

America's Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor's Degree - pchivers
http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=wWwv6kBkcTbYktwbjrJkskjtdhknjqvf

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geebee
This article mainly seems to focus on the outcome for the bottom tier of high
school students going to college. Top tier students may do much better.

A top student who goes to a top law, med, or business school is probably
getting a trememdous ROI on education.

Interestingly, neither category describes the startup crowd. Hackers
represents an unusual group - people who are able to study the hardest
subjects in college and grad school, but who choose to work in such an
unregulated and loose culture that nobody strictly needs a degree at all.

Law or Medicine require a grad degree - and as a result, the grad degree is
very valuable (it's a gateway into the cartel that controls these services).
Nursing also requires a degree.

Programming doesn't require a degree, but can't be done in any innovative way
by someone who isn't smart enough to get a math/science/or engineering degree.
It leads to an interesting kind of distain for formal education in a group
that often has impressive formal credentials.

~~~
donw
I think the disdain for academia comes from having to participate in the
cesspool which 'liberal arts' have become. The words 'liberal arts' _used_ to
describe someone who was skilled in both the sciences and the humanities; now
it just identifies people who hated real work so much that they opted for the
degree program that had 'Finger Painting' listed as an upper-division course.

Ok, maybe I'm being a bit hard on the Liberal Arts people, but when you
busting your tail to finish classes that are actually hard, watching people
coast through in easy degree programs can be very, very demoralizing; in fact,
I was quite bitter towards academia for a few years because of it.

This almost caused me to give up on wanting to get a graduate degree, even
though I love the subject, because I never wanted to become one of 'those'
people, and the only thing that kept me going is that grad school is a really,
really good time to try and start a company.

~~~
nostrademons
I went to a liberal arts college. "Liberal arts" still describes someone
skilled in both sciences and humanites...sort of. What tends to happen is that
the folks who major in hard sciences at liberal arts colleges become those
people, while those who major in the liberal arts become basically
unemployable. My fellow math/physics/CS majors (there were only about 10 of us
per department per year, so we all sorta combined socially...) used to comment
ironically that 50% of Amherst students never take _any_ math or hard science
course, yet it is impossible for a science major to avoid taking any
humanities or social science courses.

Two things you need to remember about this:

1.) The folks who major in English and take only easy courses will get their
comeuppance in the job market, which now basically _requires_ quantitative
skills.

2.) Many of those folks go to liberal arts colleges because they have a
particular career track they _know_ they want to do, and they're fully willing
to make the financial sacrifices for that. For example, one of my friends
wanted to be a professor of English, specializing in poetry, from the day he
got to college. Another wanted to be a librarian. They're willing to live like
grad students until they're in their 40s to do so, and to take the financial
hit afterwards that comes with their chosen professions. I can respect that.

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dougp
This article boggles my mind. If you don't think the degree is worth the money
then don't go to college. The worst thing that can happen is schools start
teaching students to pass some government mandated generic career readiness
test.

~~~
yummyfajitas
I think the point is that thanks to deceptive marketing, most people don't
properly evaluate whether it is worthwhile to go.

As for a "generic career readiness test", that's probably pointless. On the
other hand, some sort of standardized testing would be useful.

Take a student who got a B in calculus at Rutgers, and a similar student who
got a B in calculus at NYU. Are they equally skilled at calculus (Hint:
definitely not)? Given a standardized calculus test we could tell the
difference.

~~~
silencio
There already are exams if you want to go on (e.g. that GRE link). But having
all graduates take it regardless is quite useless, especially as a method to
determine how "good" one program/class/graduate is to another.

We've already had to deal with standardized testing BS thanks to NCLB before
college, and look at the mess now. Teachers only teach to the exam and that is
really not a good thing.

~~~
yummyfajitas
I'm aware of the GRE math test (I took it many years ago). And if everyone
took it and appropriate breakdowns were provided (e.g. "Students with SAT
between 1300 and 1400 did scored 6 on the national"), that would be a good
thing (at least to evaluate math majors). You look for your interval, and find
a college that will do well by people like you.

Also, teaching to the test is fine _if the test is good_. If the test
accurately measures knowledge of the subject (1), then teaching to the test
means teaching the material. It's very rare for one of my students to do well
on a test without knowing the material.

Regarding NCLB, the current mess is the same as the old mess. NCLB just gave
teachers someone else to blame.

(1) Most calculus/physics/chemistry tests do a decent job of this for skill
levels not too high. Most tests make good students indistinguishable from
great ones, but that can be remedied by putting harder questions on. If
someone gets a perfect score, the test is too easy.

~~~
wanorris
> Also, teaching to the test is fine if the test is good. If the test
> accurately measures knowledge of the subject (1), then teaching to the test
> means teaching the material. It's very rare for one of my students to do
> well on a test without knowing the material.

Sure, but do you really want the federal government to decide the appropriate
curriculum across all colleges? "Sorry, we're dropping topology because it's
not on the federal recommended list, and we're focusing on test readiness."
Um, I'll pass on that.

~~~
yummyfajitas
The government wouldn't be deciding the appropriate curriculum. They would be
creating a measuring stick to compare curricula. If, as you suggest, advanced
courses were not on it, then it would simply be useless at the top: 80'th and
99'th percentile students would have the same score.

As for colleges cutting advanced classes, I just can't see it happening (1).
If they can find students willing to take it, someone will teach topology
(it's better than doing Calc 2 again).

Colleges don't suffer from the same institutional failings as public schools
(they have their own unique institutional failings).

(1) Note: I have a few years of experience teaching in college, and a few more
working in college math depts.

~~~
wanorris
Your view of how this works wouldn't be all bad.

However, the original article was talking about standardized testing modeled
after the test used in primary and secondary schools. This includes the
government setting minimal, uniform standards, and has often led to cutting
"advanced" or "peripheral" material to concentrate on teaching "fundamentals"
(i.e. the stuff that bores the smart kids to tears). Schools that don't pull
resources from other areas to concentrate on teaching to the test may see
their funding cut, because their students don't do well enough on the tests.

When you talk about the positives of having standard tests, be careful what
you wish for, because what shows up may not be what you had in mind.

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donw
Having read the article, I think the problem isn't that having a college
degree is overrated, just that some people aren't cut out for school, and that
this is okay, because there are plenty of good jobs that don't (or shouldn't)
require a college education.

What boggles my mind is the guy in the article who spent eight years and over
a hundred grand, all to end up forty-five units (three semesters) short of a
degree? I can understand taking eight years -- that's how long it took me to
finish up both of my degrees, because I worked, so that I could finish school
with no debt.

Mr. Sob Story wasn't going to college. He partied for eight years, washed out,
and now wishes he had made better use of his time. Rather than admitting this
and learning from it, he makes the university system the scapegoat for his own
lack of self-discipline.

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subwindow
It was an easy choice for me. I got _paid_ to go to college. In Georgia, the
HOPE scholarship paid for 100% of my tuition and fees, and the Pell grant paid
for a decent portion of my living costs.

That said, education is one of the most valuable things in the world. If
you're thinking of it as a risk/reward based on how much you pay versus how
much you could earn, you're doing it wrong.

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hobbs
In IT, I've found that the degree only has any influence on your first job.
After that, future employers only care about your work history - no one cares
anymore about your degree, your GPA, or the school. So if instead of going to
college, you can find an employer who's willing to hire a high school grad,
you may be 4 years (and many $$$) ahead of the game.

Does anyone know if this is the case in other industries? Does the degree make
a difference to a prospective accounting clerk if she already has 5 years of
work experience?

~~~
dnaquin
It's amazing what doors having attended a good university can open. I'm on my
second job after graduation, and I could obviously tell that the university I
attended had a much larger impact on my hiring than the last years' worth of
work experience.

~~~
aantix
Have you been applying to large financial institutions because they seem to be
the only ones who care anymore these days.

10 or 15 years into your career no one is going to care if you went to
Harvard, MIT, Carnegie Mellon or any other school.

You reach a point where the general studies that you took are just assumed and
people will begin to want to know the particular niche skills that you have
experience with (e.g., you've worked developing an automated trading system or
you've worked developing some sort of image processing app).

If I'm interviewing an engineer of 10 years and he mentions more than once
where he went to school I am going to hammer him with technical questions. "OK
Mr. MIT, let's see if that education really paid off."

~~~
dnaquin
I work at a small software development shop of about fifteen employees.

Though, I agree in 10 to 15 years, I'd be concerned if anyone even asked me
what school I went to. I'd start to think it's not a place I want to be
working.

