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Wages for college graduates across many majors have fallen since the recession

121 points by bootload 10y ago

manis404 10y ago
Bloomberg is supporting Trump theory of wage stagnation a bit too much lately. Maybe they are being pressured? I know for fact that minimum wage has risen, so wage stagnation cannot be true.
atemerev 10y ago
I don't see how anyone can be hired "straight after college" unless they come straight to Google or Goldman Sachs who can afford _extensive_ training programs. College education these days looks more like a luxury good, not a job prerequisite. It is of more value if you want to do research or work on bleeding edge fields like advanced artificial intelligence or biotech, but if you just want to be a decent software engineer, it doesn't make economic sense anymore, in my opinion. (Disclosure: worked 10 years in the industry before finally getting my degree — because I wanted to move to R&D).
- k-mcgrady 10y ago
  Most people going into software jobs aren't doing a lot of actual development. I've seen people who aren't techy at all and know nothing about code do a 1 year masters and go into a well paid software dev job at very large companies on a decent salary. The only experience they have is maybe 6 months doing a bit of Java. But at the end of the day they're dealing more with bureaucracy than code and bug fixing of already established systems meaning they don't really need knowledge on good architecture and practices.
  - nolite 10y ago
    That's very hard to believe. What companies have you seen that at?
    - watwut 10y ago
      Many guys I know had very little experience beyond few classes in school. Everyone in our year found a job eventually including weakest students. Plenty even studied physics or something similar instead of computer science and then got job in company desperate for people on the basis of "you are smart so we guess you will be able to learn". Actually turned out that if you have brain for physics or math, you can learn programming reasonably fast too. (And ended up being better then weak cs students.) They would not be suitable for all companies and positions obviously, but grasping enough of basics so you can be useful enough to create part of frontend pages/load data from db/whatever with a bit of supervision is not that hard.
    - k-mcgrady 10y ago
      Very common in large businesses like Citi, AllState etc. I know several people who have followed this path. They usually turn out to be people who code very little for a couple of years and then move on to product management roles and things like that.
  - watwut 10y ago
    Having to maintain an older system for a while teaches you more about good architecture and practices then all the theory you can read. People who never had to maintain the thing tend to have very theoretical ideas about what is important and what not. You don't know whether your code is maintainable until you had to maintain it for a while.
- sleepychu 10y ago
  Most of the degree is waste if you want to be a software dev (IMHO). The industry could do really well out of recognizing that it's a vocational occupation and switching to an apprenticeship model.
  - pizza 10y ago
    To zeroth degree approximation, colleges are cert-authorities
    - UK-AL 10y ago
      Vocational education normally is certification based.
      - DoofusOfDeath 10y ago
        Is a technically-focused university diploma fundamentally different than a trade-school certification, aside from the particulars of what material was learned?
        UK-AL 10y ago
        Well the particulars of what taught is exactly the difference. In computer science you will learning about generic concepts like parsers, compilers or whatever. For vocational you would learn about something specific like asp.net mvc.
  - DoofusOfDeath 10y ago
    In my experience, your point is valid regarding some software jobs, but not all. As I've worked my way into more technically demanding roles, it's been very useful to have a foundation of big-O analysis, the expressive power of different levels in the Chomsky hierarchy, (mathematical) optimization theory, graph theory, compilers, and/or computer architecture. Many of these topics could be learned by a bright person on-demand. However, some of the topics are important to be familiar with before taking on a project, because they let you avoid costly, time-consuming mistakes.
- arethuza 10y ago
  When I entered the world of work after graduating from a UK CS course in the late 1980s pretty much all employers expected that fresh graduate hires would need ~6 months before actually being a net gain in productivity. You also didn't need to have direct relevant experience as they were expecting to train you up in whatever it was they did. Now managers expect everyone to "hit the ground running" and as one consequence employees are much more careful about only acquiring skills that will be of use when they come to move to their next role. Hardly surprising.
- splike 10y ago
  The Goldman Sachs graduate training program is a joke. Having gone through it, I doubt that technical training is even the point of it. I think they just get everyone together to have a big holiday so that when the graduates start real work, they have that prebuilt network to help them out. Thats not at all a bad thing, but their technical training is rubbish.
  - atemerev 10y ago
    But for the front office, networking _is_ the job :)
    - splike 10y ago
      Oh yeah absolutely, but I was just talking about the Technology division (where almost all CS grads go).
- Broken_Hippo 10y ago
  If you look at other degrees, it is quite possible to get hired right out of college. Unfortunately, the job might just be management at the local box store. They tend to not care so much about what your degree is in so long as you have one. Nurses generally have no trouble finding work either. "College education these days looks more like a luxury good, not a job prerequisite". This very much depends on the field. I've seen administrative assistant positions that require a college degree, especially if it is at a large company. Sometimes it is just a legal requirement: A school superintendent in indiana needs to have a teaching license. The school business manager doesn't need that - merely a 4 year degree in business, though a masters degree is more normal. You just have to expand the industry you are looking at to find it: obviously, there are lots of exceptions.
- ra1n85 10y ago
  Some companies love college hires. Big tech firms hold campus hiring events. Many companies aggressively go after college grads. Some even go after juniors for internships (which is great for the company - it's a several month opportunity to vet a candidate without commitment. If things work out, the candidate gets invited to come onboard when they graduate). College hires won't get very exciting work initially. At a fast moving company, they're going to be learning on the job (which means they need to be dynamic/adaptable and curious). Unfortunately, this can mean picking up operational work that more seasoned engineers don't enjoy (however, still a great opportunity to learn and grow for most).
sprash 10y ago
Supply and demand. Solution: Don't waste money one college.
- good_vibes 10y ago
  On
  - Broken_Hippo 10y ago
    I thought that at first, but I think he's actually using a little-used saying. It sounds better voiced, with 'one' emphasized, than it reads in text.
    - sprash 10y ago
      Actually it is a typo. Apparently even college education didn't help me here.
    - to3m 10y ago
      OK... but what does that mean?
    - throwanem 10y ago
      Doesn't work that way for me. Can you cite the saying? I know of a dialect in which the 'o' in 'on' is long, but that doesn't change the spelling, and 'one' doesn't sound like it. ('Own' does.)
- eecc 10y ago
  College, for profit little more than professional training centers sure. Proper University no, culture and knowledge is never a waste
  - cmahler7 10y ago
    as a current student I see no value in Universities to be honest other than the gathering of smart people in one place, which could be replicated for far cheaper. Everything else can be learned online for free, universities have no value proposition in the 21st century.
lsjdfkljdfwkwdf 10y ago
What's with all the socialist propaganda from Bloomberg today? Plenty of HN readers make over 100k straight out of college. It's not taxpayers fault that you didnt spend your time wisely in college
- to3m 10y ago
  What would your preferred non-socialist article look like, if it were based on the same data?
  - llamataboot 10y ago
    Lazy college graduates get what they deserve /snark
- kbart 10y ago
  "Plenty of HN readers make over 100k straight out of college." One bubble is not enough to counter data.
- alphonsegaston 10y ago
  Bloomberg is a news outlet named after a billionaire...
- chrisbennet 10y ago
  Ah, The Just World Fallacy... i.e. My success is due to my hard work and life choices. Step 1: Have a big brain. Step 2: Pick wealthy parents. Step 3: Pick a career that doesn't get automated 10 years after you pick it. (Law students Chose Poorly..)
  - ta95949 10y ago
    This isn't a 'fallacy' in any sense of the word. There are plenty of people from advantaged backgrounds who do poorly, and plenty from disadvantaged backgrounds who do well. The reason for that is degree of effort and life choices. Further, this undercurrent of resentment toward people from advantaged backgrounds is rubbish. There's no cosmic roll of the dice that determines into what circumstances a person is born; rather, that's the direct result of parental choices to have children, knowing full well their own life situation.
Kurtz79 10y ago
I'm talking about Europe (where college is in general more affordable and there is no stigma associated to getting your degree from a public school), but if you are looking for employment as a professional at an established company, with no previous experience, not having a degree will definitely make it harder: - To get an interview in the first place. - To get a decent starting salary. - To get into management positions as you progress.
- atemerev 10y ago
  At en established company — most definitely. However, those are not everything there is on the job market.
  - paganel 10y ago
    I think the same way, as I'm my mid-30s and I've always only worked for small(ish) companies as a programmer ever since I dropped out of college, but I had a cultural shock recently, as a close friend of mine had to provide a paper-record (don't know the exact English term) with all his college grades when he recently got hired as a software architect by a medium-to-large software company (500+ devs based in several Eastern European cities). I found that crazy, I guess I'll stick to working at small companies for as long as they'll employ me.
    - davnicwil 10y ago
      > a paper-record (don't know the exact English term) with all his college grades It's usually called a 'transcript' (in British English at least)
      - throwanem 10y ago
        In American, too. (That would be a hell of a strange thing for a potential employer to ask for here, too.)
        sndean 10y ago
kajj 10y ago
I live in Europe, I'm about to finish my Bachelor that I don't care about. I study engineering and don't think I have learned that much and have pretty much been a waste of time. But before I went to University I was unemployed, working as a industrial cleaner, working as a seller in a little Ice cream parlor, and customer support ( through the phone ) and more unemployed. So yes my degree is just to get in the door, it's ridiculous but it's the world we live in. Maybe I could have tried harder, maybe this and that. But I'm not the only one in my class that thinks like me and had the same experience.
- madengr 10y ago
  The material presented to you is only the tip of the iceberg. If you didn't bother learning the material, then why bother going through the door?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - kajj 10y ago
    Because I really don't care, because I just do it to get a job. And my grades are pretty much average in everything so shouldn't be worse off than the rest. I just do it to not be unemployed or work low paying jobs for the next 40 years.
    - stouset 10y ago
      As an American, my perspective is that this right here is why bachelor's degrees are becoming worth less and less. By your own admission, you've learned little. You've put in just enough effort to pass your classes. You aren't seemingly interested in the field. And you're not motivated to learn more on your own in a field where knowledge is rapidly obsoleted. The credential of a university degree was previously a signal of having learned about a topic, having worked hard in doing so, having interest in the field, and (at least in this field) being interested and/or capable enough to continue learning as necessary. If it's no longer a strong indicator of these things, why should employers value it as highly? My own experience mirrors your admission here: fresh university grads frequently lack even the bare minimum ability that would be expected to be productive. Many don't follow this pattern, but they're the exception rather than the rule. And they get hired while the others don't. It's not the degree that gets you the job, it's the ability. And if you have a degree but little ability, you're not getting the job. The focus on going to university should be about getting the ability, but it's become about getting the credential, even though the credential was never really the valuable part to begin with. I want to be clear here that there's no judgment on my part of you or your character. You're doing what you think is best and/or necessary in your life and it's not my place to try and find fault with that. I'm only trying to point out that your approach seems symptomatic of a larger problem — and one that I don't have meaningful solutions for. I do worry though that just getting the credential won't be enough to give you the chance of success you're hoping it will, but I wish you luck regardless.
allsunny 10y ago
FWIW, I never graduated from college but turned out quite successful, at least as far as job position and compensation goes. I make well over average at a popular software company in the Bay Area. Still, for the past 3 years I have been using my weekends and evenings to work on my BS in CS. And, while surely I was able to be successful building software without it, a new clarity has come that had never been there before. Perhaps it's because I have industry experience to draw on but I regret not having done this earlier in my life (I'm 39). So my point is, if you're in college reading this now, please do yourself a favor and see it through to completion. You're in a fortunate position (even though the daily grind sucks), take a deep breath, pause, and enjoy it.
- accountface 10y ago
  It's not worth a whole lot because I imagine tech is one of the few industries that don't follow the trend (especially in the bay area). I know this is a tech site, but MOST careers are not in software.
- digitalsushi 10y ago
  Is it possible that people just get a clarity with age? I'm 37 and also feel like I have had a fog lift this decade. I would like to hear a few other folks here share whether they felt a general increase of clarity and insight as they have come into their middle ages. My dad always said he did his best thinking in his 40s. He said that he knew he wasnt as fast or as sharp, but still having a lot of that, plus a really good working model of the world by that point, left him with the best product of those factors. Or maybe it's just obvious and not true at all.
  - allsunny 10y ago
    It could be. The clarity I'm speaking about came more from being led deeper into areas that I'd never had a need to explore in my job. E.g. How computers truly work, physically and mathematically, the specifics of scheduling algorithms used in operating systems, the utility of bit masking in assembly... I never had a need for any of that. To your point though, I may not have appreciated it when I was 18-22. I think I might have just gone through the learning motions, like when you learn the fundamental theorem of calculus; it doesn't immediately strike you as how amazing it is unless you've got the mind for that sort of thing (I don't) or you have a teacher that forces you to pause. In any event...
kevinmannix 10y ago
It's amusing that the suggested solution is to go and spend more money on a graduate-level degree. That feels eerily similar to the conventional wisdom that every single high school student should go to college majoring in a STEM field, which seems to be losing a little steam over the recent years.
- marchenko 10y ago
  The signalling competition of higher education is turning into a Red Queen race.
- madengr 10y ago
  PhD is the new MS MS the new BS BS the new HS diploma I should have stayed for my PhD 22 years ago, but back then it was only for acedemia track. These days there seem to be plenty of freshly minted PhD. Maybe that will soon be the minimum job qualification.
  - amelius 10y ago
    And, unfortunately, knowing how to code is not the new literacy.
    - mustacheemperor 10y ago
      But having an MS in data science without being able to write six functioning lines of python is already common.
      - Balgair 10y ago
        And people on HN wonder about the disconnect between the pay of the Big 4 and their eternal complaints of 'we can't find any engineers'. Maybe they aren't just greedy, maybe there is a nugget of truth in their statements.
  - southbridge 10y ago
    What about double majors? Or a BS with a minor? Knowledge in multiple subjects can create a synergistic effect. For example a double major in computer science and biotechnology - or something similar - could be effective. I think that jobs are becoming less specialized, and also workers need to do several things well.
cadlin 10y ago
This article talks about wage growth for college only. There's no comparison to high school grad's wage growth or those with graduate degrees. You are jumping to conclusions about the value of a college degree without accounting for alternatives. Most high school grads won't become programmers. They will work in warehouses, low level healthcare jobs, etc. The wage growth for high school graduates is worse than college graduates. It's a problem with the whole economy, not colleges specifically.
- devwastaken 10y ago
  Its easy to say that those who go to college make more, which is true, but those who go to college generally have higher goals and will work for years in suffocating living conditions. Not that they knew of that beforehand (gotta leave that out to get that special debt money), but they adapt. I don't think college creates success in programming, its yourself. In fields such as Medical or physical engineering, I completely agree that schools dedicated to that play a significantly bigger part, though.
Neliquat 10y ago
When everyone has a degree, it just shows that undergrad level should be tought in HS. Oh and yadda yadda 'everyone has a degree, except subhumans with GED' is partly becoming true in peoples eyes...
danielvf 10y ago
The number of newly graduated college students per year has increased approximately 50% in the last fifteen years. A reduction in average wages would be expected from supply and demand alone. However, I don't think an "oversupply" is the correct explanation. At least in the technical, engineering, and manufacturing fields that I know, companies are desperate for more good people. And this is even as STEM graduation rates are at an all time high. Looking at it from the the graduate's side, every single clueful person I know that graduated in the last five years is employed, and quickly so. How can can average wages be going down, even demand increases? The key is that we are talking "average wages". College graduates in any field are not a uniform bunch. The number of new competent individuals graduated seems to be holding steady, while around them grow an increasing sea of people who don't show up for work, or have a clue about getting actual work done in their profession.
- alphonsegaston 10y ago
  >How can these apparently conflicting facts be true? The problem is that many of the people who graduate do not have either the technical skills or the personal skills to make a positive enough contribution to be hired. Isn't this simply a Just World fallacy? Outside of the simulations of economists, I know of no example where the labor market operates with this degree of narrative and rationality.
- wlesieutre 10y ago
  > companies are desperate for more good people Not desperate enough to give the recent college grads a raise, apparently
  - madengr 10y ago
    Maybe cause there are not many good ones. It used to be, in engineering school, 2/3 flunked out or changed majors. Even with the remaining 1/3, there are the C/D students. I'd only want to hire the A/B students. I think people are figuring out engineering is a lot tougher than the "making stuff".
    - 10y ago
kolbe 10y ago
"College graduate" means almost nothing anymore. When not having a college degree became a social shame, the US government decided it needed to socialize the pride of achievement that true college grads used to get to feel.
- bigtimeidiot 10y ago
  >"College graduate" means almost nothing anymore." Exactly. I have 2 degrees, obtained about 8 years apart, so I've spent a few years doing undergraduate work. Not sure what it's like in the US, but here in Canada it's nearly impossible to flunk out of University. Between the ability to find "bird courses" with the help of technology to rank and rate classes and profs, to the garbage incentives of "if this person flunks out, there goes next year's tuition" pretty much everyone can scrape by.
drawkbox 10y ago
Undeniably this has been a trend downward in wages into wage stagnation. The share of GDP to workers is on a near 50 year decline since the mid-70s[1]. Wages and raises, once a staple of America and working hard to achieve a good life, has become lost and efficiently worked out of the system. Wage stagnation for 15 years heavily and 40 years overall does a number on the wallet while the costs of everything are far beyond inflation[2]. America has lost the ability to give meaningful wage increases to keep growth going in a consumer based economy. When the consumer based economy is low on fuel (cash in wallets and accounts) then it sputters. Back in the day America viewed wages as a sign of good work and companies saw benefits of increasing workers pay. This led to more money in the system, employees that buy and recommend where they work, better customer service, better informed employees and more. To "Make America Great Again" either raise wages as a function of work over time/productivity or drive down the dollar so Americans can get raises again. In both cases the wealthy will have to be willing to pay their part, but they didn't get rich by paying. [1] https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2016/06/2393/ https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2016/06/2393/ [2] http://fortune.com/2015/09/01/heres-the-real-reason-you-dont-make-enough-money/ http://fortune.com/2015/09/01/heres-the-real-reason-you-dont...

121 points by bootload 10y ago

Bloomberg is supporting Trump theory of wage stagnation a bit too much lately. Maybe they are being pressured? I know for fact that minimum wage has risen, so wage stagnation cannot be true.

atemerev 10y ago

I don't see how anyone can be hired "straight after college" unless they come straight to Google or Goldman Sachs who can afford _extensive_ training programs. College education these days looks more like a luxury good, not a job prerequisite. It is of more value if you want to do research or work on bleeding edge fields like advanced artificial intelligence or biotech, but if you just want to be a decent software engineer, it doesn't make economic sense anymore, in my opinion. (Disclosure: worked 10 years in the industry before finally getting my degree — because I wanted to move to R&D).

k-mcgrady 10y ago
Most people going into software jobs aren't doing a lot of actual development. I've seen people who aren't techy at all and know nothing about code do a 1 year masters and go into a well paid software dev job at very large companies on a decent salary. The only experience they have is maybe 6 months doing a bit of Java. But at the end of the day they're dealing more with bureaucracy than code and bug fixing of already established systems meaning they don't really need knowledge on good architecture and practices.
- nolite 10y ago
  That's very hard to believe. What companies have you seen that at?
  - watwut 10y ago
    Many guys I know had very little experience beyond few classes in school. Everyone in our year found a job eventually including weakest students. Plenty even studied physics or something similar instead of computer science and then got job in company desperate for people on the basis of "you are smart so we guess you will be able to learn". Actually turned out that if you have brain for physics or math, you can learn programming reasonably fast too. (And ended up being better then weak cs students.) They would not be suitable for all companies and positions obviously, but grasping enough of basics so you can be useful enough to create part of frontend pages/load data from db/whatever with a bit of supervision is not that hard.
  - k-mcgrady 10y ago
    Very common in large businesses like Citi, AllState etc. I know several people who have followed this path. They usually turn out to be people who code very little for a couple of years and then move on to product management roles and things like that.
- watwut 10y ago
  Having to maintain an older system for a while teaches you more about good architecture and practices then all the theory you can read. People who never had to maintain the thing tend to have very theoretical ideas about what is important and what not. You don't know whether your code is maintainable until you had to maintain it for a while.
sleepychu 10y ago
Most of the degree is waste if you want to be a software dev (IMHO). The industry could do really well out of recognizing that it's a vocational occupation and switching to an apprenticeship model.
- pizza 10y ago
  To zeroth degree approximation, colleges are cert-authorities
  - UK-AL 10y ago
    Vocational education normally is certification based.
    - DoofusOfDeath 10y ago
      Is a technically-focused university diploma fundamentally different than a trade-school certification, aside from the particulars of what material was learned?
      - UK-AL 10y ago
        Well the particulars of what taught is exactly the difference. In computer science you will learning about generic concepts like parsers, compilers or whatever. For vocational you would learn about something specific like asp.net mvc.
- DoofusOfDeath 10y ago
  In my experience, your point is valid regarding some software jobs, but not all. As I've worked my way into more technically demanding roles, it's been very useful to have a foundation of big-O analysis, the expressive power of different levels in the Chomsky hierarchy, (mathematical) optimization theory, graph theory, compilers, and/or computer architecture. Many of these topics could be learned by a bright person on-demand. However, some of the topics are important to be familiar with before taking on a project, because they let you avoid costly, time-consuming mistakes.
arethuza 10y ago
When I entered the world of work after graduating from a UK CS course in the late 1980s pretty much all employers expected that fresh graduate hires would need ~6 months before actually being a net gain in productivity. You also didn't need to have direct relevant experience as they were expecting to train you up in whatever it was they did. Now managers expect everyone to "hit the ground running" and as one consequence employees are much more careful about only acquiring skills that will be of use when they come to move to their next role. Hardly surprising.
splike 10y ago
The Goldman Sachs graduate training program is a joke. Having gone through it, I doubt that technical training is even the point of it. I think they just get everyone together to have a big holiday so that when the graduates start real work, they have that prebuilt network to help them out. Thats not at all a bad thing, but their technical training is rubbish.
- atemerev 10y ago
  But for the front office, networking _is_ the job :)
  - splike 10y ago
    Oh yeah absolutely, but I was just talking about the Technology division (where almost all CS grads go).
Broken_Hippo 10y ago
If you look at other degrees, it is quite possible to get hired right out of college. Unfortunately, the job might just be management at the local box store. They tend to not care so much about what your degree is in so long as you have one. Nurses generally have no trouble finding work either. "College education these days looks more like a luxury good, not a job prerequisite". This very much depends on the field. I've seen administrative assistant positions that require a college degree, especially if it is at a large company. Sometimes it is just a legal requirement: A school superintendent in indiana needs to have a teaching license. The school business manager doesn't need that - merely a 4 year degree in business, though a masters degree is more normal. You just have to expand the industry you are looking at to find it: obviously, there are lots of exceptions.
ra1n85 10y ago
Some companies love college hires. Big tech firms hold campus hiring events. Many companies aggressively go after college grads. Some even go after juniors for internships (which is great for the company - it's a several month opportunity to vet a candidate without commitment. If things work out, the candidate gets invited to come onboard when they graduate). College hires won't get very exciting work initially. At a fast moving company, they're going to be learning on the job (which means they need to be dynamic/adaptable and curious). Unfortunately, this can mean picking up operational work that more seasoned engineers don't enjoy (however, still a great opportunity to learn and grow for most).

sprash 10y ago

Supply and demand. Solution: Don't waste money one college.

good_vibes 10y ago
On
- Broken_Hippo 10y ago
  I thought that at first, but I think he's actually using a little-used saying. It sounds better voiced, with 'one' emphasized, than it reads in text.
  - sprash 10y ago
    Actually it is a typo. Apparently even college education didn't help me here.
  - to3m 10y ago
    OK... but what does that mean?
  - throwanem 10y ago
    Doesn't work that way for me. Can you cite the saying? I know of a dialect in which the 'o' in 'on' is long, but that doesn't change the spelling, and 'one' doesn't sound like it. ('Own' does.)
eecc 10y ago
College, for profit little more than professional training centers sure. Proper University no, culture and knowledge is never a waste
- cmahler7 10y ago
  as a current student I see no value in Universities to be honest other than the gathering of smart people in one place, which could be replicated for far cheaper. Everything else can be learned online for free, universities have no value proposition in the 21st century.

lsjdfkljdfwkwdf 10y ago

What's with all the socialist propaganda from Bloomberg today? Plenty of HN readers make over 100k straight out of college. It's not taxpayers fault that you didnt spend your time wisely in college

to3m 10y ago
What would your preferred non-socialist article look like, if it were based on the same data?
- llamataboot 10y ago
  Lazy college graduates get what they deserve /snark
kbart 10y ago
"Plenty of HN readers make over 100k straight out of college." One bubble is not enough to counter data.
alphonsegaston 10y ago
Bloomberg is a news outlet named after a billionaire...
chrisbennet 10y ago
Ah, The Just World Fallacy... i.e. My success is due to my hard work and life choices. Step 1: Have a big brain. Step 2: Pick wealthy parents. Step 3: Pick a career that doesn't get automated 10 years after you pick it. (Law students Chose Poorly..)
- ta95949 10y ago
  This isn't a 'fallacy' in any sense of the word. There are plenty of people from advantaged backgrounds who do poorly, and plenty from disadvantaged backgrounds who do well. The reason for that is degree of effort and life choices. Further, this undercurrent of resentment toward people from advantaged backgrounds is rubbish. There's no cosmic roll of the dice that determines into what circumstances a person is born; rather, that's the direct result of parental choices to have children, knowing full well their own life situation.

Kurtz79 10y ago

I'm talking about Europe (where college is in general more affordable and there is no stigma associated to getting your degree from a public school), but if you are looking for employment as a professional at an established company, with no previous experience, not having a degree will definitely make it harder: - To get an interview in the first place. - To get a decent starting salary. - To get into management positions as you progress.

atemerev 10y ago
At en established company — most definitely. However, those are not everything there is on the job market.
- paganel 10y ago
  I think the same way, as I'm my mid-30s and I've always only worked for small(ish) companies as a programmer ever since I dropped out of college, but I had a cultural shock recently, as a close friend of mine had to provide a paper-record (don't know the exact English term) with all his college grades when he recently got hired as a software architect by a medium-to-large software company (500+ devs based in several Eastern European cities). I found that crazy, I guess I'll stick to working at small companies for as long as they'll employ me.
  - davnicwil 10y ago
    > a paper-record (don't know the exact English term) with all his college grades It's usually called a 'transcript' (in British English at least)
    - throwanem 10y ago
      In American, too. (That would be a hell of a strange thing for a potential employer to ask for here, too.)
      - sndean 10y ago

kajj 10y ago

I live in Europe, I'm about to finish my Bachelor that I don't care about. I study engineering and don't think I have learned that much and have pretty much been a waste of time. But before I went to University I was unemployed, working as a industrial cleaner, working as a seller in a little Ice cream parlor, and customer support ( through the phone ) and more unemployed. So yes my degree is just to get in the door, it's ridiculous but it's the world we live in. Maybe I could have tried harder, maybe this and that. But I'm not the only one in my class that thinks like me and had the same experience.

madengr 10y ago
The material presented to you is only the tip of the iceberg. If you didn't bother learning the material, then why bother going through the door?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- kajj 10y ago
  Because I really don't care, because I just do it to get a job. And my grades are pretty much average in everything so shouldn't be worse off than the rest. I just do it to not be unemployed or work low paying jobs for the next 40 years.
  - stouset 10y ago
    As an American, my perspective is that this right here is why bachelor's degrees are becoming worth less and less. By your own admission, you've learned little. You've put in just enough effort to pass your classes. You aren't seemingly interested in the field. And you're not motivated to learn more on your own in a field where knowledge is rapidly obsoleted. The credential of a university degree was previously a signal of having learned about a topic, having worked hard in doing so, having interest in the field, and (at least in this field) being interested and/or capable enough to continue learning as necessary. If it's no longer a strong indicator of these things, why should employers value it as highly? My own experience mirrors your admission here: fresh university grads frequently lack even the bare minimum ability that would be expected to be productive. Many don't follow this pattern, but they're the exception rather than the rule. And they get hired while the others don't. It's not the degree that gets you the job, it's the ability. And if you have a degree but little ability, you're not getting the job. The focus on going to university should be about getting the ability, but it's become about getting the credential, even though the credential was never really the valuable part to begin with. I want to be clear here that there's no judgment on my part of you or your character. You're doing what you think is best and/or necessary in your life and it's not my place to try and find fault with that. I'm only trying to point out that your approach seems symptomatic of a larger problem — and one that I don't have meaningful solutions for. I do worry though that just getting the credential won't be enough to give you the chance of success you're hoping it will, but I wish you luck regardless.

allsunny 10y ago

FWIW, I never graduated from college but turned out quite successful, at least as far as job position and compensation goes. I make well over average at a popular software company in the Bay Area. Still, for the past 3 years I have been using my weekends and evenings to work on my BS in CS. And, while surely I was able to be successful building software without it, a new clarity has come that had never been there before. Perhaps it's because I have industry experience to draw on but I regret not having done this earlier in my life (I'm 39). So my point is, if you're in college reading this now, please do yourself a favor and see it through to completion. You're in a fortunate position (even though the daily grind sucks), take a deep breath, pause, and enjoy it.

accountface 10y ago
It's not worth a whole lot because I imagine tech is one of the few industries that don't follow the trend (especially in the bay area). I know this is a tech site, but MOST careers are not in software.
digitalsushi 10y ago
Is it possible that people just get a clarity with age? I'm 37 and also feel like I have had a fog lift this decade. I would like to hear a few other folks here share whether they felt a general increase of clarity and insight as they have come into their middle ages. My dad always said he did his best thinking in his 40s. He said that he knew he wasnt as fast or as sharp, but still having a lot of that, plus a really good working model of the world by that point, left him with the best product of those factors. Or maybe it's just obvious and not true at all.
- allsunny 10y ago
  It could be. The clarity I'm speaking about came more from being led deeper into areas that I'd never had a need to explore in my job. E.g. How computers truly work, physically and mathematically, the specifics of scheduling algorithms used in operating systems, the utility of bit masking in assembly... I never had a need for any of that. To your point though, I may not have appreciated it when I was 18-22. I think I might have just gone through the learning motions, like when you learn the fundamental theorem of calculus; it doesn't immediately strike you as how amazing it is unless you've got the mind for that sort of thing (I don't) or you have a teacher that forces you to pause. In any event...

kevinmannix 10y ago

It's amusing that the suggested solution is to go and spend more money on a graduate-level degree. That feels eerily similar to the conventional wisdom that every single high school student should go to college majoring in a STEM field, which seems to be losing a little steam over the recent years.

marchenko 10y ago
The signalling competition of higher education is turning into a Red Queen race.
madengr 10y ago
PhD is the new MS MS the new BS BS the new HS diploma I should have stayed for my PhD 22 years ago, but back then it was only for acedemia track. These days there seem to be plenty of freshly minted PhD. Maybe that will soon be the minimum job qualification.
- amelius 10y ago
  And, unfortunately, knowing how to code is not the new literacy.
  - mustacheemperor 10y ago
    But having an MS in data science without being able to write six functioning lines of python is already common.
    - Balgair 10y ago
      And people on HN wonder about the disconnect between the pay of the Big 4 and their eternal complaints of 'we can't find any engineers'. Maybe they aren't just greedy, maybe there is a nugget of truth in their statements.
- southbridge 10y ago
  What about double majors? Or a BS with a minor? Knowledge in multiple subjects can create a synergistic effect. For example a double major in computer science and biotechnology - or something similar - could be effective. I think that jobs are becoming less specialized, and also workers need to do several things well.

cadlin 10y ago

This article talks about wage growth for college only. There's no comparison to high school grad's wage growth or those with graduate degrees. You are jumping to conclusions about the value of a college degree without accounting for alternatives. Most high school grads won't become programmers. They will work in warehouses, low level healthcare jobs, etc. The wage growth for high school graduates is worse than college graduates. It's a problem with the whole economy, not colleges specifically.

devwastaken 10y ago
Its easy to say that those who go to college make more, which is true, but those who go to college generally have higher goals and will work for years in suffocating living conditions. Not that they knew of that beforehand (gotta leave that out to get that special debt money), but they adapt. I don't think college creates success in programming, its yourself. In fields such as Medical or physical engineering, I completely agree that schools dedicated to that play a significantly bigger part, though.

Neliquat 10y ago

When everyone has a degree, it just shows that undergrad level should be tought in HS. Oh and yadda yadda 'everyone has a degree, except subhumans with GED' is partly becoming true in peoples eyes...

danielvf 10y ago

The number of newly graduated college students per year has increased approximately 50% in the last fifteen years. A reduction in average wages would be expected from supply and demand alone. However, I don't think an "oversupply" is the correct explanation. At least in the technical, engineering, and manufacturing fields that I know, companies are desperate for more good people. And this is even as STEM graduation rates are at an all time high. Looking at it from the the graduate's side, every single clueful person I know that graduated in the last five years is employed, and quickly so. How can can average wages be going down, even demand increases? The key is that we are talking "average wages". College graduates in any field are not a uniform bunch. The number of new competent individuals graduated seems to be holding steady, while around them grow an increasing sea of people who don't show up for work, or have a clue about getting actual work done in their profession.

alphonsegaston 10y ago
>How can these apparently conflicting facts be true? The problem is that many of the people who graduate do not have either the technical skills or the personal skills to make a positive enough contribution to be hired. Isn't this simply a Just World fallacy? Outside of the simulations of economists, I know of no example where the labor market operates with this degree of narrative and rationality.
wlesieutre 10y ago
> companies are desperate for more good people Not desperate enough to give the recent college grads a raise, apparently
- madengr 10y ago
  Maybe cause there are not many good ones. It used to be, in engineering school, 2/3 flunked out or changed majors. Even with the remaining 1/3, there are the C/D students. I'd only want to hire the A/B students. I think people are figuring out engineering is a lot tougher than the "making stuff".
  - 10y ago

kolbe 10y ago

"College graduate" means almost nothing anymore. When not having a college degree became a social shame, the US government decided it needed to socialize the pride of achievement that true college grads used to get to feel.

bigtimeidiot 10y ago
>"College graduate" means almost nothing anymore." Exactly. I have 2 degrees, obtained about 8 years apart, so I've spent a few years doing undergraduate work. Not sure what it's like in the US, but here in Canada it's nearly impossible to flunk out of University. Between the ability to find "bird courses" with the help of technology to rank and rate classes and profs, to the garbage incentives of "if this person flunks out, there goes next year's tuition" pretty much everyone can scrape by.

drawkbox 10y ago

Undeniably this has been a trend downward in wages into wage stagnation. The share of GDP to workers is on a near 50 year decline since the mid-70s[1]. Wages and raises, once a staple of America and working hard to achieve a good life, has become lost and efficiently worked out of the system. Wage stagnation for 15 years heavily and 40 years overall does a number on the wallet while the costs of everything are far beyond inflation[2]. America has lost the ability to give meaningful wage increases to keep growth going in a consumer based economy. When the consumer based economy is low on fuel (cash in wallets and accounts) then it sputters. Back in the day America viewed wages as a sign of good work and companies saw benefits of increasing workers pay. This led to more money in the system, employees that buy and recommend where they work, better customer service, better informed employees and more. To "Make America Great Again" either raise wages as a function of work over time/productivity or drive down the dollar so Americans can get raises again. In both cases the wealthy will have to be willing to pay their part, but they didn't get rich by paying. [1] https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2016/06/2393/ https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2016/06/2393/ [2] http://fortune.com/2015/09/01/heres-the-real-reason-you-dont-make-enough-money/ http://fortune.com/2015/09/01/heres-the-real-reason-you-dont...