I have a degree from a no-name university in New Zealand. I'd do it again for a few pragmatic reasons. 1: Lots of companies will reject you on sight without a degree. I don't think it's a good thing, but it is reality. 2: With a degree your ability to move overseas dramatically improves. I moved to America after graduating. I flat out couldn't have done that without a degree. Points based systems immigration systems…
What you are portraing is your exploitation of your countries education system for your own benefit. The NZ tax payer invested in yours for your future ROI into NZ and you put this ROI in your sack.
Grad school is often funded in the U.S. (PhD at least, masters not so much)
Even then, depending on your speciality the economic return from a PhD is iffy since you're losing 5+ years of industry wages and experience.
I did my Ph.D. to get access to the interesting work that I wanted to do. This work was / is actually less well paid than a standard CS career (in the UK this is IT contracting in the City of London/Finance sector - rapidly £600 a day, often much more). But, if I had done that I think I would probably have had to quit after 10 years, and I would probably have ended up doing something like teaching. This would arguably have been a social good (depending on how good a teacher I might have been) but in terms of pay back I think that the fact that I've managed more than 20 years and am still going is clearly a good bet financially. The seniority that I have in the industry now means that I am able to command good remuneration and the work is as interesting as ever, but more stressful!
Those studies say something more like "UW Madison/U Washington/UIUC really do give you as good an education as the ivies" and quite a bit less like "college doesn't matter/is just a signal".
Ivy League matters if you want to be in finance or white shoe consulting. Everything else, you just work hard at your first job and nobody gives a shit. I went to a big SUNY school and was a mediocre student. We all made out fine.
Agreed on the Ivy League part. I work with a guy that went to Princeton. I went to a public University in Florida.
Sure he learned a lot more and had to do a thesis for his undergrad, but we have the same job now.
He has no more leverage than me when it comes to that.
Regardless of any opinions on either side, I don't understand why we have made degree a social prestige?
Someone in the comments said degree values will degrade and they are probably right as it happened with lower education as more and more people got in. Maybe there are lack of jobs or companies are exploiting people by making them grind more in an artificial constraint environment or some people are hogging off the resources and causing major inequality in pay gaps?
I have no doubt education is valuable and so is experience but why does that have to compress or translate into a paper? Should we really be running on an old feudal model of producing workers in 2020?
I have a lot of questions. I dropped out of school recently due to the toxic culture degrading my health to the point I am severely antisocial and definitely depressed enough for no reason.
The competitive grind is worse in countries with overpopulation and the quality is just outrageous.
I just wanted to work on something cool, become a surgeon but that route was sealed at 10. No money, no family prospects, grinding is too difficult and being a drug addict and die young seems a better option if you had a non functional childhood due to the whole burden later on.
I thought life would improve with vast improvements in productivity and industrial revolution but what we got in the end seems to be mostly cosmetic for the past 20 years. Yes, having the ability to order food or communicate is nice but that was doable before too. Taxi on demand? Well, we had numbers before (even though I was born in 00s), my dad has stories of it.
Fancy animated avatar on social platforms seems cosmetic. What else really changed in life quality?
When signing up for my current job, I didn't even bother bringing them my master's degree. Too bad because it's from one of top two tech unis in the country. Not to downplay the benefits of higher education, but it's certainly not a prereq for good employment these days.
I'm sure that by some economic measurement, any mediocre person today could still work hard and earn enough to afford the same standard of living as the middle class of 1950. The main problem is that this isn't actually possible to pull off, since it costs 10x as much for things like housing and medicine that aren't necessarily 10x better. There just isn't the option to buy the crappy version from 70 years ago.
Medicine from 70 years ago can be superior to modern medicine. Which would you prefer if you couldn't breathe on your own, an iron lung or a tube jammed down your throat?
By what authority and rationale do you feel so strongly about intubation, I wonder? Could it be that the entire medical profession is wrong and you are right?
I have a degree from a no-name university in New Zealand. I'd do it again for a few pragmatic reasons. 1: Lots of companies will reject you on sight without a degree. I don't think it's a good thing, but it is reality. 2: With a degree your ability to move overseas dramatically improves. I moved to America after graduating. I flat out couldn't have done that without a degree. Points based systems immigration systems…
Agree with most of this comment (couldn't read article due to blocking or something). Can confirm the blacklist on no degree. I had one that had like 10 years experience in and perfect fit. When HR found out that he did not finish his degree it was over with no recourse. Also Masters (MBA is different) is useless in most fields unless used to get a visa or something. Usually you are foregoing wages with few additiona…
You can look at it as a positive too. Having no degree as a programmer means that overly bureaucratic workplaces are filtered out and your chances of ending up at a workplace that has a minimum of BS are increased.
Only works for programmers though. Everybody else should obviously get degrees.
A person in our family is a specialized nurse. Two years of school, then some more training. $60hr any hour they "wish" to work. Saturdays/Sundays are $90hr, so is any hour after 8 hours. The demand is so high he just rejects work. If he wants to work in American Samoa or Miami: hired. I hired a person to install a garage door. $900 for an hour of work. My plumber wont show up for a 30 minute $300 job. I will call ag…
>I hired a person to install a garage door. $900 for an hour of work. My plumber wont show up for a 30 minute $300 job.
For those prices just do it yourself. Is this hyperbole or did you really pay $900 for an hour job? How complicated could it have been if it only took an hour?
Zuckerberg and Gates would have been elite if they’d never worked a day in their lives. Lots of people who come from money do something that doesn’t pay that well, like working in acting or the arts. Others don’t, and work as executives or found their own businesses even though there’s no danger of running out of money.
Zuckerberg and Gates would have been elite if they’d never worked a day in their lives. Perhaps it's just me, but in the Zuckerberg case specifically, I'd think quite a bit of luck and timing had to do with it. If Zuckerberg had been born 10 years later after the obvious social network ideas were already created? Or if he had gone to a no-name college (or none whatsoever) and Facebook had never taken off the way it d…
They seems obvious to you now but they weren't at that time. Not that I am a Zuck fan at all but he deserve credit for that and that probably demonstrate some creativity and vision from him. No ?
> Skilled manual work. Cannot be outsourced. But it can be dramatically diluted through lenient immigration policies (and that's exactly what happened). Bottom line, you have to be clever stay on your toes to make it in today's economy, and even then you need lots of luck and excellent health. UBI would result in a much more just society.
> But it can be dramatically diluted through lenient immigration policies (and that's exactly what happened
In the US ? Where you can’t immigrate legally as a skilled manual worker ?