tertiary education system to the one that exists today. Employability is important to people. That's reasonable. People are going to universities for this reason. They are taking loans for this reason. They are being funded by States for this reason. Unemployable graduates is a failure for Universities. I think comments about general enrichment are moving the goal posts. That type of University is an extreme luxury item that only a few can afford.
- angdis 11y ago
  If that's really the case, then perhaps universities should just dump all their humanities departments, fire the faculty, and re-purpose the buildings, along with any other department that doesn't produce "outcomes". And how do you measure "outcomes"? If you measure it by the first job students get out of college, that's very sad and short-sighted. To really understand the outcomes of education on careers, you need to look at the entire arc of a career-- NOT just the starting point. Employ-ability is really up to the students themselves, NOT their university, and definitely NOT the particular department.
  - netcan 11y ago

lordnacho 11y ago

There needs to be a distinction between "my degree is as if I hadn't done a degree at all" and "my specific degree could have been any other degree". Especially in the UK, your ordinary desk job can be a guy who studied anything, as long as he studied something.

Yhippa 11y ago

One conclusion from this is that okay, since degrees don't seem to help with job prospects then just do an apprenticeship or other program straight to industry. I kind of like that idea but I am worried that people are still looking for people who get their degree as a signal that they could do all the things required to get that degree.