The Great Master’s-Degree Swindle | Hacker News Reader

The Great Master’s-Degree Swindle

chronicle.com

43 pointsandrewl79 comments

“ Columbia were typically borrowing $181,000 apiece before entering a job market that pays less than $30,000”

The sickening part is hearing people not only defend this, but to attack and defame the good people who are speaking truth to power on this. It’s David and Goliath and the usual suspects, wealthy elite, attack David for trying to warn youngsters who will destroy their lives by taking on a debt burden that guarantees a lifetime of wage slavery. No honorable person can defend this.

And then people wonder why people get angry and want to burn the system down. This is the fault of universities not setting the right expectations. Drive students to where demand will be not fields with artificial cachet that have little return on investment.

These kids then sulk and bemoan society while they work at a coffee dhop that affords them higher pay than the degree they studied for affords them.

Are students really being driven to film or are there just enough people who want to be in film that they will do and try anything to succeed in it, no matter what it costs?

I have a really hard time believing Columbia made a credible argument that you can make a good salary in film.

The loans for low demand majors should not be guaranteed and those students should be allowed to default.

Majors in high demand and good with prospects can have guarantees. These can be re-evaluated periodically to adjust to demand.

Put more simply, loans should not be given out when there is a low chance they can be repayed. The term is “loan shark”. That this disproportionally enslaves minority and first generation college students makes it all the more outrageous.

This would likely just lead to oversupply of in demand fields and schools creating shoddy majors.

If everyone with a psych major switched to comp sci tomorrow one of two things would happen.

1) we’d have more engineers than we’d know what to do with - wages would collapse and companies would stop trying to conserve engineering time. Innovation would slow and we’d head back towards the days of J2EE etc.

2) universities would create fake versions of the majors that are guaranteed, but easy to pass and unlikely to lead to employment.

Presumably as CS or engineering oversupplied the market, loan guarantees would be removed and other majors in higher would get a boost instead.

Oversupply affects the current marginal negotiation power of employees. By the time loan guarantees are removed there can be massive gluts of workers who are locked into loans they can’t repay.

It couldn’t be worse than what we have now with kids going into dead end degrees and coming out loaded with debt that they can’t unload.

The universities go out of their way to give this impression by presenting “success cases” and misleading statistics.

Many of these students would rationally believe that studying “film” would lead to a shot in the film industry.

I highly recommend this video, where CaptainSparklez (one of the YT millionaires) discusses his decision to turn down an offer to pay 70K a year to get a CS degree in gaming (starts at the 15 minute mark).

https://youtu.be/TexLwzN_PiU

They never mention salary just the educational genres you could be studying. The way it is written I wouldn't think it was geared to studying hollywood movies nevermind a career.

https://arts.columbia.edu/programs-study/ma-film-and-media-s...

It does say: A few Teaching Assistantships are available. Student Service positions employ students as Programming Assistants and Research Assistants.

Academia is not elastic, many universities have limited spots for the in-demand classes like CS. For medicine, residencies are the limiting factor. Academia in general refuses to scale and be responsive to market demands.

Given what academia pays, I imagine that instruction jobs are hard to fill in CS.

The average medical student graduates with >$200k in debt, with medical residents earning an average of about $60k. But med student debt isn’t a problem because doctors earn much much more after completing their residency.

The article says “entering a job market that pays less than $30,000.” That doesn’t mean that masters holders earn that on average, or that that’s what they’ll be earning mid career.

Not to say that masters degrees aren’t a scam, nor that the article is being intentionally deceiving. But my guess is that it’s not quite as life destroying as it appears.

In many cases it’s disingenuous to argue that everyone will be in the same place as a medical student?

I know someone who spent similar amounts on a UX masters degree, and almost decade later was only finally hitting 100k/yr - in the SF Bay Area. Which cost of living/free cash flow perspective is probably even worse than your $60k/yr med student.

I’m not. What I’m saying is that you can’t compare someone’s debt level to their expected earnings one or two years out. It still entirely possible that masters degrees are a very bad deal, but the figures they show don’t fairly demonstrate that.

This is for a master's program in filmmaking at Columbia. For the most part we are talking about children of the elite and privileged being taken advantage of here.

If you’ve got that kind of money to burn on sending your kids there for funsies, is it even “being taken advantage of”?

Exactly. My point was this group is very willingly exploiting themselves.

A degree from an "elite" school costs about the same as an expensive luxury watch or car, and I'm sure that many applicants see such a degree as a prestige symbol that defies utilitarian value. Just because the author doesn't see the logic doesn't mean that there isn't any there, or that anyone is being swindled.

Are you saying that a luxury watch costs the same as a luxury car?

If that is true (which I find incredibly hard to believe) it literally makes no sense. The utility and the ability of a car to give you a ROI compared to a watch is almost infinitely more.

While the entry price for luxury watches is lower than it is for luxury cars, I see a fair amount of Pateks and APs that go for at least $100,000. There are many more exclusive models and companies that I know next to nothing about that are significantly more expensive, but you can get a sense of the wider market here: https://www.hodinkee.com/packages/all-the-new-watches-of-202.... And yes, I agree that the utility of a car far outweighs that of a mechanical watch. It's also why I believe that paying $150,000 for a fancy master's degree at a world-famous school is a pretty sweet deal for the wealthy and vain.

To be fair, a $150,000 watch can be re sold. High end watches hold their value incredibly well, and in some cases can even appreciate in value. Even luxury cars, which typically depreciate quite quickly, can be re-sold for a significant portion of their purchase price.

The same cannot be said of a $150,000 education, which cannot be re-sold. Perhaps in some cases a high value education can be turned into a higher value career, but that’s obviously not relevant to the hypothetical rich kid getting a film degree at Columbia.

Try a search for Patek Philippe watches. Some of the used ones are under $10k, but new ones go into the millions.

Depends what watches you’re talking about. For some brands $50k is the basic model.

I find it wild how often people choose online degrees and how that limits one of the most important features of education: exposure to other people and networking.

Does this depend on the field you are studying? I have 2 bachelors and a masters, all from in-person schooling when I was in my early to mid 20s. I’ve never had any contact with anyone I knew or worked with since leaving the university. Looking back, I can’t think of anyone I would have wanted to keep in touch with.

It might also depend on your school. My school has a great alumni culture, so randomly messaging other Queen’s alumni to get job intel and a referral is fairly common.

My friend at a different school has rarely received a reply doing that. There is no shared bond between U of Toronto people.

I think you are supposed to join a fraternity, or skull and bones, or quill and dagger. Think of how much power the Harvard network wields.

Not really, it mostly depends on ability to network. The main advantage some universities have is the degree to which they emphasize networking. Some fields I imagine do this as well.

If you didn't network in college, it's not surprising you graduated without one.

I am almost positive this depends upon how socially active and adept the individual is, and if they specifically seek and join internal societies that work at promoting this sort of post-grad networking.

I graduated from the Florida Institute of Technology and although I notice that Amazon is currently loaded with alumni from there, when I applied I received absolutely no "insider help" or whatever from anyone employed there.

Are these people you're witnessing employed as well? That would do it as well. For example, in the US military, to make major you used to need a Master's degree in... anything. So, everyone would do an easy one online in his or her spare time, to get promoted.

Yup, even in the CS world I now need to get a masters degree to officially do the job I’ve been doing for 3 years at a FAANG.

Credentialism is self perpetuating.

Is this true? Google and Amazon routinely spam me with recruitment emails and I don’t have a masters degree.

It’s required for a few job families (mainly in the sciences). There is also a bias towards PhDs in senior leadership roles.

There is a bit of dependency on the org, business, and existing staff.

If you're really going to do it, look into Georgia Tech's online MS in CS. The program is 100% online and is under $10k for all classes.

Hah I was actually filling out that application for the spring semester now! It’s a great deal relative to Columbia’s 120k remote CS masters program.

Depends on what you need it for.

In government, it is common for pay and promotions to be attached to certain educational levels. A teacher with a Masters can often earn more just according to the pay scales.

My grandfather used to teach, before teaching required a bachelors degree. He has a bachelors degree because he got paid more by taking more courses and if he had a degree. So he just figured out a way to cobble together nearby and cheap courses into a credential that got him a raise.

Do people getting a Masters in Film genuinely think that they will get a six figure job after it? Or a Masters in Positive Psychology?

Sure they aren’t just willing to be in debt forever to pursue their dreams like a lot of starving artists?

This is a bit of a catch-22. They need to be stupid so they don't realize it's a worthless degree. They also need to be smart because the admissions office only wants smart kids.

They're kids that don't know any better and these schools seem almost fraudulent by not being upfront about those career prospects.

It would be good to teach a class in high schools about degrees, careers and salaries so that they aren't just guessing based on feel.

If you are pursuing a Masters degree, I don't think you get the protection defined by being a "kid".

Young adults or whatever you want to call them. They don't know what they are signing up for.

When you’re 17 and many adults in your life say “follow your dreams,” and there is a low barrier to you and your classmates to taking out 200k loans, that skepticism would be low.

There are remarkably few 17 year olds signing up for Master's Degrees. There's a tremendous difference in development between a highschool grad and a 22 year old with 4 years of undergrad.

The parent comment and the article it is referring to are specifically discussing master's degree programs. No 17-year old would be applying to these programs. Most applicants would be in their late 20s or early 30s.

Ppl have been calling it unsustainable since 2013. As long as the college wage premium keeps widening, and there is zero evidence to suggest it isn't, then demand and tuition will keep going up.there are plenty of ppl here and on reddit making solid incomes and paying off student loan debt and also own home and other investment. Not all poverty as media portrays it.

Useful degrees like computer science are.. useful. Some of the other ones are almost (or maybe full on) fraudulent and prospects are dim for lots of people. People agree to pay for college out of the expectation that they will receive a salary that justifies that cost. Colleges have a pretty good idea of whether or not someone will have a good chance at a solid career and it seems really fraudulent to hide that from their students.

I think students could benefit greatly if high schools had a class about various degrees, career paths and their salaries. Kids are mostly just picking a track at random without knowing what it entails. I recall having a vague notion of being some kind of business man later in life so I decided to go that route. Thankfully it was boring enough to push me to computer science.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out an occupational handbook that outlines industries, jobs, expected job growth, salaries, credentials needed etc.

It isn’t well known which is a shame because it’s important information for anyone career / education planning.

Needs a title update: only applies to the US. In almost any other civilized country a master degree is (nearly) free.

I know people who have wasted resources on useless masters degrees, usually from for-profit schools who offer little learning and a credential with little value. I don't doubt there's a problem.

But I think there's a grave error in the framing of the issue, which is to measure degrees by only the latter, earnings, and not by the former, learning.

It hands over to the markets, and those who have influence in markets, the power to decide what is worth learning. While I think markets are powerful tools, we need to view them with a grain of salt - i.e., critically, the way we learn to examine things in school: they are distorted in reality (i.e., they are not theoretical ideal markets, some very far from it), and they yield many odd results. As one example, professional athletes, even those who never see the field, usually earn more than doctors and nurses saving lives, or more than the diplomatic and military leaders who are responsible for world peace and security, or more than the scientists discovering new states of matter. Wall Street employees make more than every teacher. Etc.

Our markets as they are don't reward arts, the study of history, the promotion of many social goods, basic science research, open source software, engineering privacy rights, any service to people who are poor and don't provide much revenue. That doesn't define the value of those things, or of learning those things.

It's entangled with market-based education, which requires schools to focus resources on revenue rather than on education. Again, it hands power to the markets, and to those who have influence in markets. It leads to schools investing in upgrading dorms or football programs, which attract wealthy people, rather than scholarships and assets that provide a return in education, not revenue. And it leads to useless masters degrees, but I certainly wouldn't include in that category a degree in film from Columbia, no matter how much the future earnings of the student (though market-based pricing certainly makes it too expensive).

You're citing that looking at earnings from different fields as the place the "market" doesn't belong. If the market has no place in labor compensation, the where does the market belong?

> You're citing that looking at earnings from different fields as the place the "market" doesn't belong. If the market has no place in labor compensation, the where does the market belong?

I'm not sure what you are interpreting from my post, or what your first sentence means, but I will try to answer:

The 'market', such as it is, determines earnings. It is deeply flawed but please don't take that to a logical extreme, that the market has "no place". For very many things, I think markets are the best solution; they are also 'free', as in freedom - not constraining individual's rights to act as they wish.

I am not an economist. My guess is that reducing distortions in the market mechanism might do wonders, particularly the distortion of imbalanced market power. For example, a single large employer has much greater power than a single employee, and thus has great leverage over them that doesn't yield economic outcomes.

Also, some things are not well served by market pricing. For example, the market serves those most motivated to pay, which is good, but also those most able to pay. Health care and education should not be distributed based on ability to pay. Another example is that the market serves work that is directly profitable. Some things don't generate profit or not quickly enough, such as basic scientific research.

It should be obvious that the recent deluge of (online) Master's programs from Harvard and other well known universities is a scam.

I think most people here are technical and would pursue a degree in a technical field so here's my personal criteria of what does and does not constitute an actual worthwhile Master's degree in science / engineering: it requires heavy calculus and other advanced math.

Programs that don't do that are generally decorated with "management" titles and/or implications, for example "Master's in Engineering Management" or "Master's in Cyber Security."

An online IT degree is how I got my foot in the door. Then I saved up money and went to engineering school. Which do you guess made the biggest difference to my world outlook and career?

Buyer beware.

What’s surprising to me is that these are not fly-by-night for profit scams. This is Columbia purely monetizing the name “Columbia”.

I guess the feeling is as long as the undergraduate program is among the most competitive in the country and the PhD’s are high quality, it doesn’t really dilute the brand.

But it feels kind of scummy.

On another note I have a friend who was a professor of film studies at USC, who was truly very bothered by their masters program, that it was predicated on a lie, and that for god’s sake, you’re in LA already - if you want to work in movies, get a job working in movies. A USC masters degree won’t hurt you certainly, but it’s a hell of a lot of money to spend.

Absolutely. But again my first degree came from an online program, and that was the only choice I had at the time (poor and deployed in Afghanistan much of that time). So they have a place. They're just not going to teach you to be an economist / engineer.

Agreed. My MSEE was invaluable, and the math in my Advanced Engineering Electromagnetics course was pretty hairy.

> Regulations that disqualify programs with high debt and low earnings from receiving federal aid would force universities to reappraise master’s degrees that frequently leave graduates in dire straits.

I think this is reasonable. My non-STEM Master's program was tuition free, because my field isn't particularly lucrative, but it is considered important enough to merit large numbers of scholarships. The only programs that would be hurt are those that are neither in the interest of the student nor society at large.

At Oxford and Cambridge in the UK one gets their Bachellor's degrees upgraded to Master's 2-3 years after graduating provided one hasn't been arrested or divorced.

What

Huh, I looked it up and that's sort of the case. But I don't think they "upgrade" your degree, they just award you the rank of "Master of Arts". This would appear to be entirely different from earning a Master of Engineering/Science/etc, or even an MA at any other school, which is an actual degree.

There was a whole ceremony and I have a certificate that says Master of Arts, it looks exactly the same as my certificate that says I have the degree Bachelor of Arts.

None of this is helped by the fact that the primary requirement for your degree is to be "touched by grace" after holding one of 5 fingers while a man called a Praelector says in Latin something to the effect of, "These 5 people holding my fingers are jolly good chaps and chapettes and should be given the degree of ..."

My CS MS paid for itself in under a year of work. In 1997.

It wasn't always awful, but now it's awful.

This is why my last teaching gig was at a place that used income share agreements; alternate payment methods need to be promoted. Starting a house in debt is a ball and chain that doesn't help anyone.

Accreditation is a major issue that needs addressing, as well.

"Anything different is good." --Phil, Groundhog Day

Recent and related:

Of 55 students in my class at Columbia’s Film program, 4 made a career out of it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27827592 - July 2021 (448 comments)

This article misses out on some of the most insidious behavior, exclusive PHD programs that require a Master's degree. They know they are asking a large pool of students to pay for the privilege to compete for a small number of spots.

Wow. I hadn't thought of that wrinkle. That's a particularly sleezy way to limit access.

A school may offer 6-8 PHD openings a year in a department, but have 3-4 times as many students enter the Master's degree program knowing most of them will never get into the PHD program.

Does an online master degree allow for an easier H1B visa? Genuinely asking.

I think that a masters degree always helped with an H1B visa. In addition, credentialism, as far as am aware has been proposed for the Green Card process and it is a point based system IIRC. In that case I think a masters degree would improve your standing*. I'm not clear how the Trump administration changed things in relation to visas and immigration so I'd also like to know where things stand now especially since perhaps the Biden administration may have rolled back or made additional tweaks.

An notable factor in the merit based system is that it discriminates against middle aged or older.

* A US based degree would be preferred according to the proposal.

If you don't want to sign up for the free account, you can read the text at:

https://outline.com/FLJHjc

Thx. I have heard the, it is easy to bypass signup-walls, pay-walls, etc. argument. I personally think that argument is foobar. But why can HN not have a filter option to simply not show such walled links? Surely, I'm not the only one peeved by these.

It would be nice to have an algorithm that shows you before clicking the link. Eg grays the text, and/or adds a moneybag unicode symbol.

However... this is muddied by the presence of workaround links like outline.com one in the comment you replied to.

Or disable JavaScript, or use the reader view in Safari.

I won’t bother. If they want fewer readers, fine by me. A shame to see the chronicle sink as it has but that’s capitalism for you.

Journalists need to eat too.

and pay off their masters degree loan :^)

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