
What Is a Master’s Degree Worth? - robg
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/what-is-a-masters-degree-worth/
======
msluyter
I found this insightful:

 _The prevalence of so many strapped borrowers is why I recommend students
borrow no more for their educations, in total, than they expect to make the
first year out of school.

This rule of thumb won’t work for everyone — heaven knows, you may be the rare
literature M.A. who writes a best-selling novel and pays off her debt with one
check — but it’s a good starting point for anyone considering strapping
herself to more education bills._

Also, I should note that if your undergrad degree was in a non-technical
field, a technical master's will be quite worth the price. My undergrad was in
music, and without my master's in CS I think I would have had a difficult time
entering the field. Sure, I hear it's possible to become a programmer without
any formal training, but the degree opened doors that allowed me to start in a
much higher position.

~~~
hack_edu
Could you elaborate a bit more about the the CS program and how it prepared
you for industry? What distinguished you from other BA holders?

~~~
crs
I think the original poster was saying that he didn't have a B.S. in a
technical field. So getting the Masters gave him the credentials he needed to
go after jobs he was intrested in. I do not believe he was saying that he had
a B.S. in Computer Science and needed a M.S. in Computer Science to compete.

I think its a good example of one of the points made in the linked articles.
That if you have an undergrad degree that's not really what your interested in
a Masters lets you correct that.

~~~
msluyter
Yes, that's correct. Not only was my undergrad degree in music, I had
virtually no computer/technology experience of any kind (this was back in the
80's and I was still using typewriters to type up papers.) So it would have
been pretty difficult for me to enter the profession directly.

As an aside, my master's program probably wasn't the best overall preparation
for a career as a software developer, actually. It was highly
theoretical/mathy, and I think undergrad CS students probably got more and
more relevant programming experience. It was mostly about having the
credentials, I think.

~~~
ambulatorybird
Was it difficult getting admitted to a master's program in CS without a
technical bachelor's degree? My impression is that technical grad schools only
want applicants with top-notch technical skills.

~~~
msluyter
Well, don't think the CS program was that highly ranked, but I did have to
take a lot of undergrad deficiencies (including about 15hrs math). IIRC, there
were leveling classes (like grad level intro to CS classes) that you could
take, but they didn't have a very good reputation and I opted to take a core
of undergrad classes with better instructors instead.

Mostly it just took time and persistence to get through the deficiencies. My
case was probably extreme because my undergrad music program required no
math/science whatsoever, so i had a lot to make up for.

------
gaius
The liberal education establishment has long maintained the fiction that "all
degrees are equal". But no-one should be under any illusion that undergrad is
a choice between professional/vocational training in knowledge work or a
4-year vacation (in the sense of spending time pursing a hobby).

~~~
bmcleod
I don't think either of those options can be faulted and I don't think the
people who choose either of them are the ones with problems.

It's the kids who go to Uni because it's what you do after high school that
are wondering what has happened to them.

There's also a group of people who went in intending to become academics and
have found that academia is now madly cutting costs, but that's a different
and more complex story.

~~~
jerf
"I don't think either of those options can be faulted and I don't think the
people who choose either of them are the ones with problems."

I do. I'm perfectly willing to fault people for going to University, spending
tens of thousands of dollars, and walking out with a degree in some obscure
postmodern discipline or something. No matter how you may _feel_ about such a
degree, the _objective_ value is quite low.

"Shouldn't people follow their bliss?" Well, first of all, no I actually don't
entirely believe that, but secondly and _much_ more importantly, have you
_looked_ at a real University's course list? You seriously had to pick "French
Literature in the 19th century" as your specialization when there are 30 types
of engineering, 50 types of science, and a couple hundred other programs with
some sort of actual use?

When I went to university, I had two basic interests I could have specialized
in: Music composition, and computer programming. _That's_ a no-brainer! In the
course of my education, I subsequently discovered that I could have tolerated
psychology, mathematics, electrical engineering (though I do prefer
programming), and there's a couple of other things on a lower tier below
those. Note how those are entire disciplines, each with interesting
specialties of their own.

Did I fail to follow my bliss? No, I still minored in music, in fact. But I
have no regrets about spending my money to get real skills.

The only people who share the fault with the students are the numerous people
who told them to ignore practicality, at a time in the student's life when
they still had no actual experience with which to understand the full
implications of that and resist. Some might still have chosen to pursue their
bliss, and I have no problem with that, _as long as it is done with eyes
open_.

~~~
gaius
Indeed. Even at 17 contemplating university, it was _obvious_ that some
disciplines were massively more employable than others. But there was - is - a
myth that employers don't care what degree you have, so long as you have one,
and that no matter what the subject is it's just a vehicle for "learning to
learn". And that is arrant nonsense!

------
crs
At Boeing (where i work) a Masters Degree in an Engineering Field (cs for me)
counts as about 2 years experience when promotions are considered. If you get
your degree (Boeing will pay for everything) while you are employed here, they
also give you a 100 shares of Boeing Stock.

So for some like me, getting an advanced degree is free, and only offers
upside. So after reading the articles, I could sum it up as advanced technical
degrees can help, advanced liberal arts degrees not so much. Oh and some
schools have bills and need more students paying tuition to pay them. There
are no surprises here.

------
jlees
As an entirely international aside I got paid to do my Master's degree (EPSRC
funding in the UK) rather than incur more debt. With a theoretical computer
science BA, my MPhil allowed me to specialise and become more employable
within my field, as well as having an easy transition into a related PhD - it
was a no-brainer, really.

~~~
theblackbox
May I ask for the specifics of your course/field? I wanted to apply for EPSRC
funding for a Masters/PhD at Warwick complexity complex but have been somewhat
sidetracked by other opportunities. Would like to hear more about other
peoples experience down similar roads so I can keep the idea on the back
burner and sort out my long term plans.

~~~
jlees
MPhil in Computer Speech & Language Processing at Cambridge.

------
ori_b
A grad degree is a chance to be paid to work on a project of your choice,
without as strong a demand to make it mass-marketable. It's a chance to work
on a project where novelty and interestingness are the lead factors in the
viability, and not how easy it is to sell it to end-users.

How valuable is that? Well, that depends on you.

------
jadence
[note: off topic but it's still somewhat relevant to this crowd as it's an
example of how not to implement print view]

That's a rather annoying "print view."
[http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/what-
is-a-...](http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/what-is-a-masters-
degree-worth/?pagemode=print)

You gotta go through the article and click on all the "Read more…" links to
get the full text before printing and it still has the "Resources" links (as
if I can click on them after I've printed out the article, which I'm
presumably going to do if I'm looking at the article in print mode).

I expect more from the newspaper that gives such nifty charts, various APIs,
etc.

------
pj
The question is: Who is the customer? You could say the customer is the
student who pays the university for the education. Or you could say the
customer is the employer who hires the graduate.

There has been the impression in the past that getting a degree meant getting
a job, but this is not the case. Employers, who have more at stake when hiring
don't have to wait 4 years to learn whether or not their "purchase" was a good
one. They are learning that the value of a college degree is not much when
used as a predictor of job success. More valid predictors are work experience,
internships, side projects, and a work ethic. None of which are gained in
college. A lot of students think college is enough, but it isn't.

This is where the problem starts over the confusion about the customer.
Colleges want students to be enrolled for 4 years. If college is hard and
students don't make the A's they think they deserve simply for attending
class, then the student leaves the university for one where an A is easier.
The student consumer is buying a product and their product is a good GPA. A
low GPA won't get them a job and that's what they are after.

This is a problem with money really. It's a philosophical life issue. Is your
goal to receive value _from_ the rest of the world, or to create value _for_
the rest of the world. No one wants to work anymore. We've gotten lazy and
complacent. The job has become avoiding work, when all too often, doing the
work is easier than avoiding it.

Life has become too easy for too many. The rest of the world is eating
America's lunch. Even our president thinks it's fine to "bailout" businesses
who don't want to put the effort into producing products the world wants to
buy. They are losing out to better innovation, better business models, and
harder work from their competitors around the world.

For too long, education has been selling hope for a better life, a better job,
a higher income. So students go into debt. Debt has allowed universities to
continue charging more and more and more over time with deferred payment plans
that yield little consequence to the full time student who doesn't yet
understand the concept of debt or even _money_.

And let's not forget the parents who spend more time at work than at home
teaching their children good values, a work ethic, how to care for themselves,
the value of money.

America is really in a sad state of affairs. A depression is definitely on the
way. Life has been too easy for too long. It's amazing as I think about it
right now, I can _feel_ it. I can feel the exhuberance evaporating. I can feel
the realization setting in that our hopes and dreams for an easy future are
being dashed. Only a few people really _get_ it right now. There is still an
air of optimism floating around. People are thinking, "No... no really, we can
keep going like this... we can. If only we try."

But we can't. We can't keep going like this and be worth anything. What we are
doing isn't worth anything. Who wants to pay for it? What is the value? What's
the value of your college degree? What's the value of your employment? What's
the value of your iPod and your 6 room house in the suburbs and your SUV and
your $20,000 in credit card debt and $125,000 in student loans.

Too many people are falling for the clever sales and marketing strategy of the
universities, the car companies, the banks, the real estate agents. The
irrational are the prey. The predators are eating your money and you are left
empty -- today _and_ tomorrow.

The easy path is the path to destruction. You have to _work_. You have to
_think_. You have to analyze and predict and learn _math_.

This stuff is hard folks. It's hard to do things faster, or cheaper, or better
than everyone else. Mediocrity isn't valuable. You have to be the cream of the
crop. You have to work and practice and strive for perfection _every day_.

No one said life was going to be easy. It's even harder now that the
competition has become _everyone_ in the world.

~~~
gizmo
Well, if we're ranting, I might as well add my gripes:

One of the things people need to realize is that in order to earn $80.000 a
year, you have to create say $130.000 for the company to break even on you. It
isn't easy to create this kind of value every year. If you're in the producing
layer of a company (software engineer / graphic designer) you have to create
enough value to also pay for all the salaries of your managers, testers,
secretaries and all other non-producing employees.

People focus way too much on what their want to earn, not on how to create
value. The reasoning often goes like this "I have to do X, which is much
harder than Y, and people who do Y earn $Y, so I should earn more than that!".
Almost everybody has this weird concept of a "fair" salary, that has no
bearing on reality.

~~~
DannoHung
Except... if X is much harder than Y, and people who do Y earn $Y dollars, but
people who do X will earn less than Y dollars, who in their right mind is
going to go and do X?

If the effort/reward/value equation doesn't balance, the role will go unfilled
until it does.

~~~
jerf
But that's the way it's supposed to work. If nobody is willing to pay more
than $Y for X that is harder than Y, then you _shouldn't_ go into it. That's
not a bug, it's a feature.

You're looking at an instantaneous snapshot of a dynamic system. If it's a
problem that nobody will do X, then people will pay more for it once the
feedback propagates through. If it never does, then it wasn't worth it and you
shouldn't specialize in it.

~~~
pj
jerf, you aren't looking at it from two perspectives. Both employers and
employees have options. If an employee could do teaching or job x, and
teaching pays $30k and job x pays $60k, which should the employee take? If
teachers earned more, then the pool of talent gets larger.

You say, _If it's a problem that nobody will do X_ , when really the issue is,
"Nobody will do X for $X, but lots will do X for $Y."

In something as complex as a society, society has to make investments it its
future. In our society, we have become so short focused on quarterly reports,
that we have forgotten the value of education. The payoff of education to a
society takes years, decades, generations... this is beyond simple
supply/demand microeconomics.

~~~
jerf
You've attached extra semantics to X and Y that were not in the original post.
I do not apologize for failing to _guess_ what you would read those variables
as.

I acknowledge the value of government in tweaking the market values of some
things; I'm only a little-l libertarian. However, as an engineer, I observe
that in order to do that successfully, you have to start with a correct
understanding of how the market works, _dynamically_ , not just statically.
Getting emotional about valuations the market gives is not a good start.

------
compay
Sometimes, less than nothing. I was in the University of Connecticut's
graduate linguistics program for a year before deciding it wasn't for me and
dropping out. I could have stuck around for one more year and left with a
master's, but in linguistics it's generally viewed as a "consolation prize"
for students who weren't good enough to complete the PhD. For that reason I
didn't even bother.

------
metachris
bottom line: some degrees pay off more than others.

as recent census data shows, advanced degrees in business or engineering may
earn up to 15% more, in contrast to degrees in arts or anthropology which face
no substantial increase

------
eleitl
The difference between a job, or no job.

~~~
andyking
I know plenty of people with no degree who are working - some in quite highly-
paid and fulfilling work. They've got there through being in the right place
at the right time, internships, voluntary work and being good at what they do.

I also know a number of very talented people who've graduated university with
BA and MA degrees this year - most of whom are currently scrambling over one
another grasping desperately at what meagre scraps of low-paid part-time work
exist in the radio industry at the moment. You can't put it in such simplistic
terms. (I went out with a girl who'd been to Oxford a couple of years ago. She
was jobless and living in a council flat.)

