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Quantifying The Value Of A College Degree (By Major)

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Re: Quantifying The Value Of A College Degree (By Major)

#21

Post by ylem »

niels_olson wrote: post #13

A cursory review of the numbers makes me think this is a scam. > Hard sciences such as Physics and Biology pay rather less well than I would have expected. Interestingly, when I used the calculator to search for a BS in Physics, it says "No Statistics for that Degree". I also find it a bit hard to believe that optometrists and lawyers make out better than doctors, or that the lifetime value of a Physician's Assistant…

I don't know about scam, the search page itself is definitely lacking--all I found was geophysics. It could be that the original analysis is good, but the web page is lousy.

When looking at median salaries for physicists, on the BLS site (where this data is taken from: http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos052.htm), it is $103,000 which isn't all that bad (if you can get a job). But, the problem with the proxy that the author uses (given job, extrapolate major) is that it doesn't account for fields where relatively few people actually get jobs in that field, but tend to migrate to other fields--depending on what field they migrate to, then the salary may be much higher or lower. Take physics for example. The fraction of physics PhDs who actually get jobs as professors is rather small. The fraction who go on to national labs is small--even the numbers for industry (doing physics) is small and many people leave for other fields (programming, financial engineering, management consulting, etc.)--So to get accurate numbers, what you need to do is to survey people at companies and ask them what their degree is and what their salary is....

Re: Quantifying The Value Of A College Degree (By Major)

#22

Post by cantbecool »

rubyrescue wrote: post #14
patio11 wrote: post #2

Folks have told me on HN several times they wanted to hear about some number crunching/SEO work/etc that I did regarding the worth of particular college degrees. I just got the OK from my client to share results, so here you go. Search tool: http://www.onlinedegrees.org/calculator/ Summary article: http://www.onlinedegrees.org/calculator/salary/engineering-d... Short version: get an engineering degree. The client has…

This is fascinating and I want to respond on two levels - technical/SEO and moral/emotional. I consulted for the main competitor to these guys until a few months ago so I can speak only generally but I know the subject with some authority. 1. Anyone reading this post is not the target market for this. The real target market are the suckers that they can convince to take out $40,000 in unforgivable government student…

I've watched that particular Frontline special before, and I must say, as a current college undergrad, it is eyeopening. Although, I must applaud the University of Phoenix investor, Michael K. Clifford. He is at least doing some form of philanthropy with all the money he's is making from for profit universities.

I wish I had a mentor of some sort as a teenager, who would have convinced me to attend a public institution or a junior college first, which would ultimately lower my student loan debt. I was suckered in by all my advisers and and the media that the only way to succeed is going to college.

I'm currently going to be somewhere in the ball park of $100,000 in debt after my 5 year BSIS degree at Drexel University in Philadelphia. I do not even live on campus; I commute from my childhood home. All I've had after 4 years there is horrible professors and teaching assistants from another planet. I wanted to learn how to program and create things, but all that I've learned is that I could have received a better education from my local public library.

Re: Quantifying The Value Of A College Degree (By Major)

#23

Post by p_nathan »

ylem wrote: post #17
jerf wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next generation nothing, barring a major and sudden economic turnaround I expect this to happen next year , by which I mean, this next fall school year. Somewhere in March I expect a few little nervous merpings to trickle out about how college applications seem to be a bit down this year but we're talking ourselves into believing they'll pick back up by the start of the school year, and somewhere in June or July for…

Actually, given the differential in the unemployment rate between high school only and college graduates, I expect to see the fraction of people attending college to increase. Furthermore, given the job market for new graduates, I expect to see an increase in the numbers of students seeking masters degrees, hoping to wait out the downturn. It would be interesting to calculate the ROI on that. Imagine that you have st…

I rummaged up the numbers from the BLS this fall for unemployment vs. education over the past 10 years. They came out to something like this:

No HS degree: > 10% unemployment

HS/some college: 7-9% unemployment

Associates: 5-7%

Bachelors+: 4%

Seasonal fluctuations drop dramatically as education levels go up.

I have heard anecdotally that Masters+ is 2%, but the BLS did not provide data there.

The BLS did not quantify the jobs (e.g., the MA in English working as a barista qualifies as employed).

My conclusion is this: the data recommends a degree for employment, statistically speaking.

Re: Quantifying The Value Of A College Degree (By Major)

#24

Post by stretchwithme »

xlorm wrote: post #12
billpaetzke wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great work. I really like it. I wonder if the "Wage Gap" data and article will persuade more women to do engineering and other currently male-dominated careers. But I doubt it. Perhaps we are hard-wired to enjoy certain types of work. Quick bug report: the textbox "Your Major" on http://www.onlinedegrees.org/calculator/ is case-sensitive. I would suggest making it insensitive. Then "computer science" would return a r…

> Perhaps we are hard-wired to enjoy certain types of work. I would guess it has more to do with expectations.

so Bill Gates really would have been a nanny if expectations had been different.

Re: Quantifying The Value Of A College Degree (By Major)

#25

Post by samd »

patio11 wrote: post #20
samd wrote: post #11

If I'm understanding your methods correctly, you only have data for earnings by occupation. So when you say "Computer Science majors earn x." it actually means "People who do the same jobs that computer science majors tend to do earn x." If that's the case then the data is not really actionable unless we also know the probability of getting a job with and without some degree. For example, if computer science majors a…

I think this data is a lot more accurate and actionable than "All degrees are equally valuable, honey", which is the advice I'm most concerned with competing with.

Yeah, sure it is, because that's horrible advice. Does anyone actually believe that all degrees are equally valuable?

I think people have a general idea of which degrees are more valuable than others, a flawed and vague idea to be sure, but it's not obvious that this data is more accurate than that.

I wonder if you couldn't get very similar results by asking people on Mechanical Turk to rank degrees by what they thought was their value.

Regardless of how it fares against other advice, it still has flaws that can significantly affect its accuracy; and I'd want anyone I cared about to understand that before making decisions based on it.

Re: Quantifying The Value Of A College Degree (By Major)

#26

Post by steve-howard »

tjsnyder wrote: post #4

I think we're going to see the next generation of kids taking a much closer look at what they will be studying and the cost/benefits of those studies. College tuition has gone up so much and people are in so much debt now that 2nd generation college students will likely have better advice from their parents. All I ever got my whole life was, "go to school." Luckily I majored in engineering, but I know too many people…

UChicago gives a speech every year entitled "The Aims of Education" to its freshman class. One quote from a while ago: "There are no aims of education. The aim is education. If -- and only if -- you seek it... education will find you." From what I know of my UChicago friends, they really downplay majors and emphasize their liberal-arts core.

In other words, it seems that education is generally a pursuit for personal enrichment, unless you happen to love whatever field will make you money (I thank my lucky stars that I'm in computer science and my internships are quite well paid; my friends in other disciplines like journalism are not so lucky).

I have generally judged people who major in economics here but hate it (it's a big thing at Northwestern, since we don't have undergrad business). It always seemed like those people are saying "I want to get into a good business school and then stuff myself into a suit for the next 40 years"; it's a depressing analysis of one's own strengths. But then again, maybe those people are just smart and I'm just lucky.

I also wish we'd work with kids on finances before they pick a college. Here at Northwestern, student loans are capped at $20k. It's one of the most expensive schools in the US, but the financial aid office does try to keep its students from drowning in debt. Other schools, though, don't really care how much debt students rack up, and they're the ones with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to work on.

Re: Quantifying The Value Of A College Degree (By Major)

#27

Post by stevejohnson »

cantbecool wrote: post #22
rubyrescue wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fascinating and I want to respond on two levels - technical/SEO and moral/emotional. I consulted for the main competitor to these guys until a few months ago so I can speak only generally but I know the subject with some authority. 1. Anyone reading this post is not the target market for this. The real target market are the suckers that they can convince to take out $40,000 in unforgivable government student…

I've watched that particular Frontline special before, and I must say, as a current college undergrad, it is eyeopening. Although, I must applaud the University of Phoenix investor, Michael K. Clifford. He is at least doing some form of philanthropy with all the money he's is making from for profit universities. I wish I had a mentor of some sort as a teenager, who would have convinced me to attend a public instituti…

I hate to use an HN thread for this kind of thing, but you don't have your email address in your profile or on your blog. Would you mind shooting me an email? I'm collecting people who write well about colleges they attended. (Nefarious purposes, obviously.)

Re: Quantifying The Value Of A College Degree (By Major)

#29

Post by steve-howard »

patio11 wrote: post #16
rubyrescue wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fascinating and I want to respond on two levels - technical/SEO and moral/emotional. I consulted for the main competitor to these guys until a few months ago so I can speak only generally but I know the subject with some authority. 1. Anyone reading this post is not the target market for this. The real target market are the suckers that they can convince to take out $40,000 in unforgivable government student…

With regards to the SEO bits: total agreement. With regards to the indictment of for-profit education: I half agree. The government giving buckets of free money gets lower class, lower income people who are unprepared for higher education into non-selective institutions, including for-profit institutions. That isn't a bug, it is a feature . They have sucky graduation rates -- in some cases, extremely sucky graduation…

Harvard covers full tuition for low-income students: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/03/harvard-increa...

"Families with incomes above $120,000 and below $180,000 with assets typical for these income levels are asked to contribute 10 percent of their incomes. For those families with incomes below $120,000, the parental contribution declines steadily from 10 percent, reaching zero for those with incomes at $60,000 and below."

Harvard isn't right for everyone. But remember that nonprofit universities love drawing diverse crowds, which includes the poor (admittedly, only those that make it through the selection process).

Re: Quantifying The Value Of A College Degree (By Major)

#30

Post by sp4rki »

cantbecool wrote: post #22
rubyrescue wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fascinating and I want to respond on two levels - technical/SEO and moral/emotional. I consulted for the main competitor to these guys until a few months ago so I can speak only generally but I know the subject with some authority. 1. Anyone reading this post is not the target market for this. The real target market are the suckers that they can convince to take out $40,000 in unforgivable government student…

I've watched that particular Frontline special before, and I must say, as a current college undergrad, it is eyeopening. Although, I must applaud the University of Phoenix investor, Michael K. Clifford. He is at least doing some form of philanthropy with all the money he's is making from for profit universities. I wish I had a mentor of some sort as a teenager, who would have convinced me to attend a public instituti…

I could have received a better education from my local public library.

- How'd you like them apples? Sorry couldn't resist some good will punning.

Anyways, I've always said (even when I was in high-school) that I'd just get a bachelors degree from the most reputable University I can afford without going into debt. These days I'm still missing one year of a Financial Engineering degree, but I'm earning almost twice (and quite a bit more in some cases) what most of my high-school graduating classmates are making after getting their Bachelors and Masters, and I just took a new job paying 22% more with an awful lot of benefits as a Lead UX/Systems Developer (yeah I have a weird mix of responsibilities, but they're exactly the responsibilities I wanted to have, as I quite enjoy both sides of the equation) for a big software company in my country. Take in account that I went to a recognized private school, so you could say my classmates where predestined to at least make a modest living without having to resort to flipping burgers at McDonalds.

So there. I learnt everything I know by reading, programming, and designing on my own. I was able to secure my first job pretty easily (I was 19 at the time) since I was one of the three persons out of a pool of 85 people who passed a simple test for a job working for a company that made shopping cart and merchant software. They hired me because even though the other two had degrees, I had done significantly better than they had on the test and trust me, I wasn't/am not a genius or anything or that sort.

I guess my point is that a degree is a must have because it's a great thing to fall back on if you ever need it and it can help your formation and tune your thought process, but it is by no means a silver bullet for actually achieving a great education nor does it make it a given that you'll do better in the job market. Make sure you learn what you need to learn, regardless of where you learn it, and make sure that you really learn to sell yourself instead of letting a piece of paper dictate how you do in life.

Oh and by the way... bachelor degrees are so passe this days. If you want offers based on your degrees more then your proven experience, opt for a masters degree as fast as you can.

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