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Comment by junto | Hacker News Reader

This is spot on. One final point is that if you get a BSc in electrical engineering in Germany then you have little choice but to get your masters and PhD or you just won't get a job.

In the UK the BSc is often enough to get yourself on the job ladder.

Almost all the sciences in Germany have a PhD as an entry point for a good job. You start working at 30. In the UK you will already have been working for 9 years in industry.

This is simply because in Germany everyone else competing for jobs also has a PhD!

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This indicates that education is an arms race, built around signalling relative qualities, not a human capital building exercise centred on the pursuit of knowledge and skills. If it were about gaining knowledge and understanding, your relative level of credentialing, and the selectivity of the institution would be almost irrelevant to employers. If education is an arms race, subsidizing it will only cause people to spend more time in school, studying to beat the competition.

We should also forget that this arms race is very costly regardless of tuition prices, as most of the cost of education (to the average post-secondary student) is not tuition, but lost wages.

David Garber describes this phenomenon in his book "The Utopia of Rules". Basically everythng that used to be learned on the job, becoming a craftsman, has now been replaced by studying a degree in it - essentially reenfocing the class sytem, as only the middle and upper classes will be able to afford it.

There's a whole different aspect: you can actually choose not go to uni in Germany, and still build a career: vocational training. Germany still runs serious trainee programmes, including IT.

Yes, another difference I neglected to mention is in Germanic countries, because your degree is your life, people think it's ok take it easy, enjoy your student life a bit, maybe stretch it out to 6-7 years where it's supposed to take 5. And you certainly cannot just stop after your bachelor's degree!

In the UK, people are 21 or 22 when they finish university, and it's off to find some job. It's not unusual to find 25 year old phds who've raced through the academic system.

This naturally also has an impact on the debate about who should pay, and how much.

It's pretty common for Germans to start working in their late 20s or early 30s if they went to university.

PhD is highly unusual if you want to work in the industry. The standard degree is the Master, but Bachelors are also hired, albeit a bit more reluctantly.

For technical areas you are right, but if you are looking in the field of chemistry or biology a PhD really is required, although even then most of these are doing ordinary lab work which a technician could do as well.

Yes, but these are pretty much the only fields where this is the case (ignoring the almost worthless MD).

That's a well-known anomaly.

Biology too. I graduated with a batchelors 20 years ago, and pretty mush the only thing you could do with that was PhD, or some really crap lab job. They taught you to design experiments, but you would never get the chance to do that without a PhD.

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