Two-thirds of American employees regret their college degrees

There is a worthwhile discussion to be had about the cost of college tuition and actuarial tables of different degrees and their earning power and how that relates to pay structure for graduates and for professors and how college programs are run.

Trying to have that discussion on hacker news starting from a primary source consisting of a CBS News poll is like trying to get to the moon on a North Korean rocket with sadness and starvation as your rocket fuel.

I regret the four years part at least. I believe undergrad really only needs to be 2-3 years tops.

Before being an SE, I had many shit jobs and getting the college degree unlocked many doors for me.

I went to a state uni, it was relatively cheap, I don't think I would make anything close to what I make now as I hate sales. However, I know smart people with art degrees, which are useless to them.

Every competent person I have met when studying computer science is doing very well, would they achieve the same success without a CS degree? Maybe, but that degree definitely helps getting jobs at non-tech companies.

I have no "regrats"

It's unclear what 'advanced' means in that bullet; most of the article seems to refer to undergraduate majors, or perhaps all post-secondary (after high-school) education.

The confusing writing continues when the article gets to numbers for different areas-of-study, as it alternates between reporting percentages for "have regrets" and "no regrets". (The last 7 paragraphs would be clearer as a table taking 1/3 the space.)

Thanks! The CBS write-up is really, really awful – from the headline (about respondents regretting "their degrees" as opposed to having a mix of debt/topic/networking/institution/etc regrets) to the confusing prose descriptions of alternating "regret" or "no regrets" levels.

The raw tables, & accompanying descriptions, at your link are much clearer.