America's Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor's Degree
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
A top student who goes to a top law, med, or business school is probably getting a trememdous ROI on education.
Interestingly, neither category describes the startup crowd. Hackers represents an unusual group - people who are able to study the hardest subjects in college and grad school, but who choose to work in such an unregulated and loose culture that nobody strictly needs a degree at all.
Law or Medicine require a grad degree - and as a result, the grad degree is very valuable (it's a gateway into the cartel that controls these services). Nursing also requires a degree.
Programming doesn't require a degree, but can't be done in any innovative way by someone who isn't smart enough to get a math/science/or engineering degree. It leads to an interesting kind of distain for formal education in a group that often has impressive formal credentials.
Ok, maybe I'm being a bit hard on the Liberal Arts people, but when you busting your tail to finish classes that are actually hard, watching people coast through in easy degree programs can be very, very demoralizing; in fact, I was quite bitter towards academia for a few years because of it.
This almost caused me to give up on wanting to get a graduate degree, even though I love the subject, because I never wanted to become one of 'those' people, and the only thing that kept me going is that grad school is a really, really good time to try and start a company.
Two things you need to remember about this:
1.) The folks who major in English and take only easy courses will get their comeuppance in the job market, which now basically requires quantitative skills.
2.) Many of those folks go to liberal arts colleges because they have a particular career track they know they want to do, and they're fully willing to make the financial sacrifices for that. For example, one of my friends wanted to be a professor of English, specializing in poetry, from the day he got to college. Another wanted to be a librarian. They're willing to live like grad students until they're in their 40s to do so, and to take the financial hit afterwards that comes with their chosen professions. I can respect that.
I've been very well served by this educational approach. I absolutely do NOT use my philosophy of quantum physics topical material at work. However, I do outperform some of my peers by having competent technical skills, competent people skills and the ability to work through very complex and abstract problems that have lead to generations of prior teams throwing up their hands in defeat. These are things I attribute to a diverse education.
The people that coast through on a liberal arts degree, as you describe, are generally either coasting towards an entirely different type of life, enrolled in the wrong program (of their choosing) or the type of people that will end up succeeding regardless because they are talented, motivated, curious people. All of which is to say that I think you are hitting too hard on liberal arts, but not to blame you for that because the program you've experienced might have just been crappy and not a good one from which to generalize the argument.
As for a "generic career readiness test", that's probably pointless. On the other hand, some sort of standardized testing would be useful.
Take a student who got a B in calculus at Rutgers, and a similar student who got a B in calculus at NYU. Are they equally skilled at calculus (Hint: definitely not)? Given a standardized calculus test we could tell the difference.
Although I don't know what we would gain by making every graduate taking the exam, even if they didn't want to continue on to graduate school.
We've already had to deal with standardized testing BS thanks to NCLB before college, and look at the mess now. Teachers only teach to the exam and that is really not a good thing.
Also, teaching to the test is fine if the test is good. If the test accurately measures knowledge of the subject (1), then teaching to the test means teaching the material. It's very rare for one of my students to do well on a test without knowing the material.
Regarding NCLB, the current mess is the same as the old mess. NCLB just gave teachers someone else to blame.
(1) Most calculus/physics/chemistry tests do a decent job of this for skill levels not too high. Most tests make good students indistinguishable from great ones, but that can be remedied by putting harder questions on. If someone gets a perfect score, the test is too easy.
Except that the GRE math test covers nothing that should even remotely be considered appropriate for a undergraduate mathematics curriculum. It is only tangentially related.
Sure, but do you really want the federal government to decide the appropriate curriculum across all colleges? "Sorry, we're dropping topology because it's not on the federal recommended list, and we're focusing on test readiness." Um, I'll pass on that.
As for colleges cutting advanced classes, I just can't see it happening (1). If they can find students willing to take it, someone will teach topology (it's better than doing Calc 2 again).
Colleges don't suffer from the same institutional failings as public schools (they have their own unique institutional failings).
(1) Note: I have a few years of experience teaching in college, and a few more working in college math depts.
However, the original article was talking about standardized testing modeled after the test used in primary and secondary schools. This includes the government setting minimal, uniform standards, and has often led to cutting "advanced" or "peripheral" material to concentrate on teaching "fundamentals" (i.e. the stuff that bores the smart kids to tears). Schools that don't pull resources from other areas to concentrate on teaching to the test may see their funding cut, because their students don't do well enough on the tests.
When you talk about the positives of having standard tests, be careful what you wish for, because what shows up may not be what you had in mind.
What boggles my mind is the guy in the article who spent eight years and over a hundred grand, all to end up forty-five units (three semesters) short of a degree? I can understand taking eight years -- that's how long it took me to finish up both of my degrees, because I worked, so that I could finish school with no debt.
Mr. Sob Story wasn't going to college. He partied for eight years, washed out, and now wishes he had made better use of his time. Rather than admitting this and learning from it, he makes the university system the scapegoat for his own lack of self-discipline.
That said, education is one of the most valuable things in the world. If you're thinking of it as a risk/reward based on how much you pay versus how much you could earn, you're doing it wrong.
Does anyone know if this is the case in other industries? Does the degree make a difference to a prospective accounting clerk if she already has 5 years of work experience?
It is very true that not having a degree shouldn't be a bar to employment, but the process of getting that piece of paper does display a level of discipline that is very important when it comes to getting things done. I know that someone with a baccalaureate in mathematics or any of the sciences has had to work very, very hard in order to get that degree, and that they have needed to do a number of things which they considered obvious and boring, because those things were essential to getting the job done.
I know there are people who don't have degrees who have that sort of dedication; in fact, one of my friends fits the bill perfectly. These people will demonstrate their value in other ways, but the majority of people who blow off college are, frankly, lazy and disorganized, and often think that they are much more skilled than they really are. This goes double for programmers, who already have a natural habit of overestimating their abilities.
From the perspective of an employer, I would think very carefully about hiring someone without a degree. I would probably not even consider hiring someone without some college experience, unless they had a stellar work record and about a mile of ironclad references.
Working on an open-source project or consumer website or other project teaches you to overcome hurdles, but only when they're necessary. If you're responsible for results, then you have an incentive to find and take whatever shortcuts you can. You plow through only the obstacles that absolutely are essential to getting the job done.
Getting a degree teaches you to work very hard at whatever your professors tell you to do. A lot of it is pointless; a lot of it is stupid. You do it anyway, because you have to. But if you do too much of this, you start seeing things that are really pointless and stupid as necessary, and do them anyway. This is the kiss of death for a startup: you have to be ruthless about inefficiency, and nobody (other than the blatantly dishonest folks who cheat their way through college) learns to be ruthless about inefficiency through a college degree.
I'd stop well short of saying I'd never hire anyone with a college degree, because I know a lot of smart folks who have one. But I won't make the degree more than a tiny portion of who I decide to hire. (I'd refuse to hire anyone that had never taken their own project from conception to completion, however - this will weed out virtually all of the lazy and disorganized, and also weed out people who are only good at following orders.)
This is the number one thing to look out for, that can't be easily gamed. If somebody has a 4.0 GPA from a top school but no external side projects built on their own volition, they are probably not what you want, unless you run a very big company.
10 or 15 years into your career no one is going to care if you went to Harvard, MIT, Carnegie Mellon or any other school.
You reach a point where the general studies that you took are just assumed and people will begin to want to know the particular niche skills that you have experience with (e.g., you've worked developing an automated trading system or you've worked developing some sort of image processing app).
If I'm interviewing an engineer of 10 years and he mentions more than once where he went to school I am going to hammer him with technical questions. "OK Mr. MIT, let's see if that education really paid off."
Though, I agree in 10 to 15 years, I'd be concerned if anyone even asked me what school I went to. I'd start to think it's not a place I want to be working.
The signaling type jobs (law, finance, hedge funds) require the big name schools, but not a specific skill set. Which tends to make me think that they are full of shit.