'My degree is next to worthless'
bbc.com
bbc.com
A more subtle point is that the more specific the degree is the more vulnerable it is to obsolescence or changing market conditions.
People keep saying "we need more STEM graduates", but without being more specific about exactly what degrees people should do it's just going to result in more of this kind of problem.
If a four-year lag has any chance to eat your job, what's the point of getting a degree for it? A degree should land you jobs for several decades to be worth the investment.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7549106.stm
I've also seen it on the top 10:
http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/these-are-the-10-best-...
Although there's a 5 year difference.
Never mind people who do business degrees. It's almost expected that they are in it for the money.
It's also amazing how many CS majors waste their 3-4 years addicted to video games (LOL seems to be the big one right now). Those 1000's of hours are better spent building that portfolio that will net you $100k day 1 out of your degree.
Video game addiction is serious. Google for solutions, it can be fixed. It does not improve your resume to mention your lol rank.
This viewpoint is garbage. Outside of work hours, a person has no obligation to be career-focused. Tech shouldn't require someone to be about their career in their free time as well.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you. I sure hope I am because this expectation to make CS your hobby to be a valid CS grad in the workplace is awful.
Similarly, I used to have a crippling envy of accomplished coders who were same age as me, which has long since evaporated.
Probably a symptom of ADHD, my life consists of many short distinct phases where I hyperfocus on an interest. Knitting, woodworking, programming, reading, etc. I do have several projects that I wish I could just dedicate a couple of months too, however! Seeing how far I could get in a dedicated week always makes me long for another month of intense focus.
I'd like to think I'm not that uncommon for a geek. I love coding. (I have been coding since the 80s, and professionally since the late 90s. You will find my name in a handful of credits files, and a number of mailing list and usenet posts.)
But I won't start using centralized services just because you or some recruiter decides it's the new cool place to be. Sorry.
Developers come in many different shapes and forms :-)
I think part of the problem is the pace of change. That's both the reason for the bad data and the time lag issue. It's just impossible to make a decent guess at the necessity of acquirable skills on a useful timescale. Even technical skills that have a fantastic outlook from todays vantage point… Our visibility is not really that far, 15-20 years at a stretch.
For example, it seems like a good bet that for the next 15-20 the skills that allow you to write programs for a living will still be marketable, assuming a non trivial amount of re-skilling along the way. past that, who knows. For a 20 year old, that's one third of a career.
Take the skills required to be employed in the enormous and affluent financial sector. Accounting, finance, data analysis, math.
Can you imagine that over the next 15-20 years something happens (bitcoin?) that turns this business on its head and makes a big chunk of its employees obsolete?
For the opposite, can you imagine that 15-20 years from now gene-tech has created industries that demand geneticists the way programmers are now in demand?
Pace of change is itself a meaningful change.
Another metric you could use is value for money. There is not a lot a CS course provides that you couldn't do yourself if sufficiently motivated. Whereas a Chemistry course provides a lot of facilities and kit. One of the reasons I went for EEE rather than CS. Pretty tricky to build a clean room or giant laser at home.
Is a university degree basically a form of "Vo-tech school"?
That's what a lot of students and employers seem to think.
At the same time, many people do just fine in their careers after college even if they majored in English Lit or philosophy. Perhaps we should consider the possibility that "an education" is a separate thing from vocation training?
> many people do just fine in their careers after college even if they majored in English Lit or philosophy
Yes, but many, many don't, and they take out loans expecting "jobs" of one sort or another to be there upon graduation. I can't count the number of friends I have with $50K+ in student loans working at minimum wage jobs with a worhless degree on two hands.
If you really _just_ want "a good job" there are easier ways to do it than going to a 4 year university.
I think that students who major in something like philosophy or literature are aware of what awaits them after college and are going into it with open eyes. Those that expect more than entry-level jobs immediately after college are simply failing to grasp reality.
That said, a good education, whatever the subject matter is DOES HELP people in their lives in ways which are hard to measure. Bright English lit majors who end up as waiters after college, don't necessarily remain as waiters for the rest of their careers.
The weird thing is, if you replace "want \"a good job\"" with "want \"a good education\", that sentence is still true.
You can get a good education at a library, a bookstore, fucking around on the internet, and more recently, MOOCs.
Universities are still useful if you want to advance the state of the art, discover something new, and so on. Not so good if you just want to learn things already known by others.
Perhaps in the future things will be different, the resources just aren't there right now.
There might be a sweet spot if you are dedicated enough not to just go through the motions at college and actually take advantage of it, and yet you are not motivated enough to do that outside of college.
For people with different interests, there is a trade-off.
What people really are looking for is vocational education, which is not what an undergraduate institution is good at doing.
Whether the method is specific career training or general education, a very big part of the end goal is employability. Otherwise we're talking about a completely different (probably much smaller and certainly worse funded) tertiary education system to the one that exists today.
Employability is important to people. That's reasonable. People are going to universities for this reason. They are taking loans for this reason. They are being funded by States for this reason. Unemployable graduates is a failure for Universities.
I think comments about general enrichment are moving the goal posts. That type of University is an extreme luxury item that only a few can afford.
And how do you measure "outcomes"? If you measure it by the first job students get out of college, that's very sad and short-sighted. To really understand the outcomes of education on careers, you need to look at the entire arc of a career-- NOT just the starting point.
Employ-ability is really up to the students themselves, NOT their university, and definitely NOT the particular department.
I don't know how you measure outcomes. As research facilities, employability is not a factor. I don't even know that studying anthropology and behavioral psychology is not effective at making people employable.
What I am saying is that the students, their parents, their government, society, expect that employability is an outcome of undergraduate education. This is why they are pouring so much resources into it. This is why it exists in the form that it does.
There is certainly room in the world for enrichment. I wish we had more of it. I'm always happy to hear about people taking time to do gap years, study tangental to career career goals. It's great. But, this is a consumption. It needs to be balanced with what you can afford and I think most undergraduate students cannot afford an undergraduate degree that does not leave them more employable in the long term. I don't think they signed up for that.
Lets be friends though, even if we disagree.
I agree that employability is something the students, parents and society _want_ after college.
But look at it this way, if a student decides to major in philosophy, whose fault is it if the student graduates and ends up as a admin-assistant on the first job out of college? It sounds like some want to blame the university system and that's wrong.
University makes you more employable in the sense that many companies are looking for well rounded individuals that show they have a dedication to learning. Did I need to take courses in studio art, afro-am, and comparative literature for my job as a programmer? No, but they made me a better person, citizen, and probably employee.
We also need to do better at advising young people about the debt they're about to incur before they go ahead and take those loans. It's very difficult at 18 to comprehend what having $28k in debt, on average, is like.
I'm not trying to move the goal posts, I'm just arguing that we need to set expectations a lot better.
Middle-class people don't typically spend years of their lives and tens of thousands of dollars on structured self-betterment activities.
Many people believe that an education is a good thing in its own right. Its a sad view of life that you're own betterment isn't worth any price. I guess its all for hedonistic pleasures then? Video games, movies, fancy car - those are the meaning of life?
* middle class
* structured
Also, if it were all for self-betterment, why have degrees at all? Why not just take classes that seemed worthwhile? Why have grades for that matter?
We have degrees to satisfy the need for some for closure, to recognize accomplishment, and to get old students out of there and make room for new ones. That a degree has been fastened onto as a job-training certificate is just unfortunate.
If we treated it like a necessary component of responsible citizenship, the duty of society to generate an educated voting populace, it would be a lot cheaper and people wouldn't be so upset walking away from college "just having become educated and being better, wiser people" without a job-training certificate.
Alternately, we could remove art/non-engineering science/humanities and give up on the idea of education and just have vocational training camps so every citizen can become a happy capitalist worker bee doing whatever their betters see fit to train them in.
But they really wish they could, and they actually believe they can, because there are always loans available to them.
I think the useless degree is an extreme form of luxury. You get to show others that you are rich (otherwise you would work or go to a vocational school) and that your money doesn't define you (because otherwise you would study something useful to make more money).
> A majority of graduates in the UK are getting jobs where they do not need a degree, according to a report.
But I have to say the three examples are not. Two of the three degrees are jobless anyway, and the one that isn't ("town planning") is extremely specific, and as the article said the dude just got unlucky.
Please list off what jobs are available for "conservation biology" and "politics and philosophy" which ARE degree specific.
If it is true that the "majority of graduates" aren't getting jobs where their degree applies, that is genuinely interesting, and something worth discussing. The rest of the article is just "I did a stupid degree and didn't get a job!"
>The rest of the article is just "I did a stupid degree and didn't get a job!"
This is interesting in itself. Why do people spend so much time and money on something like that?
The town planner was unlucky. Not much can be done about that.
The 'politics and philosophy guy' says he was misled. He does not say his age, but I bet he was young and immature when he chose his mayor.
The conservation biologist says she wanted to work in something that helps people and not just make money. If she had given half of the money she used to study biology to whichever organization she hoped would hire her, she would have saved money, time, and would have helped more.
The article doesn't really give an answer, but it raises an important question.
The whole thing is probably fallout from the Blairite changes to the system. It used to be that degrees were free and scarce - limited by academic admissions criteria. They have been changed to widespread and loan-based. People expect them to have the door-opening prestige of the old system and haven't really adapted to them becoming an expensive trade school for the middle class.
I understand that nobody wants to do the experiment with their own lives, but if you can realize that there are competent people who aren't getting hired because they lack college degrees, surely employers will realize that too.
Would they leave money on the table like that?
Probably because it makes them feel unique and special. It's a badge they can wear that sets them apart. Nobody really advertises that they're getting a History/Literature or CompSci/Engineering (or some other dime-a-dozen major) degree without being prompted, but I guarantee you that girl that's studying "Oriental Medicine and Horticulture" or that guy that's majoring in "Fermentation Sciences" are going to tell everyone they meet.
I agree that the examples in the article aren't great. I think "I did a stupid degree and didn't get a job!" is a bit unfair.
In my state-run sixth form college (age 16-18 in the UK) all students were encouraged to go to university. But unfortunately, and I think wrongly, many were encouraged to study subjects which required both exceptional talent and luck to end up working in the field, e.g. music technology, fine art, and photography. Fair enough if they want to do it for personal reasons, but a lot of people were sold university courses (by further and higher ed institutions) as a way into a careers that don't really exist or very few in number.
In the 1990s and earlier, one would undertake a degree, possibly in a strictly academic discipline such as history or philosophy, and, if one didn't then enter academia, one might (for example) join a Graduate Training Programme at a big company or the Civil Service, and become a management consultant, strategic analyst, policy advisor, or some other such position that is considered to require the kind of intellectual rigour that is supposed to be evidenced by achieving a degree. i.e. a "graduate level" position. Politics and Philosophy is exactly the kind of degree that such positions used to crave.
Now, such people are becoming bartenders, receptionists and estate agents, jobs that would historically have been occupied by those with little or no post-16 education.
I have no idea of the ratio of graduates of vocational vs academic degrees, but given the number of non-vocational degrees available, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of graduates have "jobless" degrees.
Also, given that the banking sector seems to be hoovering up graduates in numerate disciplines, and that a PhD is now often the entry requirement for Bench Science jobs. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of (e.g) Chemistry graduates are going into finance for big bucks now, instead of taking on a further 3-4 years of low wages to get the qualifications to start a relevant career.
I find the level of scorn that is nowadays placed on non-STEM pure academic degrees interesting, as though anything other than vocational education is a waste of time. When I was an undergraduate, it was shortly after all the polytechnics became universities. At that time scorn was mostly heaped upon all the new vocational degrees.
One way is that in the 90s most bartenders were high school educated. We as a society and they spent a lot of time and money educating them to University level for no reason. Bartending demands haven't change much. Taking that further though, a generation prior most bartenders were primary educated and that worked too. If we keep rolling back to illiterate bartenders we probably hit a point where the education is actually useful. You're better off to a literate bartender, but it seems like the 0-marginal-return-on-education for a bartender line was crossed before University.
If everyone is to be University educated (the trend leads here), then we'll either have no bartenders or university educated bartenders.
^Obviously, there was always a mix of education levels among bartenders. I'm talking about trends and volume.
Especially in the UK, your ordinary desk job can be a guy who studied anything, as long as he studied something.
OECD Education Indicators in Focus: What are the returns on higher education for individuals and countries?
http://www.oecd.org/edu/skills-beyond-school/Education%20Ind...