The case against CS master’s degrees

you can get a stipend along with tuition forgiveness, so all you're really losing is $150k+/year in opportunity cost by goofing off in academia rather than working

I have an undergrad from a large, anonymous state school, and a masters (earned in 1993) from a smaller, regionally prestigious private engineering school.

I honestly don't believe that I learned anything useful when getting my MS. The upper level undergrad courses that I took at the state school were mixed grad/undergrad, and covered far more material than the ones at my grad school. I sailed through all the coursework because it was an easier version of the courses I'd previously taken.

I applied and was accepted to the PhD program at the school because I thought I wanted to study AI (in the early 90s). I was lucky enough to get a fellowship, so I took an overload of coursework. After 2 semesters, I decided that I was much more interested in systems, and was at the wrong school. So I decided to leave with an MS and did a project over the summer and left.

All that year really did was to pad my resume a bit and put a better known school at the top of it. I think it I may have gotten a marginally higher salary at one of my first employers because of that. I'm still thankful for the fellowship, and the knowledge that getting my MS cost me almost nothing beyond delaying my career by a year.

It is possible to get a position as a graduate assistant or teaching assistant where the university pays for your tuition and pays your living expenses in exchange for you helping the CS department with various tasks (which can include teaching undergrad classes if you're a TA).

I did that for a year and then ended up a class short of graduating because of a scheduling mistake. Since staying a grad assistant wasn't an option, I ultimately dropped out and started working instead. Getting the GA job required me to take the GRE (I scored 170 on the math part, 165 on the verbal and 90 something percentile for both with only minimal studying for the test) and be interviewed about some undergrad CS concepts.

If you're able to do grad school in CS and you've already got permanent legal status in the US, it doesn't really make financial sense even if you're a GA or TA. You can make much more just getting a job. That said, I don't regret doing it because I probably enjoyed that year more than any of my undergrad years (this was pre-pandemic) and I didn't go into any additional debt to do it!

I graduated with a humanities degree from Penn, spent a decade working and eventually became a self-taught developer, then obtained a masters degree in computer engineering through Boston University’s LEAP program. While I agree with most points in the article, getting my master’s degree was definitely the right choice for me. The program I attended also included undergraduate courses to ramp up to the master’s, so it is a little different than what is being critiqued here.

The main omission of the article is that while the author feigns (or projects) surprise that universities aren’t entirely dedicated to teaching, they omit the major benefit of _opportunity_ that students get when attending universities.

I entered the program knowing that I wanted to focus on things like cloud computing and k8s; it turned out my university had a partnership with one of the two main companies working in k8s and this allowed me an opportunity to get an internship.

That’s just my personal example, but the connections and opportunities from attending a university are a pretty fundamental part of the experience and outcomes. It is the other half of the coin for the individual students in the visa cash cow story.

> Even with CS… honesty I still disagree that academia doesn’t have a purpose or value

I said their model is not viable and they need to evolve. Academia and education has a lot of value.

> Just reading a good research papers recently, one of my favorite recent topics being new ways to discover spy cameras using smartphones

That research paper probably started by the author searching on google and finding a conspicuous mind showing how they were able to use their phones to spot IR lights.

> Also some of our greatest minds have received a lot of benefits from an academic environments

I agree, we need a central resource of our greatest minds and that's why I hope academia finds a way to evolve, because widespread education is doomed if they don't. Important to note, some of our greatest minds are autodidacts.

> My degree cost me out of pocket about ~$5k for my tuition

Most people don't even know how they are going to pay for the next rent or meal. They should still be able to access knowledge and education.

> Sounds like a version of tutorial hell potentially

Any subject as complicated as it might seem, to a devoted person digging information online they can learn it. Academia is not different in that aspect either, they usually just provide a direct link to the information and students have to learn it on their own.