
Help, My Degree Is Underwater - peter123
http://tbm.thebigmoney.com/articles/diploma-mill/2009/04/13/help-my-degree-underwater-0?page=full
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jballanc
As one of the (soon to graduate) 20-something Ph.D.'s referenced in the
article, I feel no sympathy for any whining. The only problem people like me
face is false expectations. We were all promised professorships, but it was
mostly a lie.

My attitude: No tenure track positions available? Crappy pay for indefinite
post-doc appointments? Screw it! I'm going into the software industry...

No, I don't worry about the advanced degree holders. What I worry about is the
kid graduating high school and being fed false expectations. Too many people
don't understand how correlation works. i.e. "Hey! People with college degrees
make more money, so if we get every American high school student to go to
college and get a degree, they'll all make more money!!!"

...uh, no.

~~~
timr
Bite your tongue. I'm no defender of graduate education, but I think it's a
tad on the mean-spirited side to refer to what these people are doing as
"whining".

A lot of smart, hard-working people have just been screwed by circumstances
that are beyond their control. Not everyone with a graduate degree knows how
to code. Moreover, just because someone doesn't know how to code doesn't mean
that they studied basket-weaving, and are therefore useless. If you worked
your butt off getting a PhD in the sciences, only to graduate this year --
well, that's just plain bad luck.

Finally, trust me: if this downturn goes on long enough, even the programmers
will feel the pain. So if I were you, I'd start hunting for a big hunk of
wood, and start knocking as hard as you can.

~~~
jballanc
First thing I would say is that you don't have to code to get a job. The
reason I classify what these individuals are doing as "whining" is because
there's not a lack of opportunities, just a lack of the opportunities they
expected to have.

Let's take, for example, the English Literature Ph.D. working at a Starbucks
in NYC (I know a few...). Why are they there? Because they want to be in NYC.
They want to be near the "action", by which I mean the publishing houses and
big universities. Great! That's one choice.

Another choice would be to travel out to the heartland of America which is in
dire need of educated individuals. Get a teaching position and set-up writing
workshops, for the locals to improve their resumes even. Take up an interest
in back-woods folk lore. --or-- What about other countries? I hear that the
Czech republic is in need of professors. Poland, too!

You see, the problem is that college coddles people (or at least, it did me),
and graduate school coddles people. It's not that these individuals can't go
out, be creative, try something daring, and maybe fall flat on their faces a
couple of times. No, instead, working an 8 hour shift to go home, change, hang
out at the bars the "writers" hang out at, and desperately try to sell that
novel to yet another publishing house is, let's face it, comfortable. Sure,
there's a chance at success, and some people willingly make this choice.

The bottom line is: if the years upon years of education you've received can't
somehow be turned into good fortune in the absence of an obvious path forward,
then what good were they in the first place?!?

~~~
timr
You can't be serious. You're talking to someone who left academic science to
go into software, yet even I don't blithely assume that more than a handful of
my colleagues could have done the same thing, even in a good market.
Furthermore, you've _totally ignored_ the fact that I wasn't talking about
PhDs in English literature (I know quite a few un- or under-employed engineers
and scientists, who are neither unskilled, nor lazy) so that you could draw a
caricature of the slacker intellectual.

I suppose that you could take the attitude that everyone who isn't picking up
the proverbial shovel right now is just "whining", but I think you're missing
the point: if we're in a position where our most educated and talented people
are digging ditches and serving coffee, then _everyone else_ is well and truly
screwed. It isn't "whining" to observe that it's probably not in our best
interest as a society to have lawyers and scientists stocking shelves and
slinging espresso to make ends meet.

~~~
jballanc
With all due respect, I think _you're_ missing the point. I did not mean to
imply that the individuals you were referring to were of the "slacker
intellectual" variety, I merely used the English Lit major example as a
reference to the original article. (Personally, I wouldn't classify those
people I know as slackers to begin with. Comfortable != Slacker)

The point is, if the education you received doesn't improve your ability to
provide for yourself, then something is either wrong with the education you
received or the approach you're taking to the job market. Let's take the first
of those possibilities.

I know individuals who are working on very focused topics; things like "The
anharmonic instabilities of zwitterionic heterocycles and their effect on
fragmentation patterns" (I just made that up, so don't bother Googling it).
For these individuals, if they can't secure a post-doc studying Mass Spec, or
an industry position in a Mass Spec lab, then they're screwed! But really, is
that the job market's fault?If your education is not sufficiently broad, then
your education is broken.

What about the second option? What if you get out of school and there are no
opportunities? Well, who was supposed to provide those opportunities? The
Government? Yeah well, guess what...the government doesn't care so much about
science and research any more. Really, though, whose fault is that?

I have the same issue with biologists who moan and groan, "whine" even, about
the Intelligent Design movement. They always want to view the poor
understanding of evolution by the general public as being the fault of the
general public, rather than a failure of scientists to adequately explain
themselves and their work. If you can't get a job doing hard science, why not
look for work as a science writer? Why not start up your own science outreach
program? I'm sure there must be a market for "traveling science shows" (I used
to be part of one in high school).

The only way such opportunities wouldn't exist is if the population is just so
apathetic to knowledge and learning that they can't even be bother to listen
when you break things down for them. If that's the case, go somewhere else!
Highly educated Americans are going to have to start thinking of overseas as a
viable job market. What America has is a glut of educated individuals, and
small demand for them. Trust me, there are plenty of places in the world where
those positions are reversed. Why not "Scientists without borders"? There's
already Engineers without borders...

~~~
timr
_"The point is, if the education you received doesn't improve your ability to
provide for yourself, then something is either wrong with the education you
received or the approach you're taking to the job market."_

False dichotomy. There are plenty of other options, including (but not limited
to) industry trends, bad/slow job markets and people who make weird
stereotypes about the work ethic of graduate students.

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3pt14159
To the liberal arts majors/masters/Ph.D.s don't say nobody told you it would
be like this. My engineering/math/science friends would tell them the truth
when asked and they wouldn't hear it. All they needed was +1 level (major to
master, master to doctor) and THEN they would get that amazing job that would
pay them for knowing the first year red dye paint was imported to Scandinavia.

No. That isn't how the world works. You get paid for knowing useful things,
like the coefficient of friction of various materials, the modulus of
elasticity of building members, the viscosity of fluids, how circuits work,
how to program. Useful things.

~~~
lethain
The problem with an engineering student telling a liberal arts student that
their degree isn't valuable, is that the engineering student's opinion is very
rarely grounded in experience. Although one group happens to have the "right"
opinion, that's all it is until reality vindicates it.

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sketerpot
Does a fact need to be grounded in personal experience? I know that 10 gigabit
ethernet exists, but I have never actually experienced it. Likewise, I know
that a degree in history increases someone's expected earnings much less than
a degree in nuclear engineering. Even though I have no personal experience in
those areas.

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BigZaphod
This has already been here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=556625>

~~~
jacobscott
also, from the same poster, to the actual source (slate). I flagged this one.

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furburger
this is a good. college tuition costs need to not just drop, but crash. they
won't until people stop propagating the idea that they are required.

