Biggest Offender in Outsize Debt: Master’s Degrees
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Their non-profit status hasn't even done much to keep costs low, as they can just keep hiring tons of redundant administrators and have never-ending construction, thereby justifying higher tuitions as "operating costs".
The dept of education needs to treat universities the same way Medicaid treats healthcare providers. Determine what it actually costs per student per year to run a university, and tell the schools "Accept $x or shove off". If they're going to benefit from gov backed loans, they should play by the govs rules.
Look no further than this chart (https://i.imgur.com/B3sVMjg.png), around 2010 was when the gov started fully backing and giving the loans directly, and conveniently it's when students needs for loans skyrocketed. It's so obvious that colleges took advantage of it.
Enough is enough, this college cost situation is entirely the fault of the gov for allowing it to happen, and it's a massive drag on our economy and the potential of our citizens.
Still bad for college: why give free money to the richest of society?
This is what makes me skeptical. A solution in the United States for our education, healthcare, or other problems has to involve removing the leeches from the system. But political bribery is legal in the US, and the leeches have more than enough money to bribe the politicians.
So insurance companies will keep existing. University presidents will keep taking home 7 figures. Turbotax won't go away anytime soon. You can either find a way to suck money away from the vulnerable, or you can be poor.
In all the case of electricity, it is hugely profitable for the government and used to balance the budget. I went to university and turned a good profit working part time as a programmer (while paying everything and having an apartment). My University had a balanced budget too and grew over 50% since I graduated. Hospitals are as good as anywhere else. They spend billions building them and replace the older facility as they become obsolete. Yet the cost are totally under control.
Public infrastructure work as long as the bureaucracy is kept in check and corruption is managed properly. Inefficiencies and corruption is unavoidable, but at least the slippery slope of "on purpose" waste like US Universities is avoided.
edit: typo
Moving to a university as a center for education means ending the iron rice bowl for overeducated good thinkers. Good luck.
It's not like Europe has a carbon copy of the American system but with a greater commitment to throwing money at it.
In the US, it really comes down to how Republicans feel about a program. The programs they hate are often forced to run at maximum efficiency because they face an large amount of scrutiny and budget instability.
It's the programs that Republican fail to scrutinize that become symbols of waste and mismanagement. The biggest and most obvious case is the military. I can't imagine the HHS being in a situation where they are forced by Congress to spend a few hundred million dollars on equipment they don't need, so it's given away, or having any project that costs $1,500,000,000,000.
I hate to be political like this, but it's an observable trend. Scrutiny over the use of public funds by officials is an efficient means of cost-control. But the country has an issue with selective enforcement based, it seems, on how much of a program's budget is funneled into the hands of private government contractors.
after all that is the attitude with regards to medical care.
However I feel a better solution is for the government to still do it as loans but set the rates and required classes for each degree type. simply put there are valueless degree programs out there which only enrich the schools. Colleges would still trip over themselves to offer class and degree programs to fit into these restrictions, those that don't could rely on the private market, endowments, and scholarship programs.
Money is a means to quality of life, sure. But you can't ignore the things that are part of the "quality" because they're not profitable.
What the OP is referring to is probably degrees such as theater, women's studies, philosophy, etc. Women's studies and philosophy have no real job potential, and while theater might, there's only a very small market for actors compared to the number of starlets who dream of that job, which is why LA is so full of "actors" working as restaurant waiters.
Career-oriented math degrees are found in the engineering school.
The difference between math and philosophy is that having a pure maths degree will provide someone with a number of job prospects. But that isn't really the intent of math programs. I venture to guess most people studying math are like the GP and doing so because they enjoy math.
I realize this, but the reality, as you stated yourself, is that it really does make you employable. The intent doesn't matter; the actual employability the degree confers does.
Theater degrees are basically the opposite here. The goal of that degree is surely to produce people who can act on stage (and have it transferrable to TV/movies too I suppose), but the reality is that it isn't very employable because there just aren't many job openings in that field compared to the number of people who want to work in it.
The intent doesn't matter if you're in control of allocating money for degrees for prospective students; the only thing that matters is how likely those borrowers will be to pay back their loans, or if this is a grant (i.e. free university), how likely this investment will be to produce someone who will pay back society with taxes. A degree that has a very poor likelihood of leading to a decent-paying job is not a good investment from this point-of-view, and the "intent" of that degree is irrelevant.
But if you think of a degree as purely a signaling mechanism, then a pure math (or astrophysics or latin or whatever) degree is a very clear signal about what your brain is capable of.
I assume by "this" you are refering to the OP's statement that "This is what happens when there's 0 pressure on universities to price their programs competitively."
One of the idea's behind free public college is to apply market pressure to private college's, so that they have to price their programs competitively. In a risk free debt financed system, prices will rise, the same dynamic happens for both medical care and real estate.
I am not sure on what basis you think this kind of system would make the problems worse.
Also I am curious, are you in favor of abolishing public high school? What part of your argument against free college does not apply to free high schools? One of the many talking points behind the free college proposal is that in today's job market, a college degree has the some utility that a high school degree used to have.
The current proposals as I understand them will subsidize tuition at the current, severely inflated rate, letting the colleges get away with their price gouging, and I want to see accountability there. I wonder if as an incremental step attaching cost effectiveness conditions to school's ability to accept loan funds would be better. I believe this was Obama's general approach, though I will admit I have not looked into the issue deeply.
This is great point in my opinion. Solving this issue in the real world is not simple, it comes down more to the political power of various competing factions than it does to coming up with a "big idea". Once you have a "big idea" (like free public college), unless your faction has sufficient political power, then how are you going to implement it?
The problem is not that we are lacking big ideas that will work, there are many of them. The problem is we don't have the political power to implement a single one of them.
Consider this statement from the OP:
"Look no further than this chart (https://i.imgur.com/B3sVMjg.png), around 2010 was when the gov started fully backing and giving the loans directly, and conveniently it's when students needs for loans skyrocketed. It's so obvious that colleges took advantage of it."
Right now the gov't intervene's in public education by "fully backing and giving the loans directly". My position is that not all forms of government intervention are inherently bad, for example, the way the government intervenes in public high school is something we both agree is good.
I believe that the current way the gov't intervenes in college education is deeply problematic, and that instead of completely removing the role of gov't, we should copy the model from high school which has proven to work very well.
High schools definitely seem cheaper (though I’m not sure how much cheaper), but I don’t think high schools have as much incentive to increase performance.
Regardless, I think the bigger problem here is we don’t really know what we want from colleges. They’re a status symbol, a rite of passage, a place to learn about the world, a place to try out adulthood, a place to party, a place to demonstrate intelligence, a place to learn career specific skills, and a place that promises to lift people out of poverty.
Those are all very different things.
I think we’d be better off if each of those goals were separated into different institutions. Colleges have become little utopian towns in which everything a young adult would want is wrapped into a single package. It’s like the space shuttle: it’s been designed by a committee that wants it to do everything. Expense and compromised performance is inevitable.
I think parents, kids and employers are as much to blame as the institutions themselves. You can get a lot of what college promises from different sources for a fraction of the cost. But we don’t accept the alternatives that should be driving the cost down because college is such a deeply ingrained institution, and is considered the only onramp for most forms of success. We accept the price because we feel like we have to.
The key to a good negotiation is the willingness to walk away. Until we accept that there are alternatives to the fantasy package that is modern day college, I don’t think the price will lower.
The major issue is student debt, regardless of any other legitimate criticisms of college culture/education, this is literally the largest source of debt in America today. There is more student debt than there is real estate debt. In many ways, college has become a scam designed to entrap young people in a life time of debt servitude. We dont have to fix all the other problems with college at the same time. I am lucky to have no student loans, but most people I know are saddled with massive debt. I want to do something to help them.
I’m not sure the debt situation can be fixed until we deprogram people to stop seeing college as this one, singular, necessary thing, though. We can transfer that debt around, but I think the key to really getting rid of the bloat is to change how people think about college and to get them to pick the specific things they need/want most.
I’m not sure how you do that without creating competitive, viable substitutions for the different purposes colleges seem to serve that people are willing to do instead of college. I think a lot of those alternatives exist already, people just don’t accept them as substitutions. EX: apprenticeship programs, online classes, meetups, conference organizations, maker spaces, etc. I think part of the key to that is coming up with a reliable measure of performance in and quality of alternative programs.
But at the end of the day, I don’t think there’s an easy solution; I think a lot of things need to change. I’m pessimistic about our ability to reign in the bloat/debt from a top down approach before any of that other stuff happens. I think that any solution that doesn’t solve those other problems will result in student loan debt of about the same size just being passed on to taxpayers.
This is an interesting point of view, and I would like to push back on this.
In my view, it is not a practical suggestion to "deprogram people" like you describe, anymore than it is practical to "deprogram" the general population to no longer fall victim to ponzi scheme's or other scams like fake ICO's etc... This is because con-artists prey on fundamental aspects of human nature and employ sophisticated social engineering techniques to manipulate the behavior of their victims. In order for the social engineering of "our side" (i.e. deprogramming people) to overcome the social engineering of con-artists, we would need to be better at it than they are! We are not going to beat them at their own game, and attempting to do so is a losing strategy.
The student loan industry is a predatory and hostile industry which is backed by the biggest banks and has enormous political influence in congress. The main goal of their lobbying is to prevent being regulated.
This is a smart strategy for them because in my opinion, history has clearly demonstrated that the best solution to this type of problem is government regulation which prevents the worst abuses of a free market system.
There used to be laws where you could clear your debt by filing for bankruptcy, but this is no longer possible for student loans. If my generation had more political power in DC, we would pass laws to allow this as well as cancel a very large percentage of outstanding student debt.
So I strongly disagree with proposal that people need to be "deprogrammed" because I don't think this is a practical approach to address this major problem.
I definitely agree with allowing people to file for bankruptcy to clear student loan debt, and agree it’s a much more practical step than changing the culture. That will cause lenders to be much more cautious and prevent people who can’t afford college and aren’t going into high paying fields from being saddled with enormous debts.
That being said, I don’t think we should ignore the cultural problem, as legislation tends to reflect the culture, whether that be through enforcement of the culture or abuse of the culture. There’s a complex feedback loop going on, and it goes both ways, but I think an approach that only looks at adding or reforming legislation, while maybe more practical in the short term, will eventually lead back to where we are now. A side effect of allowing bankruptcy will be a reduction in the amount of people going to college, since fewer will be able to get the loans to afford it. They will likely demand access to college and get us back to where we are now, or a future where college is “free” and everyone’s taxes start to look like student loan payments.
I think what people currently want is quite expensive, even if we could trim all the fat. Someone needs to pay for it. We could add roadblocks in the form of legislation to prevent lenders from abusing what is often an unnecessary want rather than encouraging it, but as long as that want exists, there will be a large incentive to take advantage of it.
I’m also not sure about the history of this problem. I think a lot of it stems from legislation rather a lack of legislation. Federally backed student loans seem to be a major part of the issue.
So to be clear, I’m not against legislative reform, I’m just worried that it’s not sufficient, and that the current public conception of post secondary education is inevitably going to be too expensive to sustain. In my opinion there are much cheaper and more effective ways of doing what colleges do. The most effective long term solution is to accept more of those alternatives and force colleges to compete.
there are already some very high quality state universities in the US where you can get a first rate education. fund these schools to the point where tuition is somewhere between $0 and $5000 a year and see how the elite private schools justify their prices.
High schools are for minors. The return/cost benefit of them is much higher, and the users of it are not responsible adults, a decision is made unto them.
College is used mostly by the upper half of society, and the majority that goes to college can afford it. Taxing the populace to give the richer resources is "trickle down economics".
Where things get tricky is funding this. By and large, new construction is donor secured -- it's relatively easy to put a name on a building. But those donations come attached with strings, ie the name on the building. you can't reallocate it elsewhere. And donor funding for endowed faculty seats or administrative costs are not so frequent. Ongoing costs of running the university (salaries, utilities, maintenance, public safety, cleaning) are funded via three main sources: state funding (ever dwindling), tuition (ever growing but small overall) and research. Research is where state universities pull in the big bucks, but it also often requires expensive specialty capital equipment and facilities in which to install and run it. A rule of thumb is 30 percent of research grant is handed over to administrative overhead. That is effectively rent to pay for depreciation of the building.
tl;dr: expensive construction is required to further the mission of public universities, and doesn't mean general funds are available.
ITT! American discovers something else almost all of the rich world is doing, claims it can't be done.
As the child of a couple teachers, I can tell you they're both still waiting on this wealth transfer you speak of.
As for non-sequitur - the administrators are making their money off of the sports teams, not tuition.
This.
Either eliminate Federal aid entirely, or if you want aid, here's the price you're gonna charge.
The very best thing to create an engaged electorate is to make policies that affect the people you want voting. This is why Democrats are pushing for these changes (and Republicans resist). It's also why even though Republicans will cut the budget, and cut social programs, they always promise (not necessarily promises they intend to keep) to leave Medicare alone (old people vote, and are more Republican than young people).
I don't necessarily want to change the level of $X. I just want to raise $X_students at the expense of the other two.
Is there any evidence of non-profit universities doing that? Here's the best expenditure data I have from the Department of Education. Per-student real expenditures are up about 20% over 17 years. That doesn't seem like "hop(ping) on the gravy train".
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_334.30.a...
At least in the state I went to public university at, its not so much that per-student expenses went up (though they did to some degree), its that the State started funding a far lower percentage of costs, leaving the student (and the student's ability to take loans) to pay for a larger share.
In the US, 4-year private (non-profit) college tuition averages somewhere around $60K/year, while 4-year public (in-state) college tuition is closer to $20K. Out of state tuition is much higher, and state schools make a "profit" on out of state student ($50K tuition). But they are still competitive because similar private colleges cost even more.
Yes, in the past few decdes there is much less of a sense that having an educated population is a common good, and much more of a sense that it is an individual investment.
This sounds appealing, but healthcare and education are different in some fundamental ways.
People (generally) don't end up in the hospital, on Medicaid, by choice. So there is a moral argument to be made in regulating pricing to avoid the exploitation of sick people who need medical care to survive, by capping prices for that care.
But people do choose to attend Masters degree programs -- they aren't forced to by circumstances outside their own control. The moral argument for preventing exploitation by capping price is much weaker compared with other avenues: transparency about outcomes, truth in advertising, required financial projections, etc. -- give people more data about what a Masters' degree is actually worth, and hopefully they'll make better choices. When you're in the back of an ambulance unconscious you are not able to make any choices, justifying societal intervention.
In education, limiting the amount of loans available / backed by the government for a single individual would do just as much as artificially capping prices. (From the article: "there are no hard caps on how much someone can borrow for graduate school".)
Let the crappy Masters' programs that aren't worth it get exposed and lose enrollment. By capping prices you're implicitly also saying that every Masters' program that charges this much is worth this much, an implication that is very much false. The value of a degree is not really correlated with the cost to provide it -- why base the price on cost rather than value? (Plus, how would you even "determine what it actually costs per student per year to run a university"? This probably depends on a zillion factors like endowment, cost of living, faculty salaries -- and their alternative job prospects -- availability of land and housing, etc. Would you average it across the country? Good luck running a school in NYC or SFBA, then.)
Telling a university how much it can charge for a Masters degree is like telling Tesla how much it can charge for the Model 3.
If a university is going to call itself non-profit, they should only be charging whatevers needed to cover costs of operating. Tuition has skyrocketed in the last 10-20 years, with no reasonable explanation for what aspect of operating costs has gone up enough to justify that.
Effectively that is the case. The problem is that when you have more to spend, your costs go up. You might opt to buy higher quality equipment, for example. But most especially, when you have more money to spend, your workers want to receive more money. A lot of the income gains that the colleges have seen have gone straight back out as administrative costs.
Second, government already runs public education -- those institutions cost less, but costs have still gone up and tuition has still skyrocketed.
Third, despite the fact that Medicaid does impose price caps, both the list price and costs for medical care have also skyrocketed.
Explain again how price caps solve anything? Every market with price manipulation looks like a disaster. Housing (rent control) and medical care (medicaid & insurance payments are limited or contractually negotiated) are just two examples.
I think what we want are not mandated prices, but mandated transparency in value, so that you know if the price is worth it!
Really? You don't think the climbing housing and living prices and job hiring requirements have anything to do with more people pursuing a Master's degree?
Are you saying people are forced to get these degrees because housing is expensive and job requirements are increasing, in the same way that someone unconscious in an ambulance is forced to get medical care?
https://www.brookings.edu/research/lessons-from-chiles-trans...
HN discussion when it was introduced four years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9514404
An essay by By Andreas Schleicher, Deputy Director for Education and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the Secretary- General, OECD from 2013 that looks at free higher education and concludes that a combination of public/private financing seems best:
http://www.oecd.org/forum/education-for-all.htm
OECD data show that tertiary education creates large social benefits in the form of economic growth, social cohesion and citizenship values that justify public investment. Equally, in light of the very significant–and growing–private benefits of tertiary qualifications, individual graduates should be expected to bear some of the cost, too. The case for costsharing is strongest when tight public budgets would otherwise lead to cuts in the number of tertiary students, a decline in the quality of instruction, or a decrease in the resources available to support disadvantaged students. Cost-sharing allows systems to continue to expand with no apparent sacrifice of instructional quality, and makes institutions more responsive to student needs. Institutions also become less reliant on taxpayers’ money and are able, within certain limits, to raise their own funds. The savings from these kinds of arrangements can be used to broaden access to tertiary education by expanding student support systems.
All things in moderation, however. Countries that rely solely on the market to determine the cost of higher education, such as the United States, often see tuition fees rise to such stratospheric levels that higher education becomes inaccessible to many prospective students. And that, in turn, undermines these countries’ own intentions of raising the level of their populations’ educational attainment. Thus, there is a case to be made for fee-stabilisation policies that contain costs.
This essay ends with a correlation but not causation conclusion. It is not the free market that makes private colleges expensive in the US.
is this a joke? it's true only in the extremely narrow sense that the US does not directly legislate the price of private college tuition.
Given the significance of public universities in US higher ed, it's not even really true in that sense, either, unless by “US” you mean just the federal government.
These articles panning formal education don't fully grasp how difficult it is to get your foot in the door as a non-cs person whose also working full time.
I also wanted to do something more technical than just web dev, which most career changers seem to land up in. Being a grad student opened a lot of doors into more technical roles in companies that are _only_ reserved for grad students.
Grad school is expensive, but I went in with a solid plan. I mitigated some of this by going to an in-state school with a good CS program and commuting to class. I was very focused in my course choices and was a 4.0 student, which unlocked even more opportunities.
I was able to land two good internships (one in embedded development and one in machine learning) and used that experience to springboard into a high paying role in NYC. I have no problems living alone in the city, paying my loans, and still saving a significant amount of money per paycheck.
This is completely anecdotal but what I'm arguing is that grad school can be a good idea if you have a solid plan of how to get the most out of your education. The people I see who haven't gotten their money's worth came into school and just drifted through while assuming that opportunities would come to them just by virtue of being a grad student.
You're right about embedded though. Most telecom hardware is a race to the bottom and there were a lot of layoffs at Nokia when I was there.
> Master’s degrees in fields like computer engineering, education, English, history and math seem to have fewer outlier programs and lower borrowing amounts over all. It’s the less mainstream programs, where vague promises of a lucrative career are easier to make, that seem to encourage irrationally large debt.
If your asking about the order I learned things I got pretty good with python for 2 years, tinkered with web stuff intermittently, then started programming in go and that is easily my favorite. I always always focused on geospatial programming which is at least tangentially related to CE.
The cool thing is you can start to see problems and build stuff to fix it in your free time, for example, this is something I built that gives mile points out in the field locally (no service needed), when normally a $800+ DMI is used to the same thing at a much hackier level.
TL:DR; Depending on what your wanting, I don't think you need to go to school to get competent at CS (although I'm sure I lack some fundamentals), just sort of hack on problems that interest you. Also I have had job offers for software / data engineering positions so I am employable in the field as well I guess.
Like I mentioned in the comment to the other commenter, the only CS course I took in college was Python. I’m very familiar with it but haven’t used it too much. I am not wanting to change careers because I also have a similar job like yours. I have plenty of time to learn and I just want to stay productive.
Anyways, thanks for the info. Really. And good luck on your PE if and when you take it. It’s not hard. It’s just a lot.
These investments aren't setting them up to be compelling candidates against folks who have equal and sometimes lesser tier schools as their undergraduate education coupled with meaningful real world experience. This carries over to performance in interviews as it related to applied knowledge as well. I'd say when putting a risk lens to this, it doesn't bode well for the likelyhood of timely repayment of this debt at scale.
I heard that there was an enormous amount of people exiting the workforce to pursue education when there were few jobs available. Instead they likely got a pile of debt with no real furtherance of career goals as the economy recovered.
It sounds like you're hiring juniors.
What about seniors? Where would you rank someone with an undergrad + 10 years work experience, versus a masters + 6 years work experience?
What about 20 vs 16?
For senior level, and YMMV, but for non-technicals, as time goes on experience beats the education badge and I think as you go higher in the sophistication of the hire the more nuanced the process becomes to where at least at the first level evaluation, formal education becomes increasingly less compelling.
in my world which is software engineering: lesser tier, middle tier and ivy league doesn't make a difference for actual wage work, with ivy league seeming to have outsized advantages in capital formation and being around capital in general.
for wage work, no degree + experience is the same as have any degree. completely obliterating the tier of school. people with no experience having the same conundrum whether they have a degree or not, but at least people with a degree can do coding interviews.
The topic of school tier is a messy one. Unless you're in a big org that's running really active recruiting efforts at the source of top tier schools, you may not have a real representative set of high tier applicants to ultimately check for differentiation. This topic also gets political and ideological really quick, but we do have some reasonably sound data that says for example that (and I'm speaking broadly here) people with MBA's from "division 1" style schools tend to annihilate (to put it lightly) lower tier MBA's in work simulation exercises involving business acumen related competencies.
I was talking about undergrad and masters degrees that weren't business programs
It is something I may pursue if I get a windfall and am no longer concerned about retirement.
A masters degree doesn't pay in dollars, but experience that can set you apart in the future.
Surely "experience that can set you apart in the future" can be captured in calculations of lifetime earnings?
Did my website get me a 6 figure job or my undergrad in engineering?
If you're saying your website is unprofitable but helped you get a 6 figure job then it isn't really "unprofitable" in a broad sense because despite not generating revenue directly it contributed to your lifetime earnings, so I don't think this conflicts with the idea of trying to capture indirect benefits by looking at lifetime earnings.
If you're saying your website is unprofitable and will never help you get a job (even as a conversation starter or indirectly through experience you obtained creating it) but is nonetheless an "experience that will set you apart" like grad school, I would disagree about whether it is really "setting you apart" after all.
There's no benefit, so unless there’s no cost, don’t do it. I got a master’s degree that one of my former employers paid for, about 10 years ago. I enjoyed it, learned a lot, felt like I got out of it, but I have no reason to believe that it’s added even one dollar to my income: I’m certain I’m in exactly the same place, career-wise, that I would have been if I had just stopped with a four year degree (in fact, there are plenty of people who consider a master’s degree in CS an anti-indicator of competence: http://blog.alinelerner.com/how-different-is-a-b-s-in-comput...).
Work experience has been valuable in a different way, and lost income is a big concern. Personally I opted for a 15 month, 4 quarter program to minimize the debt and start earning as soon as possible.
Then you're making a much more educated calculation as far as what you think it might get you, and if you want to go back to school and that.
Just throwing that all on the front end while you're in school seems a bit like gambling.
But doing grad school because you're good at school and don't know what else to do is a trap lots of otherwise smart people fall into.
I suspect that is very much a thing. School is a great system that if you're good at it provides very clear paths to lots of affirmation and ... a good time.
I don't blame anyone for being hesitant to step out of that bubble.... but not doing so can be pretty terrible too.
My concentration for my MS was AI & Computer Networks...which I've never used :) Because of market forces I'm an application developer.
I graduated 11 years ago and between then and now (married, 2 kids) I doubt I would have found the time and motivation to go back to school. It was around the housing crisis and jobs were crappy/not available so that was another motivation to do my MS. I also had the connections to form a startup (which failed) with other peers which has lead me to my current career.
On the one hand, I learned a lot from graduate classes and also used graduate school lifestyle/loans/insurance situation as an excuse/umbrella to explore a startup opportunity (that didn't succeed).
On the other hand, I sometimes regret the opportunity cost of not seeking paid employment sooner, especially given the non-success of that startup attempt versus how much I loved the last employer I interned with in undergrad versus graduating in a major recession I likely couldn't have predicted. The majority of my student loans have been from the graduate semesters and it does often leave me wondering if it was worth even the financial cost.
An M.S. isn't necessarily a risky thing to do, though, since they an be completed relatively quickly, and from a reputable CS or Engineering school, the grads are employable. At state colleges, they tend to be relatively affordable too. Professional degrees at UC schools come with very high surcharges that don't apply to academic degrees, so an MS in CS or engineering at Berkeley is $15k a year (in state tuition) instead vs ~$50k a year for the Law School (tuition is only a little higher for out of state for professional degrees).
An M.S. at Berkeley does make it a easier to get on the radar of a lot of tech companies for recruiting, so that can be an advantage. That's probably not a big factor to you if you're already an undergrad at Berkeley or other well known tech feeder school, but if that's not the case for you, it could help, it's not especially expensive, and you can often do it in a year if you crank the coursework.
Actually, if this was the profile of the typical student debtor, I doubt anyone would care. I read the NYTimes article, and I don't understand how anyone can say a $90k debt for art school with a starting salary of $35k is what was intended here. I mean, wow, they really did feed the beast, didn't they?
This is what I faced pursuing graduate studies in physics as well. Problem was, I graduated from undergrad in 2009 and the only grad school willing to pay for me during the economic downturn had a new, very poorly run program. I (voluntarily) dropped out after a year.
""" Tuition & Fees for OMS CS: Tuition: $510 per 3-credit hour course (most OMS CS courses will be 3 credit hours) Fees: $301 per academic term of enrollment ($194 institutional fee + $107 technology fee). Fees are assessed only for those terms in which students are enrolled in courses. """
> https://www.omscs.gatech.edu/program-info/cost-payment-sched...
There are other programs, like Data Analytics.
The primary effect will be to reduce the disconnect between the cost and the value. As an added benefit prices should come down, schools at the margin will fail.
I've worked with some folks with MBAs who have no clue about how to work with people / think they're just "the boss" and what they say goes because no reason at all. Worked with folks with CS degrees who I don't think really like to code / can't troubleshoot at all.
Front heavy education seems efficient on the surface, but I'm not sure makes sense without having a perspective on what life is like after that.
But just the idea of going back to school to sort of "retool" or expand your toolset for 3 months full time, or 6 or something and get something worthwhile IMO could be the future. The question is if employers will support it.
Granted going back for a more traditional school experience could be a very legitimate route too.
Just no. Schools shouldn't be selling jobs. They should be selling education.
To that end, what I really want to see is more schools than just community colleges allowing you to take classes without being enrolled in a degree program. Once upon a time I contacted a university to see about taking some additional classes to fill in some gaps I didn't manage to fill while I was getting my bachelor's, and they told me that I couldn't just take a few classes; I'd have to enroll in a bachelor's program, become a major in the school, and go through earning a second bachelor's degree in a field for which I already held a bachelor's, just to get access to one or two classes.
That's ridiculous. And anachronistic. It's a model that's designed for an era when postsecondary education was primarily reserved for children of a privileged elite class, and a very few people who were trying to break into the wealthy elite class. There's a huge gap between that model and what we actually need nowadays. In failing to adapt, the orthodox educational establishment is doing society a huge disservice, because the only other people to address it are a bunch of for-profit organizations who see the demand, first and foremost, as an arbitrage opportunity to exploit.
I think that is what we have now... the education is disconnected from the jobs in the sense that the price makes no sense.
I think a lot of what you describe is what happens when an education system thinks they're just selling "an education" without consideration that their student's are can't afford it.
- What program the student chooses
- Is said program at the University recognized
- If recognized does the program provide a proper mix of theory and application
- What opportunities does the program actively provide for the student
- Is the student willing to be an active participant in their education
- Is student and active participant in what resources the program offers
If yes to all of the above, then student really receives a proper well rounded education practical knowledge, and the resources to find a job. Along with that they have the tools to continue to be a competitor in the market and in their current employment.
Far too often it seems that a degree just implies employment and competitive salary. If properly used and taken advantage of it really implies being a much better competitor when all else is held equal.
A lot of the industries that do require continuing ed, it's often at best a rubber stamping process, or an excuse for junkets - at least from what I have seen from friends and family in education, law and medicine. What doctors do to get their continuing ed credits blows away even the fat old days of tech shows like Lotusphere.
With software, you can't just stop learning, but I'm not convinced that formal education is of much use. An RSS reader and a curated Twitter list would probably be a better investment of time.
The first 6 months of my “real” career job in tech I learned almost as much as the first 2 years of college. I couldn’t imagine having a masters especially an MBA without having worked professionally, internships aside. I’m excluding the medical professions where the minimum to employment is a masters/doctorate. Even non-doctors have a lot of clinical/hospital experience before/during a masters.
I’m about to start looking at Masters or MBA programs in my area. I’ll have almost 10 years of experience by then and happy I didn’t do it straight after school.
Edit: See Wharton class stats, shows a mean work experience of 5 years.
https://mba.wharton.upenn.edu/class-profile/
MIT/Harvard/Stanford show similar:
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/mba/admissions/class-2020-profile
https://www.hbs.edu/mba/admissions/class-profile/Pages/defau...
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/programs/mba/admission/class-pr...
I worked with an MBA who couldn't seem to iron his shirts (or just didn't) for a while. Slowly his job duties were shifted to me... the guy he was supposedly help manage after he proved he couldn't figure out scheduling a 24/7 schedule.
He clearly had no experience beyond school and some internships.
Like this guy couldn't manage a taco bell... maybe that should be the barrier to entry, to get into class you have to manage a taco bell for a time....
Funny enough, many years ago I had a very aggressive candidate for a mid-level technical development manager position who was insistent that his newly minted, no computer experience required, MSCE certificate or some such plus his handful of years managing a Pizza Hut qualified him for the job, because "a good manager can manage anything". I disagreed he was right for the job.
I'm not that certain about CS. If you're doing software engineering (or research on 'meta-SE' e.g. methodology, architecture, programming languages), then yes, it'd make all sense to get some industry experience between college and masters; however if you're going to grad school for theoretical CS or machine learning or cryptography or quantum algorithms or any other directions of primarily academic research, then industry experience is helpful but definitely isn't necessary.
"The State’s higher education and prison systems are a study in opposites. The prison system saw its state funding in dollars leap 436% between 1980 and 2011. Back then, spending on prisons was a mere 3% of California’s budget; it’s now 10%."
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/california-publ...
https://time.com/4276222/free-college/
https://senate.ucsf.edu/sites/default/files/2017-02/Reclaimi...
Since, I’ve learned and worked on some interesting problems. I want to work in big tech or in consulting. To do so, I need to be a lot better and/or have great grades.
So spending 2 years going back to school and improving seems worth it to me.
I have 0 student loans from undergrad and very minimal commitments as is.
At least back when I was in engineering grad school, everyone was covered by RA or TA grants, in addition to being paid by those.
Of course in-state tuition at KU in 1996 was under $100/credit-hour, so if I did pay, those 9 credits/semester would be under $1k total.
And the 'free standing' ones that have a lot more slots, are not research focused and cost a lot more. Often seen for professionally licensed professions like psychology, law, or medicine.
Sometimes to a degree where it's a really bad idea. Like in psychology where private grad school costs 5-7 years of your life and $200-$400k of %6-%8 debt for a job that pays $100-150k/yr.
On the other hand, degree inflation is now a thing. In some fields, those you are competing with you for a job likely have master's degrees already, and you'll suffer by comparison.
*edit: typos
OK, so you have a really awful Masters program for art at a for-profit school. So that damns all masters programs?
The problem isn't the school or the loan program... it's that someone would be so ignorant to think there is any sort of return on that kind of investment in education. It's not like the school is lying (that's not the allegation at least). There has got to be some level of personal accountability here. I'm assuming people incurring the debt at this school are adults with an undergraduate degree and I'm assuming if you've made it that far in life, you probably understand debt, the job market and how you might repay that debt.
Normally I'd say a Masters in Journalism is a waste of money but clearly this author might have benefited from learning some critical thinking.
http://thelawofentropy.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-scandal-of-c...
The Academy of Art (San Francisco) is just another place that figured out how to scam the loan system by labeling itself a Graduate School where the $limits are higher. Yale is substantially lower priced so it's not about quality or student degree choice... it's about scamming.
https://www.huffpost.com/highline/article/capitalist-takeove...