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A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

theatlantic.com

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Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#21

Post by wun0ne »

Pete-Codes wrote: post #16

If you are facing minimum of £27k tuition debt in England which AFAIK gathers interest from day one I would probably skip it. And it's even worse in the US. As far as webdev goes, you could do a bootcamp and be earning money within 6 months to a year. That's money that's hopefully going into your pension fund and earning interest while your peers are still in class. Or you could learn to code using cheap and/or free…

100% this.

If bootcamps were a valid pathway into the profession at the time after I left high school I definitely would have foregone my Computer Science degree and gone down that route.

I'm glad attitudes towards them have shifted in the last few years - most of my friends in the profession work in companies that actively seek out applicants from bootcamps.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#22

Post by quietbritishjim »

mac01021 wrote: post #13
hectorr1 wrote: post #4

Most successful people have X. Government: “Let’s give everyone X!” Over time the value of X is diluted, loses its status signaling, and overall quality degrades. Successful people move to Y.

The big question is "what is Y in this case"?

Perhaps a degree from one of the "best" colleges/universities in the country.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#23

Post by hocuspocus »

itsoktocry wrote: post #8
082349872349872 wrote: post #3

A short (and hence inaccurate) overview of the apprenticeship system for the trades in my country: Apprentices start working one day a week and going to school four. They end up working four days a week and going to school one. Apprentices can switch to a more academic track, at a technical school or university, if they get the desire. When they finish with their apprenticeship, not only do they already have horizont…

> Apprentices start working one day a week and going to school four. They end up working four days a week and going to school one. It's brilliant. And is there any profession that can't be done this way?

Well you can't become a surgeon or a lawyer unless you switch a university track at some point. But you can definitely work in the medical or legal field by doing an apprenticeship first and moving on to a 2-3 year professional degree (for instance nurse school isn't college here).

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#25

Post by nicoburns »

kamaal wrote: post #9

Life is a long haul ride, requires a lot of things to get through it well. College education is obviously one part of it. It would help people to realize any thing one does has an expiry date to it. This is why you need to have a system to remain consistent at some broad goals. Things like good eating, exercise, personal finance, relationships, reading and learning have to be done consistently, and have to be done th…

> Life is a long haul ride, requires a lot of things to get through it well. College education is obviously one part of it.

I would disagree. College education is absolutely not required to get through life. And it should be required even less than it is. There are some professions for which degrees are super useful. But most people doing degrees are going into professions that just require any degree and could easily be done without one.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#27

Post by gspr »

hectorr1 wrote: post #4

Most successful people have X. Government: “Let’s give everyone X!” Over time the value of X is diluted, loses its status signaling, and overall quality degrades. Successful people move to Y.

I mean there's a lot more to university than "success preparation". While university is indeed no guarantee for success, it does seem to help a lot with your understanding of the world and your ability to think critically.

I'm lucky enough to come from a country with free decent universities, so maybe it's easy for me to say, but I can't even put a price on how my education changed every single part of how I think and understand the world. That it prepared me for a well-paying job is just a nice side-effect.

How well do you think the misinformation that laid the foundation for the political shitstorm the US is in now could have taken hold if most people had a college education?

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#28

Post by jkingsbery »

Pete-Codes wrote: post #16

If you are facing minimum of £27k tuition debt in England which AFAIK gathers interest from day one I would probably skip it. And it's even worse in the US. As far as webdev goes, you could do a bootcamp and be earning money within 6 months to a year. That's money that's hopefully going into your pension fund and earning interest while your peers are still in class. Or you could learn to code using cheap and/or free…

I think employers are coming around to hire more non-CS majors, which is a good thing. However, most people I know of who got into software engineering didn't just skip college, do a bootcamp, and get a job as an engineer. Either they started businesses (which comes with its own financial risk), worked in some other technical area (IT, wordpress administration, etc.), or did a bootcamp in order to switch careers (and thus had acquired a lot of important soft skills).

I would love more different avenues for people to come to software engineering, and I'm rooting for boot camps, but I'm also skeptical about how universal the benefits are. I think coding is much more of a learnable skill than many already in industry give it credit, but I also think it takes years, not weeks, to learn to do it well.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#29

Post by nix23 »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #22
mac01021 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big question is "what is Y in this case"?

Perhaps a degree from one of the "best" colleges/universities in the country.

More like having the best connection's from the university/family/friends ;)

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#30

Post by omginternets »

I barely skimmed the article, but I don't find this surprising for a few reasons (some of which have been mentioned elsewhere in the comments):

- "University degree" is a heterogeneous thing. While there is such thing as non-economic value, the strictly economic value of a college education tends to cluster around a small subset of degrees.

- Many countries have enacted policies to increase proportion of people who get degrees. Far from fixing inequality, this has instead diluted the value of university degrees.

- All universities are not created equal. While it is possible (and even common) for employers to pay too much attention to the reputation of the school, it is also quite common for students to over-estimate the value of a no-name institution. I've found this to be moreso the case in the two European countries I've lived in for an extended period of time (France & England).

- The exorbitant debt incurred by university tuition in some countries (which need not be named, I think) means the ROI on the university degree has to also be exorbitant.

Have I missed anything?

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