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Comment by vaksel | Hacker News Reader

the way I see it, is if you are doing engineering or any other technical major, then yes it still is.

but humanities etc is a waste of money

unfortunately our culture has made getting a degree a prerequisite(everyone got one), so now you need a college degree for jobs you wouldn't have needed one in the past.

before, having a college degree was a means to increase your income substantially, now it's just a checkmark that you got $40-160K in debt for.

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I think your second point actually points to why the first might be wrong. There are huge ranges of jobs that a humanities degree qualifies you for that you can't get without one--- even a bunch of stuff that's unrelated to the degree, like HR or various secretarial jobs. In engineering, if you have no degree, you at least have a chance of convincing someone that you're a great engineer by doing independent work, and even large companies like Microsoft and Google do hire people without degrees. In the humanities, though, it's very hard without a degree to convince someone that you're "just as good" as other applicants who have degrees; you generally won't even get a second look.

So I'd almost say the opposite: that if you aren't going to do engineering, a degree is definitely worth it, but if you are, it might be more questionable, and depends on what exactly you want to do, and what your outside-out-school credentials are.

I find it hard to believe that a person could get the same engineering education on their own than at a good engineering university. From a practical point of view, I see what you mean, in that, an HR department weighing two candidates would probably prefer the one with a(ny) college degree. Frankly, that almost goes without saying. However, I think the same is much more true in engineering. I'm not only talking about programming shops. After all, computer science/computer engineering isn't the only form of engineering. There's material science, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, aerospace engineering, etc., and I simply can't believe that a place like Boeing would seriously consider you for an engineering position unless you have at least a bachelors in the relevant field.

Software is a rare field in that one can become competent without having a "related" college degree. You can certainly ship products without majoring in CS. On the other hand, I don't think you can build planes or bridges without a degree in aerospace or mechanical engineering.

> There are huge ranges of jobs that a humanities degree qualifies you for that you can't get without one--- even a bunch of stuff that's unrelated to the degree, like HR or various secretarial jobs.

I think that's exactly the problem. Why should that degree qualify you? It's unrelated! That's what the article and some of the comments are trying to point out: we shouldn't have careers where the college degree is treated like a checkbox instead of being a relevant indicator of your ability in the field in question. What does close examination of Chaucer or Shakespeare have to do with being a secretary? Why would someone who doesn't have a degree in Comparitive Literature make a worse secretary than someone who does? The answer is that it shouldn't.

Basically as a proxy for "is reasonably intelligent and able to apply him/herself for some period of time to achieve goals". Not necessarily a great proxy (and a very expensive one), but for a lot of semi-generic jobs it's the best currently available. At the very least, it weeds out some of the people the companies definitely don't want to hire.

Also note that the US high school diploma has been massively devalued over this period (well, Why Johnny Can't Read was published in 1955 and we're still fighting Dick and Jane and Their Running Dog Spot). So as a signal it's nearly worthless, it's not even a guarantee someone can read. A college degree is probably overkill for what a HS diploma used to provide, but it's the best thing employers have ... e.g. as far as I know it's pretty hard to graduate from a real college without knowing how to read.

ADDED: The Instapundit, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, in the context of how grim the situation is for graduates of non-elite law schools, comments "With a college degree now functioning, essentially, the way a high-school diploma used to, a law degree is the closest graduate equivalent to the traditional liberal-arts B.A." (http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/101311/).

Hmmm.

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