No it isn't? It is necessary for some high paying careers, like working in medicine. But, I am certainly a software developer, for a very large company, pretty happy with my paycheck, and I have no degree. Nobody even ever asked me about it.
Whether or not it helps is another story, I am not claiming a degree is literally useless. I am however a little rubbed the wrong way by claims that you need a degree to ever have a job that pays good, that seems false.
Not surprising. If Target has that power in the market to demand that, why not? They are doing $60M/year in sales per store, plus employing 50+ in each store, so it makes sense they want the highest skilled workers to manage so much responsibility. Not saying you learn the necessary skills to do this job in undergrad though.
I know a SWE at Google who is <20 and does not have a degree. So it certainly is possible, and it implies that you don't need 10+ years of experience to break into FAANG without a bachelor's.
Totally agree, nothing in my comment suggested otherwise
I feel like you're pulling the HN staple "anti anecdata" card when my point wasn't "you're wrong because I exist" & was instead "you're wrong because your metric says people who skip post secondary, collect a meagre salary initially, & eventually end up at FAANG by age 30 should've paid thousands of dollars to attend post secondary until their mid twenties to end up there instead."
At the best paying FAANG-type firms, the vast majority of developers have a degree. The employees there that don't have a degree typically had to spend a large part of their career working at crappier shops building their resume before becoming employable at a more desirable company, whereas the college graduates could get the cushy jobs right out of school.
Not having a degree in CS certainly limits how far up the ladder you can go. For most jobs at FAANG companies the #1 requirement is a degree. You can be the highest level senior developer at a company but you'll never make director or vp without a degree.
This is completely false. If you have the strategic insight, networking, management, and communication skills to become a director or VP at a FAANG, I promise you no one in the C-Suite is saying, "Gee I don't know, they didn't finish their bachelor's degree." People who grow into those roles do so by establishing a track record over 10+ years. At that point no one cares what they were doing when they were 21.
The people who went to MIT didn't need to spend 10+ years "establishing a track record" before getting a desirable job, people took them seriously right out of college.
It isn’t a criteria for the promotion ladder at Google. True, it may be a hard requirement for VP, I can neither confirm nor deny, and I don’t care either. But this is moving the goal posts; I don’t know by what definition my job would not be considered high paying. Certainly pays good enough for me.
Those companies generally have a technical ladder that runs parallel to the management ladder.
High-level engineers can have more influence within the company and often earn more than directors and VPs, and most developers who want to move up the ladder don't aspire to become a director or VP -- they'd rather be a Distinguished Engineer, Fellow, etc.
Gates (and Zuckerberg) went to Harvard, and would probably have had a much harder time getting venture capitalists to take them seriously if they did not have Harvard on their resume. They aren't proof that college doesn't matter, they are proof that an elite college matters a lot, but graduating matters a lot less simply than attending and getting access to the network.
I agree with you on Zuckerberg since he was chosen as the winner among a lot of competitors by the VCs. I am not sure what criteria the VCs used.
Microsoft was generating cash by writing interpretors before they brought a VC on board. They only brought in a VC for advice and not money - so they still count. Although Gates' mother also had a lot of contacts in the Seattle upper crust. I doubt Gates needed Harvard outside of finding Ballmer.
Apple got VC funding though contacts made on the job not at school. Jobs went to a Liberal Arts college for less than a year. The Homebrew Club also had a big impact on early Apple. Several members of the Homebrew Club founded companies and they all kept track of each other.
Similarly with Oracle and Larry Ellison. Ellison spent some time at two Chicago universities but his contacts and training were largely on the job.
After thinking about this over night I do believe that the difference between Zuckerberg and Gates is telling.
It used to be that having Harvard on your resume did not mean much in tech since it was not considered a tech school. The feel of the valley changed when John Sculley took over Apple since he was not at all a tech guy. This is just based on my gut, but I saw more Harvard alums after Sculley then before Sculley.
So I looked up the top schools for tech CEOs. This is the ranking of schools with the most CEOs with first round of funding. There were a few surprises for me.
1. Stanford
2. UC Berkeley
3. U of Pennsylvania
4. Harvard
5. MIT
6. Cornell
7. U of Michigan
8. U of Texas
9. Carnagie Mellon
10. IIT
Stanford and Berkeley were not a surprise since I have worked at a bunch of companies founded by Stanford and Berkeley alumni. IIT and MIT were also not surprises.
One thing that skews the results is that a bunch of schools provide masters programs to already successful professionals - so it is not clear that they actually contributed to the success of the alumni.
Yes, but the dirty secret is the earning potential of a college student is bimodal - yet people often use averages to discuss the benefits of a college degree. The $30,000 in additional earnings figure is propped up heavily by those making six+ figure salaries. Those who just barely scraped by do not earn more on average than those who only went to high school.
If you have the aptitude college will absolutely help. But for those who do not pushing them into college is just saddling them with debt for little benefit.
Some of the people without six figure salaries were interested in a subject that just simply did not pay at a high rate. They, or some of them anyway, may be glad they learned about the subject. (Of course, we are talking about lots of people so many may not be glad about what they did.)
My point is just that there are payoffs other than monetary ones. Nothing wrong with monetary, but nothing wrong with the others if that drives you.
> My point is just that there are payoffs other than monetary ones. Nothing wrong with monetary, but nothing wrong with the others if that drives you.
The issue is that college imposes a very real and life changing monetary cost on people attending. If you fail to achieve a high paying job after college you will be far behind your peers who never went, and dramatically more limited in your life choices. College debt is the closest we have to indentured servitude in the modern world.
For those who just want to learn, continuing education or course auditing is the better solution. I do wish colleges would expand upon these programs.
That's a myopic view of the situation. Under income based repayment most students' loans will actually increase despite the payments. The massive debt will prevent common middle class milestones like getting a mortgage. Further loan forgiveness comes with a balloon payment in the form of taxes - forgiven debt is income according to the IRS. After allowing it to grow unchecked for 20 years the amount forgiven will be substantial.
IBR operates very similar to welfare - including the embarrassing intrusion and analysis of your private life by your lenders. It is a last resort option and not something we should be encouraging.
Lenders look at monthly payments when calculating debt to income. $150 a month in student loans won't prevent you from getting a mortgage unless $150 is all that's preventing you from affording the mortgage.
Cancelled debt is only taxable up to the point of solvency meaning that most people who have a substantial amount of debt cancelled won't owe anything.
>IBR operates very similar to welfare - including the embarrassing intrusion and analysis of your private life by your lenders. It is a last resort option and not something we should be encouraging.
I've done it. You provide your tax return. They don't care about anything but income. It's by no means intrusive and shouldn't bhe thought of as a last resort.
The problem is the degree in a topic you are interested in but pays very little costs the same amount. The debate around college is the return on investment, which if you go to college for something you are interested in rather than something you want to market, you don't care about. I can study underwater basket weaving and get a degree in it, but being happy about learning doesn't offset the ~$80k in student loans that will make me very unhappy for a long time.
>They, or some of them anyway, may be glad they learned about the subject.
What percentage of college subjects don’t have readily available high-quality material across the Internet for free? Libgen is free. SciHub is free. Whole semesters worth of lectures are available for free on YouTube.
It would be stupid to take out loans for a degree that will never break even, when more knowledge is out there for free than ever before in human history.
> What percentage of college subjects don’t have readily available high-quality material across the Internet for free? Libgen is free.
I trained in a field that might be classed under "areal studies" more generally for a certain stretch of Eurasia. (And not a "useless" humanities subject, but something that does bring desirable job prospects.) The vast majority of literature in that subject is not available online. More recent publications might be created in PDF format, but for the most part students will need to hit the library shelves, even at the undergraduate level.
Sure, I have scanned and uploaded a great deal to Libgen myself, but I appear to be the only volunteer doing so for this entire field. Most volunteers on LibGen or r/Scholar don’t want to undertake any more effort than downloading already-digitized materials from behind paywalls and then uploading them to Libgen, they don’t want to do the hard work of scanning thousands of pages. I suspect there are a lot of academic fields where it would take decades for the handful of Libgen volunteers to adequately upload the standard publications in that field.
And hard science, like mathematics or physics relies on teacher helping you get unstuck. Learning the same thing from books takes significantly more time.
Most people dont know they exist. I surely did not just a few months ago about libgen.io.
More importantly, while I can use thesearch to learn something I know quite a lot about already, I would not know where to start in things I know nothing about. And let's not start about things that I don't know they exist (which my school covered).
All true, but you can also learn about subjects that interest you in more settings than just college. Many of them more engaging, many of them cheaper. People go to college almost entirely for the piece of paper that you can't get just by being passionate about something and exploring it on your own terms.
Maybe jobs that require college degrees pay higher on average, but it's just not true that for a high paying job you need a college degree. I was making over 100k before I finished my bachelor's doing computer programming. I've known people who own plumbing, welding, or electrical businesses that have a license that are millionaires that don't have college degrees. Maybe those aren't "jobs", but the highest paying jobs often don't follow the beaten path.
If that's the case why not do a degree you actually enjoy instead of a vocational degree? If you're a millionaire plumber, then paying tuition for an art history degree or whatever should be easy.
Actually I'd say it is the other way around. If you're a millionaire plumber then keeping up with other people with a similar level of wealth will reduce the worth of your money massively. At that point you're no longer ahead of 90% of people in the USA. You're at the bottom of your friends circle at least in terms of wealth.
Or invest in a prime developable area near a large metropolis.
Or look at the bank account and smile occasionally.
Class privilege comes with baggage. Better to focus on making the world a better place, starting with your own world -- which often keeps one from putting their nose up too high.
That's sometimes the case. One of my friends who owned a share in a construction/hvac business (he had the master plumber's license) cashed out and got a degree in counseling. He's now a full-time counselor and enjoys helping people and donates a lot of time and resources doing service projects.
His brothers just enjoy what they do, so they still own the business.
Not everyone enjoys college. I'm one that would much rather learn on my own than through a classroom. I enjoy having learned the things I did in college and felt I needed the piece of paper (and am now working on a master's to change fields), but as far as I've seen, there's no such thing as a degree I would enjoy. Just work or books I would enjoy.
