Education Pays: 2008 Unemployment, Pay, and Education Level
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Re: Education Pays: 2008 Unemployment, Pay, and Education Level
#2I'm not sure if this should surprise anyone. Of course higher education is worth it for most people. It's just if you're a programmer, after you learn basic programming skills, a lot can be easily self taught.
Re: Education Pays: 2008 Unemployment, Pay, and Education Level
#3Ooohh... It just dawned on me right now, why all the higher education hatin lately.
Lots of young kids just graduated from college and they can't get jobs, so they're thinking, "Aw crap... I just went $100,000 in debt and I can't get a job. What the hell did I just waste 4 years in school for? School sucks. I was lied to. This wasn't worth anything. I'm screwed."
My heart goes out to you. It's not your fault that the economy sucks. It's not your fault that the world told you you'd get a job if you went to college. It's a pretty sick carrot to dangle in front of you.
Your education though, does have a value. But so does work experience. Your degree does give you an advantage over those without degrees, but it doesn't give you an advantage over those with degrees and work experience. Even those with work experience can't get jobs right now and they don't have parents they can move back in with. Imagine how screwed they are.
The year after you graduate is often the scariest, most depressing you will have experienced thus far in your life. My friends from college a year or two behind me, they'd graduate and phone me depressed. They'd ask themselves and me, "Why did I just go through that? I'm lonely. All my friends moved away. I work with a bunch of old people."
It's normal. It's normal to feel this way. I think college creates a lot of hope in us. The world makes us think that if we just make it through college, life will be easy, but getting that degree is only the start. Don't look at Matt Damon, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs and think you could have been like them, why didn't you drop out sooner. Those guys are the exceptions that prove the rule.
Make the most of your time now. Get experience. Keep your skills up to date. Go travel if you can afford it. Expand your mind. Keep working hard. It does pay off.
Re: Education Pays: 2008 Unemployment, Pay, and Education Level
#4It's not the education that matters, it's how you use it.
Re: Education Pays: 2008 Unemployment, Pay, and Education Level
#5I'm not sure if this should surprise anyone. Of course higher education is worth it for most people. It's just if you're a programmer, after you learn basic programming skills, a lot can be easily self taught.
But programming by itself is not knowledge. It's a means to solve problems. It's a very important and critical skill and like any other, it's difficult to become a master, but how are you applying it?
For example, let's say you are trying to solve a problem in crystallography. You need to be a good programmer to come up with a nice refinement algorithm, but without a fundamental understanding of the problem you're trying to solve, you're not going to be able to solve it. The same goes for financial modeling, or some other kind of optimization problem.
In any field you have to keep teaching yourself new skills, since the technologies and approaches change. Even the foundational knowledge changes, but what education helps you get is a core understanding of depth that allows you to adjust. There will always be those who can do it without getting a good education, but those are rare, and in the worlds I've lived in, almost non-existent.
Re: Education Pays: 2008 Unemployment, Pay, and Education Level
#6You have to wonder how much selection bias skews this. It seems like "those who would complete more school" isn't that far off from "those who are ambitious and willing to work hard". Without schooling, I wonder how well that second group would perform. Pretty well, I'd think.
Re: Education Pays: 2008 Unemployment, Pay, and Education Level
#7Ooohh... It just dawned on me right now, why all the higher education hatin lately. Lots of young kids just graduated from college and they can't get jobs, so they're thinking, "Aw crap... I just went $100,000 in debt and I can't get a job. What the hell did I just waste 4 years in school for? School sucks. I was lied to. This wasn't worth anything. I'm screwed." My heart goes out to you. It's not your fault that the…
That is why it's such a problem graduating into a down economy. If you can't get a job in your field, when the economy turns around, say it's in a few years, you will actually be at a disadvantage compared to fresh graduates. Fresh grads get a lot of slack, especially at big firms, they get put onto "graduate training schemes" and "fast-track programmes" and so on. In many companies there are only two entry routes, graduate or experienced. The experienced hires do the work, and the managers are from the graduate scheme. If you miss the window of the first and aren't yet the latter, you're a bit stuck. It's not the end of your career, but it's a disadvantage that will take years to work out.
Re: Education Pays: 2008 Unemployment, Pay, and Education Level
#8I'm not sure if this should surprise anyone. Of course higher education is worth it for most people. It's just if you're a programmer, after you learn basic programming skills, a lot can be easily self taught.
But programming by itself is not knowledge. It's a means to solve problems. It's a very important and critical skill and like any other, it's difficult to become a master, but how are you applying it? For example, let's say you are trying to solve a problem in crystallography. You need to be a good programmer to come up with a nice refinement algorithm, but without a fundamental understanding of the problem you're tr…
Yes exactly. It's easy to learn a new language or API. But it's not easy to learn CS on your own. It's not like you can just sit down and read Knuth from cover to cover. And it's not easy to learn domain knowledge on your own either, you have to be around practitioners.
Re: Education Pays: 2008 Unemployment, Pay, and Education Level
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
But programming by itself is not knowledge. It's a means to solve problems. It's a very important and critical skill and like any other, it's difficult to become a master, but how are you applying it? For example, let's say you are trying to solve a problem in crystallography. You need to be a good programmer to come up with a nice refinement algorithm, but without a fundamental understanding of the problem you're tr…
Yes exactly. It's easy to learn a new language or API. But it's not easy to learn CS on your own. It's not like you can just sit down and read Knuth from cover to cover. And it's not easy to learn domain knowledge on your own either, you have to be around practitioners.
Right, and it seems most of the college hating HN crowd are focused on solving a problem that they can with the knowledge they already have, and then profiting from it, thus not requiring a college degree.
Re: Education Pays: 2008 Unemployment, Pay, and Education Level
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
But programming by itself is not knowledge. It's a means to solve problems. It's a very important and critical skill and like any other, it's difficult to become a master, but how are you applying it? For example, let's say you are trying to solve a problem in crystallography. You need to be a good programmer to come up with a nice refinement algorithm, but without a fundamental understanding of the problem you're tr…
Yes exactly. It's easy to learn a new language or API. But it's not easy to learn CS on your own. It's not like you can just sit down and read Knuth from cover to cover. And it's not easy to learn domain knowledge on your own either, you have to be around practitioners.
You can just sit down and read Knuth from cover to cover. The problem is most people that don't get a CS degree also avoid reading Knuth on their own.
I think one of the large gaps between those groups on average is those without a CS degree think theory is useless. When you are forced to learn the theory you end up using it constantly. However, when you see a theory without the associated experience it seems useless. So it's hard to know what to study on your own. For most people it's the rigorous nature of a good CS program that forces them to put forth the associated effort.