A Guide for Adults Going to College
npr.org
npr.org
Some insights I picked up along the way:
- community college have great professors
- community college treats you like the adult you are
- community college is underrated
- university treats you like a child
- university professors are more selfish and self-serving
- university is busy dealing with so much extra-curricular stuff that most adults don't care about, it makes you question your decision
- Different "schools" within the university do things differently
- as an adult, it sucks to work in groups with young students
- I picked up way more knowledge in the "real world" than I realized as a lot of what is being taught is redundant
- there should be 4 semesters a year, not 2, people should graduate in 2 years, not 4+
At the onset of this journey, I was enthusiastic to learn, but along the way I've been beat down to just wanting to get "the piece of paper" and be done. It's been a long three years and each day forward is increasingly difficult to stomach since I realized I can learn all of what is being taught to me faster on my own.
I don't think anyone needs a degree anymore to get to where they're going. However, it does make it easier depending on one's path.
Could you provide some more details about the community college curriculum you are talking about? To my knowledge, the local community colleges offer what is essentially the first two years of a university education, with a reduced emphasis on your actual major.
>each day forward is increasingly difficult to stomach since I realized I can learn all of what is being taught to me faster on my own.
This means that you are not taking advantage of the resources available to you. Typically, the advice to people with energy left over after classes is that they should contact the labs at their institution and become miniature grad students. You also should try to register for graduate level courses, talking to whoever is in charge at your institution if necessary. Universities offer many avenues for gifted students that want to do more work than everybody else, and I would say that fact is the main thing that separates them from community colleges.
But.
I feel that this should make it easier for an adult that would like to keep their job/income while attending school.
I also agree with most of your other gripes, having seen them at the large state school that I went to, but our neighboring state university (still a high quality school) was well known as a commuter school and went out of its way to accommodate adults. In essence, I don't think that your experience necessarily has to be universal.
P.S. Working in groups with young students is terrible even if you are a young student, and the only way I ever found to alleviate that was to select courses that were infamous for their difficulty. Easy class? Worthless group. Very hard class? Useful people that can be trusted to accomplish their part on their own time without supervision/hand holding.
> I don't think anyone needs a degree anymore to get to where they're going.
There are plenty of professions outside of tech where formalized education is held in the same regard as 100 years ago. The “times have changed” thing is very much a tech bubblethink. Good luck entering medicine or academia without a degree. There are outliers in these fields but that isn’t anything new.
Given that a PhD is basically a training course on how to be a professor, I think that one might actually be fair. The harshest criticism of PhDs is that they are only vocational training for professors, even.
The only reason to pay for college, the only value they have, is in the experience of the professors and what they can offer you one on one. Everything else is replicated outside the walls with far less effort than the cost of university.
Except for actually holding the degree.
And yes, the 100+ person classes are the introductory classes offered in first and second year before things get whittled down to something more personal. However, they really set the tone for those first couple of years, saying "You're not in high school anymore".
I'm sure the kids really appreciate the experience four years down the line when they can look back at sophomores in a real job and think "gosh, wasn't it great my first two years of college cost me 3-4 years of my post-graduate income and gave me the wonderful value for all that money of 'waking me up' to how hard college will be when I actually start getting value from it!"
At the onset of this journey, I was enthusiastic to learn, but along the way I've been beat down to just wanting to get "the piece of paper" and be done. It's been a long three years and each day forward is increasingly difficult to stomach since I realized I can learn all of what is being taught to me faster on my own.
The fact that it’s a 4-year slog is one of the factors that make university degree holders earn premium in the labor marketplace — conscientiousness, conformity and consistency required to slog through 4 years needed for school to certify it send employers a strong signal that you’re the kind of person who will do their job well. Thus, don’t give up, the paper certifying it is more important than the “education” you are getting.
In my career, everyone I've worked with had at least a Bachelor's. Most had a Master's and a few had a PhD. Only one did not finish undergrad.
I can assure you, people who hold a university degree are not particularly conscientious or consistent. I'll admit they probably do well in the "slog through mind numbingly boring work", but that's often a negative. Whenever I've been in a team full of people who have no problem doing the most tedious work you can imagine, the result have been the very same people tend to oppose ways to improve efficiency (usually "automate the boring work"). And the management doesn't care either (automating boring work will not help you in your career).
I don't want to work with people who don't mind really really boring work. I want to work with people who hate it enough to eliminate the need to do it. Engineers tend to be of the former category, and software people of the latter.
Also, depending on which school you go to, getting a degree from it is just its own skill. Knowing how to work the system (e.g. get previous years' homeworks and exams, etc) can play a big role.
I went to a low ranked undergrad and a top 5 grad school. My experience mirrors this person's if you substitute community college for undergrad and undergrad for grad. At the low ranked school, professors did not reuse homework or exams. They focused a lot more on what you were learning and less on how well you can do on the final exam. They had plenty of office hours - ranging from 3-12 hours a week (3 was considered low). Much fewer students per class. No TA's in between - faculty taught almost all the courses, and the office hours were with them.
There are down sides to a low ranked school (lack of smart peers and perhaps a slightly watered down curriculum), but I think quality of instruction is not one of them.
As someone who's spent a few years in undergrad CS at a decently ranked Russell Group university, I'd have to agree that this appears to be the case in the UK too. For some staff, teaching is clearly something they _have_ to do and effort is put in appropriately. Overcrowding is a pretty frequent issue and organisation is generally poor.
I've come to the conclusion I don't really care if the university is "research-intensive" because I've seen very little benefit from it. How much of a fundamentals course on data structures or software engineering is going to involve cutting edge research?
The TEF scores (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/news/what-tef-r...) over here have been pretty interesting too. A lot of the lower ranked institutions have come away with much higher results than some of the traditionally 'better' universities.
Well yes, of course. People don't go into academia because they want to teach. Academics are also not rewarded significantly for good teaching.
BTW, the low ranked university I went to was a research university. Professors got tenure/promotions based on that and not based on teaching. They still cared about teaching. It is at some level a matter of culture. If a top ranked university is worse when it comes to teaching, the reality is the university doesn't value education. Let's not use research as an excuse for poor education.
Undergraduate teaching ranks should be weighted more in overall rankings since that's supposed to be the school's primary function and all.
When student tuition fees make up the bulk of a department's income, is this reasonable and fair to students? Are they getting value for money?
Some institutions have separate teaching and research promotion tracks mapped to equivalent salary grades.
It's difficult to say, isn't it? How does one determine how much a university education "should" cost?
I don't see any easy solution. If we convert research-focused universities into teaching-focused institutions, what happens to the research? If we create new and separate teaching-focused institutions, who pays?
What matters is not whether they are very conscientious or consistent, but rather how conscientious or consistent relative to candidates who didn't earn the degree. Employers use this signal to perform statistical discrimination on their pool of applicants. The situation here is similar to the statistical discrimination that happens when you are shopping for car insurance: women pay lower premiums not because they are particularly safe drivers, but rather because they are safer (or less costly) than men, on average.
This kind of statistical discrimination, that is, using educational attainment to make hiring decision, is often somewhat illegal (based on straight reading of Griggs v. Duke Power Co., e.g. for most BA in History graduates it is hard to argue that their diploma is "reasonably related" to the jobs they are doing, but the employers will happily choose the graduate over someone with only high-school diploma). To my knowledge, however, nobody ever made an actual legal challenge, so employers happily keep using it.
I'll admit they probably do well in the "slog through mind numbingly boring work", but that's often a negative. Whenever I've been in a team full of people who have no problem doing the most tedious work you can imagine, the result have been the very same people tend to oppose ways to improve efficiency (usually "automate the boring work").
This may be true for people in highly-skilled jobs requiring high intelligence, which probably describes most of HN readers, but many other employers will value consistently slogging through mundane tasks over creativity and innovation.
I don't want to work with people who don't mind really really boring work. I want to work with people who hate it enough to eliminate the need to do it. Engineers tend to be of the former category, and software people of the latter.
So do I, but, as you noted, the management doesn't value these very much.
Also, depending on which school you go to, getting a degree from it is just its own skill. Knowing how to work the system (e.g. get previous years' homeworks and exams, etc) can play a big role.
Precisely. This is more important, considering that less than half of college students are proficient in reading (NAAL 2003), and the rest only has intermediate level or worse. The point here is that people tend to forget most everything they learn in school, so what they learn exactly doesn't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.
There are down sides to a low ranked school (lack of smart peers and perhaps a slightly watered down curriculum), but I think quality of instruction is not one of them.
Right. My understanding is that while teaching quality in low ranked schools is lower than in high ranked ones on average, there are still plenty of low ranked schools with high teaching quality, better than most high ranked ones. One might ask themselves then, why then are they lower ranked? The truth is that the education quality doesn't matter that much, what matters is student selection.
I don't particularly love those tasks either, but having to do them all because the alternative is to let project fail is something I don't want to go through again, ever.
There is a middle ground between the extremes :-)
I'm pretty sure you wouldn't want to work with people who insist on doing the same work manually that takes an hour, that could be scripted to take 2-3 minutes. And then they oppose your writing a script to do it. And I'm sure you wouldn't want to work there if your manager tells you that it would be awesome if you can automate it, but please understand our compensation policy will not allow us to reward you for increasing the team's productivity.
Except the manager, wherever I worked I had fixed salary and no special compensation for anything. Once in a while I would negotiate salary raise, but that is it. So it is kind of normal to me.
Aren't you on holiday for a lot of those 4 years?
I went to uni for 4 years, and it was 3 terms of 8 weeks each, per year. In other words, 96 weeks.
Throw in the occasional rest week and it should really fit in two years.
If you're just trying to get trained for a vocation, then yeah, you don't need 4 years. However, I do think a 4-year degree is a unique opportunity, and it shouldn't be seen as a screen for people who can slog so much as a fit question of "do you need the other things that come with a 4-year degree?"
I'd guess that a bit less than half of my 4 years was spent on academics, of which it was 2/3 CS degree and 1/3 liberal arts. The rest was summer internships, hobbies, personal projects, engineering teams, research, and just playing around as an 18-22 year old.
I agree with the parent poster's advice though. Outside of my academics, I learned skills like writing, speaking, organizing, diplomacy, etc. which you often learn anyway through work experience. People returning to school need that much less than people who never worked do, so there's no need for them to pay the time tax on extracurriculars.
I've found that every major personal change I've gone through - college, entering a career, moving cross-country, working at Google, being an entrepreneur, and even my relationship with my wife - took about 4-5 years before I was really comfortable on a gut level with my new life and could accept it as part of my identity. The actual technical material takes much less time to master - I found I was pretty competent at Javascript after 6 months, I could make major changes to Google at a year, I knew where most of the important things in the Bay Area were within a year, etc. But that's not really the point. The point is that when you go about your daily life, without thinking too much, have you internalized the value system and worldview that you're being educated into? It's the transition into unconscious competence.
Now, whether the university system teaches a worldview that correlates well with what you need for success in the rest of the world is another question. Just a couple months ago, the President of the U.S. was tweetstorming about academic brainwashing in universities. And depending how you squint, that may even be accurate - a worldview looks like brainwashing to people outside of that worldview. But the fact is that the vast majority of people in positions of wealth and power have been through those 4 years and have adopted that worldview, and doing so yourself will significantly reduce the friction as you interact with them.
Community college had a few great professors, but most were not good. They did not have high expectations for students, and it showed in the way that classes were taught. It was far too easy and most students were not prepared for the increased difficulty of STEM classes after they transferred.
I don't think my university treated me as a child, but they scheduled labs and exams in a way that expects you to be available at all hours. That made things difficult for the few adults students that have other obligations outside of school. I was lucky in that I could afford to quit work and focus 100% on school. Most adults can't do that, but it is the best way to learn quickly.
Professors were selfish and self-serving, but that never affected me until graduate school. The professors in the earlier engineering classes at the 100, 200, and 300 levels were outstanding and incomparable to any professor I had in community college. In general, they were unselfish and would go very far out of their way to help students succeed.
Different colleges within the university were very different. That shouldn't be a problem for a transfer student because you don't have that much interaction with colleges other than your own. I only took 3 classes outside of the College of Engineering.
I was a software developer for years before I got a degree, and I still learned a tremendous amount. I consider my time at university to be the best time of my life. I would not have my current job (at a FAANG) if not for what I learned in classes and research. In fact, I have never met anyone (at any company) in my subfield that does not have a degree.
1. Curious as to which sub-field you're currently working in 2. What was the impetus for you to make the decision to quit work full time and study again full-time? 3. When you say that you've not met anyone in your subfield that doesn't have a degree, how sure are you? I'd like to imagine that there are at least one or two that started school but didn't finish
2. Prior to going to school I was a full stack web dev. I was tired of the framework of the week treadmill and didn't think it was something I could find fulfilling for the next 20-30 years until retirement.
3. I'm very sure. Hardware is a different beast than software. In order to excel as a modern hardware designer you need all of the fundamental EE knowledge and a lot of the fundamental CS/programming knowledge.
The professors were underpaid and many of them didn't care -- some did care and were excellent teachers, but a lot of them were bitter about their career outcomes and just went through the motions. My best professors were the ones who had careers outside of the community college and taught part time, including a tenured professor at Stanford and a professional archeologist.
Honestly it's hard for me to recommend community college to people who are driven and dedicated to their educations, because so many of the other people in those institutions are not like that.
If I could go back in time I would gladly borrow an extra $20k to go to a university from the beginning. Over the time scale of a lifetime, or even just a decade, that's not a lot of money.
Given how little it pays to teach in a community college, I'm surprised there is any teacher who didn't care.
They genuinely liked to teach and loved it when they could get their students to care about a subject as much as they did themselves. You could tell they did it out of passion, and moreover, for the students.
Everyone has an anecdote.
Similarly, there were many professors who did not care at all. However, my girlfriend is currently attending the Ohio State University as a medical student, and similarly many professors either (a) do not care about their students or whether they are effectively teaching them material, or (b) have too many students and are unable to effectively teach them all.
While I attended some classes at the community college that had 150+ students (less than her largest classes, to be fair), those professors actually were some of the best I had. Maybe I just got lucky.
FWIW, she also attended Eastern Michigan University and Washtenaw Community College (with me) prior to this. The community college was her favorite.
In any case, there are plenty of skills I'd like to learn, or learn more about (e.g. mechanical skills, art skills, etc.) and without a doubt I would choose a community college -- and research my professors! -- over a university. In either case, you should pick your professors carefully; but the price difference (even on a software engineer's salary) is simply not worth going to a university IMO.
Don't forget that money spent at the beginning of your career is worth more than money spent at the end! (Assuming you're investing well.) Compounding interest and all.
The problem for me is that (like many people who didn't go to college the first time around) I didn't do particularly well in high school. And from what I've seen, the schools that won't hold my grades from 20 years ago against me are not better than the aforementioned community colleges.
Right now I'm doing a self-paced online thing... it's not better than a community college, but we will see how it turns out.
Even without the long projects, the vast majority of students in my CS and math classes couldn't have handled 2x the information. The shorter summer versions of hard classes always had a much higher fail rate.
At my university you could also take up to 21 hours if you had a good GPA, and you could go during the summer. If you could handle this, you could complete most degrees in 2.5 years.
I also didn't feel like my school treated me like a child, and 90% of my professors were fantastic.
When I had a class that covered a topic I was already familiar with, I used the opportunity to get even more familiar it with by tutoring, working on harder projects, and picking the professor's brain. I also took harder theoretical classes at every opportunity.
I worked as a programmer for almost a decade before i went back for CS, and I only had 2 classes that I thought were a waste of time (both practical non-theory classes taught by the same guy).
It depends on the subject in my experience.
At my school (major state university) undergraduate business school classes were run like high school. Attendance taken, assigned seats, pop quizes, etc.
Science and Math courses were most "adult" in their treatment of students.
Elective social sciences (100-level psych, sociology, history, political science, etc.) varied somewhere in between.
I completed all my English lit and writing requirements in high school so not sure how those classes worked things.
It's probably mostly a function of how much they feel the need to treat students like kids. Even though my university had a very highly ranked business school, business in general was kind of the refuge for people who wanted to go to college but weren't sure what they wanted to do.
>I completed all my English lit and writing requirements in high school so not sure how those classes worked things.
I took 1103 instead of 1101 and 1102 because that was a thing you could do if your SAT score was high enough. It was much less high school like than the business classes. World Lit was an elective and it was nothing like high school, no attendance requirements, and no grades except for a 2 papers.
I wish I hadn't rushed through though. The university experience is great. I wish I had socialized more, spent more time on side projects, and did internships in undergrad.
I spent way too long getting a useless degree in physics at Cal Poly SLO. They wouldn't let you switch majors (because every 17 year old knows what they want to do with their life) but it turns out changing schools is tough when your grades show you've hated your major the last 2 years.
The best thing I EVER did was sign up for classes at Santa Monica College after getting my Bachelor's. They're fantastic - this was a while back, but offering everything from Assembly to Android Dev and having great profs who actually listened to you was fantastic. I can't praise that school highly enough.
Funny enough, my wife and I both took German from _the same professor at the same time_. But I did it at SMC at night for basically free (I think $140 or so), and she paid a couple grand for the privilege at UCLA.
Community Colleges also don't destroy young lives with crushing debt that can never be discharged. We should be encouraging them and end with the cargo cult that is "everyone should go to a 4 year university"
The word "semester" literally means "six month" so you can only have two. What you might want is to have more work during these two period.
False, unless by "anyone" you mean people in the US. I'm from Colombia and back to college to get the degree because I can't find a job anywhere without it. In here 90% of job offers require a degree and some only count your experience after the graduation date.
Wondering if you would share any details on this and/or suggestions for traditional age students working with adults?
don't forget how much cheaper it is!
Since leaving university, I've found many situations where neither degree nor education matter much... and some where it did.
I'd believe many community colleges are underrated, and the modern university system has a lot of flaws and ways in which it poorly serves its participants (faculty and students alike), but the value in a specific path of participation seems a lot like a YMMV kindof thing.
My father went to university after WW2 on the GI Bill. They ran semesters year round, because there were so many vets wanting to go. End result was he graduated in 3 years.
With respect to academia, this point seems to come up a lot, which is highly dependent on school, subject, etc. But in my opinion, a lot of times it boils down to a couple things.
1. Research is your main job. 2. becoming tenured is basically your get out of jail free card. without doing something /legally/ wrong or ethically wrong, your salary is basically guaranteed until retirement. at R1 institutions, your main focus is publishing work to gain tenure.
by mixing the above two points, you produce professors who “treats you like a child.”
(I’m not a lawyer and am not an American either.)
https://bostonstudentloanlawyer.com/discharging-student-loan...
But you'll notice that it wasn't really talked about at the time in mainstream news (however, I knew about it as a progressive):
https://www.google.com/search?q=george+w+bush+student+loan+b...
For example, "student" is not mentioned on this page:
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/7575010/ns/business-personal_finan...
So many young people today think that this is how it always was, and don't realize that it's nonsense. Originally meant to decrease the deficit or whatnot, but having the opposite effect of raising the deficit as the US has become more uneducated and susceptible to ignorance.
Unfortunately a lot of other draconian legislation was passed at that time - see the DMCA, etc. Now that the truth is coming out though, there's hope that some of this can get reversed after 2020 if enough people learn about the true history of controversial issues like these.
a better comparison for an unsecured loan would be a credit card. please let me know if you find a credit card with anything near a 10% interest rate. afaik, the best rates are around 14% and only go to people with very good credit.
a private student loan is not a particularly safe debt to issue. even though the loan cannot be discharged, there is still a substantial risk that the borrower will never be able to pay it back. credit cards and personal loans are a pretty good comparison IMO, as the main difference is the fact that student loans cannot be discharged. this is in fact priced in already; even private student loans have much lower interest rates than any other kind of unsecured loan.
if you can't make your mortgage payments, eventually the bank sells your house and gets most of the principal back. the interest only has to cover the administrative cost of selling a few houses (possibly at a loss) and then it's all profit.
a certain fraction of people taking on student loans today will never make enough money to pay them off. now the interest has to be enough to actually cover the risk of the lender losing all that money.
even 13% is pretty good for an unsecured loan. according to nerdwallet's loan calculator, this is basically as good as it gets for unsecured personal loans in general. [0]
[0] https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/personal-loan-calculat...
Of course, some people take on student loans and fail to graduate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/business/dealbook/educati...
We don't need millions of people learning unproductive things for excessive prices.
Obvious people who can afford to learn something for fun can do so, and knowledge that is socially valuable but not economically valuable can be supported by government or private patrons who see the social merit. Both are better than duping kids into huge loans.
Unfortunately it is a matter of voting blue enough, not just blue. In some areas politicians, even Democrats, regularly relate to their constituents by bashing "East cost liberal elites" despite having degrees from Ivy League schools. If Doug Jones had said that a liberal arts education is valuable for developing into a well-rounded citizen his race would have ended then and there.
Even so, this comment is very interesting to me.
I frequently see on Hacker News the sentiment that modern higher education is a bubble. That if we don't actively encourage young people to consider a life in the skilled trades, we should at least be teaching respect for those who do.
But at the same time, it's hard to ignore the open derision toward non-college grads.
I mean, in this particular example, why SHOULD non-college grads support a politician's promises to subsidize colleges, at the expense of other more direct interests? There are obvious cultural/tribal resentments in play, as you're talking about transferring wealth from one class to another class which openly looks down upon the first. But even separating emotion from it, it's hard to criticize strawmen for opposing policy that might well reasonably be seen as voting against their own interests.
George W. Bush famously spoke of following his "gut" when asked about his decision process concerning foreign policy. In doing so science, research and general means of informed decision-making were dismissed as a way for an elitist to tell laborers that they're too stupid to understand his thought process. The hypocrisy is that he himself went to Yale and Harvard and clearly values higher education; he joined the same secret society at Yale to which his father and grand-father had belonged. This trend has continued to the point that lowly insults are preferred by most voters over policy discussion. This is true of both parties. (e.g. "Pocahontas", "motherfucker")
The reality is that education in and of itself is a societal equalizer. A liberal arts education was developed in the ancient world to equip people with the skills that they needed to live freely as members of a society: logical reasoning, self-expression and the ability to record your thoughts and interpret the thoughts of others. We now speak of education in terms of time commitment and expected pay-off, the massive debt considered an unavoidable nuisance. It is often after a child has selected a college or university that they consider how they will pay (or accrue debt) for it. The elites know that education is a equalizer and that is why they try so hard to frame it as a tool for the enemy of the common people. The last thing that the elites would want is commoners getting wise. When common people do see the value of education they are buried in debt to stifle their upward mobility.
To answer your question, non-college graduates should support the subsidization of higher education because nothing could do more to serve them and their interests. For the time being tough, pursuing an education may mean separating the concept of education from what we have learned to think of as an educational institution. I don't have a college degree and I don't want one (i.e. I don't want to earn one at this time) but I am convinced by the reasoning behind supporting education that has been repeated for thousands of years. In my opinion it is tantamount to supporting the advancement of human civilization and right now we desperately need a renaissance.
Do I get a credit of some sort and how large should that credit be?
I have debts too friend.
The "best" college educations typically take 4 to 10 years to reach a break even point. Some degrees can result in a net loss of lifetime income.
The older you get, typically the less monetary sense a degree makes. Couple this with an open admissions degree from a for profit college and you are likely on thin ice.
If you (as a returning adult) want to continue your education, that is great. Just make sure you are doing it for the right reasons.
Everyone else was about 20, partying and drinking, and I was studying 100% and working 50%. It was kind of hard and I'm about 10 years late with my life (compared to everyone else at work) but I finally feel that I am doing something which is challenging and fun at work and I earn a lot more than before.
The only bad thing is the biological clock not stopping to match everything else ^^.
Well I would agree, but since the UK adopted the US model of university funding, it's too late, and has been for some time.
I'd love to career change into something different. £27k of tuition fees and three years not earning makes it a £150k+ proposition. No matter how bored I've become with tech after 30 years that's a big ask. Open University charges the same fees now or that would have been an easy and obvious route. Just as it was for my aunt who did a OU degree in her seventies "for fun". From what I hear from the kids university isn't as appealing either as they've become ever more commercial.
Friends who are in lower paying careers are even more stuck. The push to get 50% of the population with a degree means even the most lowly jobs and careers often now require a degree.
I guess when I become too much the curmudgeonly old git I'll take early retirement and do some part time gardening, handyman or some such. Shame for the govt about the tax I won't be paying. :)
Especially as technology means a lot of lectures could be given online with just needing to sit exams, do labs (for certain subjects) etc.
Honestly Corbyn's idea of the National Education Service (i.e. access to education from cradle to grave) would easily win my vote if it wasn't for his Brexit support...
I finished my masters here, I consider the education quality reasonably good (hey, I even helped my theis advisor to publish a paper :) and I worked part-time for most of the time.
Friend of mine just finished his BCs, while supporting his partners a family and working part-time.
I think my real-world experience would help me a lot here, particularly if I applied to a CS program, but I'm not sure. I will speak to admissions counseling soon to get their feedback, but if anyone here has similar experience, I'd love to hear about it.
My advice would be to also reach out to the department admin and or department chair of the department you are interested in (CS at USC?) with a brief email. Even try to arrange a visit. If you get a chance to speak with them, explain you are nontrad student with industry experience and prior college credits with a minor blemish on your record. I can't imagine why they wouldn't let you in!
Disclaimer: I'm a prof.
I wish I could afford USC but I've used up most of my grants and blown past six figures so I would get no help, but I'm fine with a UC or Cal State :)
The UC schools and Cal State are all very fine universities. Good luck!
https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/courses/msc-softwar...
Applicants are normaly expected to be predicted or have achieved a first-class or strong upper second-class undergraduate degree with honours (or equivalent international qualifications), as a minimum, in a related subject, such as computer science, informatics or engineering. For applicants with a degree from the USA, the minimum GPA sought is 3.5 out of 4.0. Applications are invited from anyone with sufficient experience or proven ability in software, security, or data engineering. A typical applicant will have at least two years' experience in a professional environment, and an undergraduate degree in a related subject. However, more extensive experience may compensate for a lack of formal qualifications, and a strong, immediately-relevant qualification may compensate for a lack of professional experience. Emphasis not in original
www.reddit.com/r/omscs
The Master’s itself costs less than $10K still but you’d need to do enough undergraduate courses to have credits sufficient for a Bachelor’s, though I don’t think you actually need to be awarded one. So if I remember right you’d need to do a year’s worth of coursework towards a Bachelor’s and then you’d be admittable. Not sure though, ask in the subreddit.
With student debts and the rise of alternative tracks, we may be very close to a rapid tipping point, where the apparent safety of the traditional credentials – with stodgier institutions – collapses quickly.
And, the university system of 2019 isn't quite the same thing as the university system that gave us "the very Internet… used to type this comment" and other advances. It's a several-generations-removed descendant, with much higher costs, larger bureaucracy, more bundled tangential "lifestyle" services, heavier political loads, and so forth.
That some legacy university research has historically generated societal dividends isn't necessarily relevant to a prospective undergrad in 2019. That's especially so for those struggling with the kinds of questions addressed by the 'Never Too Late' book, like "What do I do if it's been ages since I took algebra?" They need efficient instruction. The fact that groundbreaking grant-funded research by graduate students might be happening in a nearby building is about as relevant as their school's football ranking in the Top-25 polls.
The problem with alternative tracks is that they bottle neck you. They often teach you a technology, they don't teach you an actual skill. Of course, its not that this isn't important, but the fundamentals take you much further because they're not tied to anything specific. Coupled with the knowledge of a technology, it can help you understand what you're doing and what the limitations are. Also, universities are pretty well rounded in terms of learning so they teach you about being a better person instead of being a coder like in a code camp.
Not only that, most popular MOOC sites are run by universities such as MIT, Coursera, and EdX. In fact the most top voted courses on https://hn.academy/ are from universities.
Sure it isn't the same generations ago, but you're highlighting problems that aren't inherent to the idea of the university itself. Costs can be reduced, bureaucracies trimmed, "lifestyle services" is basically the business of the Internet due to rampant self-help, not sure what you mean by "heavier political loads".
"What do I do if it's been ages since I took algebra?" is something you shouldn't address by going to university, you're correct. But if you expect to just learn an entire profession by reading a bunch of Internet articles, doing some exercises/projects, and expect to walk into companies, you're still a far cry, especially from the more demanding law/engineering/MD professions.
So I don't know if this anecdote helps, but I've been out of school for a few years now since I last attended—
I had to set an appointment with an administrator/registrar who wanted to discuss what I've been doing (work history, bit of life history—but these were more for their understanding than formally required), but ultimately the process for me, should I decide to move forward was:
* re-register (a quick form and small fee)
* the usual rigamarole— get my new student ID, register for courses when available, and carry on.
It was remarkably simpler than I thought it would be—even with the potential for switching programs and internal schools altogether.
I've thought about going back to finish the degree, but it's hard to see it as worth $60k/year.
We both have Masters and an MBA in our respective fields. The next innings will be based on our current experience (30+ years) and our education, but hoping to apply it in a macro, policy framework, for which will go back to study.
Nursing/PA is decent pay, always work opportunities, can't get outsourced (easily). You also don't have BS job interviews. If you have updated certifications and aren't an ass... Hired! You also get continuation education too!
I also like that it's hourly. The hospital needs you for OT? More money. As you get older and have more money, less expenses you can choose to work less and enjoy free time. Unless you are freelance or consulting, software doesn't have that flexibility.
Maybe in a few years...
Counterpoints (if in the US):
Capitalism is a real thing. If you work in a hospital you will be pushed to the point where things are unsafe for the patient, and if something goes wrong, you will be blamed and lose your license. A culture exists where everyone tries to cover their ass.
If you work as a contractor (i.e. you work for a firm that sends you to different hospitals based on shortages), you will be the first person to be blamed.
Unlike in tech, seniority is the main way to get better salaries and benefits. You won't get too far by performing really well.
The attitudes and behavior of fellow coworkers (nurses and nurse assistants) would be considered quite unprofessional in a typical engineering workplace.
Depending on which unit you work, patients can be horrible. You'll get all kinds of attitudes. Psychopaths, etc.
If you stick to it, expect long term injuries:
https://www.npr.org/series/385540559/injured-nurses
"James Collins, a research manager in the NIOSH Division of Safety Research, says before studying back injuries among nursing employees, he focused on auto factory workers. His subjects were "93 percent men, heavily tattooed, macho workforce, Harley-Davidson rider type guys," he says. "And they were prohibited from lifting over 35 pounds through the course of their work."
Nursing employees in a typical hospital lift far heavier patients a dozen or more times every day.
"That was my biggest shock and surprise," Collins says. "And the big deal is, the injuries are so severe that for many people, they're career-ending.""
(Experience will vary with what type of nursing you work - some nursing is a lot milder - but pays less).
It's quite a contrast to what we hear about in tech.
It helps that I work remotely. Very few see my grey beard and get the chance to see how inflexible I am because of my age, so I get the respect due a younger person.
I wish I had understood what it must have been like for him since there was nobody else in the building under 25. I know he had a sense of humor as I saw him once bring a date (around his age) back to his room.
But though we talked a bit I couldn't really comprehend what someone twice my age thought about being a student...and now I'm 17 years older than he was at the time I'd be fascinated to know.
FWIW, I also discovered there are two types of law degree. A Harvard law degree and a non-Harvard law degree. It was quite an eye opener that one.
Remember there's no guarantee that going back to school will net you the job you want but it's a guarantee that you will go into crippling debt that will follow you for the rest of your life.
Unless of course your company is paying for you to go back to school then why not.
Where are the vocational courses in edx?
Where are the teaching assistants and the study groups?
Where are the 12+ course bachelors-degree curricula?
The daughter of one of my friends had a baby at age 16, was allowed to graduate from high school early (i.e., kicked out), and got an online degree from a good university. She said the hardest part was the sheer boredom, sitting at home in front of a computer all day.
I don't think I'd want it any other way these days (oh wow, 15 years later) or feel that anything except the first week was tailored to people fresh from school. Sure - people taking courses around their work schedule is a problem, but it's a totally different problem. Either you know it's supposed to be a fulltime course, or it's not.
Also, maybe I'm a little biased for having majored in Computer Science, so mostly everything was digital or online even back then. But smartphones would make coordination with other people so much easier than email and texts... Or maybe American (live-in / campus) colleges are really that different from German universities that I simply cannot imagine the problems this book would show :P
And then are entry level jobs open to older adults?
How would you design your resume? Leave your past career off?
Edit: This was originally in response to a suggestion that OP would be uncomfortable asking a 40 year old for coffee which has since been edited.
This isn't what interns do at any reputable technology company.
My experience is interns usually try the big cool new ideas, because it frees up the regular people to bring work to production and it doesn't matter so much if the interns try something and it doesn't work?
Can confirm, have interned at 3 of the big $N.
I got to try out radical new ideas and was given a surprising amount of freedom.
I tracked one recruiter down recently and she basically told me she’s convinced I will not stick around once I feel the pinch of the salary reduction. She said she didn’t want to be hiring for the same job again in 6 months.
I’m not sure that’s the whole truth, or if the others would say the same thing.
Now I’m trying a hybrid solution, of freelancing gigs in grants and proposals part time and doing technical work part time. I’m also focusing my work on tech-centric topics whenever possible. But I usually can’t conteol that.
I’m also considering supplementing my current education with CS classes, and picking up a few more certs. But I’m not sure those will have a good return on investment.
Meanwhile I think persistence in bidding on jobs will be the ultimate solution.
Maybe I should go to the companies where I know that position exists and proactively bid on a position, rather than waiting for one to open up.
Thanks for the idea!
Thanks for the input. I’m going to broaden my search and look for these roles, and see what happens.
At an internship I lived with a fellow intern that was 12 years older than me (I was also a bit older compared to most of the interns since I was a PhD student). Everyone seemed to treat him the same and he got a full-time offer. I don't think the others ever realized he had 10 years experience and a degree in something completely different!
My idea was that some one might see my atypical CV and think outside the box about hiring.
http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/nassim-nicholas-taleb...
The problem is, a 4 year degree "if done right" is building on a body of knowledge. you can't "do" year 4 without the core competencies in years 1,2 and 3.
So, (and I admit I didn't read your article) I ask if you address the neccessary linkage problem.
Because a chain of 4 small bets is what we call a quinella or trifecta, and in betting circles its high payoff, but low likelihood: It may be better to commit to the whole big package than assume you can bite of chunks and always get the same value.
A midpoint model, is to do 1 or 2 years, get a low degree, then do 2 or 3 more and specialize for a high degree.
But why those two? Even if you are solely focused on prestige in the most superficial sense, there are at least a few more comparable US universities. You could increase your number of options by 5x or 10x even being very picky.
These classes are offered under a program called "Harvard Extension School", and they are the same exact classes that students who got accepted the "normal" way, take.
It even gets you a degree.
If what you care about is the education and resources offered by Harvard, they are available for the taking, and they are the same exact classes offered to "regular" students.
My last class, in the fall, was a course that was offered online for the first time ever. We had a bunch of Harvard College students in-person and a bunch of Harvard Extension students online watching the lectures live (they are also recorded). Office hours with TAs were live-streamed and interactive between in-person and online students, we had the same homework and exams, etc. The professor even gave out his cell phone number so we could text questions directly to him.
The professor asked us all about our interest in a particular class that they had been asked about offering online. As it turns out, Harvard is fairly open about offering almost any of their courses online if you can show that demand warrants it, the professor supports it, and that you can get the TA slots filled.
The only downside is very very few show up for class since they're often taped and can be viewed remotely, which makes for a strange dynamic. Teachers watch the class for feedback, and its difficult to teach against nothing. My genomics class had about 5-6 people actually going to the class, but about 30-40 showing up for the exams.
(my credentials: I graded for Harvard Extension School multivar calc one summer. That guy was far from a harvard professor....)
I graduated last year September at the age of 36 and I am no longer considered an IT dropout or self-taught Programmer. Reason I decided to go back to school was because I was always considered a self-taught Programmer, even though I was taught programming in a formal qualification which I didn't finish. The fact that I finished all programming related modules and was only left with 3-4 Electrical Engineering related modules, didn't help.
Studying when you are older is easier because you are doing it with a purpose. Plus when you are older, you spend more time at home and party less. Freeing more time for studying. The course I did, was heavy in programming, mobile app development and web design. Something I have been doing for over 10 years before I decided to go back to studying.
Colleges have stupid games based on a point system to get in. The games are HEAVILY biased towards people just out of high school. You only get points for shit like having taken classes at the school before or your parents being alumni. Having real world working experience doesn't give you any points.
My wife was thinking about going to nursing school. In order for her to do that she would need to quit her job take random classes for the _chance_ to eventually get into a program. We're ready to pay cash for the program which she would certainly succeed in, but there is just no chance. Was a real bummer once we realized this.
I guess this all makes sense, just frustrating.
Anybody in US should seriously consider it an option for higher learning.
FYT i did a post graduate Diploma in QUality Assurance with specialty in software engineering through Massey with course work done 1993-95 and finally delivered my project in 1997 after changing countries and jobs. Cant praise them enough.
Networking with professors? Working at the university? Or finding an employer that subsidizes grad school? Haven't seen too much on my radar in this area but have heard there are unconventional ways to offset the cost or level up by leveraging my network & career.
(For context - I'm in my late 30's, ~17 years in tech though my degree is from a trade art school, and in an engineering management role these days in Los Angeles. I've been seriously considering grad school either for CS or MBA.)
I'm a big fan of anyone wanting to further their education for whatever the reason -- and I do wish I could sometimes just study really interesting subjects again -- but for a lot of working professionals, I sometimes wonder if the degree will really matter?
Obviously, some professions are different than others and really do require a certain degree to even get in the door (medicine, law, sciences), but by the time I was 34, I'd managed to successfully build two careers in different disciplines, and neither was the focus of my degree. (And I took forever to graduate.)
Every person and situation is different so I don't want to pretend my experiences are prescriptive for anyone else -- but what I value about my undergrad experience is much less "what I learned" and the experiences I had growing up, having time to explore things I care about, etc.
Frankly, I wish there was a collegiate equivalent of a GED that would cover undergrad required classes like a science, a math class, english lit, history, etc. Make people take the actual degree classes, but allow people to test out of all the basic requirements (I realize CLEP allows for some of this but CLEP isn't accepted everywhere and there can be CLEP caps for credits). I feel like for a lot of adult learners, this would greatly reduce the mental challenge of "going back."
What I wish this had touched on more is the pervasive and predatory nature of for-profit colleges and universities. I'm all for anyone going back to school, but it makes me sick when people pay tens of thousands of dollars for bad programs from fro-profit places that have a very small chance at even helping them get a better job.
Lol. So I've been reading stuff about our ideas of free will; most recently David Orr's book on Frost; but the quote above really sounds like they're suggesting we decide to do something and then need to "identify what it is that's motivating you" I.E. to rationalize it.
I'm not saying they're wrong, it's just a funny way to put it.
There are multiple companies whose engineering headcount growth YOY is bigger than the total number of annual CS + bootcamp grads in the US.
Yes, there are a lot more engineers coming on board now. But the growth in demand is mind-boggling.
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1082101947795091458?s=21
In case you were wondering whether the engineering hiring market was slowing down, here’s Amazon deploying probably every YC company combined on one product: https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-says-it-has-over-10-000-...
A quick example on that, her school system (one of the largest in the nation) instructs her to let the kids who don't want to listen to a book to roll around, yell, play. Then she's to pull them aside later on and teach them one-on-one, while the rest are napping. That's not only disruptive, but it's not feasible. I think this culture change (it was not this way when I was in elementary in the 1980s), has doomed generations to wandering around the streets aimlessly. Possibly using drugs as so many are today, as immigrants come in and completely obliterate them from the job market. I'm not an immigrant but I say, let the strong survive and weaker cultures, like ours is becoming, collapse into mediocrity. The lucky ones who get the opportunity to turn it around later in life will be looking at "the guide for adults going to college" today, 1 year from now, 5 years from now, 50 years from now. My wife and I believe that you can't really learn without a baseline of discipline. There's enough distractions as it is and bad families to fight against.
Kids need guidance. They don't actually know anything. The people who let their kid choose a hamburger vs hot dog vs grilled cheese for 15 minutes in a fast food joint? That's a small example of the problem. A child doesn't know what he's even picking, or what he even likes. You give him something, you very strongly encourage him finish his food, and next time he may have a better idea on what he wants. That's a long-lost art of parenting in the west. Everyone treats children like they're 35 years old. Unless it's about going outside and playing, where they could truly learn about choices and consequences.
Second point, on the the "formal education is obsolete" crowd. I needed a bachelors degree and truly enjoyed the directed-learning experience, otherwise I'm self-taught. People like to say they're all self-taught, but people who also do school, do both. There's not additional real-world experience that you gleam because you don't go to school. It's nice to get evidence for your learning as well (a degree) and directed-learning is incredibly valuable, you're exposed to things that the vast majority won't expose themselves to otherwise. People who call for the end of traditional education because Youtube or websites exist are just wishing upon a star that things get easier.
Further on formal education, community college is amazing. I also have an Associate of Applied Science degree. In fact, if I were to do it all over again, I would likely pick electrician/HVAC/plumbing/welding for my AA/AS and get a BA in Education or BS in CompSci, to really cover being employable. I've spent a lifetime programming, and truly benefited from some online sources as well, especially Pluralsight, though most instructors there are well-vetted professionals, many authors there are not the best in designing coursework. Purposefully checking into algorithms and some of the math behind it all was also helpful. That's where lack of an education background causes one to fall apart, people online do not know about how to educate, and you don't know what you don't know to even look into, and why traditional directed education is as relevant as ever.
A third thing people miss, if you care about the best learning experience. Many people seek a degree to get a job, it doesn't earn you a job or even make you employable, it earns you credibility. I wouldn't go to school unless you have a thirst for learning, because to put it to work in a beyond mediocre fashion, will require continuous learning.
My gut says this is a scam.
If someone does so and makes it work, that's wonderful, but at least around here I can't see a business owner tolerating someone with age but not experience, especially with legions of twentysomethings beating down the doors begging for a job before the rent savings run out.
But why would they care if two people have the same experience but one is older? What difference does it make that they wouldn't tolerate?
Step 1 - provide free advice.
Step 2 - ?
If you perceive otherwise, then it is very possible that you are encountering one or both of the following:
1. A highly-local expectation, in your particular community/family/friend-groups. You may need to move.
2. A hyper-local expectation, in your own mind. It might be justified by the particular path through experiences you've had, but now become self-reinforcing & self-defeating. To see counterexamples, against human tendencies for confirmation-bias and negativity, you may have to deeply consider that you might be wrong, and that your sampling of the possibility space has been unrepresentative.
citation needed.