The sickening part is hearing people not only defend this, but to attack and defame the good people who are speaking truth to power on this. It’s David and Goliath and the usual suspects, wealthy elite, attack David for trying to warn youngsters who will destroy their lives by taking on a debt burden that guarantees a lifetime of wage slavery. No honorable person can defend this.
These kids then sulk and bemoan society while they work at a coffee dhop that affords them higher pay than the degree they studied for affords them.
I have a really hard time believing Columbia made a credible argument that you can make a good salary in film.
Majors in high demand and good with prospects can have guarantees. These can be re-evaluated periodically to adjust to demand.
If everyone with a psych major switched to comp sci tomorrow one of two things would happen.
1) we’d have more engineers than we’d know what to do with - wages would collapse and companies would stop trying to conserve engineering time. Innovation would slow and we’d head back towards the days of J2EE etc.
2) universities would create fake versions of the majors that are guaranteed, but easy to pass and unlikely to lead to employment.
Many of these students would rationally believe that studying “film” would lead to a shot in the film industry.
https://arts.columbia.edu/programs-study/ma-film-and-media-s...
It does say: A few Teaching Assistantships are available. Student Service positions employ students as Programming Assistants and Research Assistants.
The article says “entering a job market that pays less than $30,000.” That doesn’t mean that masters holders earn that on average, or that that’s what they’ll be earning mid career.
Not to say that masters degrees aren’t a scam, nor that the article is being intentionally deceiving. But my guess is that it’s not quite as life destroying as it appears.
I know someone who spent similar amounts on a UX masters degree, and almost decade later was only finally hitting 100k/yr - in the SF Bay Area. Which cost of living/free cash flow perspective is probably even worse than your $60k/yr med student.
If that is true (which I find incredibly hard to believe) it literally makes no sense. The utility and the ability of a car to give you a ROI compared to a watch is almost infinitely more.
The same cannot be said of a $150,000 education, which cannot be re-sold. Perhaps in some cases a high value education can be turned into a higher value career, but that’s obviously not relevant to the hypothetical rich kid getting a film degree at Columbia.