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> Really, it's a cultural problem. No, it's an economic one. > I have a liberal arts degree from an "elite private university". Ok. Let's make the assumption

• nobody31 15y ago
  >Half a mil to learn about Poetry Writing. Sorry, but that's just silly. Half a mil so that when you apply for a job at $MEGA-CORP or in government the hirer says "Oh you went to %SCHOOL%, same as me" welcome to our management fast-track program, followed by promotion and VP-dom. As opposed to "Oh you got a CS degree", well programmers get to sit in this cubicle and get paid $50k until we outsource the whole thing to India.
  • Eeko 15y ago
    > Half a mil so that when you apply for a job at $MEGA-CORP or in government the hirer says "Oh you went to %SCHOOL%, same as me" welcome to our management fast-track program, followed by promotion and VP-dom. Do companies really work that way? I think trying to max-out your competitiveness and money-making skills by hiring the right guys would make more sense than hiring via secluded grapevine.
    • nobody31 15y ago
      competitiveness only matters when you have competitors. So if you are an engineering company and you work like this you will be destroyed by countries with more meritocratic hiring systems. If you don't have any competitors because you work for government or in a sector like banking where you are protected from foreign competition and all you competitors hire on the same system - then you will do fine (for now). Can we spot any English speaking countries which might be an example of this?
    • kabdib 15y ago
      The one time I saw it work ("Oh, you went to Columbia, too!"), the manager who made the "hire" decision fired the employee about six months later. From one point, a curve, right? :-) I can't imagine this working out well on the average, though.
      • deleted 15y ago
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    • flomo 15y ago
      It does work that way, although more subtlety. More like "Oh you went to %SCHOOL% and we know some people in common. Welcome to a solid entry level position with decent pay and opportunity for advancement."
    • matwood 15y ago
      Yes and no. You have to remember a lot of jobs in $MEGA-CORP don't need much more than a warm body that can open a spreadsheet and mail it out. I deal with these idiots everyday and they often have titles of Project Manager, although I've recently been dealing with ones that have VP titles. The thing is, even in a giant company there are very few people pushing the boulder forward so to speak. So when hiring for non-boulder pushing position it's easy to hire someone with the right credentials because even if they are not the greatest hire ever they can still do the simple job they are given.
    • tsotha 15y ago
      The reason you hire from elite schools has nothing to do with the schools themselves. MIT and Harvard don't have substantially different curricula than anywhere else, and for undergrads it really doesn't matter if you have N Nobel Prize winners. But you want to hire someone who was smart enough to get in to MIT or Harvard. In terms of hiring people because they went to the same school you went to... I've never seen it, though I wouldn't be surprised if that happens with Ivy Leaguers.
  • wisty 15y ago
    Elitism only works while it has some kind of advantage. If going to an elite college gives you a better chance of reaching the top, then hirers will come from elite colleges. If getting a CS degree gives you a better chance of reaching the top, then hirers will have CS degess.
    • nobody31 15y ago
      Successful go to elite college, successful only hire from elite college, therefore to be successful you go to elite college. Of course this system eventually breaksdown. But for Eton school it's worked since 1440, for Oxford since 1096, Cambridge since 1284 - but eventually it will break down.
      • Eeko 15y ago
        > But for Eton school it's worked since 1440, for Oxford since > 1096, Cambridge since 1284 - but eventually it will break down. Universities pretty much had the monopoly for highly specialized knowledge until very recently. The companies, public and students waking up to the fact that knowing your rhetoric & poetry ain't so valuable any more IS the system breaking down. Right now. You'll rather hire from HN than from Oxford.
        • nobody31 15y ago
          Yes it was different in the middle ages, it has changed now. Only 10% of UK government ministers went to Eton and only 70% to Oxford and Cambridge so the power of the old-boys network is disappearing.
    • jtbigwoo 15y ago
      If getting a CS degree gives you a better chance of reaching the top, then hirers will have CS degess. Getting a CS degree does not give you a better chance of reaching the top. It gives you a better chance of reaching the upper-middle.
      • learc83 15y ago
  • bretthoerner 15y ago
    > As opposed to "Oh you got a CS degree", well programmers get to sit in this cubicle and get paid $50k until we outsource the whole thing to India. If you're making $50k you're being screwed. Also, a small percent of people (business students, poetry majors) ever go down the VP track. As a CS major I'm much, much better off in pay, quality of life, career stability than my friends who got business degrees. Never mind liberal arts, liberal arts is a vacation you take before you actually go to (graduate) school.
    • gaustin 15y ago
      > If you're making $50k you're being screwed. I'm being screwed then. I have a CS degree and a business Masters degree. I'm a "senior" developer and make $55k. The primary employer in my area is the Montana State government. Programmer pay here tops out at about $60k/year. Low-end programmer salaries are about $35-$40k. In the private sector you'd be lucky to get $70k/year. My wife and I are thinking about moving, but you can't really beat the quality of life here. Remote work is an option, but I don't really have the network/stomach to freelance and remote permanent positions are pretty scarce.
      • TheCapn 15y ago
        Agreed. My area's companies typically offer $50k for entry level developers. You can swindle more out of companies if they've been looking for someone for long enough or you have a special skillset that interests them. I have one friend who got $75k off the bat but that was a job in a company that employs 4 programmers for the entire company (national) and is energy industry related.
      • learc83 15y ago
        Ok if you lived in a major metropolitan area you'd be getting screwed. Cost of living is cheaper in rural areas, and there are fewer tech companies. But the vast majority of CS graduates live and work in metropolitan areas, so for the vast majority of CS graduates $50k is getting screwed.
      • bretthoerner 15y ago
        You're right, cost of living matters. I think it's safe to say that 50k in most metros (even ignoring the coasts) is a pretty bad deal, though.
• nekojima 15y ago
  > I would much rather my kid spend his time working in a small business and learning about entrepreneurship hands-on... As much as I'd want this for my kids, not all kids have the passion for entrepreneurship, or innovation, necessary to be successful. Liberal Arts degrees can help by allowing young adults find an interesting and for them beneficial and hopefully rewarding career, that they might not otherwise find if their best option is working as a cashier at a dollar store. The cost though for Arts degrees, and I have sat on the board of governors for a well-known and high reputation university, is ridiculous and largely driven by politics & tradition, more than economic value. But I don't want to pay for my children to party & socialize for four years at that cost!!
• jtbigwoo 15y ago
  You're working with the edge case in your example where a really smart person can get an amazing job right out of high school. It's more instructive to look at the average case: - In the current economy, the number of high school grads making $40k/year is vanishingly small. It's more likely he'd be making 25k or less if he has a job at all. - 25k for living expenses and books for a college student is way too high unless she's going to school across the country and flies home a ton. - The average student doesn't pay 40k/year in tuition unless he has rich parents and is a below-average student. The average is less than 20k. Let's redo the math: Tuition: 20k * 4 = 80k Living Expenses: 15k * 4 = 60k Total Expense: 140k Let's say that our college student gets a below-average job that pays 32k/year. In a 35 year career with 3% raises, our high school grad makes a total of $1,511,552. In a 31 year career with 3% raises, our college grad makes a total of $1,600,086. Considering the time value of that $140,000, it's a wash. Go to college and study poetry if you want. The impact to your long-term bottom line is negligible.
  • maratd 15y ago
    > You're working with the edge case The only people on this site, by definition, are edge cases. I really don't like mental masturbation, so I was really speaking to everyone reading this thread. Your post absolutely applies for the average person. Even for the edge cases, I'm not implying you shouldn't go to college. There is still the social aspect to consider. But, honestly, it's about time people started thinking about the option of not going to college. It's not such a terrible option and does not spell immediate doooooom.
  • beambot 15y ago
    I believe his math was accounting for the 4 years of lost wages during college as an opportunity cost of $32k/yr * 4yr = $128k for a total college expense of $140k + $128k = $268k. Now, if you could invest that money at 3% compound interest over 30 years, you're talking about $650k -- that's 33% of your final career totals. (When I do that calculation for my 10 years of BS+PhD engineering, its pretty dramatic!)
    • _delirium 15y ago
• joshklein 15y ago
  It sounds like we agree - my post was expressly derisive of the kid who sleeps through his poetry class. Regardless, it sounds like writing poetry suggests a romantic lark to you. To me, it was a lesson in how to convey powerfully complex ideas in concise, but meaningful, language. I didn't make a lot of money right out of school, but 3 years later I was making a boatload. Why? Because I can write the kind of email that will make someone who has a job I'm able to do agree to coffee with me, and pitch myself successfully in that meeting. I'm a "go getter" who goes and finds my success, because I'm the opposite of the kind of kid who goes to sleep in his poetry class. And by the way, I taught myself programming. That CS 201 class I took was a java programming class where the instructors wrote a framework that we learned. At the end of the semester, all I knew were a bunch of the functions of their framework. Why would I need school to learn programming? Unlike my major, CS had something like 20 required courses. That's at least half of your whole university education, more once you find a particular area to focus in. However, I took an economics class from a Nobel laureate and a history class from a professor who lit the room with his enthusiasm for storytelling obscure historical anecdotes. It's the difference between reading a textbook about WWII and watching Band of Brothers. You can't get that stuff on your own. Also to clarify: I partied my face off in college, too. But it was work hard, play hard. I'm a student of life, not of how to optimize my bank balance before I'm 30. Regarding below comments: other than an internship I got during college from a graduate of my school, I haven't experienced much nepotism from my university. Most people have never heard of Washington University in St. Louis unless you work in Medicine.
  • maratd 15y ago
    > It sounds like we agree We agree in the sense that we both believe there is value in a good education. Especially a liberal arts one. I learned how to learn in college. By taking disparate subjects, I can absorb new information with ease. That is the most tangible and valuable skill I picked up. I got it by taking random subjects. The very definition of a liberal arts education. That said, the degree itself is worthless. I never had a resume. I started my first business in college. That was 12 years ago. For me, it might have been better to simply audit those classes or do something on my own, and put the tuition in my pocket. I have a strange feeling that applies to many people here.
• dconway 15y ago
  Ugh. What a depressing way to think about college. But you're right. My English degree isn't doing jack for me. In my free time during college, I actually studied theology, computer science, and martial arts. They are what should be written on my diploma, and what I'd rather show to potential employers (well, not the theology part so much).
  • jamesaguilar 15y ago
    Achieving a baseline of financial success is, in the average case, about acquiring some useful skill and providing value to someone in exchange for money. Going to college and not acquiring a useful skill cannot be anything but entertainment (and very expensive entertainment when we come to it). There's nothing depressing about this, it's just common sense, albeit common sense that very few choose to apply until it is too late.
• deleted 15y ago
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• sp332 15y ago
  I can't agree with this. Spending a couple hours at a time discussing Heidegger with an engaged teacher is not an experience you can get outside of a college. And it helped me ask questions I am not smart enough to have asked on my own. The best argument for college is the social environment, which can't be replicated outside of it. Not education. I don't think that's true in serious liberal arts colleges. They're all about changing the way you think. Edit: of course the social aspect is important. But it's not the best argument.
  • gavinlynch 15y ago
    Disagree. Reading books where others smarter than ourselves ask these questions can also unfold new paradigms and impart the same intellectual growth.
    • sp332 15y ago
      I'm sure that having a conversation with about a dozen other students and a teacher was more effective than just reading the book would have been. Especially since the teacher was able to fill in some cultural and translation gaps in the book we were reading, and could make connections to other philosophies that we didn't even know about but Heidegger took for granted.
      • gavinlynch 15y ago
        I could definitely see that. I guess my point is more that I don't think the experience you outlined is unique to college. And I'm sure there is a whole other conversation (I see it everywhere in these comments) about the value for the price.
• xiaoma 15y ago
  >College tuition is 40K itself at an "elite private university". Then you add living expenses, books, food, etc. and you have another 25K. That's 65K. This is a bit disingenuous. Elite universities are almost universally free for those who need the help. >Yup. Half a mil to learn about Poetry Writing. Sorry, but that's just silly. >I would much rather my kid spend his time working in a small business and learning about entrepreneurship hands-on, than pissing away untold fortunes to sleep in a class about poetry. You can slip the kid some Robert Frost after work. Money has such a weak correlation with happiness that the argument needs to be fleshed out a bit more to be convincing. I've known many engineers in my life and I've seen no evidence that they are happier than those who have pursued the arts. Life isn't a video game in which money is a score. Heck even in a video game, it's rarely about the accumulation of money. Even in terms of building a lasting legacy, there is much to be said for the arts over business. Byron will be remembered long after the Vanderbilts are forgotten.
• bambax 15y ago
  You're counting living expenses twice. If he hadn't gone to college he'd have had to eat all the same; so it's more 320K than 420, and we're below a third of a mil instead of near half. Still a lot for learning to write poetry but that's not all he did...
• pnathan 15y ago
  > The kids get that. That's why they don't go to class. Baloney. They don't go to class because they are hung over, or because a new movie came out, or because they want to play video games, or because they just don't feel like going. A very few don't go because they are sick or have actual life issues beyond being unmotivated. They are - as a rule of thumb, say, about 98% of the time - not sipping wine and discussing complex and nuanced issues.
  • Wilya 15y ago
    As much as I would like it to be true, discussing complex issues will have very few influence on your future career. Being good at socializing and networking will. An awful lot. And being hung over with friends does qualify for that.
• cjy 15y ago
  I agree with you that the cost of education is very high, but you need to look at the marginal cost. A person has to eat and pay rent regardless of whether they are in school. You can't count that 25K as the marginal cost of school.
• pixcavator 15y ago
  >>Half a mil to learn about Poetry Writing. Sorry, but that's just silly. Except it's payed for by your taxes. Who is silly here?
• fecklessyouth 15y ago
  "Trust me, if he has an inquisitive mind, he'll explore all the weird and strange subjects on his own time. With the internet, he can even be challenged by greater minds. The best argument for college is the social environment, which can't be replicated outside of it. Not education. The kids get that. That's why they don't go to class." No. When it comes to non-technical degrees, it's the classroom environment. It's the academic and intellectual environment. Which the internet isn't close to replicating. Someday it might come close, but certainly not in the near future. If you think the internet is approaching a college education in value, you haven't experienced a proper college education.