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Comment by crsv | Hacker News Reader

As someone who's hiring folks right now, a shocking trend is applicants who chained expensive middle tier private college expenses with middle to low tier private college masters programs - often times unrelated to the ultimately role they're applying to now.

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.

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How much of what you see is people who had pursued master degrees during the economic downturn?

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.

This is a great question. There may be some variability by role type, but for the last two hires where I started noticing this trend usually the masters was acquired 17-18 or 18-19 on the resume (2 year masters programs). These are also for mid-level roles as opposed to entry level or senior. Probably a lot of factors but I'd wonder if the readily available access to student loans was the biggest enabler. Just off the cuff I'd be curious if these decisions involved the perception of necessity for masters degrees or in how many cases they simply wanted to prolong the experience of undergrad (college is often a good time, I get it), and with the barrier being no more frictive than the student loan process they navigated for under grad, the decision just being the path of least resistance more than a calculated risk/reward decision.

The relationship between the business cycle and demand for graduate school is complicated. Some programs have a very strong countercyclical component to their demand, and others don't. See http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.648... (and section 5 in particular).

out of curious, what roles do you hire for?

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.

Currently mostly non-technical: Marketing, Sales, CX.

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.

ah, you are talking about MBAs alongside marketing and sales. I would agree there

I was talking about undergrad and masters degrees that weren't business programs

> 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.

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?

Mid-levels mostly. Non-technical.

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.

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