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Comment by olegkikin | Hacker News Reader

Rather, don't waste money on a (financially) useless degree. If you want to learn arts or history or gender studies, there are much much cheaper ways than to dump $100K on your education.

I got downvoted before for stating that position, but HN has been a little hypocritical on that matter. On the one hand, when discussing issues of automation, many state that there will always be enough of jobs, we just have to educate people better and in the right fields.

On the other hand, I often see the statements that people should be able to learn (and get paid for it) anything they want.

I disagree with both of these positions.

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Notice the article was discussing biology degrees. Classic STEM. Chemistry is awful too. In reality STEM is now just TE. And The E may be collapsing soon too (and the T can't stay where it is forever, we don't need 150 million programmers in America).

So categorizing degrees into "useless" and "useful" is -- at best -- whistling past graveyards if you are still lucky to possess one of those "useful" degrees. Or maybe it's wishful thinking.

Majority of students follow the market and go for business degrees or similar. Gender studies or whatever are a bit of red herring - not that many students and mostly clustered on top schools - e.g. wealthy with connections (at which point their degree truly matters less).

HN is not made up of one person, but even if we assume it was, is it hypocritical? Education does not equal schooling. One could advocate for educating people better while not believing that the postsecondary school system that currently exists is sufficiently filling that role.

The problem is that the value of the degree is dropping significantly. I'm unemployed right now because all the tech support positions require a bachelor's degree. I already have a year and a half experience. Why should I have to go to college to get a position that should be entry level?

Tip: Ignore that 'requirement' as we all know its not one. Apply as usual, if it comes up, state your experince and enthusiasim are equivalent. They may pay you less, but seldom will the lack of degree in IT be a hard stop. The only trick is to bypass HR filters. I find talking first to the hiring manager before floating a cv works best. They can bypass the bs, and many are impressed that you did more than shoot another email in to the abyss.

The fact that this is the case is pretty terrible. And the only reason talking to the hiring manager first works is because it's not the norm. If everyone does it, the value is lost.

Same with the degree. When everyone has a degree, it's not special anymore. It's merely a way to get people in debt and transfer the cost of job training to the employee.

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