Master’s degrees are the second biggest scam in higher education?

They pay the high sticker price because it's rationally their best choice, but the value they're purchasing isn't in the degree, but rather the favorable status they earn in the immigration labyrinth.

This isn't good for them, except in comparison to other options. It certainly isn't good for native-born Americans, who are (for the most part) stuck paying the same high sticker prices, without getting the features which justify the high cost of the product.

Aren't H1-B visa workers mostly in extremely HCOL areas and significantly underpaid / taken advantage of?

I imagine if you're from India and you really want to get out of India - this sounds like a good deal (although wouldn't $50k for tuition be hard to get?) But, I'm assuming most people just want to have more money / a better life?

Wouldn't the first option be better? And then you could stay closer to friends and family.

Beyond that, the international Masters students are really subsidizing the education of other students. Every time there is some friction added to the student visa process, all but the top schools with huge endowment funds feel the financial pressure.

Most narratives I read about this situation paints the picture of the students buying their way into US residency via Masters program. But it works the other way too - many US citizens are able to get educated at an affordable price because of the money these Masters students bring in to the school.

I'm not talking sadistic google interview questions, these were things that anyone with a BS should be able to answer.

Not just the US. Most countries in Europe offer international master degrees in english that serve the exact same purpose.

But with a typically enterprising capitalist mindset, the American system also wants to ensure that talented individual don't go back to their country (or elsewhere) immediately after getting a degree. This is where the high cost of a US college degree comes into the picture - the burden of paying for it acts like an anchor for most students who come from developing countries or econonomically weak background. Even if they get some kind of scholarship and / or do part-time work, they still have to take a huge loans to live in the US to complete their education. And often the fastest way to repay these loans is to work in the US or other developed nations. This may take another few years. The American system hopes that by then the potential immigrant would be sufficiently exposed to the American culture and lifestyle and consider staying here.

(The high cost also ensures quality of education is high in the US, thus attracting talents from around the world. And the money is also pumped into a lot of R&D in the college allowing US to maintain a big tech lead. It's a neat system that seems to work so far.)

The other aspect of ensuring that higher education remains costly in the US is to also ensure that a blue-collar workforce continues to exist, and wage is suppressed among the white-collars. Perhaps the law makers also feel that it acts like an incentive to work more diligently, out of anxiety and worry - after all, people with more qualification, experience and higher stable income often tend to jump around more (which the big tech try to thwart by entering into illegal agreements to not hire each others employee).

In Denmark and some neighboring countries there's this concept of a school you can go to just to learn stuff later in life, as an ongoing thing. There's a whole bunch of themes (sports, history, etc), and often you can book yourself in for whatever amount of time makes sense for you.

I say this as a mid 20s return college student. My experience going back to college without the "stars in my eyes" so to speak, has really left me embittered by the system altogether. Schools act like autocratic bureaucracies that when they make a mistake all you get is an "oops sorry. Now deal with it lol." Also student employment is not only predatory (cause the pay is just garbage), but it's like they don't even train students either. If you want any answers, you have to wait to talk to one of the few people who has actually been hired on as an employee.

Higher education is structured for students going from high school to their institutions. They also assume students don't have full time employment or a family. So basically if you have either of those, the school doesn't care at all about your plight. They know your gonna pay off your loans and complete your degree. They prefer younger impressionable kids who are gonna waste a lot of time and money there instead.

Slight anecdote, I gave a few geometry lessons to a teen. And witnessing his brain operate was quite staggering. Teen operate at high frequency low depth it seems. He didn't want to grasp the rule or symmetry but ran in many intuitions very rapidly (honestly my brain froze at his pace of change, so vibrant) only to feel defeated or confused. Made me think adult and kids really need different approaches. Our emotions facing a new topic are so different.

Depends on the country. Masters degrees can be research which are the first year of a Ph.D. or they can be taught degrees. In the latter they are usually called "conversion" courses where there's intensive focus on filling in gaps in education for somebody moving to the field. E.g. moving from an Economics B.Sc. to a Computer Science degree.

Where I was educated the Computing Science undergraduate degree is the equivalent of any Masters degree in the same subject. There is nothing in the subject matter that would be of value as another degree as it isn't advancement. It would be merely repackaged undergraduate courses like you suggest.

As an adult, I don't really have much interest in a complete degree with a certification. (With the exception of very bounded industry-specific things.) So in that respect adult education certainly is different.

I have known people who got PhDs as adults and I think they mostly didn't care for the experience. I know I have zero interest in getting another degree. Even a couple of decades ago, it would have zero value for my professional development and would, in fact, have been mostly a distraction.

However, there are a ton of educational opportunities often oriented to working adults. Community colleges, extension programs, online learning of all sorts...

I get that you need a big enough audience in order to set up any class, and supply/demand is definitely an issue. But I think the demand is much higher than what the supply side seems to cater for.

Things like Khan Academy are great, but they've begun to scale down their offering in favour of university prep. The Open University has some truly great content, but it's prohibitively expensive. MOOCs seem very hit or miss, and often lack a good mechanism for feedback. And quite frankly, I enjoy being in a classroom full of motivated people.

- It's not a legally qualifying degree like studying medicine

- It's academic in the sense that you can use it to gain entrance to a phd, and has academic content that isn't just "how to code".

- And yet you learn a fair bit about how to code. You'll in all likelihood come across actual tools, not toys, that real coders use, eg Git. You might also do some specialist stuff that is directly applicable to an employer, rather than just demonstrating interest. Eg if you do a systems programming course, you might actually understand systems in a way that's useful from the start.

Rather than focusing on degrees, I think it's a lot more important to focus on learning, however you don't know what's important to learn until you actually start working on real problems.

The same applies to some degree of the sciences in general but, there, you probably have to get to a PhD for the opportunities to be significantly elevated relative to a BS.

In any case, this meme about Master's degree scams is mostly directed at high-cost degrees in journalism and the like where the career opportunities aren't great with or without the degree.

In engineering, an MS in CS has the least value to employers. However, in other areas of engineering, it has a pretty high value. Many big companies will not let you do EE design work with just a BS, for example.

- A well taught undergrad degree in CS (Masters fill gaps caused by bad classes or different fields)

- Graduated with undergrad degree recently (getting a Masters degree after being out of school for 10 years can be a good refresher and update on how the field has evolved/changed)

- Masters degree classes in an area of CS you are familiar with (Masters degree is a great opportunity to take classes in areas that you care about but don't know well, if you are a great Rails webdev with 7 years experience, then taking a Masters degree class in Rail WebDev is just wasting your time.)

I’m not sure any of this helps, though, since it would only prove you’re good at the test.

Maybe markets have a difference concept of efficiency than society...

So if you as a student do have some of that debt leftover, it is much smarter to use that toward a car down payment or a deposit on an apartment. I feel like most college kids don't have even the slightest grasp on budgeting and how all transactions affect the accounting equation honestly.

You show a $50k a year degree to an 18 year old from a more middle to upper middle class family, though, and they're not going to understand how much money that actually is. They're going to see one big party that they don't need to pay for until they're done.

I also remember when I was in high school, all the boomer teachers and parents were saying university is a gateway to easy money after. We were sold something that hasn't held true, and I think a lot of people are very bitter about that.

At least with some graduate programs—in areas of actually value—you might qualify for an RA or TA subsidy. But it’s not worth paying full freight.

The fact that you have to pay for your degree out of pocket may mean that more people will choose to do degrees that are worth something, which is a great thing for society overall. Having said that the prices of degrees in the US are outrageous. A middle ground should be found.

Despite programming (in GWBasic) since 7 years old, the IT school didn’t transform me into a good developer. In fact most of my colleagues became managers. It’s only 4 years AFTER school that I landed in a famous startup, where I learnt to recompile open-source and use Maven properly and understand the underlying concepts, what to study, what to look into.

And immediately, I created my startup which is now successful.

This whole beginning of career / engineering school has been a terrible waste of youth energy, along with stressing me out because I knew something wasn’t right, and making me intensely depressed. I’m enraged that studying is so hard, and yet, you’re left with absolutely no time to program on your own and discover the scroll of truth.

When very few people had college degrees, they were of high value because the programs were more likely to be rigorous.

As US society said "higher education is the best path to success", it drove up demand where people who never would have considered college otherwise were pushed that way by teachers, guidance counselors, and parents. The high school system adjusted to launch more students in better ways.

Along the way, that morphed into "higher education is the only path to success" and suddenly anyone who didn't go was considered a failure and the entire high school system dumbed down to the point where more and more otherwise normal courses were deemed "college prep."

Unfortunately, it put students who would be below college standards or even just borderline a generation ago in a bad spot where they were underprepared. But colleges get massive cashflow so they introduced more remedial courses in the first year and the average student is graduating in 5 or 6 years. They've steadily devalued themselves and are looking more and more like high school 2.0 but longer with a massive price tag.

(Background: Have a college age kid just going through this personally and watching his friends struggle as some hit these walls. It's sad and ugly and didn't have to be this way.)

This is an unbelievably cynical take on the world. Society and the economy are not zero-sum, and having better education and better skills make someone better off without taking away an equal amount of opportunity from others.

Lowered standards and devalued degrees is probably a thing though.

A few exceptions:

1) You want to learn something but doesn't want to go through the 90-credit undergraduate. In my university they give you access to a CS graduate diploma that consists of 10 core CS courses under the requirement that you already have an undergraduate degree (non-CS) and pass the entry CS course about programming (usually a Java 101 course). IMO it's a LOT better than a 90-credit second undergraduate degree on CS.

The other exception is that you want to do the research but I'd argue it still doesn't worth it unless it's a prestigious school like top 20 in North America (MIT, Stanford, CMU, Waterloo, those top schools).

That would be true only if all the jobs requiring these credentials were already filled and none were to be created in the future.

There's an ongoing weakening of the signal for people with degrees who can actually do design engineering.

To them, "college is good" is an unquestionable truth, and the systems they build will always give more resources to colleges.

Also the fees page suggests that it costs at minimum, 550k, and if I'm reading it correctly, 1.5m.

https://emba.hkust.edu.hk/admissions/fees/

Of course, that was from a time when MBAs were probably more of a requirement even in tech for senior exec roles than they are today. These programs obviously still exist but I'm not personally aware of anyone who has gone to one any time recently.

2. In addition to technical knowledge, the students are also exposed to other future executives in other industries. This network can be very powerful.

Scam #1 is the level of executive compensation, particularly in the US.

Scam #2, the EMBA, rides on the back of #1. Cost is "justified" by what #1 makes possible, but nothing else.

An American undergraduate plus masters is six years, which is absolutely insane.

Let alone their PhDs, which mean you could easily end up 29 before you graduate.

I had a friend in Europe who finished their PhD with top-tier publications in two years - much less mucking around than in the US.

Mostly in softer fields like marketing and (English) language.

They have all communicated the same thing - it's a necessity for starter jobs.

Bachelor's degree is often enough for a starter job in industry and I don't think it matters that much if it's Master's or Bachelor's even later in your career (at least in software dev), PhD is definitely regarded much higher

E.g. most industrial fields that include scientist in the title. DS/AS roles in tech, Product management roles etc.

Don't make overly broad statements. This is true for many programs, but false for many programs. It tends to be true for CS, and less true for EE, for example. When I applied for grad schools in EE, the universities that let you in the PhD program with just a BS were a minority. The top 10 school I got into said they would allow it only for special circumstances, and even then, would make you take about 2 extra years of coursework compared to those coming in with an MS (so practically the same as being admitted to a MS first). In my time there, I didn't encounter a single person who got into the PhD program with just a BS.

Googling now, what I say may be less true. My undergrad university, which absolutely required a MS to get into the PhD program, no longer does. Although the grad school I went to hasn't changed - you still have to take about 2 more years of coursework if you get in without a MS, and your qualifying exam is delayed pretty much as if you were first getting an MS.

In terms of secondary education, after a dozen years of schooling young adults are launched into the world with exactly zero marketable skills. Zero.

What is the average US high school graduate good for?

Stacking boxes and, after training, making coffee and a number of other low skill/knowledge jobs.

This, from my perspective, is a travesty, a serious breach of the trust we place on a system of education that seems to have no ability to deliver real value for the money we spend.

At the university level we easily add a year or two to degrees by adding what I call “degree-irrelevant” courses.

An engineering degree should not have —as a graduation requirement— history, social science or non-technical classes.

Please note I said “graduation requirement”. You should not need to pass a class on Middle Earth History and Poetry to obtain an Electrical Engineering degree. This is silly and it wastes a tremendous amount of time and money.

Why do we have this?

Well, our secondary education sucks, so we teach and re-teach that which should have been learned in high school.

Worse than that, because the government is in the student loan business (and they are dumb as can be) the education “mafia” figured out how to fatten-up degrees to extract more money out of the system.

A history class is inexpensive to teach, and yet it costs the same per credit than, say, a chemistry class that requires more infrastructure. Degrees are padded with crap no employer values at all.

If you go to a university that costs, say, $30K to $50K per year, you likely have somewhere in the range of $30K to $80K in coursework loans that is utterly irrelevant to your degree.

The other angle is that, without this coursework we would be able to graduate engineers about 25% faster than we do, which would be a competitive advantage.

These graduates would start their professional lives with about 25% less debt. The lifetime benefits of this cannot be understated.

The opportunity cost, for the person and prospective employer, of taking an additional year or more to graduate people with technical degrees is, in the aggregate, massive in scale.

Someone might say: A well rounded education is important!

Absolutely agreed! Just not as a graduation requirement that adds tens of thousands of dollars to the already abusive cost of education and, in most cases, over a year of time to obtaining a degree.

This is where secondary education should shine. We should demand that young adults emerge from that system with both a well-rounded education and marketable skills.

Society would benefit immensely if we were better at the business of education, from K through university.

EDIT:

As one of many personal examples. Many years ago I hired an EE out of Intel. He spent around five years there designing switching power supplies. That's what I hired him for. He worked for my company for several years doing exactly that, designing switching power supplies. The fact that his US degree required him to take a bunch of irrelevant courses added exactly zero value to what he could do for anyone who might hire him, myself included. This means this person wasted a year+ of his life in school taking courses nobody cares about (and nobody will pay him for). A year later I hired yet another EE to do the same work. His degree was from Europe. He had nearly zero non-STEM coursework. He performed just as well, and in some aspects better, than the US-graduated EE.

I don't understand why we allow the education system to do things that are demonstrably detrimental from nearly every angle. If someone does want to study philosophy or history while obtaining a degree, no problem at all. It should be THEIR decision. And, if they think it might have future value to employers, they would get to highlight the fact that they took and passed such coursework. They could even opt to go for a minor in a certain area of study. Again, this should be the decision of the student and it should self-select based on the ultimate value assigned to such studies by society, not imposed upon every single student by a system with already ridiculous cost structures.

Also, a STEM masters allows one to do three years of OPT, which is basically a work permit.

A masters was a great choice for me. I did my engineering undergrad abroad, got a very good education for not much money. Doing a masters in the US allowed me to specialize and enter the US market.

Comparatively, the price of a technical masters in the US was on part with that of an MBA on my country of origin. After crunching the numbers, it was an easy decision.

I am happy with the education I got, and the opportunities it opened for me.

That was the case for me in Ireland when I did my doctorate.

I also hire people out of code schools as well. I get a lot of resumes from people with a degree in some random field…then spent a few months at a boot camp. So far, our boot camp employees have been very good.

I know a lot of working journalists and very few of them went to J-School. (Many worked on undergrad newspapers and some colleges have undergrad elective classes.)

Can you expand on what you mean by "access to elites"

I was in a similar situation as you. I did a 3-month “boot camp” and then worked at an unknown startup until FAANG recruiters started to email me, but obviously YMMV.

Every company I've every worked for offered money for education but usually it only covered slightly over 1/3 of the total expense when everything was said and done. (And this was early 2000s when University was cheaper)

Also, two companies required at least a B for reimbursement which is not always that easy in a competitive STEM class. I found I could do work, or school, well. But not work and school and subsequently dropped out of my Graduate program. It worked out in the end. :)

Are also hoops people in certain fields need to jump through for jobs (e.g., community college faculty, lecturer at some other institutions), advancement or pay incentives, etc.

"useful" is in the eye of the beholder. I would expect a company hiring manager to put a candidate with a Master's degree higher on the pile than those with high school or Bachelor's degrees, too.