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Master’s degrees are the second biggest scam in higher education?

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Re: Master’s degrees are the second biggest scam in higher education?

#161

Post by gffbkugf »

LatteLazy wrote: post #110
chmod600 wrote: post #70

"We can’t just rely on the market to provide all of the quality discipline that master’s programs need." It seems like if the federal government stopped lending for master's degrees, and allowed students to file for bankruptcy to get out of private loans, then the market might very well sort everything out.

Wouldn't that just mean rich people got masters they didn't need and poor people didn't get ones they did need? Maybe markets have a difference concept of efficiency than society...

hacker news: I've got mine!

Re: Master’s degrees are the second biggest scam in higher education?

#162

Post by andrew_eit »

I disagree.

Firstly, the question needs to be narrowed down. The topic of a master's degree in Europe vs in the UK and in the US varies, hugely: 1) The UK and the US have a great focus on the elitism of the university name. Countries like Germany do not, a masters from a (known) university with good grades, is pretty much as valuable as all the others. 2) Fees in Europe its free (as has been mentioned countless times here) so there's less of a "shopping" market here, in terms of looking for the most elite degree to graduate with, and much more about content 3) It depends on what you want to do as a career. In Europe, scientific and engineering fields do look for postgraduate degrees as a minimum. Companies like Amazon, hire data scientists mostly with PhDs in Germany or on exception, highly talented engineers.

But the main "pro masters" degree argument for me, is the learning experience.

My master's studies, was so intense, so stressful and so unbelievably intellectually rewarding that it shaped me and my character in a way that my bachelor's did not come close to.

It gave me that confidence to approach fields and advanced topics, where I am not familiar with the notation, the terminology and don't know where to start, and it taught me how to dive in deep, in a self-motivated and self organised way. I really felt the whole time like an independent researcher, picking up books where I needed to, learning mathematical tools and programming skills I never thought of using to solve new problems. And participating in the latest SOTA research, in a way that has made me quite intellectually fearless now, going forward in my career.

Re: Master’s degrees are the second biggest scam in higher education?

#163

Post by csa »

adamdusty wrote: post #104
kaiwen1 wrote: post #96

I wonder if this scam also applies to executive MBA programs? For example, the Kellogg-HKSTU program cost US$220,000 for about 18 long weekends of on-site classroom time. This is exorbitant, but the Financial Times has ranked the program as the best EMBA program in the world 10 times, primarily due to the large increase in salary after graduation, up 67% to $528,057 in 2020. [1]. In fact, the reported salary increase…

One of the admission requirements is that your company sponsors you as outstanding with potential within the organization. Another requirement is that you are already or will soon be an executive. This makes me assume the salary increase is due to the fact that they only accept people that are positioned to get big salary increases. Also the fees page suggests that it costs at minimum, 550k, and if I'm reading it cor…

> Also the fees page suggests that it costs at minimum, 550k, and if I'm reading it correctly, 1.5m.

Fwiw, those are HK$, so about $193k USD.

Re: Master’s degrees are the second biggest scam in higher education?

#164

Post by csa »

kaiwen1 wrote: post #96

I wonder if this scam also applies to executive MBA programs? For example, the Kellogg-HKSTU program cost US$220,000 for about 18 long weekends of on-site classroom time. This is exorbitant, but the Financial Times has ranked the program as the best EMBA program in the world 10 times, primarily due to the large increase in salary after graduation, up 67% to $528,057 in 2020. [1]. In fact, the reported salary increase…

1. These students are almost always sponsored by the their companies.

2. In addition to technical knowledge, the students are also exposed to other future executives in other industries. This network can be very powerful.

Re: Master’s degrees are the second biggest scam in higher education?

#165

Post by pacman2 »

lordnacho wrote: post #21
wirthjason wrote: post #14

One of the key issues I see is that we don’t place a high enough value on adult education. A philosophy professor of mine told me the word “andragogy”, which is the theory of adult education. It’s different from “pedagogy” which means the education of children. I always thought that learning is learning. It never occurred to me that there’s a difference between how and why children learn and that it could be differen…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_high_school In Denmark and some neighboring countries there's this concept of a school you can go to just to learn stuff later in life, as an ongoing thing. There's a whole bunch of themes (sports, history, etc), and often you can book yourself in for whatever amount of time makes sense for you.

ROTFL. This is called "Volkshochschule" in Germany. Hochschule can be translated to University. One guy from former Yugoslavia took an accounting course there, got a certificate and had this translated (to Serbian, Croatian or whatever). The translater did indeed translate Volkshochschule to Peoples University and the guy managed to secure a Professor position with it at a University. Of cause later this caused a scandal...

Re: Master’s degrees are the second biggest scam in higher education?

#166

Post by matsemann »

hallway_monitor wrote: post #82
depressedpanda wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, I don't even have a bachelor's degree in CS, and I haven't suffered at all because of it. I got a job offer before graduating, and decided my time was better spent earning money than learning stuff I would probably never have any use for. Rather than focusing on degrees, I think it's a lot more important to focus on learning, however you don't know what's important to learn until you actually start workin…

Funny how those of us who didn't spend more than a couple years in school think the rest of the years are probably a waste, and those that did spend a lot of time and money in school think it was useful.

Who got more accurate information in that case.. ;)

It might be because education is free in my country, but I loved my Uni years and am glad I got 5 of them no matter the use for my career.

Re: Master’s degrees are the second biggest scam in higher education?

#167

Post by quantumofalpha »

murderfs wrote: post #94

The article doesn't mention one of the biggest draws: having a masters degree from an accredited U.S. institution improves your chances at getting an H-1B visa.

You meant STEM OPT? H1B masters pool only marginally improves H1B lottery chances, which are far too low today to begin with.

Re: Master’s degrees are the second biggest scam in higher education?

#168

Post by break_the_bank »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #159
phsource wrote: post #150

One reason that often gets glossed over (including in this article) is how (non-online) Masters programs are huge moneymakers as a ticket to working in the US. I've seen that in CS programs at University of Buffalo and Yale, a majority of Masters students are from abroad, especially from Asia. Basically, if you wanted to work in tech in the US, you could either: - Find a multinational company in your home country, wo…

Assuming you're actually smart and skilled - wouldn't it be better to just start your own consulting business, or if you're really ambitious, eventually an agency? Aren't H1-B visa workers mostly in extremely HCOL areas and significantly underpaid / taken advantage of? I imagine if you're from India and you really want to get out of India - this sounds like a good deal (although wouldn't $50k for tuition be hard to g…

1. I think you are mixing smart with courageous, starting a business requires some courage.

2. Nope. At least those working for FANGs aren’t. You can see so many cases of folks were for low paying consultancies in India getting masters and then getting a job at FANG.

3. Getting an education loan for STEM is really easy and people are willing to put their parents house up for collateral.

I think with a FANG or good tech job you can be done with your loan in an year or two. Some people go to state schools and don’t get into any debt, or pay it off via internships. The US in most Indian people’s head comes with a better quality of life, a lot more money and better infrastructure. Perhaps some status too.

Re: Master’s degrees are the second biggest scam in higher education?

#169

Post by dragonwriter »

ghufran_syed wrote: post #154
dragonwriter wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, having government involved always creates inflation. No it doesn't. > It's no coincidence that the two areas with most government involvement, education and health care, are the things that have outpaced every other measure of inflation significantly. The government is less (EDIT: more ) involved (proportionate to total expenditures in the domain) in healthcare lots of places outside the US without equal, much…

It sounds like you’re saying that places with less government involvement have less healthcare inflation - isn’t what the comment you are replying to is arguing?

> It sounds like you’re saying that places with less government involvement have less healthcare inflation

Yeah, it did; that was an error.

Re: Master’s degrees are the second biggest scam in higher education?

#170

Post by ghufran_syed »

UK-Al05 wrote: post #83
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better skills are not zero sum, but credentials are. Having a doctorate is only impressive if everybody else doesn't also have one.then you would have to have two doctorates.

What? Doctorate implies you've learned some skills. If everyone suddenly everyone got better at maths and critical thinking. Overall the economy would be more productive, and everyone would be better off. There isn't a fixed amount wealth, to be divided up between people. If you increase skill levels, total level of wealth can increase.

You’re assuming that getting the doctorate actually increased people’s skills that are economically useful - this book suggests otherwise:

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2018/05/30/book-rev...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education

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