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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

$170k for a bachelor's in photography?!?

This is why I argue against liberal arts degrees. There are so, SO few people who will ever be able to bring the sort of value required by a degree in the liberal arts based on the skills such a degree would provide that it is completely economically irresponsible, especially now that just having a Bachelor's degree says about as much as having a High School diploma did about 30 years ago.

$170k for a photography degree is asinine. I am a photographer, and the field is more like 90% business and 10% photography. If nothing else, the years of running the business have taught me that people don't necessarily want the ultra-artsy approach tendered by those liberal arts schools -- they will, most of the time, pick the standard, face-forward, simplistic pose.

I went to college and it sure wasn't for photography. Photography just happened. I have a BS in Computer Science, and I also have no debt resulting from it. Rather than pursuing a software developer job, which I expected I would be doing, I opened a photography business and have been quite comfortable. Software is now just my hobby, but it's a very useful one.

Knowledge of business and accounting will get you far further in almost any industry than a specialty degree will.

What do you think of her portfolio?

http://www.allisonbrookephotography.com/#/client/content_pag...

I like what I see.

Decent, though I'm personally not a fan of the faux coloring or the frequent tilting that seems to be the trend lately. But, she's in the Bay area. That's one of the most saturated markets in the US, and some of the best photographers I know are there. The competition would be very, very tough.

Regardless of how good her portfolio is, I think the point he was trying to make is that you don't need a degree in photography to be a good photographer. My brother-in-law does some of the best corporate photography I've seen, well respected in his field, and he got an unrelated degree.

I think his point about business knowledge is a good one. If you want to be a successful photographer, you're probably better off getting a degree in marketing, communications, or business management, and minor in photography.

This reminds of the argument that you don't need to a degree in CS to be a good programmer. Sure you don't, but it helps.

Regardless of her portfolio, I spotted two typos on her intro page alone.

people don't necessarily want the ultra-artsy approach tendered by those liberal arts schools -- they will, most of the time, pick the standard, face-forward, simplistic pose.

This is a problem with most practical, art-based practices (except at the high end). The customers don't have a good critical eye and will frequently choose a photographer or artist by price, prestige, recommendation, or by merely liking one of their earlier pieces - rather than on any technical merits.

I suspect someone with no photographical experience but strong business savvy could make a good go of being a professional photographer with the right equipment and just a little training in basic technique. I'd love to watch a TV show about such an experiment - it'd be like Faking It.

(And before I'm accused of cheapening a whole industry with the last paragraph, I believe the same about my two industries - publishing and programming. There are more than a few "copy and paste" developers making good money out there. It ain't noble, but it can work.)

Photography isn't really a liberal arts degree. It's pretty specialized.

So one of the projects paying the rent this summer was working for a client which markets college degrees. They asked me to crunch some government data and figure out what degrees are worth on a per-major basis. While I'm mostly done and paid (yay), the project isn't live yet, or I'd show it off.

I think they'll be OK with me saying this much: the data do not agree with your conclusion, for any sensible value of "liberal arts."

Now photography, that is another story. My research methodology totally missed it as a major choice, because the obvious occupation (photographer) doesn't require a degree. Looking at the BLS source data though, egads, $170k to become a photographer is a bad call economically. The median annual salary (note: for photographers at all stages of their career) is $19k. The overwhelming majority are part time only. If you give generous assumptions as to future income growth, the NPV of being a photographer is $410k.

That compares disfavorably with every degree I actually have in the data set. (Including, most relevantly to her situation, the associate's degree you need to become an X-ray technician, which you can get for less than $5,000. Spend another $10,000 on camera lenses, bam, you're an X-ray technician doing something she loves as a hobby.)

She's in San Francisco. If she can get regular work at weddings she'll be able to pull down $2000-3000 per gig, and probably more over time. I talked to people who wanted $5-6k -- when I stopped laughing they told me that there are people who will pay it. Weddings are an absurd profit machine.

This is true. But it is also true that the wedding photography business is under severe pricing pressure right now, so I would not count on those prices being sustainable for a lot of photographers.

That makes sense. I got married a few years ago and was shocked at what some of vendors were asking for. With a rough economy I can see weddings being an area that gets scaled back for a lot of people.

The pricing for a weddings-only photographer is largely based on the number of bookings they will do in a year and their demand. All else being equal, the $6k one is likely in more demand than the $3k one. That demand is almost entirely based on word-of-mouth referrals, which take time to build, so it ends up like any brand -- it's worth more when more known.

The deliverables are drastically different between different photographers as well. The wholesale cost difference between our upper-end album and the lower-end one is about 600%.

I don't remember the article to reference it here, but the current cost of weddings was started largely by the introduction of gift registries. It snowballed from there.

It's obviously demand-based, but when I went through this a few years ago, the least experienced people we talked to were asking in the $2k range (this is in SF). Book 30 of those a year and you're grossing $60k. You have to work weekends and there are consultations and other stuff, but it still strikes me as a lucrative job if you can pull it off.

The wedding photographers have some clever ways to sell you more stuff too. Most of them want to retain the rights to the photos that you pay them to take, so they can sell prints to your guests or license them as stock art and stuff. I actually got into a shouting match with one photographer over that -- I insisted on treating the photos as works for hire under US copyright law. One guy had "his and her iPods" that he would load up with wedding pics at the end of the reception. The cost? $1000. Yeah, no thanks.

$60k would be great if that were all income, but the majority of it isn't. After everything is accounted for (product cost, equipment depreciation, studio space, updated samples, advertising, etc), the profit amounts to 20-30% of it We spend about $1500/mo here just on studio rent and utilities.

I won't go into your second paragraph, though, because that mostly boils down to a difference of opinion.

It seems counterintuitive to simply list cost of rent and utilities when discussing photographers as if no other business suffers the same. It'd be more interesting to list expenses specific to the industry.

Yes, obvious standards costs of business, but the post above does the calculation: 2k x 30 = 60k salary. If you're arguing with someone who doesn't have the basics down, that's the place to start.

I did say "gross $60k", and I meant something more like "revenue" than "salary".

Obviously there are expenses that come out of the basic fees, but when I was doing this, the people I talked to at the lower end of the cost spectrum seemed to operate without some of the expenses that came up (ie, home studio, little/no advertising).

The point I was trying to make was, wedding photography is competitive but potentially lucrative if you can establish yourself, particularly in markets like SF.

Part of that "other stuff" would be countless hours of finishing/retouching/correcting, etc. Some photographers will spend a week P/T to work through the photos they took on one night.

I think there'd be a few people who get into wedding services expecting it to be lucrative and then find it a lot more difficult than they expect. I've mentioned on here before (check comments history) a client of mine who got married, noticed the huge prices, bought a wedding services business and then sold it within six months - more hassle than it was worth!

I had a friend take the photos for the cost of film. Years later, we look at only a handful of photos anyway. No regrets. YMMV.

Never heard of a couple wanting to know if their prospective photographer had a degree before hiring them though!

Yeah, degrees don't mean much compared to real samples and references.

I'm saying that but my wedding photographer had just come out of college. We paid $750 for the photos and it was a pretty good deal, she had some shots taken during school, they were pretty good and that was all we needed to decide. I think we were her first customers of her new company. It was a risk but now days, every aunt and uncle comes with a digital camera.

Thanks for pointing this out! I went to Iowa State, and if you got a degree in Math, or Physics, or, gasp, CS, the degree came from the same "college" as would a degree in English, or Anthropology. And, if you took enough "geeky" courses, you could easily get a BS (instead of a BA) in English or Anthropology. At ISU, a math degree was very seriously a "liberal arts" degree. And yet, on a regular basis, engineering students would say that all colleges at ISU, except for the College of Engineering, should be abolished. It shows you how stupid they were (maybe still are..), considering one of the colleges they wanted to get rid of was Ag, and ISU is a Land Grant University! So sad.

The magic of compound interest...

Seriously, though, in most schools tuition is the same regardless of the major. I hear it's $40K+/year for tuition alone at many private schools.

Seriously, though, in most schools tuition is the same regardless of the major.

I don't think GP's surprise was based on the idea that a bachelor's degree in such a major would typically be cheaper than others. I think GP was surprised that someone would be willing to take on so much debt for a degree in that major.

Here's a table of tuition fees for her school http://www.universities.com/edu/Brooks_Institute_of_Photogra...

It's 25K-26K per year, so even if she paid nothing out of pocket and had no financial aid, she'd owe slightly over $100K when she was done. And the rest of it has compounded.

But yeah, most people don't do the math and don't have a realistic view of their career path when they enroll in their programs. I think depression would be a lot more common, if they did...

Wow, this is highway robbery. People need to realize that they don't need to pay crazy money for a degree. Unless you go to one of the top 20 school in the US. You are getting nothing better than a state school degree. And some state schools are quite good (many programs are rated higher than all these private schools charging 20+K)

The best advice is to pay the minimum you can unless you get a shot at going to harvard. And if you do, some of these school now are offering free tuition for people making less than X amount of money.

I might be biased because I have a degree from a state university but that never prevented me from getting work.

That is a lot of lenses.

I read the article one or two hours ago and the NYT has switched both the main article picture (it used to be the small one that can be seen once scrolling down) as well as the caption below the image.

I wonder why/how often they do that.

The new main picture is more relevant to the story since it has the boyfriend in. The other picture looks like any of a million stock photos. I suspect the cleavage got it relegated too (though if it were the Daily Mail or New York Post, that'd get it promoted ;-)).

should it really cost $170k for a bachelor's degree in anything?

No. Part of the reason for that is America's culture of debt; it's obviously not real money to the woman in the story. I wonder what her credit card statements look like.

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