Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

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Folks have told me on HN several times they wanted to hear about some number crunching/SEO work/etc that I did regarding the worth of particular college degrees. I just got the OK from my client to share results, so here you go.

Search tool: http://www.onlinedegrees.org/calculator/ Summary article: http://www.onlinedegrees.org/calculator/salary/engineering-d...

Short version: get an engineering degree.

The client has generously permitted me to talk about the business case for this project in broad strokes, and I think it is potentially very interesting for the average HNer startup. The general gist is that the government has terabytes of very interesting data and very limited resources for publicizing it. The NYT knows this and they totally kill it by turning CSV files of population statistics into compelling, actionable presentations that tell a story. You can do this, too.

With a little creativity, 1 GB of Bureau of Labor Statistics data becomes several hundred pages of rather interesting content for the client's niche. Google doesn't particularly love raw data in terms of rankings, though, so the graphs got beefed up a bit with content written by TextBroker writers, stock photos, and the like.

The business goal is that eventually most of these pages will rank for, e.g., [computer science degree average salary], and that some portion of searchers will request an application packet through the website. The CPA for that is between $10 and $100 (I'm not familiar with exactly how it is set).

This project took a few thousand dollars of outsourced work plus the equivalent of about three weeks of full time work from myself. The client and I anticipate that it will be very successful for them.

You can do something fairly similar for your startup -- I've never seen one that can't combine engineering expertise plus writing to generate fairly compelling content at scale, and the SEO gains for it are considerable. I recommend trying it.

This is fascinating and I want to respond on two levels - technical/SEO and moral/emotional. I consulted for the main competitor to these guys until a few months ago so I can speak only generally but I know the subject with some authority.

1. Anyone reading this post is not the target market for this. The real target market are the suckers that they can convince to take out $40,000 in unforgivable government student loans when they enroll at University of Phoenix. Your client is a vehicle for UofP to find these people. It's a very lucrative business for both companies BUT IT IS FOR MOST OF THEIR CLIENTS A SCAM. The people they need are low-income, not tech-savvy, and IRONICALLY, not savvy about the true value of the degree that Online Degrees is selling.

2. Please read the reviews (for instance for Ashford University) http://www.guidetoonlineschools.com/online-reviews/ashford-u... and note that, with rare exceptions, the only positive reviewers are sock puppets.

3. Yet one of the things I don't get is how there could be so many bad reviews and yet people keep signing up. Unfortunately it's probably because of content like this, where the "value" of the degree is shown as "millions of dollars" and not "a slightly higher than minimum wage job (that is not much better than the one i had before) with $40,000 of debt I can't escape even in bankruptcy". I'm NOT exaggerating - please watch the Frontline special on these schools - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/view/

4. I don't want to pick on you. It's a massive US Government federal student loan subsidy system - handing out essentially free money - that makes this system such a mess and makes the prospective students $30-50k "marks" for the "schools". I personally couldn't take direct part in it anymore but I don't begrudge anyone because it's a system that's broken, some small % of students find it valuable, and these adults are not being forced to go to these schools.

Putting emotion aside for a second and talking about the SEO:

1. The SEO technique you're describing - take public data, build it out with cheaply hired content, and stock photos, is great. That works well and everyone serious (particularly this space, because there is so much data) is doing similar stuff to stay at the top.

2. HNers doing SEO should note that you always have two target markets when you build content - SEO content for people who will backlink to and tweet about that content, and content for the actual users of the site. People looking for an online degree or buying insurance don't tweet and blog (with no-nofollowed links) about it - so you need to put content that SOMEONE ELSE will write about. That doesn't mean the people who link to that content may ever consider using the products your site is selling.

In technology often those two groups are the same; in almost every other area of the web, they're not. Tech guys often don't realize this because their only experience with online content is reading HN and TechCrunch and they see all the consumers of the site's main content tweeting about it. But when was the last time you tweeted about your car insurance?

3. In my SEO consulting, every project is surprisingly, 80% technology and about 20% content. Tech guys are building systems to make massive creation of "useful" content possible, writers are getting paid small amounts to crank out the articles. This trend is accelerating, which ironically makes it a great time for a tech person to be in SEO - the opportunities to crunch data are only growing.

With regards to the SEO bits: total agreement.

With regards to the indictment of for-profit education: I half agree. The government giving buckets of free money gets lower class, lower income people who are unprepared for higher education into non-selective institutions, including for-profit institutions. That isn't a bug, it is a feature. They have sucky graduation rates -- in some cases, extremely sucky graduation rates. Free money also inflates the costs of "good" educations -- e.g. kids who get $100k of loans to go to UofI (or Harvard) and then get a degree in photography or religious studies aren't great off, either.

That said, it is a net gain for students if they're convinced to get a low-prestige degree like e.g. an Associates in Radiology rather than going for a Bachelors in English from UoP. (Or, ahem, a Bachelors in English from Harvard.)

Harvard covers full tuition for low-income students: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/03/harvard-increa...

"Families with incomes above $120,000 and below $180,000 with assets typical for these income levels are asked to contribute 10 percent of their incomes. For those families with incomes below $120,000, the parental contribution declines steadily from 10 percent, reaching zero for those with incomes at $60,000 and below."

Harvard isn't right for everyone. But remember that nonprofit universities love drawing diverse crowds, which includes the poor (admittedly, only those that make it through the selection process).

I've watched that particular Frontline special before, and I must say, as a current college undergrad, it is eyeopening. Although, I must applaud the University of Phoenix investor, Michael K. Clifford. He is at least doing some form of philanthropy with all the money he's is making from for profit universities.

I wish I had a mentor of some sort as a teenager, who would have convinced me to attend a public institution or a junior college first, which would ultimately lower my student loan debt. I was suckered in by all my advisers and and the media that the only way to succeed is going to college.

I'm currently going to be somewhere in the ball park of $100,000 in debt after my 5 year BSIS degree at Drexel University in Philadelphia. I do not even live on campus; I commute from my childhood home. All I've had after 4 years there is horrible professors and teaching assistants from another planet. I wanted to learn how to program and create things, but all that I've learned is that I could have received a better education from my local public library.

I could have received a better education from my local public library.

- How'd you like them apples? Sorry couldn't resist some good will punning.

Anyways, I've always said (even when I was in high-school) that I'd just get a bachelors degree from the most reputable University I can afford without going into debt. These days I'm still missing one year of a Financial Engineering degree, but I'm earning almost twice (and quite a bit more in some cases) what most of my high-school graduating classmates are making after getting their Bachelors and Masters, and I just took a new job paying 22% more with an awful lot of benefits as a Lead UX/Systems Developer (yeah I have a weird mix of responsibilities, but they're exactly the responsibilities I wanted to have, as I quite enjoy both sides of the equation) for a big software company in my country. Take in account that I went to a recognized private school, so you could say my classmates where predestined to at least make a modest living without having to resort to flipping burgers at McDonalds.

So there. I learnt everything I know by reading, programming, and designing on my own. I was able to secure my first job pretty easily (I was 19 at the time) since I was one of the three persons out of a pool of 85 people who passed a simple test for a job working for a company that made shopping cart and merchant software. They hired me because even though the other two had degrees, I had done significantly better than they had on the test and trust me, I wasn't/am not a genius or anything or that sort.

I guess my point is that a degree is a must have because it's a great thing to fall back on if you ever need it and it can help your formation and tune your thought process, but it is by no means a silver bullet for actually achieving a great education nor does it make it a given that you'll do better in the job market. Make sure you learn what you need to learn, regardless of where you learn it, and make sure that you really learn to sell yourself instead of letting a piece of paper dictate how you do in life.

Oh and by the way... bachelor degrees are so passe this days. If you want offers based on your degrees more then your proven experience, opt for a masters degree as fast as you can.

And as a vision of the future, Germans often don't leave university until after 30...

True but misleading. Germany has some of the lowest university enrolment figures in the EU. There are a couple of reasons for this but the most important are

1. They stream early (10 years old) and savagely. Only those who go to grammar school (Gymnasium) are eligible to go to a classic university. That's less than 40% of the population.

2. They have an absolutely excellent apprenticeship system. All businesses pay taxes to their local Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and these coordinate training at a state and national level. Apprenticeships last 2-3 years, you spend a third to a half of your time at a trade school and the rest working for your employer.

The concept of streaming disturbs me, because I know I would have been streamed into a delinquent centre for always being bored and acting up (also, I'd have been killed during fascism, nazi times, communism, the inquisition, and the witch burning sessions - this is truly a great time to be me).

I love the German system. Here in Canada half my friends got absolutely nothing out of grades 9 through 12. The one non-university geared guy that actually made something out of his life noted that working hard at "applied" (here applied means "dumb" rather than actually applicable) courses was a waste of time because all he really needed was to graduate. He ended up working 40 hours a week during high school. Only now am I finally catching up with his net worth. Compounding interest is really working in his favour and he should be retired at 50 or 55 if he keeps it up.

Also, he is earning about 50% more than his other "applied" friends because his years of experience put him into middle management, rather than front line. Anyways, streaming early is good, especially if it is self directed.

Sounds slightly more like an argument against dumb education (and I couldn't agree more) rather than streaming.

Personally, I would have preferred to have been working between 13 and 18 - except for maths class, and possibly science and physics, technical drawing, French, art, could have skipped Irish, but would have replaced English with a more modern curriculum, ... okay... school was not as bad as I remember.

I hate to use an HN thread for this kind of thing, but you don't have your email address in your profile or on your blog. Would you mind shooting me an email? I'm collecting people who write well about colleges they attended. (Nefarious purposes, obviously.)

are you also collecting people who think otherwise?

I'm collecting people who write well about colleges they attended.

Heh, I interpreted this as stevejohnson is looking for people who "write about the colleges they attend" and who "write well" (presumably the writing they do about the colleges they attend is the writing that is well written).

Yes.

> I could have received a better education from my local public library.

And printed a diploma, too.

Great work. I really like it. I wonder if the "Wage Gap" data and article will persuade more women to do engineering and other currently male-dominated careers. But I doubt it. Perhaps we are hard-wired to enjoy certain types of work.

Quick bug report: the textbox "Your Major" on http://www.onlinedegrees.org/calculator/ is case-sensitive. I would suggest making it insensitive. Then "computer science" would return a result. (I browsed with OSX 10.6.5, Safari 5).

> Perhaps we are hard-wired to enjoy certain types of work.

I would guess it has more to do with expectations.

so Bill Gates really would have been a nanny if expectations had been different.

If he grew up expecting to be a nanny then wouldn't it make sense that his chances of actually becoming a nanny would be higher?

Certainly, but by how much? It's not nature vs. nurture -- it's nature and nurture. They both matter, but a priori, it's not clear how much. Further, their relative weights of importance could very well change based on what is being evaluated (e.g., sexual orientation vs. career choice).

I completely agree. I of course don't actually know how much, but most of the women I know don't seem to enjoy technology or math any less than I do. I was mainly responding to the way billpaetzke's comment that men and women may be "hard-wired to enjoy different types of work" jumped to the easier conclusion.

Intuitively, I would expect MD degrees to be very clearly on top -- the expected salaries are easily the highest, and there is relatively more data available on that (look at the merrit hawkins surveys). So when a low-end salary for a doc is $150k -- which, to my knowledge, would be a high-end salary for an engineer -- why is engineering coming out on top?

I believe they're all bachelor degrees.

One important factor that you missed is that where you study is also hugely important. Here's a graph of some similar data from the UK:

http://i26.tinypic.com/8ywawn.png

(Data based upon surveying graduates 3.5 years after they left uni)

Well, for lack of an apparent better way, person, or place to ask- thoughts on a degree in applied mathematical economics and finance- or the closest equivalent degree in this database?

Closest to Econ or Finance. I think you're in a pretty good place to be relative to e.g. Social Work.

Do the actuarial exams instead. They cost less, require no degree and are not more difficult than those degrees you mentioned.

For Americans http://www.soa.org/education/exam-req/

For the UK and much of the Commonwealth http://www.actuaries.org.uk/

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