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Comment by khawkins | Hacker News Reader

The fact that the article features an English professor is unsurprising. This is a supply-side problem--liberal arts degrees are in relatively low demand, but institutions continue to graduate students at unsustainable levels. No one is telling the students that they're spending 4-12 years getting an education which is worth less than what they're paying for it.

For the most part, the only jobs that hire for English and other liberal-arts degrees are universities and schools. Even so, we're graduating people at rates comparable with STEM fields. With so much supply, the price of the work is driven far down.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cta.asp

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> For the most part, the only jobs that hire for English and other liberal-arts degrees are universities and schools

This is such nonsense. Most jobs don't care what degree you have as long as you have a degree, and with an English degree you can apply for 90% of jobs. You could graduate and go on to be anything from an advertising executive, to a soldier. Most jobs don't care - it's technology that's unusual.

You can be a soldier without ant college education (and qualify for a direct path to Officer Candidate School with a two-year degree or equivalent credits, IIRC), so giving “soldier” as on option with 4-year English degree is literally suggesting that it is worth the same as no college education at all.

That's what I'm saying though - most degrees aren't career-specific, and most careers don't need a specific degree, or any degree at all as you say.

You can only enlist without a degree. With a college education you can be an officer. In that case, the degree would almost certainly be worth it.

Yeah,the OCS requirement is different than what I remembered.

That's largely true for an undergrad degree. For a graduate degree, and a PhD in particular, there aren't a lot of alternative employment options. I've been told that having a PhD in those fields makes you less employable for positions in general (because why are you applying for this job, and it is uncomfortable to hire an older person with a PhD for an entry-level position).

An unqualified 30 year old going for a grad position will face the same age bias regardless of whether there was a phd in their past or just 6 years of working in ski chalets.

That's true in software. Source: mid 6 figures principal engineer w/ high school diploma.

Other jobs are pickier.

I'd say it used to be true in software. Try repeating that achievement starting out today. You'll be lucky to get any sort of tech job at all.

Meh, if you're passionate about technology as a kid and end up building lots of useful things I don't see why you can't get internships which will inevitably lead you to higher paying jobs.

My company offered an internship to someone who was 17. At Digital Ocean one of the interns was 16.

Tech moves quick and the less outside responsibilities you have the more time you can commit to building and learning.

I think it's still largely true. In some sense it can be harder, especially if you don't plan to go through some form of web dev path or mobile development path, but on the other hand there are more opportunities now to quickly build up your knowledge and experience and showcase it. Open source projects don't care, and the coding bootcamp craze can be a substitute to a full degree while still offering pretty good odds at job placement. There are several contracting agencies out there as well that will help you out, if you're good those can lead to full time. Once you get your foot in the door and work in a tech role for over a year (or bootstrap your own tech startup for a year), or sometimes being an intern is enough), just about every place after that will look past not having a degree.

I started learning to code in 2011 when I was 28. I've been steadily employed in this industry for over 5 years now. I have a music degree.

You should try applying for CSO at Equifax. There is soon going to be an opening available for that role and it looks like you have the necessary qualifications.

I started full time in 2008 when the recession was bad. I don't know if 2008 was a long time ago or not.

Turns out when companies are making money, they want to hire engineers to build new stuff. When they are losing money, they want to hire engineers to automate.

There were certainly some lucky breaks involved. I like to think of it as I'm lucky the doors opened, it wasn't luck that had me searching for open doors and walking through them when I found them.

mid 6 figures? As in, half a million?

400 actually

You can get any job, but it's going to be harder and you're probably not going to be compesated as highly [0].

[0] https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21646220-it-dep...

> Most jobs don't care what degree you have as long as you have a degree

Then why do they require a degree at all? What specific skills will a degreed applicant have that a high school grad won't?

Depends what classes they take, how good their teachers are, and how dedicated a student they are!

I don't think they see it as about specific skills - rather about general skills and maturity. Also I think they value having a lot of people with deeper knowledge of a diverse range of subjects.

Statistically higher IQ and various other variables that positively correlate with work performance.

If you have a pool of applicants for a job, all with no relevant experience, it's an easy filter. You filter out all the people who haven't proven they can do something they agreed to do for 3/4 years.

If that's all it is, there's got to be a way to come up with something that lets someone prove they are willing to do something for 4 years, but only costs maybe $250 a year.

MOOCs will make that happen within a decade's time.

While they area bit more expensive than that target, universities that focus on credentialing without doing much of the rest already exist (e.g., Western Governor's University).

This is mostly a problem of the Anglo-Saxon world. In continental Europe, for the most part, at least AFAIK, publicly owned universities are harder to get in, harder to get a degree from, and valued much more in the job market. The upside is that the education is subsidized by the government to the point of being roughly that expensive.

I.e. one enrolls in a privately-owned, for-profit universities if they have the money, but don't want to work their arse off to get a degree, or don't have good enough grades from the secondary education to qualify for public unis.

Remember that lots of student debt isn't necessarily on tuition fees. I went to university for 4 years with "low" fees (started at €1750, ended at €2750, now €3000), but renting a room in that city will cost you 5-6 hundred euro a month, plus other "normal " living costs like eating, transport (another €120/month). All while you're probably not supposed to be working. My loan was purely to pay for accommodation for my time there.

> What specific skills will a degreed applicant have that a high school grad won't?

Just as requiring a high-school diploma is a filter for the general education requirements that apply to a diploma, requiring a bachelor's degree in any field is a filter for the level of general education that comes with that, not the domain-specific skills of a degree.

And it's an imperfect filter, but its job isn't to be perfect, it's too reduce the absolute quantity of bad applications that need to be reviewed.

Right, but now it's effectively become a positional good -- you get the education to indicate being in the nth percentile by general capability. Subsidizing further education then means that people have to get more education (with no additional human capital enhancement on the market) simply to signal being in the same percentile. And refusing the rigamarole just brands you as "different" with its own barriers to overcome.

To add to what the others mentioned: critical thinking skills, and the ability to write themselves and their reader out of a paper bag.

Skills which, as an aside, don't always have as high a priority with the "more practical" degrees whose use for a certain job is more obvious.

> What specific skills will a degreed applicant have that a high school grad won't?

For one thing, the "skill" of (probably) not being from that stratum of society that doesn't get their kids through university. Asking for degrees is a subtle way to perpetrate socio-economic discrimination. (In some cases, it has to be a degree from the right set of schools, not just anywhere.) It's so easy! You don't have to look at race, or what neighborhood someone grew up in. Just this: do they have a degree or not. Saves time and protects from litigation: it's brilliant!

Getting a degree demonstrates some measure of discipline and work, and the delaying of gratification for the sake of a longer term goal that is several years away, while completing various tasks, jumping through hoops and so on. It's like a job. You have to attend to certain things on time, like showing up for exams, and meet deadlines (term papers, etc).

If you have a degree, you probably pulled an "all nighter" or two to submit something on time or prepare for an exam, and that's just the sort of dedication that employers crave.

This is true for occupations like sales where the litmus test is professionalism and the ability to stick to goals. However, you will lock yourself out of occupations with degree requirements for credentialing and those with domain knowledge you gain through school like Chemistry.

I live in LA and, surprise surprise, there are a lot of writers, artists, and other folks who want to work in Liberal Arts oriented industries. Most of my Liberal Arts degree equipped friends are in sales while dabbling in their art on the side. A few of them sell a book or script every 3-5 years. The rest of them went back to school for a Law Degree or an unrelated Masters degree.

You know, that's a problem too. I mean, I take that 90% of jobs aren't specialized positions. Once you need a college degree for a position that only requires general skills, or in which the employee can do just fine on-the-job training and experience, then what are those years in college for exactly?

As far as I know, people could get by with a high school degree in the 1970s: there was no significant wage difference between a high school graduate and a college graduate, and both faced similar rates of unemployment. Nowadays employers take for granted that candidates must have some form of qualification, even for positions that don't seem to require it. Has the quality of education fallen and the grades been inflated to such a point where degrees are no longer reliable signals of productivity?

Exactly. If no domain specific skills are needed and a general education is good enough, then a high school diploma should have sufficed anyway.

Degrees are not reliable signals of productivity.

I would much rather hire someone who didn't finish college but has had five years of progressive responsibility in the right area, than someone who had just finished a four or five year degree course but had never worked.

I didn't say they were. They aren't, that's the issue. A college degree overshoots the level of qualification necessary for a general skills job and comes short of the qualification necessary for a specialized position.

Also, your crosswise comparison between an experienced candidate without a degree and an inexperienced candidate with a degree only tells me that you put more weight into experience than having a degree. It really doesn't tell me much about whether a degree is a good signal, but only that it's worse than experience. Now, if you had told me that you don't consider whether a candidate has a degree at all then I'd be able to infer that they are terrible signals and carry no information at all.

I said what I meant: they're not reliable signals.

You've got a space of time in a person's life between, presumably, graduating high school and sending you a resume. What did they do with that time?

Merely having a degree doesn't say much.

Merely not having a degree doesn't say much.

Having an honors BS in CS from CMU, MIT, Stanford, or a bunch of other schools implies academic competence and exposure to a certain range of ideas. But I don't know that they can be productive outside of that environment.

Having an ordinary BS in a STEM subject from a random college that I've never heard of means even less to me. But is it zero? No.

Holding down a job for those four years is a signal, too, and it needs evaluation. What kind of job? While living at home? Did anything progress during that time? Is it relevant to what we're trying to hire for?

For most people, college education funges against job experience. It's hard to work full time while also being a college student.

But does the progressive responsibility ladder exist for a high school graduate? Can they start their career in a job, even at an internship level?

I think you can tease out three possible factors influencing the situation here:

- more people graduating, more supply, means that even entry-level jobs are flooded with college graduates - entry-level jobs in decline, either due to automation or companies just not interested in providing apprenticeships - student loans shifting the power dynamics between employer/employee; you're more pressed to get a job, any job, so you're more likely to take up positions where you're overqualified and underpaid

These scenarios all form positive feedback loops to each other; with more high-skilled worker supply in the market, companies can grow their non-entry level jobs while automating the low-level ones; this reduction in entry jobs means that the desperate college students compete more fiercely with high school students, raising the bar for entry level jobs; the raised bar for entry level jobs forces more high school students to go into college rather than start work, which saddles them with student debt, feeding into the cycle.

I've noticed that many social situations tend to end up in such vicious, entangled circles. My dad used to call these the "downward spiral of failure" and the "upward spiral of success", and I really don't know how you transition from one to the other without a monumental effort or some kind of miracle breakthrough.

Exactly this. The problem here is wanting to be a tenured professor, not having an English degree.

it’s a good rule of thumb that punching up your argument with ridiculous emotionally resonant hyperbole makes your logic seem really, really strong.

It's a good rule of thumb that comments necessitating a new throwaway account aren't worth making.

And yet, he's 100% right.

What's the best way to ensure employee loyalty? Make sure they're saddled with mountains of crippling debt so they can't afford to quit!

And why should companies have their HR departments thoroughly vet candidates when they can rely on the college admissions process to do it for them?

Free vetting AND loyal slave... uh... I mean... employees! Who could say no to that!?

> then what are those years in college for exactly?

A proxy for an IQ test?

Just ask for SAT scores..

Nope! They are an indicator to work at a fairly long-term goal fairly diligently, and jump through various hoops.

That's right. With a music composition degree you can be a Chief Security Officer at large companies such as Equifax.

"buuuuuurn" -Klaus

Why do employers keep putting so much value on something so worthless? There must be cheaper ways to demonstrate to employers you have something equivalent to whatever it is they think they're getting from any old 4 year degree.

Conceivably, a system of tests or certifications could be used as a reliable signal of competence. Just make a candidate go through a battery of exams. The issue is that firms most likely wouldn't have any interest in doing this and any independent organization doing this would be tempted to change into the business of selling certificates, which would make the certificates themselves worthless.

Which isn't to say that the issue is unsolvable. But it still needs solving. I don't think anyone has paid much attention to it.

It hasn't been proven that employers put so much value on a degree. Certainly a lot of people think that employers think that, but I've yet to see a real life hiring manager come out and say "I don't care how much experience you have, without a degree I won't consider you."

In B2B deals, government contracts and the like, sometimes companies like to brag about how many PhDs and Masters they employ.

If you are selling a product to a government or a big enterprise, it helps to have a lot of people with impressive credentials in your staff.

A bachelor's degree of any type demonstrates ("signals" in economic terms): communication skills, ability to follow instructions, sufficient persistence to finish a long-term project. Some colleges are way overpriced, but in general I doubt you're going to find a cheap way for prospective employees with no real work experience to demonstrate those qualities.

I think the issue is exactly that - the colleges are low efficiency, either overpriced or not a good match for the position you go to work as.

As a hypothetical, let's say that most jobs require a degree. Let's say that you use 50% of the stuff in your English Major throughout most of your career; you've eaten a 50% inefficiency on your college investment(essentially doubling the "price/skills" of your degree), you've lost time that you could have invested in obtaining those skills. Further, you are pressured into demanding a higher salary because of your college investment, which isn't matched by the skills you've received; so either your employer carries the burden of your inefficient education, or you do.

This is usually decided by the power dynamic between the two, and if you're a broke college student desperate for a job, you don't have much bargaining power, so you're shouldering all the burden. The worst part is, there's no way for you to fix this - there's no 2-year program that is 100% aimed towards your career goal, and there's no entry-level job for you to start at 0%(you're probably already starting at the entry-level even with your 50% degree). So you're stuck making this investment whether you want to or not.

One way to look at university is insurance - you're learning all these extra things as an insurance that you'll have a baseline of skills if you change your career. The issue is, not everyone can afford such an expensive insurance, but most people are forced to take it under our hypothetical.

I think in part, it's because "they" have a degree. There can be quite a bit of condescension from people who have degrees towards those who don't.. "I got a degree to get this job, you should have one too".

Because doing so would signal non conformity.

Bryan Caplan has a book coming out soon on the signalling model of education here's notes from a course he teaches http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/e496.html

> Most jobs don't care - it's technology that's unusual.

TBH I am far more likely to hire an English major with demonstrated technical skills than a technical person with a purely technical education.

Learning the technical skills to live up to the expectations of an entry level software or coding job is just not that hard for a decently smart person. I want to see evidence that you can think more broadly too rather than just checking the boxes.

To be fair, I graduated from a good uni with honors, so not to say this out of spite, but in my experience this evidence you speak of--in non-technical courses--says more about whether the prof liked you and you stuck to affirming or regurgitating their ideas.

Additionally hearsay is one of the worst kinds of evidence, scientifically speaking.

I wish there was more development into standardized testing... People pretend profs are altruistic and stop acting like people when they become profs.

>says more about whether the prof liked you and you stuck to affirming or regurgitating their ideas.

My best classes were the ones where the professors and I came from wildly different places. There are bad profs, but in my experience it is pretty uncommon for professors to actually want to see you regurgitating their ideas. Moreover, most of my grading was done by TA's anyway so it's not even like the prof's take was relevant since the TA's have their own agendas.

More often the fact is that, undergraduates (and many graduate level students) suck at properly arguing their point. It’s not their fault really, they’re just less experienced at building a case, operating under a time and space constraint, and less knowledgable about the topic than the person grading them.

And when you’re being contrarian (going against your professor’s thinking) you’re likely to suck even more than usual because your professor hasn’t spoon fed you an acceptable conclusion, a cogent argument leading up to it, and first principles that they agree with to build an argument from.

>People pretend profs are altruistic and stop acting like people when they become profs.

Who exactly do you think would be designing (and thereby imputing their biases into) these standardized tests?

I don't think it's nonsense - I don't entirely agree, but I would agree with a milder version of the statement. I do know an English majors who is a director at at a top tech company, so I would agree that many companies will hire English majors.

However, that's different than saying you can get hired as an English major vs saying these companies hire for English majors.

Engineering and CS are majors that companies specifically target, in large numbers for hiring. "Related" majors like Math, Physics, other sciences, may also get recruited in the same batch.

Although English is sometimes specified as a specifically targeted major for a job, this is considerably less common.

> Engineering and CS are majors that companies specifically target

In your industry.

Lots of companies outside the tech industry still have to recruit CS and other tech majors. The demand for specifically English majors outside tech doesn't come close to balancing things out.

Which industries hire for English majors? Are there good opportunities to be had, and are future prospects looking stable,upwards or down?

Industries where writing and reading comprehension arein demand, such as advertising, journalism, marketing, film, diplomacy, public relations, publishing, technical writing, law, and many more ...

For those fields, wouldn't one be significantly better of with a degree in advertising, journalism, marketing, film/media, policy (local/foreign), print/media, engineering, law?

That kind of education doesn't teach you to reason, to understand the world, and to think critically (except about a narrow subject). I'd much rather hire a liberal arts major - the vocational stuff can be learned later.

If having that English degree makes the job more attainable than not having a degree, then in a way they do hire for English majors (even if not specifically, but by way of the class-instance relationship).

Exactly this. The problem here is wanting to be a tenured professor, not having an English degree.

its not non-sense but it might be underspecified. the only jobs that care that you have, specifically, an English degree are jobs in academia. Corporate jobs will gladly hire an English major just because it's a degree they don't care that it's an English degree though.

From my viewpoint this stopped being the case in the UK around 20 years ago, not coincidentally around the exact same time that the numbers of graduates started rising considerably year on year. It's a simple case of supply and demand. If you went to a top uni, have contacts or are genuinely oustanding then great, you probably have the luxury of being able to walk into a decent job from nearly any degree, but if not you are competing with tens of thousands of other graduates for the remaining decent jobs. So how do you make yourself stand out? I'd suggest that a CV that shows no evidence of interest in the field before graduation is not a terribly good differentiator. Far better to have studied something related or at least have gained some work experience in the area rather than look like every other grad that's graduated and thought oh shit, must find a job, any job..

That is absolutely false. Since I have my computer science/math degree my linkedin inbox has been flooded with messages from recruiters. I can guarantee you that they are not looking for an English major.

This is not about the teaching discipline. I am a Computer Science adjunct, and the salary I get from teaching is equivalent to what the article mentions.

I only do this because I like teaching, so this is not my main source of income. I am not in the verge of homelessness because I do programming for a living. But the problem is still the same: Universities are charging astronomical tuitions and then paying a laughable part of them to teachers.

It does not make any sense, and IMO that explains in part why University education is losing its value: you get overworked and unmotivated teachers as a student, so you may better learn your stuff online.

> I only do this because I like teaching, so this is not my main source of income.

IMO, this is what adjuncting excels at: supplementing your full time instructors with professionals spending most of their time in the workforce. This more or less happens in CS, but service departments like Math or English end up replacing the majority of their instructors with adjuncts working at 2-3 colleges.

Sadly, this trend does make sense and is easy to diagnose. Instructor salaries have stagnated despite increased student tuition because states have, for the past few decades consistently cut higher education funding. I was laid off from a self-funded university unit amid a very real concern that the state's failure to raise taxes to pay for pensions would ultimately impact the university's funding, and while this was not the immediate cause for the unit's layoffs, it was absolutely a factor in whether to cover the unit's budget shortfall.

There's nothing wrong with getting an English degree. Practically any uneducated person would benefit greatly from four years of college level writing courses no matter the level of "usefulness". The problem is the overarching mentality of the culture which says "you have X degree, so you must now try to use it for X". If you judge English degrees on the same level of a job training course it doesn't make sense. They have different purposes entirely. The point of a liberal arts education is to sharpen the mind and create better decision makers and thinkers.

> There's nothing wrong with getting an English degree. Practically any uneducated person would benefit greatly from four years of college level writing courses no matter the level of "usefulness".

I think you entirely missed what the comment said. The statement wasn't about there being anything "wrong" with getting an English degree. It was that there aren't enough jobs for English PhDs and comparably too many students getting them, hence driving the salary down:

>> The fact that the article features an English professor is unsurprising. This is a supply-side problem--liberal arts degrees are in relatively low demand, but institutions continue to graduate students at unsustainable levels

All fine things, but probably not worth putting yourself into a lot of debt for.

This is not a pure supply-side problem. In general, demand for college instructors remains high and job growth in the sector outpaces the average[1]. This is not surprising given that the number of students enrolled in post-secondary education continues to rise[2]. There is plenty of teaching to be done, the problem is that the bulk of this teaching is no longer done by full-time professors.

In the last decade, universities have shifted teaching responsibilities from full-time, tenure track positions to part-time adjunct positions. Today, half of all teaching positions are part-time and include no benefits. Adjuncts are paid an average of $2,987 per semester-long course[3]. That's less than $1000 a month. If you've ever taught a college class before and realize how much preparation it actually takes, an ostensibly "part-time" position easily demands 40-60 hours of work a week.

In some fields, over-supply is helping drive this trend[4]. We produce more History PhDs than there are jobs to fill. This weakens the bargaining power that academics have on the market. But this does not absolve universities from their role in the immiseration of academics – after all, they continue to accept more PhD candidates with full knowledge that most of them will never find gainful employment in their field. This is not surprising given the fact that departments now rely on _graduate students_ to teach one-fifth of their course loads[5].

The "casualization" of post-secondary teaching is also a disservice to students, many of whom don't realize that the bulk of their instruction is now done by overworked, underpaid adjuncts who don't have the time or incentive to do their best work.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/posts... [2] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_101.20.a... [3] http://www.chronicle.com/article/Adjunct-Project-Shows-Wide/... [4] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/11/grad [5] https://www.aaup.org/issues/contingency/background-facts

> No one is telling the students that they're spending 4-12 years getting an education which is worth less than what they're paying for it.

I think that some fault lies with unrealistic expectations. Every liberal arts graduate student knows that there are only enough positions for 1 in 10 of their cohort, but each firmly believes that they will be in that 10%. Worse, many who are talented enough to actually be in that 10% self-sabotage by being unwilling to move to locations they perceive as less than desirable.

It's a risk worth taking if you think you're too good to work in private industry. Almost all liberal arts phds i know couldn't stomach working for the man.

The schools exacerbate this because the professors themselves have such survivorship bias.

I once had a professor try to convince me to go for a bio phd. I objected that there's only one TT position for every 20 graduates. His response was that it's just about hard work - look at him, for example!

He didn't get my point; I didn't get the phd.

A lot of English majors work in journalism, copywriting, advertisement. Tech companies also employ them for writing documentation.

Same for other "liberal-arts" degrees.

Not to mention writing books, writing for television, plays, screenplays, etc.

Yes, but those are rarely "walk-in, get paid" jobs

> No one is telling the students that they're spending 4-12 years getting an education which is worth less than what they're paying for it.

Because that would be like saying "hey, there is a big white elephant in the room!" to the room's occupants, when there is indeed precisely such a beast in that room.

Such as proclamation is rather more befitting of, say, the Economics faculty.

I think you're confusing "liberal arts" with "humanities." Math and science are liberal arts, though engineering is not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education

Humanities students do indeed go on to earn less, but the differences are much more slight than stereotypes would have you think. They also narrow as people progress in their careers:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/10/05/new-data-what...

There are indeed too many PhDs minted in the humanities, but I'd say this also applies to pretty much every field other than, perhaps, CS. Times are pretty tight for bench and social sciences as well.

> This is a supply-side problem

It's a demand-side problem. Most higher education is funded by state and federal government, and they have been cutting funding dramatically, reducing demand for skilled academics.

It doesn't have to be that way. The U.S. could fund higher education at the levels it used to, and fund reasonable incomes for the higher ed workforce. To create a less educated population than the prior generation is to go backward.

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