Say what you want, but a college degree is still necessary for high paying jobs.
Whether or not it helps is another story, I am not claiming a degree is literally useless. I am however a little rubbed the wrong way by claims that you need a degree to ever have a job that pays good, that seems false.
Ever since the recession flooded the market with laid off grads.
Like the other comment pointed out, they are doing $60M/year in sales per store and have staff upwards of 50 people per store.
And in many EU countries its effectively a hard NO
No degree here. I took on work at a low salary for the first few years, viewing it as "paid education". Now working for Microsoft
Let's not move the bar of this discussion to "first job"; it's not a useful metric. Better to discuss position attained by some age
I know a SWE at Google who is <20 and does not have a degree. So it certainly is possible, and it implies that you don't need 10+ years of experience to break into FAANG without a bachelor's.
I feel like you're pulling the HN staple "anti anecdata" card when my point wasn't "you're wrong because I exist" & was instead "you're wrong because your metric says people who skip post secondary, collect a meagre salary initially, & eventually end up at FAANG by age 30 should've paid thousands of dollars to attend post secondary until their mid twenties to end up there instead."
High-level engineers can have more influence within the company and often earn more than directors and VPs, and most developers who want to move up the ladder don't aspire to become a director or VP -- they'd rather be a Distinguished Engineer, Fellow, etc.
Microsoft was generating cash by writing interpretors before they brought a VC on board. They only brought in a VC for advice and not money - so they still count. Although Gates' mother also had a lot of contacts in the Seattle upper crust. I doubt Gates needed Harvard outside of finding Ballmer.
Apple got VC funding though contacts made on the job not at school. Jobs went to a Liberal Arts college for less than a year. The Homebrew Club also had a big impact on early Apple. Several members of the Homebrew Club founded companies and they all kept track of each other.
Similarly with Oracle and Larry Ellison. Ellison spent some time at two Chicago universities but his contacts and training were largely on the job.
It used to be that having Harvard on your resume did not mean much in tech since it was not considered a tech school. The feel of the valley changed when John Sculley took over Apple since he was not at all a tech guy. This is just based on my gut, but I saw more Harvard alums after Sculley then before Sculley.
So I looked up the top schools for tech CEOs. This is the ranking of schools with the most CEOs with first round of funding. There were a few surprises for me. 1. Stanford 2. UC Berkeley 3. U of Pennsylvania 4. Harvard 5. MIT 6. Cornell 7. U of Michigan 8. U of Texas 9. Carnagie Mellon 10. IIT
Stanford and Berkeley were not a surprise since I have worked at a bunch of companies founded by Stanford and Berkeley alumni. IIT and MIT were also not surprises.
One thing that skews the results is that a bunch of schools provide masters programs to already successful professionals - so it is not clear that they actually contributed to the success of the alumni.
I know many folks who have went on to leadership roles in SV without degrees. It does matter who you know, but that matters even with a degree!
If you have the aptitude college will absolutely help. But for those who do not pushing them into college is just saddling them with debt for little benefit.
My point is just that there are payoffs other than monetary ones. Nothing wrong with monetary, but nothing wrong with the others if that drives you.
The issue is that college imposes a very real and life changing monetary cost on people attending. If you fail to achieve a high paying job after college you will be far behind your peers who never went, and dramatically more limited in your life choices. College debt is the closest we have to indentured servitude in the modern world.
For those who just want to learn, continuing education or course auditing is the better solution. I do wish colleges would expand upon these programs.
You pay 10% of your disposable income (income above 1.5 times the poverty level) for up to 20 years.
Not sure that's really far behind. For a family of 4 making the median household income that's roughly equivalent to a cable bill.
IBR operates very similar to welfare - including the embarrassing intrusion and analysis of your private life by your lenders. It is a last resort option and not something we should be encouraging.
Cancelled debt is only taxable up to the point of solvency meaning that most people who have a substantial amount of debt cancelled won't owe anything.
>IBR operates very similar to welfare - including the embarrassing intrusion and analysis of your private life by your lenders. It is a last resort option and not something we should be encouraging.
I've done it. You provide your tax return. They don't care about anything but income. It's by no means intrusive and shouldn't bhe thought of as a last resort.
What percentage of college subjects don’t have readily available high-quality material across the Internet for free? Libgen is free. SciHub is free. Whole semesters worth of lectures are available for free on YouTube.
It would be stupid to take out loans for a degree that will never break even, when more knowledge is out there for free than ever before in human history.
I trained in a field that might be classed under "areal studies" more generally for a certain stretch of Eurasia. (And not a "useless" humanities subject, but something that does bring desirable job prospects.) The vast majority of literature in that subject is not available online. More recent publications might be created in PDF format, but for the most part students will need to hit the library shelves, even at the undergraduate level.
Sure, I have scanned and uploaded a great deal to Libgen myself, but I appear to be the only volunteer doing so for this entire field. Most volunteers on LibGen or r/Scholar don’t want to undertake any more effort than downloading already-digitized materials from behind paywalls and then uploading them to Libgen, they don’t want to do the hard work of scanning thousands of pages. I suspect there are a lot of academic fields where it would take decades for the handful of Libgen volunteers to adequately upload the standard publications in that field.
I'd guess former bomber pilot but the rest of your comment makes me think otherwise.
More importantly, while I can use thesearch to learn something I know quite a lot about already, I would not know where to start in things I know nothing about. And let's not start about things that I don't know they exist (which my school covered).
Or invest in a prime developable area near a large metropolis.
Or look at the bank account and smile occasionally.
Class privilege comes with baggage. Better to focus on making the world a better place, starting with your own world -- which often keeps one from putting their nose up too high.
His brothers just enjoy what they do, so they still own the business.
Not everyone enjoys college. I'm one that would much rather learn on my own than through a classroom. I enjoy having learned the things I did in college and felt I needed the piece of paper (and am now working on a master's to change fields), but as far as I've seen, there's no such thing as a degree I would enjoy. Just work or books I would enjoy.
Great distinction to point out and I agree.
I didn't yet complete my Under Graduate course, because I failed in 3 subjects.
I'm being paid more than my colleagues who completed the course from same college.