5 ms·

Is a college education worth the money?

40 points by dwynings 16y ago

Alex3917 16y ago
Theology is a science now?
- philwelch 16y ago
  You're probably referring to this quote: "Particular congratulations are due to aerospace engineers, who top the list, with a starting salary of just under sixty thousand dollars—a figure that, if it is not exactly stratospheric, is twenty-five thousand dollars higher than the average starting salary of a graduate in that other science of the heavens, theology." The author doesn't mean "science" in the literal sense that implies the scientific method, he's using it in a far looser sense that only implies "the study of a subject". It is the New Yorker--there's some degree of poetic license involved here.
  - Alex3917 16y ago
    "The author doesn't mean 'science' in the literal sense that implies the scientific method, he's using it in a far looser sense that only implies 'the study of a subject'." But theology isn't the study of the heavens, it's the study of religious doctrine. I get that the author is trying to use poetic license, but describing theology as a science of the heavens is kind of alarming. Maybe I'm just a little on edge because three different people tried to convert me to their religion tonight.
adbge 16y ago
The author sidesteps the issue and answers with (roughly) "education is never a bad thing." That's true enough, but that doesn't answer the question of whether or not a degree is worth the cost. Not a very informative article. One thing I've never understood about the whole degree v no degree debate is: don't people learn on the job? That is to say: I think the educational value of things other than college are often overlooked. It's the information age! You don't have to go to a university to learn.
- bryanh 16y ago
  I think this is a good point. Has there ever been a point in history where literally anything you wanted to know wasn't locked away in some obscure institution? It's hard to sometimes remind yourself how lucky you are to live in our times (though I imagine they've said that about past decades as well).
- TheKid 16y ago
  Learning on the job is a valid point, but it's often not interdisciplinary. You learn and develop your skills in the areas you work in. Opportunities to expand your skillset and study other topics are difficult to come by in many work environments. Especially if you're in a position that didn't require a degree in the first place. I agree you don't have to go to a University to learn, but you do have to find willing and qualified teachers and mentors which can be harder than it might seem.
- tjr 16y ago
  A lot of my work is on avionics software. As far as programming knowledge goes, I've learned most of what I need to do my job before college, or at least outside of college. As far as avionics goes, I've learned most of it on the job. My college education has been at best marginal with respect to the work I actually do. However, it would have been at best very difficult for me to cut through the red tape to get the work I have without a college degree. The sorts of people who do hiring in this industry seem to really want to see that. The degree itself is valuable if you are endeavoring to work in an environment whose administrators expect you to have one. The education itself you can get on your own. Though, I personally find it helpful to be "forced" to learn some topics more deeply or broadly than I would have on my own (and this is something that I probably wouldn't have really understood until experiencing it in college).
  - jseliger 16y ago
    However, it would have been at best very difficult for me to cut through the red tape to get the work I have without a college degree. The sorts of people who do hiring in this industry seem to really want to see that. Put yourself in the place of a hiring manager, or, better still, the person setting hiring policies for large companies. You have hundreds or thousands of people competing for jobs, sending you resumes, and the like. You only need to make one decision: hire or no hire. When you're weaning down those resumes, you're probably looking for shortcuts, and one way to get there is to filter out a college degree -- which isn't that high a bar, especially for hyper competent technical people. If you're setting hiring policies, you want to stop people from hiring their incompetent brother-in-laws or wastrel friends. And so on. PG actually wrote an essay about this kind of thing in Two Kinds of Judgment: http://www.paulgraham.com/judgement.html http://www.paulgraham.com/judgement.html : But in fact there is a second much larger class of judgements where judging you is only a means to something else. These include college admissions, hiring and investment decisions, and of course the judgements made in dating. This kind of judgement is not really about you. Anyway, this isn't an attack on the parent poster, but it is an attack of the thoughts I often see on HN and other tech sites about the lack of importance of a college degree. If you start your own company or can get others to pay you... great. But degrees are often there not only to show that you've learned and provide learning, but also as a heuristic for people who are hiring. False positives and false negatives exist, but not so much as to abrogate the usefulness of the entire system.
philwelch 16y ago
I said in another thread around here, "if you're going to get a liberal arts degree, either have enough money to afford it, or be so intensely interested in the liberal arts that you're willing to pay back your damn loans." But really, what I mean by that is a slight bit more direct (yet subtle) than it seems. It's quite possible that the study of purely academic subjects--subjects which have little chance of improving one's employment prospects--will enrich someone's life tremendously, and that the university is the best place to study some of these subjects. I'm not interested in boring arguments about what those subjects might be, or whether any such subjects may exist, but let's entertain at least the possibility that some do. Isn't lifelong enrichment worth a decade or so of loan payments? Engineers see the cost of college as a variable in a purely financial cost-benefit analysis, and don't understand why philosophers would even bother because it fails that analysis. But philosophers get something fundamentally different out of college. Is it worth the money? That's a personal question.
- mquander 16y ago
  OK. 50 or 60 percent of U.S. high school graduates in 2009 went directly to college. What percentage of those do you think are studying academic subjects because they feel the subjects are "enriching their life"? 20%? 10%? 5%? 2%? The American 18-year-old is not a demographic in which you find many philosophers.
  - ihodes 16y ago
    I think you'd be surprised. Maybe it's the company I keep, or the college I go to, but hell if not at least 90% of the kids who go here think they're "enriching their lives".
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - jrp 16y ago
      No. I am a grad student teaching first-year calculus. 90% are getting a chance to party and maybe 10% are the idealists.
ajushi 16y ago
Yes. The people you meet, the connections you make, the overall experience is all worth it. As with everything in life it's relative.
aufreak3 16y ago
You can't get a reliable answer from anybody for this question. Academics might tend to say "absolutely!" while those who skipped it would say "who cares?" or something like that. They key is to figure out what directions you want to grow in and seek out the opportunities that align with them. Acads, biz-world all offer a wonderful palette of such opportunities to pick from. I work part-time and am a part-time Ph.D. student. I'm enjoying both their contributions to my growth.
philk 16y ago
On a somewhat peripheral note I found this a bit disappointing: According to the Times, eight out of the ten job categories that will add the most employees during the next decade—including home-health aide, customer-service representative, and store clerk—can be performed by someone without a college degree. I was kind of hoping we'd be able to use advancing technology to reduce our need for people in the customer service/store clerk fields.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- billswift 16y ago
  Those kinds of fields require human interaction or flexibility or, more often, both that is incredibly hard to automate. For an entertaining fictional explanation, see Heinlein's Door Into Summer where the inventor of the robots explains why housework is harder to teach a robot than, for example, bricklaying. (I don't know of as short and clear nonfiction example.)
perlpimp 16y ago
1. Education should be good & free(in both ways) . This is essential to a democratic and efficient populous. 2. Whatever you get, you have to make it work for you. Education is no exception - you drift through school - expect it, to make almost no substantial difference to your quality of life. 3. Posing question with so many broad implications from different angle is bating. Listing who gets jobs more is narrowing use of a degree to establishing a career. Degree, as in piece of paper is good for just that. But education is so much more then just ability to earn on a slightly higher pay scale. Its a tool to change the world, make it better. It is sickening to see all these 'repeat' articles pepper various syndicated publications. Education is essential and yes it is worth it, if you want to get it to better yourself. Go to a technical school if you need a paper to get a job. With a piece of paper and a bit of networking you will get a job. Education is beyond that - its what you can give to your kids. How can you put a price tag on that? But I digress.
bpm140 16y ago
So many people look back and say college was the "best four years of their life." This is usually due to a sense of nostalgia, often aptly described as "a longing for simpler times." I hated college when I was there. Sure there were fun parts, but there was also loads more pressure and a much greater opportunity to fail than I had experienced in high school. However, now that I'm pushing 40, I look back at college with a sense of fondness, thinking how much easier life was without a mortgage, two kids and the incredible cost of health insurance. As a result, I think that most people look back at college and consider the money well spent because it was money spent pushing off the pressures of adulthood. So while the college education might not be worth the money, the college experience often is.
timcederman 16y ago
I'm still amazed at the cost of a college education in the US. My computer engineering degree in Australia cost $15k total, then a PhD was free (with many, including myself, getting a scholarship to pay for living expenses).
- GVRV 16y ago
  Only because of HECS. I'm a full fee paying computer science student, and it'll cost me upwards of $60K
  - timcederman 16y ago
    That's true. I didn't realise how large the disparity was.
  - maigret 16y ago
    Then compare the US to Europe. There education is viewed as public good, though it's slowly changing.
- ludistan 16y ago
  I'm from Europe, and my electrical engineering degree didn't cost me a single euro. So with me, it was more question like "Is it worth the time? I could spend time on something much more interesting."
  - aohtsab 16y ago
    how so?
    - ludistan 16y ago
      I'm from Slovenia, but I think most European faculties (colleges in Europe) don't charge students for degrees. We pay that through taxes. I hope that answers your question.
- smokey_the_bear 16y ago
Enlightenment 16y ago
For software and hardware engineers, you usually need a degree for most jobs in the USA, otherwise HR will ignore your resume.
Enlightenment 16y ago
If you lack the grades or income or don't want to be in DEEP DEBT, and can handle moving away from your friends, then 'shop around' the USA for colleges in states that have lower tuition. Depending on the out-of-state costs, it might be worth moving to that other state and working for the minimum amount of time to be considered a resident of that state, then go to college at the resident rate. The difference between resident and out-of-state can be very high!
robak 16y ago
Why Americans looks on everything from the standpoint of money? Isn't that just important to be an educated nation? I don't see anything wrong with educated mailman. And hey, if he can't find a job that suits him, maybe there is something wrong with the economy, not with him?
julius_geezer 16y ago
It is probably fair to say that a large percentage of the enrollment at almost any college anywhere is there because that is what one does after high school. Henry Adams says of the Harvard of the 1850s "All went there because their friends went there, and the College was their ideal of self-respect."

40 points by dwynings 16y ago

Alex3917 16y ago

Theology is a science now?

philwelch 16y ago
You're probably referring to this quote: "Particular congratulations are due to aerospace engineers, who top the list, with a starting salary of just under sixty thousand dollars—a figure that, if it is not exactly stratospheric, is twenty-five thousand dollars higher than the average starting salary of a graduate in that other science of the heavens, theology." The author doesn't mean "science" in the literal sense that implies the scientific method, he's using it in a far looser sense that only implies "the study of a subject". It is the New Yorker--there's some degree of poetic license involved here.
- Alex3917 16y ago
  "The author doesn't mean 'science' in the literal sense that implies the scientific method, he's using it in a far looser sense that only implies 'the study of a subject'." But theology isn't the study of the heavens, it's the study of religious doctrine. I get that the author is trying to use poetic license, but describing theology as a science of the heavens is kind of alarming. Maybe I'm just a little on edge because three different people tried to convert me to their religion tonight.

adbge 16y ago

The author sidesteps the issue and answers with (roughly) "education is never a bad thing." That's true enough, but that doesn't answer the question of whether or not a degree is worth the cost. Not a very informative article. One thing I've never understood about the whole degree v no degree debate is: don't people learn on the job? That is to say: I think the educational value of things other than college are often overlooked. It's the information age! You don't have to go to a university to learn.

bryanh 16y ago
I think this is a good point. Has there ever been a point in history where literally anything you wanted to know wasn't locked away in some obscure institution? It's hard to sometimes remind yourself how lucky you are to live in our times (though I imagine they've said that about past decades as well).
TheKid 16y ago
Learning on the job is a valid point, but it's often not interdisciplinary. You learn and develop your skills in the areas you work in. Opportunities to expand your skillset and study other topics are difficult to come by in many work environments. Especially if you're in a position that didn't require a degree in the first place. I agree you don't have to go to a University to learn, but you do have to find willing and qualified teachers and mentors which can be harder than it might seem.
tjr 16y ago
A lot of my work is on avionics software. As far as programming knowledge goes, I've learned most of what I need to do my job before college, or at least outside of college. As far as avionics goes, I've learned most of it on the job. My college education has been at best marginal with respect to the work I actually do. However, it would have been at best very difficult for me to cut through the red tape to get the work I have without a college degree. The sorts of people who do hiring in this industry seem to really want to see that. The degree itself is valuable if you are endeavoring to work in an environment whose administrators expect you to have one. The education itself you can get on your own. Though, I personally find it helpful to be "forced" to learn some topics more deeply or broadly than I would have on my own (and this is something that I probably wouldn't have really understood until experiencing it in college).
- jseliger 16y ago
  However, it would have been at best very difficult for me to cut through the red tape to get the work I have without a college degree. The sorts of people who do hiring in this industry seem to really want to see that. Put yourself in the place of a hiring manager, or, better still, the person setting hiring policies for large companies. You have hundreds or thousands of people competing for jobs, sending you resumes, and the like. You only need to make one decision: hire or no hire. When you're weaning down those resumes, you're probably looking for shortcuts, and one way to get there is to filter out a college degree -- which isn't that high a bar, especially for hyper competent technical people. If you're setting hiring policies, you want to stop people from hiring their incompetent brother-in-laws or wastrel friends. And so on. PG actually wrote an essay about this kind of thing in Two Kinds of Judgment: http://www.paulgraham.com/judgement.html http://www.paulgraham.com/judgement.html : But in fact there is a second much larger class of judgements where judging you is only a means to something else. These include college admissions, hiring and investment decisions, and of course the judgements made in dating. This kind of judgement is not really about you. Anyway, this isn't an attack on the parent poster, but it is an attack of the thoughts I often see on HN and other tech sites about the lack of importance of a college degree. If you start your own company or can get others to pay you... great. But degrees are often there not only to show that you've learned and provide learning, but also as a heuristic for people who are hiring. False positives and false negatives exist, but not so much as to abrogate the usefulness of the entire system.

philwelch 16y ago

I said in another thread around here, "if you're going to get a liberal arts degree, either have enough money to afford it, or be so intensely interested in the liberal arts that you're willing to pay back your damn loans." But really, what I mean by that is a slight bit more direct (yet subtle) than it seems. It's quite possible that the study of purely academic subjects--subjects which have little chance of improving one's employment prospects--will enrich someone's life tremendously, and that the university is the best place to study some of these subjects. I'm not interested in boring arguments about what those subjects might be, or whether any such subjects may exist, but let's entertain at least the possibility that some do. Isn't lifelong enrichment worth a decade or so of loan payments? Engineers see the cost of college as a variable in a purely financial cost-benefit analysis, and don't understand why philosophers would even bother because it fails that analysis. But philosophers get something fundamentally different out of college. Is it worth the money? That's a personal question.

mquander 16y ago
OK. 50 or 60 percent of U.S. high school graduates in 2009 went directly to college. What percentage of those do you think are studying academic subjects because they feel the subjects are "enriching their life"? 20%? 10%? 5%? 2%? The American 18-year-old is not a demographic in which you find many philosophers.
- ihodes 16y ago
  I think you'd be surprised. Maybe it's the company I keep, or the college I go to, but hell if not at least 90% of the kids who go here think they're "enriching their lives".
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - jrp 16y ago
    No. I am a grad student teaching first-year calculus. 90% are getting a chance to party and maybe 10% are the idealists.

ajushi 16y ago

Yes. The people you meet, the connections you make, the overall experience is all worth it. As with everything in life it's relative.

aufreak3 16y ago

You can't get a reliable answer from anybody for this question. Academics might tend to say "absolutely!" while those who skipped it would say "who cares?" or something like that. They key is to figure out what directions you want to grow in and seek out the opportunities that align with them. Acads, biz-world all offer a wonderful palette of such opportunities to pick from. I work part-time and am a part-time Ph.D. student. I'm enjoying both their contributions to my growth.

philk 16y ago

On a somewhat peripheral note I found this a bit disappointing: According to the Times, eight out of the ten job categories that will add the most employees during the next decade—including home-health aide, customer-service representative, and store clerk—can be performed by someone without a college degree. I was kind of hoping we'd be able to use advancing technology to reduce our need for people in the customer service/store clerk fields.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
billswift 16y ago
Those kinds of fields require human interaction or flexibility or, more often, both that is incredibly hard to automate. For an entertaining fictional explanation, see Heinlein's Door Into Summer where the inventor of the robots explains why housework is harder to teach a robot than, for example, bricklaying. (I don't know of as short and clear nonfiction example.)

perlpimp 16y ago

1. Education should be good & free(in both ways) . This is essential to a democratic and efficient populous. 2. Whatever you get, you have to make it work for you. Education is no exception - you drift through school - expect it, to make almost no substantial difference to your quality of life. 3. Posing question with so many broad implications from different angle is bating. Listing who gets jobs more is narrowing use of a degree to establishing a career. Degree, as in piece of paper is good for just that. But education is so much more then just ability to earn on a slightly higher pay scale. Its a tool to change the world, make it better. It is sickening to see all these 'repeat' articles pepper various syndicated publications. Education is essential and yes it is worth it, if you want to get it to better yourself. Go to a technical school if you need a paper to get a job. With a piece of paper and a bit of networking you will get a job. Education is beyond that - its what you can give to your kids. How can you put a price tag on that? But I digress.

bpm140 16y ago

So many people look back and say college was the "best four years of their life." This is usually due to a sense of nostalgia, often aptly described as "a longing for simpler times." I hated college when I was there. Sure there were fun parts, but there was also loads more pressure and a much greater opportunity to fail than I had experienced in high school. However, now that I'm pushing 40, I look back at college with a sense of fondness, thinking how much easier life was without a mortgage, two kids and the incredible cost of health insurance. As a result, I think that most people look back at college and consider the money well spent because it was money spent pushing off the pressures of adulthood. So while the college education might not be worth the money, the college experience often is.

timcederman 16y ago

I'm still amazed at the cost of a college education in the US. My computer engineering degree in Australia cost $15k total, then a PhD was free (with many, including myself, getting a scholarship to pay for living expenses).

GVRV 16y ago
Only because of HECS. I'm a full fee paying computer science student, and it'll cost me upwards of $60K
- timcederman 16y ago
  That's true. I didn't realise how large the disparity was.
- maigret 16y ago
  Then compare the US to Europe. There education is viewed as public good, though it's slowly changing.
ludistan 16y ago
I'm from Europe, and my electrical engineering degree didn't cost me a single euro. So with me, it was more question like "Is it worth the time? I could spend time on something much more interesting."
- aohtsab 16y ago
  how so?
  - ludistan 16y ago
    I'm from Slovenia, but I think most European faculties (colleges in Europe) don't charge students for degrees. We pay that through taxes. I hope that answers your question.
smokey_the_bear 16y ago

Enlightenment 16y ago

For software and hardware engineers, you usually need a degree for most jobs in the USA, otherwise HR will ignore your resume.

Enlightenment 16y ago

If you lack the grades or income or don't want to be in DEEP DEBT, and can handle moving away from your friends, then 'shop around' the USA for colleges in states that have lower tuition. Depending on the out-of-state costs, it might be worth moving to that other state and working for the minimum amount of time to be considered a resident of that state, then go to college at the resident rate. The difference between resident and out-of-state can be very high!

robak 16y ago

Why Americans looks on everything from the standpoint of money? Isn't that just important to be an educated nation? I don't see anything wrong with educated mailman. And hey, if he can't find a job that suits him, maybe there is something wrong with the economy, not with him?

julius_geezer 16y ago

It is probably fair to say that a large percentage of the enrollment at almost any college anywhere is there because that is what one does after high school. Henry Adams says of the Harvard of the 1850s "All went there because their friends went there, and the College was their ideal of self-respect."