6 ms·

This whole discussion is based on wrong assumptions. You don't go to uni, learn about thermodynamics, and then go and build turbines. It's certainly possible t

This whole discussion is based on wrong assumptions. You don't go to uni, learn about thermodynamics, and then go and build turbines. It's certainly possible to have such a career path, but you won't have actually learned the thing you need to know in uni and then applied it at work for the next 40 years. What you do in uni is demonstrate that you're interested in certain things and you have enough work ethic to learn the exam answers. That's all. I had a guy with a biology degree at an HFT debug a threading issue. Really smart guy. He didn't learn how CPP works in his PhD, he learned it in his own time because he had an interest. I actually did study thermodynamics as part of my engineering course, and guess what, it's not in itself useful in finance. It's just a demonstration that I might be able to learn certain mathy things, not even the same things. So coming back to this idea of ROI on a degree, there's only broadly two things you can demonstrate. I'm more of a lumper than a splitter, so you might have more. But the two things for me are whether you can do technical cave diving like figuring out what happened to that threading issue, and whether you have the capacity to read and understand a large amount of text, like being a lawyer or political science student. The thing to remember is you don't just gain some skill in uni, chances are you mostly have personal preferences that are revealed, and that that is far more important than what you learned. ROI in this case would seem to just mean "the kids who studied business did so because the are interested in business and so went and got high paying MBA jobs". Similarly for kids who liked building robots or kids who read a lot about history. Finally I'd like to say we all need to learn broadly about the world, I don't condemn people who happened to not be technical. But education itself is worth pursuing just for it's own merits.

nobrains 5y ago
:) So college degree is like POW (proof-of-work) in blockchains.
- waterhouse 5y ago
  And, estimating the cost... I see some site say $27k for tuition per year. Assume four years per person; assume people live for 80 years; assume half the population goes to college; then 1/40 of the population is attending college in any given year. If we say the U.S. has 300M people, then that's about $200 billion per year, for this proof of work. Meanwhile, this site estimates Bitcoin's annual electricity consumption at $7 billion worth: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
  - vkou 5y ago
    Bitcoin manages to perform ~7 financial transactions a second, whereas this 'proof of work' manages to assign jobs for ~300 million people. Some of those people even manage to learn something useful, and go on on to design things like Bitcoin and the power plants that produce electricity that is wasted by it.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      > Bitcoin manages to perform ~7 financial transactions a second, whereas this 'proof of work' manages to assign jobs for ~300 million people. First, obviously, no it doesn't. But second, even if it did, would that be more or less than 7 transactions / second?
wwweston 5y ago
> the two things for me are whether you can do technical cave diving like figuring out what happened to that threading issue, and whether you have the capacity to read and understand a large amount of text, like being a lawyer or political science student. Aaaand this is the moment where I worry that I'm a decade or two into the wrong track, because while my math degree says I'm not chopped liver at the former, I'm probably better at the latter.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  But actual work experience is an even better hint that someone can do a job...
  - shapefrog 5y ago
    Is it really? I doubt I am the only one who has worked with a highly regarded colleague, who when you actually do the work on the ground with, you discover they are incredibly unimpressive. Promotions for incompetence, serial job hoppers who move on before being discovered as being shit ... etc
    - lordnacho 5y ago
      I've been in that situation as well. It's not like signals can't be wrong. Question is who do you want to hire, someone with no experience or someone with some years doing the job?
      - shapefrog 5y ago
        Naturally experience, ultimately hiring managers have never seen a cv without experience, the choice is how you differentiate different experiences. Ultimately it all comes down to 'which candidate do I want to (or can tolerate) spending more time with than my own family'.
wanderingmind 5y ago
Yes but in this given day and age, maybe a high school graduate can take a year or two off just to focus on creating open source projects or contributing to open source projects. Heck they can even build some hacky basic hardware + software systems using Pi or Arduino. That will include learning across disciplines beyond computer science like thermodynamics if they work on measuring and controlling thermal outputs. A candidate whose github project is highly starred and forked is a lot more valuable to employer than someone with a paper showing the degree. It will cost less than one fourth of what it will cost to a semester in top US school.
- jltsiren 5y ago
  Those people are also the ones who would benefit most from higher education. They are learning and doing new things because they are genuinely interested in it. A good university would give them a chance to spend a few years exploring the possibilities without the pressure to do something immediately productive. They would learn from experts, find new interests, and work with peers with similar interests. Any job a bright self-taught recent high school graduate can get is likely a job they should not take. Many bright young people turn bitter and disillusioned, because they made the easy choice when they got an offer for a real job. The job may very well be a local optimum with no good way forward. Because they are too focused on short-term goals, they may never get a chance to stop and think what to do with their lives. The academia has a similar trap further on the road: grad school. If you are a good student who is genuinely interested in learning for the sake of learning, grad school looks like the obvious step forward. For many, it will be the wrong choice.
  - tylerhou 5y ago
    > Any job a bright self-taught recent high school graduate can get is likely a job they should not take. Many bright young people turn bitter and disillusioned, because they made the easy choice when they got an offer for a real job. Any examples of this happening? I haven’t seen this to be the case.
WA 5y ago
> What you do in uni is demonstrate that you're interested in certain things and you have enough work ethic to learn the exam answers. That's all. I think you’re right, but the next question would be: how is the hefty price tag for American universities justified, if your statement is true?
- lordnacho 5y ago
  It's a guild fee is what I'm saying. If the guild is making a lot of money it's worth it to pay to join. See MBAs. I can attest as a graduate of a world famous business school (ok it's the the uni and not the biz school) you won't learn how to run a business. But you do get that "ambitious hard worker who is somewhat social" label.
  - shapefrog 5y ago
    Satement of intent is how I think of a MBA - there is nothing you couldnt learn from a book and $1.50 in late fees from a public library. At the end of the day it is all theatre to satisfy the hiring managers. Who do you select from; the candidate who says they read the book or the one that ivy league school says read the book?
    - e1g 5y ago
      Take the same person with the inartistic desire to learn. Offer them an excellent library with vetted books. Give them 2 years to focus on this learning full-time. Surround them with like-minded peers so they can share ideas and grow together. Add world-level experts to stimulate and group discussions. Guarantee them a job at a company they respect, starting at $150k, if they do well at the end. Will these things make a difference to their self-study course? Is this difference in trajectory worth $100k? Enough people say yes, and very few of those who actually did it regretted their choice.
  - WA 5y ago
    I see it like you. So I guess it makes sense to evaluate the ROI of American universities based on the guild you’re joining. Kinda sad.
matthewmacleod 5y ago
What you do in uni is demonstrate that you're interested in certain things and you have enough work ethic to learn the exam answers. That's all. That might be true for you—and others—but it’s not always that way. I use the knowledge I learned in my degree all the time in my work - sometimes directly, sometimes as the foundation on which I can build my understanding of a more domain-specific problem. That knowledge is augmented by the extracurricular I did and my experience working in various roles over the years. I’m pretty sure this isn’t uncommon. I agree that the softer skills of self-directed education, research, writing etc. are important and widely transferable. Plenty of people I know have been successful in careers distinct from their higher education. But I do think it’s a bit reductive to dismiss the value of a deep technical education so easily.
swiley 5y ago
IMO: economics is just heat transfer with extra steps.
mettamage 5y ago
> What you do in uni is demonstrate that you're interested in certain things and you have enough work ethic to learn the exam answers. That's all. Wrong. Why? There are many counter examples. But perhaps you meant that it tends to be true, if so then I read your comment a bit too black and white. That would be a lot tougher to see whether that's true or not. I'm purely going to keep this comment on a content level (e.g. I'm not concerned with the fact that you also make lifelong friends at uni, etc.). I've done quite different study programs, so let's see what happened there (I'm only talking about the ones I've finished since I know those well). I studied: - Psychology (bachelor) - Information Science (20% business, 80% computer science, bachelor) - Game-design (master) - Computer science with a specialty in multimedia and security (master) For my psychology degree, I really agree with your general message. When I look at where my classmates are today, I feel that content-wise university was a bit worthless. However, of those psychology students there are about 5 to 20 percent of people that are using their knowledge. One does a lot of statistics at work and did a lot of statistics in a psychology minor (structurual equational modelling). Another one did research for the government and wrote fairly similar-ish research reports compared to psychology papers. Finally, a large part of this group becomes a clinical psychologist and then a large part of your study is relevant because most of the program is about interpreting research. So... 80% agree, 20% disagree. Information Science: 20% of the people were already working in IT. For us other eighty-percenters a lot of us went into consulting and a few of us into hardcore computer science. Information science definitely teaches things about requirements gathering that I've used as a freelancer later on. I wouldn't say that the whole program is useful, mostly because it's split between two worlds and you end up picking one of them. But for the world that you pick, it had a lot of useful courses. For me, I gained the ability to learn anything in the IT world. Before I went to uni I've tried it but I failed. I tried learning PHP, I failed. I tried learning Objective-C/iPhone apps but I failed. But at uni, I learned programming, networking and computer systems (among other things) and suddenly revisiting those topics 3 years laters I felt learning Objective-C was easy! So... I tend to disagree completely here. Game-design: people went to a lot of different fields after this, I think most of us aren't using any of the theory/practice that we've learned in this degree. However, some of us are! I'd estimate about 10% is still heavily using their game-design skills (e.g. one is a online curriculum-designer and the whole thing about user feedback shares a lot with game-design). In my case, it's mixed. I made one game Unity3D and it was the first time I was introduced to C#. I did a few things in JavaScript. But mostly I learned about player behavior and I've noticed a lot of game-design knowledge is a specialized version of UX. So when I tend to develop an app, I tend to see "users" as "gamers" (if applicable) and utilize my intuition that I've built up with this program. So... I tend to agree, but there are exceptions. Computer Science: in one course I made a computer graphics engine that had 10K lines of code. That was very educational. In another I made and sold an iPhone app (rewarding and educational). And I've done a lot of hacking courses that now allows me to pentest production applications while I'm a full-stack engineer. So... I tend to disagree. Yes, the skills I've learned here are foundational and not fully on point to what I do now (full-stack dev, currently interviewing with a FAANG company, searching for referrals to Google still :P) but it definitely helps with what I do today. At the very least, I tend to catch critical security issues in code review (and hack into them as a PoC when no one believes me) and code (hopefully) secure code myself.
avereveard 5y ago
It's a very superficial take of what a university course gives to you; sure, it doesn't give immediate work skill, but the shared "vocabulary" of theorems, formulas, notations and conventions you build if your curricula matches your job goals and your team formation gives you tremendous synergy both in learning on the job and in functioning as a team; the understanding of principles behind the workings enables you to learn faster, to more aptly move your knowledge into similar area interdisciplinarily, and to be more flexible in modifying existing solution to novel issues within your field.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  But you'll end up getting a whole new vocabulary when you join a new industry. What you did at uni was practicing learning new vocabulary and models. I would say as far as something like math appears to be foundational, what it really makes you practice is precision thinking: this thing matters, this other thing doesn't. One thing that might convince you is that when you look at math the subject itself, how many people who were good at applied math like calculus and PDEs actually know anything about mathematical foundations like ZFC, Gödel, and that type of thing?
  - avereveard 5y ago
    no lol job providing theory learning are exceedingly scarce, at most you get some practical level stuff and off you go. all the learning you do on the side do help, but formal learning is a completely different thing than running two courses off udemy
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Well said. In Liar's Poker, the author has an Art History degree. That book inspired many young people at the time to work on Wall Street. Several of my friends who went to work at various trading desks did not study business. One of the most successful (highest "ROI") majored in Philosophy. The idea of an uneducated electorate that increasingly gets its (mis)information from social media and aims to "earn" its money only from venture capital and online advertisers is, IMHO, frightening. However, the bigger picture is not something these "ROI" analysts ever seem to consider.

nobrains 5y ago

:) So college degree is like POW (proof-of-work) in blockchains.

waterhouse 5y ago
And, estimating the cost... I see some site say $27k for tuition per year. Assume four years per person; assume people live for 80 years; assume half the population goes to college; then 1/40 of the population is attending college in any given year. If we say the U.S. has 300M people, then that's about $200 billion per year, for this proof of work. Meanwhile, this site estimates Bitcoin's annual electricity consumption at $7 billion worth: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
- vkou 5y ago
  Bitcoin manages to perform ~7 financial transactions a second, whereas this 'proof of work' manages to assign jobs for ~300 million people. Some of those people even manage to learn something useful, and go on on to design things like Bitcoin and the power plants that produce electricity that is wasted by it.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > Bitcoin manages to perform ~7 financial transactions a second, whereas this 'proof of work' manages to assign jobs for ~300 million people. First, obviously, no it doesn't. But second, even if it did, would that be more or less than 7 transactions / second?

wwweston 5y ago

> the two things for me are whether you can do technical cave diving like figuring out what happened to that threading issue, and whether you have the capacity to read and understand a large amount of text, like being a lawyer or political science student. Aaaand this is the moment where I worry that I'm a decade or two into the wrong track, because while my math degree says I'm not chopped liver at the former, I'm probably better at the latter.

lordnacho 5y ago
But actual work experience is an even better hint that someone can do a job...
- shapefrog 5y ago
  Is it really? I doubt I am the only one who has worked with a highly regarded colleague, who when you actually do the work on the ground with, you discover they are incredibly unimpressive. Promotions for incompetence, serial job hoppers who move on before being discovered as being shit ... etc
  - lordnacho 5y ago
    I've been in that situation as well. It's not like signals can't be wrong. Question is who do you want to hire, someone with no experience or someone with some years doing the job?
    - shapefrog 5y ago
      Naturally experience, ultimately hiring managers have never seen a cv without experience, the choice is how you differentiate different experiences. Ultimately it all comes down to 'which candidate do I want to (or can tolerate) spending more time with than my own family'.

wanderingmind 5y ago

Yes but in this given day and age, maybe a high school graduate can take a year or two off just to focus on creating open source projects or contributing to open source projects. Heck they can even build some hacky basic hardware + software systems using Pi or Arduino. That will include learning across disciplines beyond computer science like thermodynamics if they work on measuring and controlling thermal outputs. A candidate whose github project is highly starred and forked is a lot more valuable to employer than someone with a paper showing the degree. It will cost less than one fourth of what it will cost to a semester in top US school.

jltsiren 5y ago
Those people are also the ones who would benefit most from higher education. They are learning and doing new things because they are genuinely interested in it. A good university would give them a chance to spend a few years exploring the possibilities without the pressure to do something immediately productive. They would learn from experts, find new interests, and work with peers with similar interests. Any job a bright self-taught recent high school graduate can get is likely a job they should not take. Many bright young people turn bitter and disillusioned, because they made the easy choice when they got an offer for a real job. The job may very well be a local optimum with no good way forward. Because they are too focused on short-term goals, they may never get a chance to stop and think what to do with their lives. The academia has a similar trap further on the road: grad school. If you are a good student who is genuinely interested in learning for the sake of learning, grad school looks like the obvious step forward. For many, it will be the wrong choice.
- tylerhou 5y ago
  > Any job a bright self-taught recent high school graduate can get is likely a job they should not take. Many bright young people turn bitter and disillusioned, because they made the easy choice when they got an offer for a real job. Any examples of this happening? I haven’t seen this to be the case.

WA 5y ago

> What you do in uni is demonstrate that you're interested in certain things and you have enough work ethic to learn the exam answers. That's all. I think you’re right, but the next question would be: how is the hefty price tag for American universities justified, if your statement is true?

lordnacho 5y ago
It's a guild fee is what I'm saying. If the guild is making a lot of money it's worth it to pay to join. See MBAs. I can attest as a graduate of a world famous business school (ok it's the the uni and not the biz school) you won't learn how to run a business. But you do get that "ambitious hard worker who is somewhat social" label.
- shapefrog 5y ago
  Satement of intent is how I think of a MBA - there is nothing you couldnt learn from a book and $1.50 in late fees from a public library. At the end of the day it is all theatre to satisfy the hiring managers. Who do you select from; the candidate who says they read the book or the one that ivy league school says read the book?
  - e1g 5y ago
    Take the same person with the inartistic desire to learn. Offer them an excellent library with vetted books. Give them 2 years to focus on this learning full-time. Surround them with like-minded peers so they can share ideas and grow together. Add world-level experts to stimulate and group discussions. Guarantee them a job at a company they respect, starting at $150k, if they do well at the end. Will these things make a difference to their self-study course? Is this difference in trajectory worth $100k? Enough people say yes, and very few of those who actually did it regretted their choice.
- WA 5y ago
  I see it like you. So I guess it makes sense to evaluate the ROI of American universities based on the guild you’re joining. Kinda sad.

matthewmacleod 5y ago

What you do in uni is demonstrate that you're interested in certain things and you have enough work ethic to learn the exam answers. That's all. That might be true for you—and others—but it’s not always that way. I use the knowledge I learned in my degree all the time in my work - sometimes directly, sometimes as the foundation on which I can build my understanding of a more domain-specific problem. That knowledge is augmented by the extracurricular I did and my experience working in various roles over the years. I’m pretty sure this isn’t uncommon. I agree that the softer skills of self-directed education, research, writing etc. are important and widely transferable. Plenty of people I know have been successful in careers distinct from their higher education. But I do think it’s a bit reductive to dismiss the value of a deep technical education so easily.

swiley 5y ago

IMO: economics is just heat transfer with extra steps.

mettamage 5y ago

> What you do in uni is demonstrate that you're interested in certain things and you have enough work ethic to learn the exam answers. That's all. Wrong. Why? There are many counter examples. But perhaps you meant that it tends to be true, if so then I read your comment a bit too black and white. That would be a lot tougher to see whether that's true or not. I'm purely going to keep this comment on a content level (e.g. I'm not concerned with the fact that you also make lifelong friends at uni, etc.). I've done quite different study programs, so let's see what happened there (I'm only talking about the ones I've finished since I know those well). I studied: - Psychology (bachelor) - Information Science (20% business, 80% computer science, bachelor) - Game-design (master) - Computer science with a specialty in multimedia and security (master) For my psychology degree, I really agree with your general message. When I look at where my classmates are today, I feel that content-wise university was a bit worthless. However, of those psychology students there are about 5 to 20 percent of people that are using their knowledge. One does a lot of statistics at work and did a lot of statistics in a psychology minor (structurual equational modelling). Another one did research for the government and wrote fairly similar-ish research reports compared to psychology papers. Finally, a large part of this group becomes a clinical psychologist and then a large part of your study is relevant because most of the program is about interpreting research. So... 80% agree, 20% disagree. Information Science: 20% of the people were already working in IT. For us other eighty-percenters a lot of us went into consulting and a few of us into hardcore computer science. Information science definitely teaches things about requirements gathering that I've used as a freelancer later on. I wouldn't say that the whole program is useful, mostly because it's split between two worlds and you end up picking one of them. But for the world that you pick, it had a lot of useful courses. For me, I gained the ability to learn anything in the IT world. Before I went to uni I've tried it but I failed. I tried learning PHP, I failed. I tried learning Objective-C/iPhone apps but I failed. But at uni, I learned programming, networking and computer systems (among other things) and suddenly revisiting those topics 3 years laters I felt learning Objective-C was easy! So... I tend to disagree completely here. Game-design: people went to a lot of different fields after this, I think most of us aren't using any of the theory/practice that we've learned in this degree. However, some of us are! I'd estimate about 10% is still heavily using their game-design skills (e.g. one is a online curriculum-designer and the whole thing about user feedback shares a lot with game-design). In my case, it's mixed. I made one game Unity3D and it was the first time I was introduced to C#. I did a few things in JavaScript. But mostly I learned about player behavior and I've noticed a lot of game-design knowledge is a specialized version of UX. So when I tend to develop an app, I tend to see "users" as "gamers" (if applicable) and utilize my intuition that I've built up with this program. So... I tend to agree, but there are exceptions. Computer Science: in one course I made a computer graphics engine that had 10K lines of code. That was very educational. In another I made and sold an iPhone app (rewarding and educational). And I've done a lot of hacking courses that now allows me to pentest production applications while I'm a full-stack engineer. So... I tend to disagree. Yes, the skills I've learned here are foundational and not fully on point to what I do now (full-stack dev, currently interviewing with a FAANG company, searching for referrals to Google still :P) but it definitely helps with what I do today. At the very least, I tend to catch critical security issues in code review (and hack into them as a PoC when no one believes me) and code (hopefully) secure code myself.

avereveard 5y ago

It's a very superficial take of what a university course gives to you; sure, it doesn't give immediate work skill, but the shared "vocabulary" of theorems, formulas, notations and conventions you build if your curricula matches your job goals and your team formation gives you tremendous synergy both in learning on the job and in functioning as a team; the understanding of principles behind the workings enables you to learn faster, to more aptly move your knowledge into similar area interdisciplinarily, and to be more flexible in modifying existing solution to novel issues within your field.

lordnacho 5y ago
But you'll end up getting a whole new vocabulary when you join a new industry. What you did at uni was practicing learning new vocabulary and models. I would say as far as something like math appears to be foundational, what it really makes you practice is precision thinking: this thing matters, this other thing doesn't. One thing that might convince you is that when you look at math the subject itself, how many people who were good at applied math like calculus and PDEs actually know anything about mathematical foundations like ZFC, Gödel, and that type of thing?
- avereveard 5y ago
  no lol job providing theory learning are exceedingly scarce, at most you get some practical level stuff and off you go. all the learning you do on the side do help, but formal learning is a completely different thing than running two courses off udemy

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

Well said. In Liar's Poker, the author has an Art History degree. That book inspired many young people at the time to work on Wall Street. Several of my friends who went to work at various trading desks did not study business. One of the most successful (highest "ROI") majored in Philosophy. The idea of an uneducated electorate that increasingly gets its (mis)information from social media and aims to "earn" its money only from venture capital and online advertisers is, IMHO, frightening. However, the bigger picture is not something these "ROI" analysts ever seem to consider.