6 ms·

Which degrees give the best financial returns?

52 points by theocs 11y ago

mwhuang2 11y ago
Good to hear that engineering is less dependent on institutional prestige. As someone who doesn't attend a name-brand university, I hope to be evaluated more for my skills than for the school I went to.
- brianwawok 11y ago
  It may make your first offer harder. Some companies are way more likely to put a booth at the career fair of MIT compared to Foo State. After that meh.. some people care about schools, many do not.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - santaclaus 11y ago
    I would imagine that the social network one builds in college can help later on, too, if only for internal referrals. I would be interested to see what percentage of Google employees attended Stanford vs. other schools vs. started professionally programming without a college degree.
- morgante 11y ago
  Just find some way to get yourself into the "in network." That can be attending a prestigious university, but you can also get it from the right internships or hackathon connections. I didn't attend a traditionally top-ranked university, but it turns out that the majority of my useful connections did.
spo81rty 11y ago
On the developer side I have seen studies showing those with less college actually make more than those with the most college education. Good programmers are self taught. It is in their blood. Getting a masters degree in computer science doesn't guarantee you are a good developer. It isn't a requirement or necessary like some other careers. It's meaningless compared to on the job experience. At my last startup, the first 3 developers, including myself, all lacked a college degree. We kicked butt and knocked it out of the park.
- quaffapint 11y ago
  Depends upon where you want to work. If you want to work for smaller or startups, I would imagine you could get away with less college education if you have the background and skills, but for fortune 500 enterprise type gigs, the paper is still often required to even be considered.
  - santaclaus 11y ago
    I have a good friend who has been a developer at various hedge funds and financial institutions for a while now, and his applications were highly focused on credentials across his educational career. They wanted everything from his SAT and GRE scores to his transcript and grades from his masters.
- nickff 11y ago
  This is survivorship bias in action. If you compared all university-educated developers to all self-taught developers, you might have a valid comparison. If you only compare startup-employed university-educated developers to their self-taught brethren, you run into selection bias issues. For one thing, you are discarding all unemployed self-taught programmers (who may be very motivated, but not very good). Another issue is that university-educated programmers have various other characteristics (such as greater conformism) that reduce the likelihood they will want to work at a startup, or be successful in that environment. Self-taught developers who get hired to 'good' startups are also likely to have achievements that made their resume more appealing to the interviewer than a university degree; this means the self-taught developers who get hired are probably more accomplished.
  - tonyedgecombe 11y ago
    I think you need to compare people who have an offer to study and refuse it to those who have an offer and accept. I'd be surprised if the difference in this case was large for developers.
    - nickff 11y ago
stickhandle 11y ago
No argument with the premise or results. That said, if I were to advise a 16 yo self, I would include consideration for skilled trades. A plumber/electrician/hvac specialist with decent business/accounting/bookkeeping skills can pretty much write their own ticket past apprenticeship.
- morgante 11y ago
  I don't think anyone who can cut it as a top maths/eng graduate should consider a trade. It's a gross misuse of their skills and will definitely lead to lower returns over their lifetime. Skilled trades are a great option for a mediocre student with no real interests, but it's not really an ideal alternative to tech.
  - Spooky23 11y ago
    I've seen plenty of talented devs slinging shitty enterprise crud apps or building Facebook for hamsters. The average dev does ok until he hits 40, unless you embed in the right enterprise. A smart, ambitious person in a skilled trade (or even not so skilled) can can make a lot of money and have rewarding work. My neighbor prints money as running an excavation & dumptruck business. He uses the cash to buy property and find his wife's fledgling business. Every time a building burns, floods, etc in my city, he has a 1/5 chance of making about $75k at 80% margin. And that is a tiny part of the business.
    - morgante 11y ago
      A smart, ambitious developer will make an order of magnitude more than a smart, ambitious tradesperson over their lifetime. Work at Google for 10 years and you'll have plenty of money to buy any property you want. It's not like this is something we have to debate. The average developer easily makes more than the average plumber, with a lot more potential for upside. [1] [2] [1] http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Developer/Salary http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Developer/S... [2] http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Plumber/Hourly_Rate http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Plumber/Hourly_Rate
GoodJokes 11y ago
Which degrees give the best societal return? yay capitalism
zhte415 11y ago
One of the comments to the article makes the very valid point no control for sex is done, and Math/CompSci/Engineering degrees are much more male dominated. Could this also be expanded to location? Salaries in high cost locations tend to be higher. Salaries, over 1 or 20 years, are not the same thing as take-home net of living and property costs. Are Math/CompSci/Engineering employment paths located in higher cost locations? I don't know, but they could be.
dpweb 11y ago
It's problematic looking at salaries college students vs. non-college students, as if the single choice of going to school or not makes the difference, and getting the degree assures the good pay. Too many recent graduates know better. Obviously college students would make more than non-college. Just for the fact that supply and demand in the job market - less people will go further in their education and so the college grad, masters, PhD is going to be less supply. Looking at salary as a return on investment of tuition however, that is shoddy. The very smart person will make more money (if they decide that is important to them), but not because they went to college - other personal characteristics will determine that.
morgante 11y ago
One huge factor that this study apparently left out is that more prestigious universities can generally offer much better financial aid, and hence offer a much better ROI for middle and low income students. MIT and Podunk U might have the same effect on your salary, but if MIT is charging you only $5,000 a year (including room & board), it's going to be an order of magnitude better ROI.
intopieces 11y ago
It seems that in America, there can be no education for education's sake; post-secondary pursuit of knowledge has been so monetized that 18-year-olds are expected to see into the future and determine the earning prospects over their 50-year-career. If your interests are in less paying fields you are the target of constant derision. These articles and charts change nothing. They merely allow the prized few whose talents and interests line up with the capitalist zeitgeist to pat themselves on the back and shun all those little people who dared to pursue their own genuine interest with their own life and their own money.
- douche 11y ago
  In the US, we can't go to university for $500 a year, like in some European countries. Or like our parents did a generation ago. You've got to come up with the scratch somehow to pay for the education, and that comes in, on average, somewhere north of $20k per year. Most people take out student loans, and graduate with the equivalent of a medium mortgage-worth of debt out of the gate. If you get a degree in some squishy field, you're taking the risk that you're going to sentence yourself to a decade or more of near-poverty because of the combination of loan debt and low salary/lack of occupation in that field, or you have to double-down and go to grad school, racking up more years of debt. Then you might find that you haven't bought yourself much advantage with the two or three years and $75k you spent. It's always your decision what to do. Fiscal prudence shouldn't be a target of derision either. You can always go pursue your passions on your own time after you put food on the table.
  - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    None of what you said actually enables anyone to make accurate, or even rational, forecasts of which educations will be the most profitable 50 years into the future. Even 20-30 is fairly difficult.
    - douche 11y ago
      You may not be able to pick the best horse in the race, but you probably shouldn't bet your life's savings on the three-legged, spavined goat.
bubo_sibiricus 11y ago
That which gives the highest financial return is unrelated to the degree. Political connections and charisma is what makes you the most financially successful. Look at Carly Fiorina - sucks at running a business, but she's rich because she's connected and talks a lot. Same with a lot of CEOs and politicians. It's why many people go to big name schools like Harvard. Not because it's a good school, there are many good schools, but because of the political connections one may make. If you live in Utah and plan to stay there, and you want political connections, you go to BYU, not Harvard, even if you qualify for a full ride at Harvard. Speaking of which, there is definitely something in the water when it comes to BYU and political funny-business. And it ain't ethics.
- vankap 11y ago
  BYU does produce some really good CS grads though :)
bubo_sibiricus 11y ago
That which gives the highest financial return is unrelated to the degree. Political connections and charisma is what makes you the most financially successful. Look at Carly Fiorina - sucks at running a business, but she's rich because she's connected and talks a lot. Same with a lot of CEOs and politicians. It's why many people go to big name schools like Harvard. Not because it's a good school, there are many good schools, but because of the political connections one may make. If you live in Utah and plan to stay there, and you want political connections, you go to BYU, not Harvard, even if you qualify for a full ride at Harvard. Speaking of which, there is definitely something in the water when it comes to BYU and political funny-business. And it ain't ethics.
puranjay 11y ago
Humanities (English) graduate here. I'll be honest: my education did help me understand the world better, but it left me completely and utterly unprepared for a role outside of academia. Fortunately, I've had an entrepreneurial spirit and freelanced my way through college and through extensive self-study, built up a career in marketing. But my college mates who weren't as entrepreneurial, or didn't have as much business sense are suffering. They're working mostly dead end jobs or grinding away at the bottom end of academia. It's not pretty. I would caution anyone going for a humanities degree to think long and hard about their decision. If you're not entrepreneurial, can't hustle, and don't pick up secondary skills (marketing, coding, sales, etc.), you're going to have a hard, hard time.
- flexie 11y ago
  Thank you for the honesty. It is a touchy subject. Whereas there are several examples of graduates or dropouts within humanities who did very well for themselves (most famously superstars as Zuckerberg, Jobs and PG) it's almost always outside the fields they studied. PG didn't set up the most famous philosophical school, Zuckerberg didn't make the largest psychological experiment (or did he?).
  - puranjay 11y ago
    Well, most entertainers, writers, comedians, etc. tend to have a humanities background. But these people (like Patton Oswalt) are outliers; they are so ridiculously talented that they would've done with or without any degree. The more time I spend in humanities, the more I realize that this is a field only for the exceptionally talented or the exceptionally hard working. I'm neither of these things. I just happened to grind away and had a strong analytical mind. This also means that if you get an application from a humanities grad who has 'made it' within or outside the field, you should take notice - it's likely that this grad worked far harder/smarter than a STEM major to get where he is.
jkot 11y ago
That list is missing 'no degree'.
WalterBright 11y ago
Regardless of major, to move past a certain level, some knowledge of business fundamentals is necessary. Things like accounting, marketing, sales, management, finance, etc.

52 points by theocs 11y ago

Good to hear that engineering is less dependent on institutional prestige. As someone who doesn't attend a name-brand university, I hope to be evaluated more for my skills than for the school I went to.

brianwawok 11y ago
It may make your first offer harder. Some companies are way more likely to put a booth at the career fair of MIT compared to Foo State. After that meh.. some people care about schools, many do not.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- santaclaus 11y ago
  I would imagine that the social network one builds in college can help later on, too, if only for internal referrals. I would be interested to see what percentage of Google employees attended Stanford vs. other schools vs. started professionally programming without a college degree.
morgante 11y ago
Just find some way to get yourself into the "in network." That can be attending a prestigious university, but you can also get it from the right internships or hackathon connections. I didn't attend a traditionally top-ranked university, but it turns out that the majority of my useful connections did.

spo81rty 11y ago

On the developer side I have seen studies showing those with less college actually make more than those with the most college education. Good programmers are self taught. It is in their blood. Getting a masters degree in computer science doesn't guarantee you are a good developer. It isn't a requirement or necessary like some other careers. It's meaningless compared to on the job experience. At my last startup, the first 3 developers, including myself, all lacked a college degree. We kicked butt and knocked it out of the park.

quaffapint 11y ago
Depends upon where you want to work. If you want to work for smaller or startups, I would imagine you could get away with less college education if you have the background and skills, but for fortune 500 enterprise type gigs, the paper is still often required to even be considered.
- santaclaus 11y ago
  I have a good friend who has been a developer at various hedge funds and financial institutions for a while now, and his applications were highly focused on credentials across his educational career. They wanted everything from his SAT and GRE scores to his transcript and grades from his masters.
nickff 11y ago
This is survivorship bias in action. If you compared all university-educated developers to all self-taught developers, you might have a valid comparison. If you only compare startup-employed university-educated developers to their self-taught brethren, you run into selection bias issues. For one thing, you are discarding all unemployed self-taught programmers (who may be very motivated, but not very good). Another issue is that university-educated programmers have various other characteristics (such as greater conformism) that reduce the likelihood they will want to work at a startup, or be successful in that environment. Self-taught developers who get hired to 'good' startups are also likely to have achievements that made their resume more appealing to the interviewer than a university degree; this means the self-taught developers who get hired are probably more accomplished.
- tonyedgecombe 11y ago
  I think you need to compare people who have an offer to study and refuse it to those who have an offer and accept. I'd be surprised if the difference in this case was large for developers.
  - nickff 11y ago

stickhandle 11y ago

No argument with the premise or results. That said, if I were to advise a 16 yo self, I would include consideration for skilled trades. A plumber/electrician/hvac specialist with decent business/accounting/bookkeeping skills can pretty much write their own ticket past apprenticeship.

morgante 11y ago
I don't think anyone who can cut it as a top maths/eng graduate should consider a trade. It's a gross misuse of their skills and will definitely lead to lower returns over their lifetime. Skilled trades are a great option for a mediocre student with no real interests, but it's not really an ideal alternative to tech.
- Spooky23 11y ago
  I've seen plenty of talented devs slinging shitty enterprise crud apps or building Facebook for hamsters. The average dev does ok until he hits 40, unless you embed in the right enterprise. A smart, ambitious person in a skilled trade (or even not so skilled) can can make a lot of money and have rewarding work. My neighbor prints money as running an excavation & dumptruck business. He uses the cash to buy property and find his wife's fledgling business. Every time a building burns, floods, etc in my city, he has a 1/5 chance of making about $75k at 80% margin. And that is a tiny part of the business.
  - morgante 11y ago
    A smart, ambitious developer will make an order of magnitude more than a smart, ambitious tradesperson over their lifetime. Work at Google for 10 years and you'll have plenty of money to buy any property you want. It's not like this is something we have to debate. The average developer easily makes more than the average plumber, with a lot more potential for upside. [1] [2] [1] http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Developer/Salary http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Developer/S... [2] http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Plumber/Hourly_Rate http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Plumber/Hourly_Rate

GoodJokes 11y ago

Which degrees give the best societal return? yay capitalism

zhte415 11y ago

One of the comments to the article makes the very valid point no control for sex is done, and Math/CompSci/Engineering degrees are much more male dominated. Could this also be expanded to location? Salaries in high cost locations tend to be higher. Salaries, over 1 or 20 years, are not the same thing as take-home net of living and property costs. Are Math/CompSci/Engineering employment paths located in higher cost locations? I don't know, but they could be.

dpweb 11y ago

It's problematic looking at salaries college students vs. non-college students, as if the single choice of going to school or not makes the difference, and getting the degree assures the good pay. Too many recent graduates know better. Obviously college students would make more than non-college. Just for the fact that supply and demand in the job market - less people will go further in their education and so the college grad, masters, PhD is going to be less supply. Looking at salary as a return on investment of tuition however, that is shoddy. The very smart person will make more money (if they decide that is important to them), but not because they went to college - other personal characteristics will determine that.

morgante 11y ago

One huge factor that this study apparently left out is that more prestigious universities can generally offer much better financial aid, and hence offer a much better ROI for middle and low income students. MIT and Podunk U might have the same effect on your salary, but if MIT is charging you only $5,000 a year (including room & board), it's going to be an order of magnitude better ROI.

intopieces 11y ago

It seems that in America, there can be no education for education's sake; post-secondary pursuit of knowledge has been so monetized that 18-year-olds are expected to see into the future and determine the earning prospects over their 50-year-career. If your interests are in less paying fields you are the target of constant derision. These articles and charts change nothing. They merely allow the prized few whose talents and interests line up with the capitalist zeitgeist to pat themselves on the back and shun all those little people who dared to pursue their own genuine interest with their own life and their own money.

douche 11y ago
In the US, we can't go to university for $500 a year, like in some European countries. Or like our parents did a generation ago. You've got to come up with the scratch somehow to pay for the education, and that comes in, on average, somewhere north of $20k per year. Most people take out student loans, and graduate with the equivalent of a medium mortgage-worth of debt out of the gate. If you get a degree in some squishy field, you're taking the risk that you're going to sentence yourself to a decade or more of near-poverty because of the combination of loan debt and low salary/lack of occupation in that field, or you have to double-down and go to grad school, racking up more years of debt. Then you might find that you haven't bought yourself much advantage with the two or three years and $75k you spent. It's always your decision what to do. Fiscal prudence shouldn't be a target of derision either. You can always go pursue your passions on your own time after you put food on the table.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  None of what you said actually enables anyone to make accurate, or even rational, forecasts of which educations will be the most profitable 50 years into the future. Even 20-30 is fairly difficult.
  - douche 11y ago
    You may not be able to pick the best horse in the race, but you probably shouldn't bet your life's savings on the three-legged, spavined goat.

bubo_sibiricus 11y ago

That which gives the highest financial return is unrelated to the degree. Political connections and charisma is what makes you the most financially successful. Look at Carly Fiorina - sucks at running a business, but she's rich because she's connected and talks a lot. Same with a lot of CEOs and politicians. It's why many people go to big name schools like Harvard. Not because it's a good school, there are many good schools, but because of the political connections one may make. If you live in Utah and plan to stay there, and you want political connections, you go to BYU, not Harvard, even if you qualify for a full ride at Harvard. Speaking of which, there is definitely something in the water when it comes to BYU and political funny-business. And it ain't ethics.

vankap 11y ago
BYU does produce some really good CS grads though :)

bubo_sibiricus 11y ago

puranjay 11y ago

Humanities (English) graduate here. I'll be honest: my education did help me understand the world better, but it left me completely and utterly unprepared for a role outside of academia. Fortunately, I've had an entrepreneurial spirit and freelanced my way through college and through extensive self-study, built up a career in marketing. But my college mates who weren't as entrepreneurial, or didn't have as much business sense are suffering. They're working mostly dead end jobs or grinding away at the bottom end of academia. It's not pretty. I would caution anyone going for a humanities degree to think long and hard about their decision. If you're not entrepreneurial, can't hustle, and don't pick up secondary skills (marketing, coding, sales, etc.), you're going to have a hard, hard time.

flexie 11y ago
Thank you for the honesty. It is a touchy subject. Whereas there are several examples of graduates or dropouts within humanities who did very well for themselves (most famously superstars as Zuckerberg, Jobs and PG) it's almost always outside the fields they studied. PG didn't set up the most famous philosophical school, Zuckerberg didn't make the largest psychological experiment (or did he?).
- puranjay 11y ago
  Well, most entertainers, writers, comedians, etc. tend to have a humanities background. But these people (like Patton Oswalt) are outliers; they are so ridiculously talented that they would've done with or without any degree. The more time I spend in humanities, the more I realize that this is a field only for the exceptionally talented or the exceptionally hard working. I'm neither of these things. I just happened to grind away and had a strong analytical mind. This also means that if you get an application from a humanities grad who has 'made it' within or outside the field, you should take notice - it's likely that this grad worked far harder/smarter than a STEM major to get where he is.

jkot 11y ago

That list is missing 'no degree'.

WalterBright 11y ago

Regardless of major, to move past a certain level, some knowledge of business fundamentals is necessary. Things like accounting, marketing, sales, management, finance, etc.