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The value of an engineering degree
- ForHackernews 13y agoNote that the list is based on self-reported data from PayScale.com, and doesn't include any graduate-level education. It's not news that engineering degrees pay well coming right out of undergrad.
- not_paul_graham 13y agoSurprised that Georgia Tech is not on that list. GT has consistently ranked among the top 5 colleges for ROI on most of these lists that are published.
- pconner 13y agoYeah, for both engineering and computing fields
- ghc 13y agoThere are two reasons for that: 1. Georgia Tech is just off the list. I saw another version of this list with the ivy league schools removed and it was there. 2. Many engineers that come out of Georgia Tech stay in the south, making less money due to lower cost of living. Schools in Boston, New York and SV will of course provide higher ROI because jobs in those areas pay more. I made $20k more than many of my classmates who stayed in Atlanta just by moving to Cambridge.
- waterlesscloud 13y agoGT and UVA get special shout-outs in the source article- http://qz.com/193400/here-are-the-american-colleges-and-majors-with-the-highest-roi/ http://qz.com/193400/here-are-the-american-colleges-and-majo...
- rayiner 13y agoNot starting your Y-axis at zero is a sin.
- tel 13y agoIf you go to the linked QZ article where they change the computation to take cost into account differently you have UVA and GT (in-state) topping the list with a significant margin.
- lotharbot 13y agoGT is #2 on the public schools list, and just outside of the top 10 overall. GT also blows the roof off of the scale when it's measured by percentage ROI instead of raw dollars. http://www.thewire.com/national/2014/03/these-are-the-schools-most-worth-their-price-but-good-luck-getting-in/359675/#disqus_thread http://www.thewire.com/national/2014/03/these-are-the-school...
- meritt 13y agoYou can also make an incredible ROI by not paying for an expensive degree and instead gain knowledge & experience through other means (teach yourself, free online courses, open-source projects, paid internships, etc). Just take a look at today's "Who is hiring?" [1] and you'll notice very few list degree requirements. Most are looking for a combination of experience and knowledge. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507765
- randomdata 13y agoYeah, it is troublesome to me that they always do these comparisons across professions. What would the numbers look like if they evaluated people with engineering degrees vs. people with other degrees (or perhaps no degrees) in the same jobs? Would the ROI of an engineering degree still come out so far ahead?
- vonmoltke 13y agoWhich is fine if you are both good at and interested in something wherein you can do this. I have a BSEE and am trying to get back into an EE-oriented position. For EEs, things have gotten to the point where me just having a BS is tolerated; they really want an MS+. Professional licensure is going that route as well now, unfortunately.
- not_paul_graham 13y agoEveryone does not have access to the link that you've just posted. Also in fields other than computing, you can't get hired (of course there are always exceptions) to design mission critical systems unless you have an aerospace / mechanical / chemical engineering degree. Good luck studying on your own to want to work as a chemical engineer because MegaCorp will totally hire you to work with chemicals and there aren't many startups hiring ChemEs. Also, kids are quite gullible and everything for most kids suggests that you need to go to college. The path goes somewhat like this: born -> pre-school -> school -> middle/high school -> college There are a lot of people that take 6 figure loans to study photography, or major in english. That I don't get.
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- HaloZero 13y agoI'm not sure what this post provides when the original post they link to is pretty much the same data plus some additional data about computer science degrees specifically. http://qz.com/193400/here-are-the-american-colleges-and-majors-with-the-highest-roi/ http://qz.com/193400/here-are-the-american-colleges-and-majo...
- rch 13y agoI invested a little cash in '97 when I went to college. If I'd invested 4-5 times more I might not be working right now. Or I might have gotten excited, over extended, and lost it all. Who knows. I also wonder how the typical ROI compares to just buying a condo in a college town instead?
- Omniusaspirer 13y agoThe gotcha with that comparison is that people will give you 100k in student loans at 18 years old, but you'll have a hell of a time getting 10k to go margin trading with.
- MimiZ 13y agoBecoming an engineer is a great foundation upon which you can change the world by building and doing. However, to advance higher you also need to complement those skill sets with good interpersonal skills.
- logfromblammo 13y agoAh, but if you have those interpersonal skills, you can advance almost as far without the engineering degree at all. You see the problem. The business economy rewards bullshit and schmoozing to a higher degree than it does actual work. Until that changes, any attempt to get kids to learn useful things instead of how to work the system is fighting to swim upstream against a very strong current. As a result, a lot of people that are engineers, scientists, or any other profession that requires a great deal of training in proportion to the typical monetary rewards are doing it because that is something they had a personal interest in doing. They achieve personal satisfaction in doing work that is too difficult or detailed for others to do well. You can only rely on that for so long. If you structure jobs in your companies for such people to be spectacularly unrewarding, the people who would have otherwise been engineers will choose other difficult careers that pay well, and satisfy their engineering urges as a sideline or hobby. As long as we have a business culture that values the ability to have a conversation over the ability to land a camera inside a 10m by 10m square on a completely different planet and still get clear images back, the people who can do both will often choose to engineer their own career path rather than work for the benefit of people who do not fully appreciate their work.
- pm90 13y agoIts a human thing more than a business thing. We believe in the principles that we are taught about when growing up, either by society or the media.
- snowwrestler 13y agoBig things are only accomplished by teams. Building and maintaining a team of people who are skilled and work well and productively together is actually very difficult. Most teams fail to achieve anything lasting of note. For example, most startups fail. NASA needs great engineering to build things like the Mars Rover. But they also need great management--it takes both.
- bcohen5055 13y agoLooking at the ROI on a college degree is very tricky even if you are just using to to compare schools. I clicked through to the original data set (http://qz.com/193400/here-are-the-american-colleges-and-majors-with-the-highest-roi/ http://qz.com/193400/here-are-the-american-colleges-and-majo...) and it shows that they used a net figure for calculating tuition that assumes average grants and loans. I don't believe this includes a TVM calculation for the loans though. This can really add up if you have 70K in student loans... I'd like to see a better comparrison with public schools in the engineering field across the entire career of an engineer. I went to a good state engineering school for mechanical engineering. Cheap in state tuition (and a 529) meant no debt post graduation. That's huge when starting out. Additionally my classmates and I had offers inthe 60k-80k range. That might not be as high as people right out of Stanford but I can't imagine it has a large effect over the length of someones career. When you factor in that many of the graduates from more prosetgious colleges carry debt for 5+ yrs after graduation.
- vonmoltke 13y agoThe annual % ROI on my degree is basically infinite, since the state of Florida paid for my entire BS. Sure, Florida Atlantic is not a place most people have heard of, but I still managed a Fortune 500 EE job right out of school, in late 2002 no less.
- randomdata 13y agoI would suggest you still have opportunity cost to consider. Assuming a four year program, you could have, on average, earned $120,000 during that time. If you then invested that at 5% until you reached retirement age, you could have earned right around $1,000,000 over your career above your regular income going forward. As such, your ROI should really be calculated on what you are able to earn in your career above that. To add, I would suggest that someone who has the determination and mindset to successfully complete an engineering degree should be able to earn even more than $120K during that initial period, but there are lots of variables that could be considered. It is impossible to narrow down exactly what opportunity you lost during that time, but it is almost certainly not zero.
- plg 13y agoThe world is not a meritocracy, and so we must not underestimate the value (ROI?) of the various social connections one makes at different schools and degree programs.
- segmondy 13y agoThe value of a lot of things in life including an engineering degree cannot simply be reduced to a dollar amount, unless the moment you set out to get a degree, your only and final goal was how much that degree would fetch you down the line.
- keeshawn 13y agoUnfortunately that isn't really up to us, since in our society you have to work to survive until you die or retire. Until having no job means a livable lifestyle, most people have to consider real dollar values when considering education.
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoWell then, we'd better get to work on fixing that problem, shouldn't we?
- m_ke 13y agoThis is BS, most of these companies are looking for snowflakes from top 10 schools, who have been programming since they were in middle school. I have plenty of competent friends who had a hard time finding anything better than an IT desk job after graduating from Stony Brook, NYU-Poly and City College. Most smaller tech companies don't even consider training their new employees. Instead they want a 'ninja' who is comfortable with their tech stack and can hit the ground running straight out of school. To make things worse 90% of them think their analytics platform or social network for cats is the next Google, so they put their candidates through ridiculous interviews that have nothing to do with writing CRUD apps. I even know people here at Columbia University who didn't get any good offers outside of finance.
- Ologn 13y agoI don't disagree that companies are often looking for people who have resumes and skills far exceeding the simple, minor needs of particular jobs. On the other hand, I have met many CS majors at local New York colleges, and even among the seniors who seem to be in the top half of the class, their knowledge of some basic things is almost universally absent. Such as software version control - they don't know what it is, they don't know the names of any version control systems, like git or perforce, and they don't know how to use any of them. They study for class, mostly, but seem to have no interest in all of this outside of class. Not once in four years do you check a project out of github, fix a bug, and then send a patch and pull request? And that's among those who study and are in the top half of the class. Some kids don't even care about studying much and I don't know why they're even bothering.
- m_ke 13y agoI know what you mean, but I can't blame people for having other obligations or interests outside of programming. I went to a public high school here in NYC and have good friends who had to work their way through college, some of them even had siblings to support. Knowing about git, tdd and etc is important but it's not something that can't be taught. It's as simple as pairing them with experienced engineers and pointing them to a few relevant books.
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- chollida1 13y agoI'm Canadian, but I always thought I was knowledgeable about American universities. I'd never heard of Harvey Mudd college, and here it is competing with the two giants of US engineering, MIT and Caltech. The take away from this seems to be that you shouldn't assume your interviewer knows that your degree is from a "name" school, or that the school you went to will influence any one in a positive way. I remember someone here mentioned that they went to University of Texas Austin and that they thought that should ensure them of getting an interview anywhere and I wasn't sure if they were joking or being serious as I'd never heard of UoT Austin before as being a good computer science school.
- sliverstorm 13y agoCaltech is much the same way though, outside of engineering nobody has heard of it. Like Harvey Mudd, it's a small *private school that hasn't yet become a household name.
- beagle3 13y agoFeynmann taught at caltech. It is far from unknown.
- sliverstorm 13y agoI didn't say it is unknown. It's well known, but only in certain circles. As contrasted with, say, Harvard which is known by just about every mother, brother, and child.
- WalterBright 13y ago> only in certain circles The circles that matter :-)
- mhartl 13y agoAs a graduate of both Harvard and Caltech, I can confirm that this is true. Even many people in Pasadena, where Caltech is located, are only vaguely aware of its existence, and even many southern Californians confuse it with Cal Poly Pomona. Of course, Caltech is universally known and respected among technical people, but the contrast with Harvard—which, as you say, is known by just about every mother, brother, and child—is unmistakable. (Indeed, it's telling that many references to Caltech in these comments misspell its name. Hell, even many Pasadena city street signs misspell its name. Apparently the Institute is embarking on an ambitious new branding strategy—I suggest that getting Caltech's home town to spell its name right would be a good place to start.)
- Bahamut 13y agoI argue that mathematics and physics degrees are more valuable than engineering degrees. It prepares you for one of the most fundamental of skills for white collar jobs: critical thinking. Much of the other stuff can easily be self-taught given a strong/exceptional foundation in critical thinking ability, and it can be used to great advantage in differentiating yourself from your peers.
- balls187 13y agoI don't know what engineering degrees they offer at your school, but pretty much every one of my classes was Math & Physics.
- bobster15 13y agoA degree in math or physics requires much more math than that which engineers study. Likewise a degree in physics requires much more physics than engineers study.
- balls187 13y agoNeither of which is an indication that they are better at engineers at critical thinking.
- jeffbr13 13y agoI think the difference might be this, in undergraduate degrees: * Mathematics is entirely about proving arguments and solving problems within logical systems. * The 'hard sciences' (esp. physics) are about working within a theoretical (often mathematical) framework and testing it with experimentation. Contrast this to engineering disciplines, or even medicine, where the focus is on gaining knowledge which you can use to solve problems. It's problem-solving, but doesn't have much of the scientific method about it.
- crazy1van 13y agoNearly every engineering class I had was really a math class in disguise. Granted, it was often a very specialized, applied math class. Although in my experience at least by grad school, math students are usually in a very specialized field of mathematics as well...just a different one from engineers.
- jjeremycai 13y agoWhy do you think Babson's ROI is so high, considering it's an undergraduate business school? Disclaimer: I go to there, but want your genuine insight
- oneshotaccount 13y agoThe "usual suspects" answer is that the students there are elevated in quality relative to other schools. For a similar concept, I lost a job as a teacher that paid $20k / year after taxes. For a year after that, my job-seeking strategy might be best described thus: http://xkcd.com/874/ http://xkcd.com/874/ Then I got a job (in software development, not teaching) paying low six figures (...before taxes. Watch the magic of accounting render two similar things nearly incomparable to each other). Does that reflect the incredible (in excess of 100% annual return, say) effectiveness of "fuck around" as a way to get jobs?
- avckp 13y agoDegrees are not valuable until you know what you should know.
- avckp 13y agoPolitics is a different thing but still.
- FD3SA 13y ago"There are more technical jobs open than qualified candidates to fill them." I love how virulent memes just get reiterated as fact once they reach a certain critical threshold. This one in particular, is pure bullshit as has been falsified over and over again [1][2][3][4]. If you see people bring this up, please set them straight. This meme needs to be killed. Labor has never been in such high supply, and it has never been cheaper. [5][6] With regards to stupidly overpriced education, I recommend it to those who can afford it because it is an extremely enjoyable experience. Don't take out 300k of loans to do it though. Instead, use online courseware (EdX, Coursera) to build a useful skill set, work for a few years, then go to college if you really want the social experience and old boys network. Because that's the only thing college has to offer in this day and age. 1. http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-i... 2. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/the-fake-skills-shortage/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/the-fake-skills-... 3. http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/the-myth-of-the-science-and-engineering-shortage/284359/ http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/the-myt... 4. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9245494/What_STEM_shortage_Electrical_engineering_lost_35_000_jobs_last_year http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9245494/What_STEM_sho... 5. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/opinion/capitalism-vs-democracy.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/opinion/capitalism-vs-demo... 6. http://inequalityforall.com/ http://inequalityforall.com/
- vacri 13y agoCoursera has a lot of intro-level courses, but not really much in-depth stuff. I remember being at the end of my degree and a bunch of us were sitting in the cafeteria complaining about how we hadn't learned anything. Then we realised that we were just talking about facts (and of which we had actually learned a lot - especially about underlying systems rather than factoids), but we had ignored a ton of soft skills in terms of research, collaboration, scientific procedure and rigor, self-expression, critique of other's work rigor, ethics, and plenty more I can't think of right now. In particular, it taught us how to learn further. This is a skill that a lot of people don't have. There are plenty of autodidacts, but they are definitely a small minority of people. A smattering of online courses doesn't cover most of these items in the same manner or depth. It was certainly more than 'an old boys network', especially for me, since I have kept in contact with 0 people from those days. Is it worth 300k? Maybe not[1]. But I didn't pay for a US university, and I've seen here on HN that there are claims that such sky-high figures are not the norm, and that there are plenty of ways to get cheaper degree-level education. [1]Well, it was 'worth 300k' in a way - it changed who I was as a person for the better, and the way I look at new information. But I wouldn't have gone 300k into debt at the time. I did go about 40k into debt though (via HECS)
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