College Is Much More Than a Means to a Higher Salary
sam-koblenski.blogspot.com
sam-koblenski.blogspot.com
"College is just a means to a higher salary" is a strawman. The real question is whether the other things it brings are worth tying yourself down in heavy debt for most of your working life.
Also, if a big reason to go to college is motivation you can't find anywhere else, how completely f*ed will you be when you enter the real world heavily in debt and unable to learn new things without paying an institution thousands of dollars per month to motivate you?
I've always wondered about this. Does having a degree lead to higher salary? Or is it that the types of people who go to collage and get degrees are more naturally inclined (for whatever reasons) to get paid more?
It seems like a pretty 'basic' and fundamental question, so I'm sure there's been studies/research on it before.
Although I'm still relatively early in my career (23 years old) - Lacking a degree has never been a problem for me and I've still ended up in a pretty well paid job.
Want to meet a developer from Xero? Tweet 'em. No luck? Ask somebody you know if they know someone who works there, likely they or someone they know does.
I don't have ten years of experience, and I don't think I'm particularly exceptional. I think you're just being more pessimistic than is warranted. SV is definitely not a perfect meritocracy but it's not exactly France circa 1788 either.
But I have to admit my graduate credentials get me the interview sometimes, and that's what gets us in. So not having a college degree can be a bar to entry. A very real problem.
Or my preferred theory, which is that you have to put up with a lot of bullshit in order to get a degree, and you also want to hire employees that can put up with a lot of bullshit in order to get necessary work done. The kind of smooth-talking folks who can convince you to hire them without a degree might be naturally suited to sales... which is one of the few fields where you don't need the degree anyway.
Considering the typical adult entering the workforce today is going to have a career on the order of 40-50 years until retirement I don't think the typical 10 year repayment period of a typical college loan qualifies as 'most' of your working life.
My motivation comes from a wellspring of desire to know. Desire to master. If someone needs another human to be that source of motivation, then they are already doomed. Degree or not.
That just happened to law schools.
If you are stuck with a crappy low paying job, that means that your only paying 10% of any income over about $18k (for a single person).
The best knowledge that I have retained over my educational "career" has been self taught.
College partially helped dictate the direction but why should I be paying 100,000 grands for just directions ?
The best learning also happens when you are not stressed out due to "shame, external pressure". Or in my case financial and parental pressure.
I remember reading studies done recently that found out that students are more stressed out than people locked up in prison.
How is this fair ?
Khan Academy's lectures on cryptography, physics and chemistry helped me through high school and college more than any other source.
To the author of the blogpost : Stop whining about having to listen to young people's doubt about college when you have no clue what society is putting them through.
You don't have to spend anywhere near 100k for college, and the vast majority of people don't.
The average in state tuition and fees at a public university is $9,139. Some kind of assistance is available to most people--the Pell Grant is income based and many states have Scholarships. Georgia (where I went to school) has the hope scholarship that covers around 90% of tuition and fees for high school students with a B average and close to 100% for students with a 3.7.
In addition almost everyone qualifies for student loans. And if you take out more than $30k or so (I forget the exact amount) you can qualify for income based repayment where you pay back only 10% of your discretionary income (Income - 1.5 * Federal poverty level) for 20 years.
Anybody with decent grades can get into the local branch of their state school, live with their parents/friends, and graduate with minimal debt. It's not as sexy as going to a big name school and living in the dorms, but it's a lot smarter in the long run. It's especially true in a field like Computer Science, where it's so easy to impress people with results. To most people a degree from MIT means a lot less than a profile of impressive projects, and the projects don't cost an arm and a leg.
I'm curious which prisons were used in the study. High security? White collar? Food and shelter are provided for inmates. Students, on the other hand, have to make tuition payments, rent payments, figure out where every meal is coming from, work in groups for grades, deal with exams, ever changing project requirements, etc.
In general, I agree with your sentiment: the best learning is done when you aren't being pressured by anyone other than yourself to do it, and at this point the sticker price for college is well out of wack of any value it could provide to students who aren't able to use the credential it provides to line up a high paying job or who aren't coming from very well off families.
I do think, however, that there are things that it is hard to teach yourself, and that a college or college-like situation (i.e. where you have a few months to study a small set of subjects without regards to your immediate output and in the presence of other people who are studying those subjects) is probably going to be the best or only environment for providing.
The first thing that I think it's very hard to teach yourself is how to approach problems in a field at a high level. For instance: I doubt I would have been able to get myself to my current proficiency (roughly 'beginning phd student') in mathematical proofs without a lot of work with a professor and graders. The material gets to a point where it becomes too hard to approach with your current mental toolbox, and I found that I usually needed some guidance if I was going to get myself to the next 'level' persay.
The other thing that I found valuable and think is hard to find outside of a college was learning what problems fields other than your own find interesting, and how they approach those problems. I found that some of the most valuable experiences for me in college were taking upper level courses in subjects I didn't have a lot of experience in, particularly when those courses largely consisted of reading papers/books that were aimed at other scholars in that field, with a professor giving us context to the conversation that those papers and books were part of and a classwide discussion of the ideas presented. What I got out of those courses was an understanding of how ideas developed and what tools fields would draw on and apply to supporting or refuting those ideas. That was incredibly valuable to me because each course like that which I took gave me an entirely new toolbox for looking at the world and what's in it. (Sometimes I also wasn't super fond of that toolbox, and that was also enlightening.) This approach to learning wasn't confined to the soft sciences/humanities, either, although it seems to kick in sooner in those fields: graduate computer science and math seminars use an almost identical model.
I think both of these can largely be categorized by "it's hard to teach yourself how to think."
I think the first example is something where I at least needed the help of an instructor and grader to really grok it. It's things like that which I think you need some sort of college setting to really truly learn.
The second could maybe be moved to online courses, and I know some OCW materials have that kind of feel to them (particularly for graduate courses) but I think it would require a different approach to the courses. Online courses often seem to focus on imparting the material, rather than about teaching about the process of how the material came to be. The courses involved a certain amount of discussion that was (sometimes) just as valuable as the actual reading and surrounding clarification that I don't think you'd get at all with most of the current iterations online courses.
College forced me to learn the all the (seemingly) boring parts of Computer Science that I'd skipped over while teaching myself. Some people have the discipline and drive to spend time proving that an algorithm is O(n^2) or that a grammar isn't regular--most do not.
My CS degree filled in so many holes in my background that I didn't even know I had, and most of the other self taught programmers I've worked with weren't too different from me. Many times this is the difference between spending a week banging your head against a wall, and taking 10 minutes to realize your particular problem was solved 50 years ago.
If you don't have the motivation to learn something, then I posit that you haven't framed the topic in the right way. I like this quote from Feynman:
> "I don't know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough."
The only way I'm going to put in the effort to learn something (really learn it, not just pass the class) is if I find it interesting in some way. I'm sure that awesome professors are great at framing topics in the right way, but I can also see myself doing that.
For example, 3D graphics. There can be a lot of tedious math and programming involved, but if you can master it, you have the ultimate ability to visualize anything you can think of.
I just graduated at 41 years old. There's not a clean, easy single reason why. But it involves some bits of pride and shame. I'm the oldest of all the grandkids in the extended family and had been the only one who hadn't earned a degree. Lost one of my grandmas a few years ago and I wanted to make sure my other one could see me get there. Also I wanted to do it just to prove to myself I could finish something I started over 20 years ago.
Money ain't everything.
But when I reflect: "no degree" always rankled, especially when I was hanging out with MIT grads at conferences. It definitely opened doors to them that were closed to me. I have heard "I could get you a semester of research in my lab if you had a degree".
So here I am at 46 doing a BSc and am lining up my doctorate. Dr SixSigma has a good ring to it.
"How much can I expect to make after graduation" was something people always considered, but the recent steep rise in tuition has made it more of an overriding question.
That's nowhere near a mortgage at the income levels where it makes sense. If you're stuck in a crappy job making $30k a year and you're single, it's about $100 a month.
If you're making $60k and you're single, you could definitely pay off the average $30k loan in 3 or 4 years (assuming you live somewhere where 60k is a decent income).
And If you're making $60k and you have a family of 3, you're payments are going to be about $250 per month.
Obviously the cost of college has gone up a good bit. Mainly due to an increase in the number and cost of administrators and a decrease in state funding.
However, it hasn't gone up nearly as much as it seems when you realize that most people aren't paying the sticker price after you factor in federal grants, state scholarships, and university scholarships.
>And we went to Stanford
Right now if you go to Stanford and your parents make less than $65k a year, you get a waiver for tuition and room and board. They also waive tuition for students whose parents make less than $125k a year.
Anyway, folks aren't bellyaching about $100 a month. Student loans are costing millions of Americans many times that for 20 years.
True, but that's probably the case regardless of whether you have a $100 a month student loan payment.
> 100$ a month for life is a significant fraction of your disposable income, and it never ends.
It's not for life. If you haven't paid it off in 20 years, the rest is forgiven.
>Anyway, folks aren't bellyaching about $100 a month. Student loans are costing millions of Americans many times that for 20 years.
The income plan is for people on the lower side of the income scale. The standard plan is only 10 years. If you can afford that, you'll be done in 10 years.
If you can't afford that, it's unlikely that you'll pay "many" times $100 a month for 20 years because what you pay is directly proportional to your income. And anyway, $100 a month for someone making $30k a year is basically an equivalent burden to $350 for someone making $60k.
Sure there are exceptions--people who took out enormous sums of money to live on campus at an out of state school. The solution is to got to either go to a state school and don't live on campus, get scholarships, or go to a school with a large enough endowment to waive most of the cost.
Which is absolutely crazy.
If on the other hand you make you get a better paying job making $60k your payment will be about $350 a month, and you'll pay off the average student loan debt (close to $30k) in about 10 years.
But, that one line keeps the door open when I need to look for jobs. I have an ex-coworker with similar skills, experience, etc. And when looking for positions I get about 2x-3x as many callbacks as he does. HR departments seem to throw his resume away, and the only thing we can think is that it must be the lack of degree.
If he got no interviews whatsoever, then it'd be a cause for concern. But it seems to me he's got a more optimal list of possible future employers.
So they choose college degree, for (somewhat) defensible reasons. And they interview those that pass the filter, and choose 'good fits'. Which is what they'd have done if they had used any filter at all.
(edited to add) I should also note that the Coursera lectures themselves were pretty boring -- the innovation is that they provided slides and lecture notes so that I didn't have to sit through the lectures.
The best teachers don't lecture. They facilitate discussion or present a problem and give you feedback while you work through it. You watch some videos outside of class and you come to class to be assessed.
But that's hard work. Lecturing for an hour 3 times a week and giving a bubble-sheet test is easy for the teacher, and easy for the student.
Unless of course you're just looking for a GPA and need the easy grade.
If the school just made you sit there because reasons, well, yes, that's a huge problem. A problem which is being rectified all over the US.
I know as a TA, it can be hard to answer some questions via e-mail, so I'm assuming it would be difficult to do in a web forum as well. I once spent several e-mails trying to explain something to a student and after failing, asked them to come to my office and explained it in five minutes in a way they understood. So, while there might not be the difference for a lecture, it's the things around the course that can make the experience better.
I know Khan Academy has some problems (at least in the past) with some of its material. One example is discussed in,
http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2012/12/khan/
I can verify what he's saying is correct as I used to be involved in teaching the same material.
I first learnt C++ in an in-person corporate training session and it was excellent. I think it all depends.
While there's plenty of edge-cases in that definition (esp. the orders of magnitude over-represented college dropout billionaire), indubitably I think it is worth it for the vast majority of people for these two reasons:
1) The majority of society (aka the people who work in HR) still thinks it's important. Being the guinea pig (or crusader) isn't fun. While people like Peter Thiel, who graduated from Stanford 2x, pontificate about the outdatedness of education, note that before becoming a billionaire he leveraged his education to earn serious money and experience in respected careers that unanimously goto college graduates: finance & law. This gave him the financial foundation & creditability to invest in Max Levchin and ultimately run PayPal.
The same opportunities are not offered in our society to people who graduate from top 10 universities vs drop out from the average American university. The latter will have to prove themselves 5x more to compete for the same opportunities - whether it is jobs, capital, co-founders, or even dating. Theres nearly no statistically likely argument where dropping out leads to better outcomes for the typical HN user over the long run across almost any metric.
2) Wait till you want to change careers or move into senior management to earn more money. Want an MBA so you can double your salary for the next 25 years? Want to become a teacher or a professor? How about a lawyer. Great, now take a bunch of classes with 18 y.o. know-it-alls and earn zero money for 4 extra years of undergrad tacked onto grad school when your opportunity cost is literally $500k (just for undergrad).
I fought the good fight, and the lesson is it's generals and politicians who win wars, not soldiers.
And lectures are dying. Modern teaching methods are trying to phase them out, as the Internet is really good at giving you information. The educator's role is now a facilitator.
"Guide on the side, not sage on the stage", or so it's been said.
And that's how it has to be - that's the only way a college can compete. Because the online lectures you see are just captures of regular lectures. You don't need to go somewhere and pay money to watch someone talk.
The value the professor adds is in assessing your work. And if classtime can be used to do that, or classtime can be used to let you practice, then there's the advantage.