Are master’s degrees on their way out? Alternatives grow as enrollment fades
washingtonpost.com
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I'd say in general, the value of an M.S./M.A. is far below that of a B.S./B.A. It's more valuable than had I gone and gotten an A.S./A.A. even though the A.S./A.A. would have been more work.
I can't say I regret getting it, because it checked some boxes for me that let me move up the corporate ladder without as much fuss. It's kind of like getting a "free" extra 2-3 years of work experience and tends to move you up a hair in seniority, but that's about it. I seem to get management tasks a little bit faster than my non-M.S./M.A. peers.
It seems to be that the next most valuable degree is a PhD, but with few exceptions, it's not nearly as valuable in industry as one might think. I'm not even sure if it's really worth it in terms of ROI, whereas I'm highly confident that a B.S./B.A. will generally earn you more than without. So in that case an M.S./M.A. is just a stepping stone towards that. And that makes the PhD even harder to justify.
The people I know who seem to do the best have both a PhD and and MBA, which aligns them well with executive and senior executive placement in high-tech industry. It doesn't really even seem to matter what the PhD is in. An alternative that also seems popular among executive recruiters is J.D. & M.B.A.
A PhD MBA sounds...very weird.
For example, it's not uncommon for a researcher to come up with some great idea at a lab somewhere, quit, form a company (with him as CEO) and license the tech away from his former employers. In order to give the investors more of a warm fuzzy feeling about the competency of the guy running the company, they'll often have him do an executive MBA program while the company is still early stages.
In megacorp-land, PhDs for senior execs are reasonably common as well, and it's desired that they also have excellent business education -- so you'll see lots of MBAs in executive resumes that they picked up somewhere during their careers.
I haven't usually seen it as part of the education progression, it's treated more like a specialized certificate or accreditation program when people are moving out of researchy roles and into business ones.
One can use the same amount of money to start a business instead of a MBA. By doing this, at worst case, you will lose the MBA money but gain far valuable information + experience compared to a degree.
Although i guess one big trade-off is that its far more stressful :)
In one case, I worked at a small startup with a VP with an MBA and a CEO without. The CEO was brought in to pivot the company, and for the first couple years it was going really well - from -15% growth to +30-40%. He ended up getting rid of the VP for all the kinds of reasons MBAs don't do well in this kind of company.
But then the CEO decided to go get his MBA, and a year into it started making really terrible typical MBA style "let's squeeze blood from this stone" decisions and the company was vapor within a year.
Now at the tail end of my PhD, remembering my earlier years is like looking back at a bad hair-style - how could i have been so stupid. If you view a PhD as writing papers, low pay/lobbying for funding, a few classes, and a big project then you are missing what's between the lines. The biggest thing i've gotten out of my PhD is learning how dumb i was and how dumb i am now.
A PhD is definitely not for everyone, and maybe a M.S.C. is enough. Though just as an anecdote, i'm currently at a top university (think MIT, CMU, Stanford, etc...you may be able to figure out where in my previous comments, i can't remember if i've listed it) and in every single machine learning, computer science, and engineering class i've taken the projects/papers/presentations from the masters students is largely very poor quality. I'm definitely not saying they're bad students, or whatever, most are probably overworked from taking too many classes each semester, but it was very surprising for me to see such a low level of polish (and sometimes effort) being put into their work. And if their work is any indication of what they're taking away from their M.S., then the M.S. is definitely not enough.
I feel the biggest thing I got out of it was the ability to take a vague project idea, and properly make it into something tangible, by myself. Analyzing previous work, modeling, designing building and testing protos.
The specific tech skills I learned along the way are mostly moot. So, I guess it was more of the "learning to learn" thing that undergrad engineering degrees are supposed to be.
I can't say I regret it, mainly because trying out research/academia is something I wanted to do. The opportunity cost is definitely high though, around 100-120k in lost salary alone, plus the salary I'm expecting now, out of school, is likely not very much above a new B.Eng. grad. Had I gone to work out of undergrad, I'd have enough experience to get PE and pull a much nicer figure.
My only expectation is that it might help pull a job more tech/R&D oriented that is generally given to more experienced people, but even that is far from a given.
Yeah, I agree with that. In my program at least, the assignments were heavily structured around teamwork. And they were just large enough that one person couldn't just do the whole thing. So it really forced you to work on soft skills.
I had already been in the workforce for quite a while when I got my M.S., so I'm sure it colors my feelings about it. I had already been working on team projects, so I didn't get much out of those aspects of it. But I did learn how to work with younger people who hadn't had the same experience, and that has proven more and more valuable the older I get (and relatively the bigger the delta between me and new hires).
I could take or leave the technical and functional things I studied. I think I got a new appreciation for UML, I now merely hate it instead of loathe it. But I honestly couldn't point to any class I took that I felt I really learned something from other than the soft skills.
Regarding a Ph.D., unless you're in an industry that needs it, it's still vast overkill. I have a couple friends who opted to be ABD to increase their career prospects. But those decisions were made 5 years ago, so it may be less relevant.
Sadly, all I have are anecdotes instead of solid numbers. It seems right, though.
Now we know where Dilbert's pointy-haired boss learns his new buzzwords from!
In all seriousness, I can't help feeling that someone who, for example, learns how to program using a Lynda.com online course, is missing out on a lot of things (e.g. the underlying principles of computer science) that are taught as part of a full academic course of study (whether or not that course is taught in the traditional manner in lecture theatres, or online, using video lectures).
Given I'm not a programmer, I'm interested in hearing others' thoughts on the matter.
There are plenty of driven people who want to know the absolute most they can, and won't stop once they're able to generate applications.
There are then plenty of others who get something to "work" and call it a day. But that's not restricted to self-learners. You can do the absolute minimum in college, too. Not to mention all of the things that you learn but don't apply after graduation, if you're taking specific classes and don't work directly in OS design or algorithms, that fades pretty quickly.
More importantly, CS programs don't spend a ton of time on the programming itself, so to some degree you have to be a self-learner even at a college-level CS program.
At least in my CS program you can't get away without getting a decent exposure to algorithm design and theoretical computer science. You can on the other hand easily learn programming without ever touching these subjects.
While academic computer science is certainly useful for programming in industry, and some parts of it are essential to some jobs, not everyone programming needs a computer science degree or equivalent coverage in less-formal education.
I used them quite a bit in college, because my cs professors were horrible at teaching.
He was very good in his area of focus but once he got outside of his narrow area, the consequences of his lack of education became extremely clear.
He didn't have any understanding of how the stack operated or how I, a college student at the time, could write code that executed significantly faster than his.
This has been pretty frustrating to me, because I am fully self taught and I know that stuff.
Additionally, your comment overlooks the fact that much of what is taught in college is really ancillary to what a programmer does most days. It's nice to know, but I'd say that most CS grads learn enough to pass tests then promptly forget it. Then, they get a job, and learn a bunch of stuff that wasn't taught in college that actually is useful.
Seems like a waste of time to me. Why teach people stuff that 90% of them forget? The only reason I learned this stuff is because I found it interesting, and I learned that while making money instead of going into debt taking on student loans.
There's a (growing?) divide between "cs" and "programming" and it really bugs me that people are assumed to be better at "programming" because of a CS degree. CS knowledge isn't irrelevant, but it's not always relevant to many aspects of actual day to day programming either. Perhaps it's sort of "arelevant"?
Just to make sure we understood how they worked, we had to make our own linked list objects and then write functions to traverse them.
It turns out that by saving money at a community college, I actually got a better education than I otherwise would have.
I think the class started with about 60 people, and ended with 11, 6 of which were my community college peers. All of my group worked up through school and graduated with top marks. It was funny, years after we had all met at CC to be standing on stage during our University graduation all receiving some kind of academic award.
In general I'd say that most of my CC professors were more dedicated and accessible to teaching than my uni professors (with a couple exceptions). I remember several fond Saturday afternoons in the library where a couple of our professors would hold tutoring classes for students struggling with pointers and other hard to get concepts.
I have the sense that none of my CC classes were weed-out courses, the notion was that all of the students in attendance had already been weeded-out by life in some way and were being given the golden ticket of a second chance.
It's like you said, you retain what you love. Knowing myself, I wouldn't have loved being spoonfed computer science in a formal setting without any real context. I've retained all of the comp sci I've taught myself and I mentally review it often because it's just so damn interesting.
I think the dichotomy isn't between formally and informally educated, but between excited and unexcited engineers.
I think you're misinterpreting the article. You're looking backwards at lynda.com, Khan Academy, etc and biased by their current incarnation of not having comprehensive CS foundation topics.
Instead, the article is looking forward and speculating that trends may be changing. One has to look at those online education alternatives as something that may gain relevance (and possibly prestige too). The journalist was using # of masters degrees as one possible indicator of this changing trend. (It's too early to tell and the journalist may be overstating the evidence.)
For example, when Harvard was started in 1600s, it was primarily a school to train ministers and clergymen. If someone said in 1675, "trends may be changing, and new schools like Harvard might teach the next generation of lawyers and businessmen", a colonial person that looked at the world as only a static snapshot would have been skeptical. He'd insist that a young man must apprentice at some workshop to learn business skills. Harvard is that weird place that makes you study the Bible in Latin forwards and backwards. But indeed, Harvard did "change" and ~200 years later, they added a law school and ~300 years later, they added a business school. Now, "Harvard Law School" and "Harvard Business School" have overtaken "Harvard Divinity School" in terms of mindshare.
We can't predict what will happen with Lynda.com and others but I'm sure they won't take 200 years to figure out how to expand their scope in hopes of making themselves more relevant. Time will tell how society responds.
Is Khan Academy, Lynda.com, etc the "Harvard of the 1600s"? If not, what's stopping it?
I don't doubt it is happening but come on. Do some reporting. Link somewhere. Or change the title of your piece.
If there were an affordable online B.A./B.S. program from a reputable institution, which was tailored to worldly-wise people for whom high school was half a lifetime ago, I might reconsider. But I haven't found it yet.
Last year I enrolled at UT Arlington to get a BS in University Studies via the Finish@UT program (http://www.finishatut.org/). I am specifically planning on finishing a CS masters via the Georgia Tech program. To finish my bachelors I will need to finish 4 semesters of part-time coursework, essentially picking up where I left off in my undergrad EE at UT Austin, but of course not getting a EE degree, but still getting a BS degree.
Anyway, as a means to an end, I can stomach 4 semesters of undergrad online coursework to (a) finish my degree as an example for my daughters and fulfil a promise to my father; and, (b) enable for me the option to get a masters in CS for personal fulfilment reasons.
You can get credit for work experience as well -- I think up to 70.
There are other options as well, many of these programs were setup originally to support nursing programs and military families. Just stick to non-profits.
I guess it's Coursera for me then :)
@lrm242 So far away. I barely have a semester worth of credits from TCC(Tarrant County) earned a decade ago.
There are also CLEP exams[1], which allow you to take exams for college credit. Most people seem to have never heard of these, though I know they were popular in some homeschooling circles.
That's the discriminant, right there. If they pay you it's because they need someone to get some work done, and the funds to pay you come from someone willing to pay them - NSF, NIH, industrial sponsor, whatever. But if you pay them they'll just make some advanced undergrad courses a requirement for your masters, and it's a farce throughout.
In these kinds of situations, it's hard to overestimate the value of a master's degree, because like others have said, besides the emerging MOOC opportunities, there aren't really any other places where someone can spend either 1-1.5yrs full time or 2-4 years part time earning an advanced credential that's globally recognized, in nearly any field.
I would not mind master's and phd's going back to the academic realm though; for people who want to do research and not 'get a high paying job' as it once was.
Continuing education has been necessary long before the rise of online video. I think these services will have a bigger effect on the publishing industry than the Master's Degree programs.
I wonder today if even that approach is viable, or if, as this article suggests, the new-model education will continue to take market share from traditional university programs.
My Master's degree was entirely paid for and I actually made money. I wrote a thesis that contained original research and published a paper with my supervisor on the research. This is awesome. It's a 'PhD-lite'. It showed me how to do research and whether or not I would want to continue on with a PhD.
An MS can be a good way to build a portfolio, gain some skills that are hard to develop while working full time, and explore interesting ideas and options that might turn into a startup or software application. It isn't the only way, of course, but it can be a good way.
The ground rules:
1) don't go heavily into debt
If you are pursuing an academic MS, you can often get a TA position that will reduce or eliminate your tuition while paying a stipend. Alternatively, consider a highly regarded public university with relatively low tuition - for complicated reasons I won't get into here, public graduate programs in CS/Engineering tend to rank far more highly than the general undergraduate programs.
I want to emphasize the debt thing again here - if you go heavily into debt, none of this is worth it. I hear what I can only call horror stories about people going 100k into debt for an MS in things like religious studies. I'm not surprised some people are passionate about this field, and by all means, they should find a way to pursue it. But I'm amazed that the federal gov't created a special non-dischargable kind of debt that allows people to go 100K or more into debt for masters degrees with such limit career earning potential.
By contrast, 10-20k of debt with a MS from a reputable engineering school is no big deal. Really, the loss of income eclipses this, since people who can apply to MS STEM programs are usually already capable of earning a decent salary.
2) choose a program with flexible requirements.
If you get into a reputable MS program in a STEM field, odds are good you've already done mathematically rigorous and highly structured undergraduate degree. Your new program should allow you to choose courses that match your more specialized interests.
3) it's ok to take a relatively easy academic load and pursue side projects. Maybe even better.
This is where I fell down a bit. At Berkeley, I could have taken Intellectual Property through the SIMS/Law schools, product development through the MBA/Engineering schools. Instead, I dropped those courses to keep up with advanced nonlinear optimization and integer programming. Those are great courses for people who plan to be research professors in those fields, but they weren't good courses for me. I would have enjoyed myself more and gotten more out of my coursework if I'd realized what I was really there to do.
On the bright side, I did pursue a lot of side projects, mainly software applications inspired by things I was learning. If you're at a good university, there will be a lot of interesting speakers, seminars, students, projects, and other types of activities that are highly relevant to your field. Of course, it all depends on what you're there for, and if you are planning on advancing humanity's mathematical knowledge of integer optimization, this wouldn't be the right advice for you. But keep in mind, a university is actually fertile ground for interesting ideas that, oddly enough, don't really fit into something that will get you credit hours. Don't lock yourself down with coursework to the point where you can't tap into that, especially if you aren't PhD bound anyway. Plus, you may be able to convert one of these activities into a MS project.
All in all, it's still up to you to decide whether it's worth the loss of a year or more of income. It can be difficult to pursue ideas like this if you're working full time, and what you do in an MS program may put you on a much more interesting and fulfilling path long term. It's hardly the only way. If so, it can be worth it.
Just really, don't go deeply into debt. All those wonderful, interesting paths that opened up to you may not be possible if debt forces you a demanding, full time job that takes up all your time and mental energy.