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> colleges offered useless degrees This is such a weird perspective. Look at any modern business. A lot of employees will have studied something in humanities.

• aortega 4y ago
  >There are valuable skills Depends on the business and the degree. They may be valuable, but they are not 500k usd valuable. >(particularly writing and communication) You should learn that in grade school.
  • Sakos 4y ago
    • dang 4y ago
      Obviously you can't post like this here and obviously we have to ban accounts that do so, so please don't do it again—regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • woodruffw 4y ago
    I think a vanishingly small fraction of liberal arts undergraduates are paying 500K USD for their degrees (even after you factor in all external costs), much less taking on that much in debt. (The rest of the comment is ridiculous -- it should be obvious that there is much more to learn about writing or communication than just what can be taught in grade school.)
    • aortega 4y ago
      > it should be obvious that there is much more to learn about writing or communication Are those skills valuable enough to warrant a 500k usd loan? clearly not, or else they should have no problem repaying it.
      • woodruffw 4y ago
        You still haven't substantiated that number. With regards to value: do you actually want to live in a society where the sole metric for human worth is one's predicted salary? That sounds miserable.
        • nightski 4y ago
          Last time I looked average student loan debt was around 30k. Not 500k. Yet we still hear all the time about how that is crippling. So much so that we need the taxpayer to come in and pay off all these loans for college graduates. So even at 30k it sounds like these degrees are not even adequate to pay off those loans. I wish we'd normalize furthering your education later in life after establishing a career and having more funds to do so. It should be less about advancing your career and more about improving and expanding oneself anytime in adulthood.
          • woodruffw 4y ago
            Thank you for responding with the actual number. Yes: even 30k in debt can be crippling, and there is a complex of macroeconomic pressures (like liberal arts jobs concentrating in HCOL areas) that make getting out from under that debt much more difficult than it otherwise would be. That being said, the solution is not to disincentivize people from getting liberal arts degrees. It's to just make college cheaper, the way every other developed nation does, and to ensure ample non-undergraduate career paths for anybody who is merely going to college because they're told "it's the thing to do." > I wish we'd normalize furthering your education later in life after establishing a career and having more funds to do so. I agree completely!
      • 4y ago
  • endisneigh 4y ago
    which schools cost $500K USD?
    • topkai22 4y ago
      Columbia is $85k/ year. Do 4 years undergrad plus a 2 year masters and you are past $500k. I’m sure people get in to that much debt, but it’s going to be rare. The largest number I’ve known of personally is $320k from undergrad, law school, and an MIS.
      • endisneigh 4y ago
        $85K is the sticker price at Columbia. Very few people actually pay that much, let alone take out loans for 500K. Sad how fake info is the top thread at HN. In particular Columbia will never make you take out loans: https://cc-seas.financialaid.columbia.edu/how/aid/works https://cc-seas.financialaid.columbia.edu/how/aid/works. The kind of people who would get zero aid from Columbia would be very unlikely to be taking out loans to begin with.
  • jakelazaroff 4y ago
    > You should learn that in grade school. Do you really think it’s reasonable to expect eleven year olds to write and communicate at the same level as a fully grown adult?
  • 6stringmerc 4y ago
    Apparently very useful degrees lead to the highly satisfying career of barely living wages as a post-doc with limited job security and work life balance, but do preach on about how useful the existing system is because $500k jobs are in finance and oil and gas, not STEM.
  • RHSeeger 4y ago
    Nobody learns professional level writing and communication in grade school. There is a huge margin between "can convey information in writing" and "is skilled at conveying information efficiently in writing".
    • namelessoracle 4y ago
      Minimum page requirements for essays and papers dont reinforce brevity in writing. They do the opposite, a way to be flower-y and add cruft. Minimum page requirements are often the bulk of your grade in non stem. If you wrote the minimum pages, followed the style guide given to you, used mostly correct English, and followed citation guides. You will get a passing grade. It encourages finding a bunch of sources that back up your point ad nauseam, and paraphrase them repeatedly.
      • jakelazaroff 4y ago
        Do you have a source for this? Because, anecdotally, I know a lot of teachers and professors and none of them grade that way.
        • namelessoracle 4y ago
          My source is "going to college" and "seeing what my peers wrote" when they asked me to help them proof read, and me seeing my paper get a 100, and their paper getting 70 despite being nonsense. (because the grading rubric rewards heavily following the process) I am sure that you have watched a teacher grade 50+ 10 page papers in the span of a week and heard their rational behind each grade though. Having graded some of those papers when being a TA, its all about the rubric, not the content, and most of the rubric is stuff like "Did they follow formatting rules? Did they hit page requirement? Did they have correct citations? Did they follow citation format?" Because not having a space in the wrong place during their works cited page is super important, but writing utter nonsense? Eh. Stuff like "the content" is sometimes low as 10 points on the paper. Usually about 20.
• 1-6 4y ago
  It it took me years of clawing out of my poor choice to get into tech. No one would grant me an interview when they saw Psychology as my major. Would I recommend other new students trying the same? No. If you’re going to stay in humanities, then go for it. No one is going to think, “cool, they’re going to thrive with us because of their unique background.” I was hoping that DEI would be more about inclusivity toward majors and not merely about one’s genealogical expressivity.
  • jliptzin 4y ago
    Maybe if you had gone into psychology instead of tech, the degree wouldn’t be useless.
    • aortega 4y ago
      But psychology clearly don't pay enough to pay the loan back, so the degree is overpriced.
      • klyrs 4y ago
        With the hourly rates and waiting lists I've experienced, I can hardly believe that.
        • jliptzin 4y ago
          Me too
    • TulliusCicero 4y ago
      You can't "go into psychology" really with just a bachelor's.
    • TylerE 4y ago
      Psychology is one of those things where it really pretty much is useless unless you to the doctorate level.
  • woodruffw 4y ago
• TigeriusKirk 4y ago
  Can you imagine a degree that would be useless? Any degree?
  • aortega 4y ago
    I can imagine many, which are not only useless, but also malicious and generally negative for society. I won't name them here so as not to 'offend' people, but it's easy to tell which ones I mean.
    • lardo 4y ago
      Marketing and Business!
• Eji1700 4y ago
  > Look at any modern business. A lot of employees will have studied something in humanities. And if businesses didn't require 4 year degrees for jobs that don't need them, they wouldn't. We literally gatekeep careers based on your ability to finish a 4+ year $10k+ degree program, and then you actually get the job and essentially nothing you learned was useful. The number of coworkers i've met with degrees outside their career is basically the majority (as i work outside of STEM), and their skills mostly correlate to how well they were trained on the job. There's PLENTY that never needed college, or that college didnt change jack about their poor skill set (in fact reinforced it). The people I know who are making the most are doctors/lawyers (and thats a whole OTHER story), and then right after that are the trades (mostly union workers) who never went to college. I'd much rather see a proper focus on the public education we already have (and varies WILDLY in quality depending on where you are) than basically saying "well we're going to require you to go to school until you're 18, and then we're going to say that no matter how well you excelled there you're only worth minimum wage unless you force yourself through college, and then get a job where you're useless until they finish the on the job training." A large majority of the economy is based on jobs that just do not require a 4 year degree (MAYBE 2, but even then it should just be a credit requirement). I'm all for better educating the populace, but accomplishing this by just kneecapping those with life circumstances that make a 4 year degree difficult isn't helping.
  • jackcosgrove 4y ago
    Credential inflation is desirable for governments because being enrolled in some kind of tertiary program suppresses the unemployment numbers. If you can learn a skill that makes getting hired easier, all the better! We won't see widespread de-escalation of credentials until there are labor shortages, at which point it's no longer in anyone's interest to keep potential workers sidelined in school.
    • ilammy 4y ago
      Moreover, not only you’re not counted as “unemployed” while attaining a degree — after you get your degree, you’re left with a hefty debt: a pretty nice incentive to not stay unemployed!
• TotoHorner 4y ago
  Funny. The first thing you have to learn when working at any company is to unlearn everything you were taught about writing in college. In terms of learning “critical thinking”, it’s just selection bias. Most smart people go to college and people misattribute the intelligence as somehow being a product of the college. No, it’s not.
  • ModernMech 4y ago
    There is a stark difference between the critical thinking abilities of my freshman and senior students. It seems to me we're doing something to them over their 4 years with us.
    • TotoHorner 4y ago
      How do you even define “critical thinking”. Obviously students will learn how to game the system and pass all the essays/tests over their 4 years. That doesn’t imply that they’re more useful for society or better placed for their futures. It just means that they know what words/phrases to use to get an A on their paper.
      • ModernMech 4y ago
        If by "game the system" you mean, "learn the necessary knowledge and skills taught in the curriculum to graduate", then yeah, they are gaming the system. But to you point, I define critical thinking as the ability to analyze and synthesize disparate data in order to form thoughts and opinions which are well founded. When they come to me out of high school, this ability is often completely lacking. When they leave after 4 years, they are being sought after by top companies, forming their own companies, and entering into public service well equipped to meet the demands of their new careers. No one is graduating from our programs by regurgitating words/phrases. I don't know where you got that perception. That would be descriptive of high school, not a top-ranked university.
    • _dain_ 4y ago
      mate, they just got older. there's a stark difference in critical thinking skill between 22 year olds and 18 year olds, regardless of what degree they get (or whether they get one at all).
• sergiomattei 4y ago
• ren_engineer 4y ago
  >The problem is not "useless degrees" (they're all useful, regardless of what you may think of them), the problem is insane cost of education. STEM degrees are essential for modern society, humanities degrees are pure luxury that could be replaced by just reading the course syllabus for free and discussing online or with local groups As for the cost of education, that could be fixed overnight by allowing loans to be discharged. Colleges would instantly stop providing most humanities courses because they know the students won't be able to repay them because they provide no real world value
  • woodruffw 4y ago
    This is a reprehensible way to look at the world, one that is self-consuming: should we close scientific research labs because they're cost centers? Should we forbid exploratory work because it lacks a clear road to shareholder value? And that's before we consider the intangible nature of "real world value." Very few of us want to live in a world where value is a pure function of expected production.
    • infamouscow 4y ago
      The death of universities cannot happen soon enough. If only to force them to genuinely re-evaluate all of their stupid decisions over the last 50 years so that future generations can avoid the same fate.
      • woodruffw 4y ago
        What "stupid decisions" are you identifying with the last 50 years? I can't think of a unifying theme in that timespan. Whether or not the thing we call "universities" continues to exist into the indefinite future is not of particular concern to me. The primary thing I'm concerning myself with in this conversation is the recurrent and myopic belief among the HN commentariat that everything, especially anything that isn't STEM, needs to fit into the bottom line of some profit structure to be worth any of society's time and effort.
        • 4y ago
• ZephyrBlu 4y ago
  If you need to spend 4 years learning how to write and communicate effectively you probably shouldn't be going to university in the first place.
  • mellavora 4y ago
    sure. Then do you also agree that if you need to spend 4 years learning how to write effective software you probably shouldn't go to university either? Your basic point is that education is worthless. What do you propose as a substitute? And please explain also why it is better at the scale of a society? Given your view on the ease of effective writing, it is fair to expect that your answer is well structured at the level of the entire essay, the paragraph, and the sentence. Your reply should also include appropriate historical references demonstrating your points. If you cannot meet that standard, then by your own argument you have proved yourself wrong.
    • ZephyrBlu 4y ago
      > Then do you also agree that if you need to spend 4 years learning how to write effective software you probably shouldn't go to university either? The scope of writing for effective communication and writing software are very different, but I do also agree with this. SE and CS degrees aren't for writing software though. I think specialized education has far fewer benefits than most people think. Basic language and mathematical skills are a good baseline, but expecting to teach the whole population advanced algebra for instance, does not seem productive. It's why people question what they were taught in school. > If you cannot meet that standard, then by your own argument you have proved yourself wrong Funny you say that, since I have always had good English without trying and my communication skills have been commented on by a number of different people I've worked with so my perspective on this is somewhat biased.
      • mellavora 4y ago
        > my communication skills have been commented on by a number of different people I've worked with so my perspective on this is somewhat biased. I want to first give you full credit for an honest and thoughtful debate, in the true spirit of HN. You have my respect. Second, I fully believe that you have exceptional talent in communication. That bias, however, is the issue. You do it naturally. You also point out that this is exceptional. What do we do with the 90% of the population who are not exceptionally gifted? Maybe they would benefit from a structured approach which trains them on the skills which come to you naturally? Same for many other things. The best programmers I've known all were really good without the Uni education. And the structured education of a good masters program brought them to a new level. Danger! sports analogy. You can't play in the majors without a great deal of natural talent. But the people with talent ANSD specialized training ("intentional practice", "good coaching", or however else you want to phrase "education") are going to dominate.
• secondcoming 4y ago
  The writing and communication skills needed for business are taught in school (at least they should be)
• LudwigNagasena 4y ago
  > A lot of employees will have studied something in humanities. There are valuable skills (particularly writing and communication) that are learned in these degrees that might not be seen as valuable by your average techie. In my experience tech people value communication and clarity as much and maybe even more than your average person. Try to write code that would be unintelligible to your colleagues. You are not going to get praised for that. > The problem is not "useless degrees" (they're all useful, regardless of what you may think of them), the problem is insane cost of education. Absolutely useless. It is ridiculous to think that it should require 14+ years of schooling to learn to communicate.
• carom 4y ago
  >There are valuable skills (particularly writing and communication) that are learned in these degrees that might not be seen as valuable by your average techie. That's true, as someone working in tech I admit, I am illiterate. I cannot read or write. My communication is very poor. I normally just scream until someone from HR brings me more snackies.
  • thfuran 4y ago
    Well, you can't punctuate.
• _dain_ 4y ago
  >This is such a weird perspective. Look at any modern business. A lot of employees will have studied something in humanities. There are valuable skills (particularly writing and communication) that are learned in these degrees that might not be seen as valuable by your average techie. they use it as an IQ filter, nothing more.
  • fallingknife 4y ago
    Of course we have a more accurate IQ filter that costs basically nothing and takes hours, not years, but then poor people might pass the filter, and rich people might not, so we can't have that.