
The Master’s as the New Bachelor’s (2011) - Futurebot
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/education/edlife/edl-24masters-t.html
======
sixtypoundhound
Ugh. Stop. Just stop.

That young man doesn't need a master's degree, he needs a lesson on how to
find a job. Taking people with a proven inability to make real money and
adding another 100k of debt on their backs for an equally bogus masters degree
is completely irresponsible.

Speaking as a hiring manager (for jobs that pay more than $50k/year), most of
the real skills that get people hired have aren't part of a degree.

\- Coding? Most of my guys got their knowledge on the job. I did as well...
not saying a CS degree doesn't help, but for many basic IT jobs, you don't
need it....

\- Sales / client mgmt? Learn by doing

\- Project management? Go run projects

\- Soft skills? Go work with people for a while, under the eye of someone
knowledgeable. Get coached. Coach others.

\- Writing? Go write something that gets edited by a pro and published.
Feedback is good.

\- Product knowledge or big blocks of local history? Here's a book, go read
it.

Sure, go set the standard of requiring a master's degree to get hired. Know
what? The smart folks network their way up.

Proof.

My #3 guy has an MBA

My #2 has a high school degree

I'm just a BA...

Explain this degree thing again?

~~~
dinkumthinkum
Noooooo that's not right. Most programmers do not "just learn on the job,"
that's hard to take seriously. There might be "that one guy" that did I guess,
I don't know, but that's so far from reality.

All programmers do not need masters degrees and there are many good
programmers that do not have a BS/BA, but most of those, that are not just
whipping out JS, are extreme autodidacts and represent a small part of the
population.

Also an MS in CS is not going to put you 100K in debt, in most cases you will
have a tuition waiver and a small stipend in the US (TAship).

I think for many an MS in CS would be beneficial but sure it's not necessary
.... with more and more JS "monkey" type jobs, it may become an expectation
for non Anders Hejlsberg autodidacts that want to make > 100K (though yes this
depends on cost of living, but I'm just comparing to your number).

~~~
Etheryte
You can have a degree, but any considerable experience and knowledge still
comes from actually doing something.

------
tzs
Futurama has noted the rising academic bar. From Season 1, Episode 11, "Mars
University":

Fry: Good old Coney Island College! Go, Whitefish!

Leela: Don't take this the wrong way, Fry, but you don't seem like the
educated type.

Fry: Oh, yeah? [He takes a piece of paper out of his pocket with "Notice of
Failure to Graduate" written on it. The CICC logo is a Ferris wheel.] Read it
and weep. I'm a certified college dropout.

Leela: Please! Everyone knows 20th century colleges were basically expensive
daycare centres.

Farnsworth: That's true. By current academic standards, you're merely a high
school dropout.

Fry: What? That's not fair. I deserve the same respect any other college
dropout gets. By God, I'm gonna enroll here at Mars University and drop out
all over again!

Leela: You won't last two weeks.

Fry: Aww, thanks for believing in me.

[http://theinfosphere.org/Transcript:Mars_University](http://theinfosphere.org/Transcript:Mars_University)

~~~
RUG3Y
I remember that episode well! Such a funny show.

~~~
mortenjorck
If you will indulge a classic HN tangential thought, this has me suddenly
wondering about the sociological phenomenon of mentally reading things in a
voice you associate with the text. There's something about the way Futurama is
written and produced that seems to make it a particularly potent example
(you've probably seen the Farnsworth "now you're reading this in my voice"
meme), and this transrcipt excerpt works particularly well. I wonder why that
is?

~~~
yaw
Character design done well? The visual design was done in a way to make these
characters very distinctive & memorable, possibly the same applies to the
auditory aspects?

Matt Groening: The secret of designing cartoon characters — and I’m giving
away this secret now to all of you out there — is: you make a character that
you can tell who it is in silhouette. I learned this from watching Mickey
Mouse as a kid. You can tell Mickey Mouse from a mile away…those two big ears.
Same thing with Popeye, same thing with Batman. And so, if you look at the
Simpsons, they’re all identifiable in silhouette. Bart with the picket fence
hair, Marge with the beehive, and Homer with the two little hairs, and all the
rest. So…I think about hair quite a lot.

Source: [http://austinkleon.com/2007/08/28/silhouettes-and-
profiles/](http://austinkleon.com/2007/08/28/silhouettes-and-profiles/)

------
sthatipamala
Interesting that software engineering in the Bay Area is the other way around.
There are such high salaries being given to bachelor's holders that it is hard
to justify the opportunity cost to go to a Master's/PhD.

~~~
dikdik
It's a result of supply and demand. In other industries there is too much
supply, people pile on the degrees (and go deeper into debt) to be more
competitive. Employers then raise the bar for hiring and people still end up
with crappy low-paying jobs.

In software, more supply = hiring people who can just get the job done and not
worrying so much about credentials.

~~~
loco5niner
did you mean this? "In software, _less_ supply..."

~~~
dikdik
yes. :/

------
jpau
This struck a little too close to home. I'm quite educated, but formally
"only" to a bachelor degree from a not-very-prestigious (but good!)
university.

This lack of signal is causing me problems - not only in career progression,
but with my actual job! Stakeholders will occasionally look me up online and
express their concern with superiors that I'm not from a Go8 university
(Australian Ivy League equivalent) and that my formal education is
underwhelming.

It's gotten to the point where my employer is considering (and is likely to)
enrolling me in the nearest Go8 and giving paid time off from work to attend
part time. They'll also pay for the degree.

And the weirdest part yet - the subjects closely correspond to my
undergraduate subjects. This isn't an exercise in improving myself - this is
solely to act as a signal.

Under this arrangement, I'm clearly the one that benefits. It costs me little
in time, and no money. But the whole thing makes no sense. Surely we can
create a better signal.

~~~
gluggymug
Have you just started working or something?

As a grad of a Go8 uni and someone who has worked a couple of decades, I
wouldn't worry about this signal stuff. If you want to improve yourself you
can do study but it doesn't mean as much to employment as you think.

Maybe in a government job you have a lot of BS from higher up idiots but not
in private industry. A year of relevant full time work is like double the
value of a year of study when we are evaluating job applicants IMO.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Eh. I got my undergrad at a second-tier university and my MSc at a top-tier
one. There's definitely been a perceptible difference in how people treat me.

~~~
Futurebot
Definitely an underappreciated part of having a prestigious degree(s). I've
written about it elsewhere with regards to having no degree vs having one, but
it applies to MS vs BS and standard state school vs top-tier just as well.

It's another form of social proof, and it affects not just whether or not you
get hired, but how people view you, speak to you, and whether / how much they
listen to or consider your opinion. Of course, many people don't give degrees
a second thought, but for every one of those, there are plenty who do.

------
1971genocide
Richard Hamming ( the person who came up with hamming distance ) has an
interesting insight - based on the rate of sub-fields being created in
mathematics - he concluded that by the year 2000 there would be 1000 different
sub-fields for every mathematical subfield !

Do the people in power expect everyone to know everything ?

Knowledge is important - but society will stop working if everyone spends
their lifetimes studying.

I read it in hacker news a while ago - the amount of _new_ information we are
introduced daily in 2015 was equivalent to what humans received in their
lifetimes - for most of human history.

We need better methods to organize information - ( this is why google has its
insane valuation - and no its not a bubble )

It should not take me 20 years to understand mathematics at the level of
newton - how am I supposed to understand another 400 years of maths before I
am homeless ?

Its a difficult question to answer but I think its a question my generation
has to find an answer - and fast.

~~~
japaw
However the tools are getting better also. You now "stand on the shoulders of
giants". With modern computer based math tools you can, for some problems, be
lot more productive then working out everything on paper.

You can also just search the internet many types of information and methods
instead of having parallel invent it. Making you more effective.

------
japaw
The world is getting more complex. Here where I live we have a system with a
basic 8-10 years of education from years ~6-16, then apprenticeship school or
university.

My grandfather had a good standard of income with only apprenticeship (3
years). My father needed apprenticeship + trade school (3 + 2 years) and my
generation will probably need a master degree to have the same income level (3
year of preparation + 5 year at the university).

I can only wonder how long my grandchildrens education will be.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I'm always a bit skeptical of these claims, given that as far as I can tell,
at least three to four years of the K-12 "education" are completely wasted on
repeating old material. I don't even think it's a matter of intelligence: we
can do a bunch more with the _non_ -gifted children than we even _attempt_.

Hell, I've heard of professional adults not knowing how to use a linear
function to estimate basic financial costs from a baseline and a per-unit
cost.

The intellectual standards we expect from people are appallingly low compared
to what they're actually capable of.

~~~
loco5niner
"how to use a linear function to estimate basic financial costs from a
baseline and a per-unit cost"

If you told me what those words meant, I could probably figure it out ;-)

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Ok! This should be easy.

"Linear function": f(x) = mx+b, or y=mx+b. You know, from 8th-grade algebra.

"Baseline and per-unit cost". So your "baseline" cost is how much you have to
pay _before_ you get the first unit of your item. Like, if your buying, say,
chocolates, the "baseline" is the cost of the _box_ , with no chocolates in
it, or of shipping-and-handling. Then the per-unit costs is just how much you
pay for _each_ chocolate.

We then map those onto the math:

"Baseline" \-- that's the y-intercept, or "b".

"Per-unit cost" \-- that's the multiplier for the number of units, or "m".

And voila, we've got y=mx+b: a simple formula for how much your Christmas
chocolates are going to cost you.

~~~
loco5niner
Yup, way easier than expected. Except now they are New Years chocolates. ;-)
Thanks for the reply!

