The latest NBC News poll shows two-thirds of registered voters down on the value proposition of a degree. A majority said degrees were worth the cost a dozen years ago.
Americans have grown sour on one of the longtime key ingredients of the American dream.
Almost two-thirds of registered voters say that a four-year college degree isn’t worth the cost, according to a new NBC News poll, a dramatic decline over the last decade.
Just 33% agree a four-year college degree is “worth the cost because people have a better chance to get a good job and earn more money over their lifetime,” while 63% agree more with the concept that it’s “not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off.”
Implementing other people’s broken garbage. As I feel I do that every day, what is it that you do for a living? Ha ha. Also, do you have any ideas for the future?
I do, I have a career goal I have been marching towards for some time but the momentum I had has stopped.
I joined the IT workforce during my generals at college, before the .com crash in the 90’s. I dropped out and have been working my way up ever since. I’ve led teams, I’ve been an architect, I’ve been a senior engineer, but I have always been after a director level role. No matter the experience though so far, the door is closed unless I have the degree.
So, I’m thinking about WGU, for an IT Management degree (maybe eventually a masters). It’s what I do every day, so I hope I can test out of a fair bit and the rest I should probably brush up on anyway.
I’m not after Fortune 500, I’ll go be a director for a balloon manufacturer or something, just a role where I can have a little of my own agency.
You and I were on much the same path at about the same time.
I saw this same thing as I was advancing. I made the hard (at the time) choice to keep my full time IT role and go back to school part time at the same time. I did part time three years Community College getting an Associates Degree. While not the director level, it did get me a better, higher paying, job. My new boss actually called out that degree as working in my favor to get the position. That company had tuition reimbursement, so while working that full time IT role, I took advantage of that to attend a university part time, and after another 3 years got my Bachelors. My Bachelors degree got me a more advanced role yet at a new org. That lead to far more advancement.
Here’s the good news. University work will be easy for you! You’ve grown into an adult with organizational skills, an awareness of your responsibilities, and time management skills. It will be significantly easier for you now, as an adult, than an 18 year old that doesn’t understand life yet. So I encourage you to do it! Figure out your degree program you want, and get a Plan of Study from a school. Enroll in a single course and see how you do. I think you’ll be surprised how manageable it is. Its time consuming, yes, but you’ll find the time. I kept to taking only 2 classes at a time, only term did I do 3 and it almost wrecked me while still doing my full time IT job.
I,m not sure this place you’re imagining exists the way you’re describing. Each level up just trades for a different yoke to bear. At the director level you could be given unrealistic KPIs to meet, or a slim budget to do so. You might find you can’t achieve what you want because you can’t get or keep competent staff. Even if you do everything right, market forces or regulatory change can nullify all your plans which are then made meaningless or ineffective.
As you get higher into management, firing people absolutely sucks. Keeping on dead weight/underperformers/overstaff instead of firing them means you are robbing your ability to give raises or advancement to the other workers you have that are really performing well. So you fire them, but it still sucks.
I don’t say any of this to discourage you. This has just been my experience. Perhaps you’ll navigate the river differently and find what you’re looking for when you advance. But seriously, you can totally get a Bachelors degree, and you don’t even need to quit your current job.
First of all, I can’t thank you enough for the thoughtful reply. Your experience in the first half of your reply is very valuable, and what I am hoping for in my journey.
I agree, it might not, but in my career, as I’ve advanced higher, I have found a new landscape to explore each time. I didn’t even get in to managing a team on purpose, I was the lead engineer on my team and my boss quit. I had no eye on the position, until the rest of my team got behind me and told both me and the company that they wanted me as their leader. It was then that I took stock of where I was going in my career and after doing that for a little while, I knew the direction I wanted to go. Despite my role turning from the day to day technical, to a more long term thinking type role, I found I enjoyed it greatly. I was able to re-shape the team to be more effective, and I made some tremendous improvements in our tech stack. Most of it didn’t come from me, it was things my team brought to me, and we worked to turn into proposals, with financial metrics and so forth. This was also where I got my first taste of Architecture, being put on the CAB, in charge of evaluating all the infrastructure requests and designs.
At the time I was sure it was the architecture and planning I enjoyed, so I accepted a position as an Architect with another company. In the end though, I realized that it wasn’t the technical work I enjoyed, it was mentoring and building a team. It felt great to be the guy who could help take the ideas that the team had, and build them into a workable business solution. I even enjoyed bringing my engineers back down to ground level; sometimes a really good idea, just isn’t workable in the current landscape. I wound up walking away from that job amicably to deal with some family health issues and now I’m stuck back in a Senior Engineer role, slowly dying of boredom.
Wholeheartedly agree, but I’ve also done this long enough, and seen enough of the type who need to go, that I am willing to act. I have not directly fired anyone, but I have been on the hiring, managing and I have had to develop performance review practices for the engineer that I wanted to fire, but did not have the authority to do so (was a good lesson, he eventually turned around, just after far more strikes than most places would tolerate).
Again, thank you so much for your input. I know a degree won’t fix every problem, but at this point, working on new ones is what I’m after. I’d change careers entirely but I don’t think I have the time, so instead I want to advance and see where it takes me.
I’m in the evaluation stage, trying to make sure I can stick to it if I embark on this journey. Discussions like this help a great deal.
You are ready and qualified for a management position right now. This is most of what I would want to hear if I was interviewing you for a leadership role.
A degree fixes one single problem that I couldn’t overcome any other way: meeting the requirement of having a bachelors degree which employers require. It will do the same for you.
I stayed in the evaluation stage for far too long. There are steps a few into the process which require actual commitment. The first few steps don’t. Do those first few starting next week. What I found was that I was missing critical information for my evaluation I couldn’t get any other way beside action.
If you’re interested I’m happy to share more tactical knowledge and experience about what to do next as a mature working IT professional wanting a degree. Let me know if you’re interested in that.
Once again, thank you so much. It means a lot coming from someone in the industry, who’s walked a similar path.
I have been making some moves. I am evaluating, but I don’t want to get stuck in analysis paralysis. I’m in the “what happens if my situation changes” stage, and right now, I still think having a degree will be a benefit.
Warning incoming wall of text!!!
There are two things I’d recommend you give some consideration to altering from what you described as your current path so far:
#1 Don’t go for an IT degree
You have decades of experience in IT. You are going to learn very little from trying to get a degree for an area of expertise you already know. Yes, you’d be able to test out of a bunch of stuff, but in the end you’re still going to have to take lots of classes that will be boring for you or worse, you’ll have to “learn it wrong” because of the gap between academic answers and what we both know from experience is how it works in the real working world. From my previously aborted attempt at college after high school I knew “getting bored with classwork” was one of my weaknesses. Pushing myself to do work I knew was useless or wrong is a large part of why I think I failed to complete the first time. You may or may not have the same issue as I did. At best, if you are successful getting an IT degree, you’ll likely have learned little to nothing more than you know now.
Consider instead getting a degree in an area you don’t know backwards and forwards already. I chose the business/marketing path. There are a number of reasons I liked this path:
The coursework is not generally difficult compared to technical IT material you and I have to consume on a regular basis for work. As I was doing full time IT at the same time, it was a really nice change of topic to be able to do coursework without getting more IT to deal with. It made it something to look forward to instead of dreading.
Having the business education gave me fantastic view of what the organizations I was working for were trying to achieve with IT, where the challenges existed we have almost no visibility to in IT, and the ability to speak the language of business to C suite executives while fully retaining all of my IT knowledge I already knew. This business communication ability alone I can point to for several specific instances where I was later successful in an IT objective because I was speaking their language.
As for the worry about having a degree not in IT, nobody cares what you get your Bachelors degree in. Employers always assume you did it after high school anyway, instead of as a mature adult. They just want the “degree” box checked for the hiring requirement. If you truly want a degree in the field you work in, do that as a graduate degree. There, it matters.
Its cheaper to get the degree! Business and marketing classes are available from far more schools on far more frequent schedules. This means you can shop on price for your school with far more schools to choose from and things like lab fees and textbooks were generally cheaper too.
#2 Don’t go to WGU as your school of choice
WGUs business model, as I’m sure you’re aware, is different than most schools. Instead of a “per credit hour” fee, you pay a flat fee “per term” that allows you to take all the classes you can handle. However, that flat fee requires nearly a full-time student course load to break even compared to other “per credit hour” schools. One the surface its a good deal. If you were quitting your full time job, I might recommend it. Instead, if you’re keeping your full time job that means you’re going to be paying FULL PRICE per term, but only able to take advantage of a small fraction of that high cost.
#3 Costs (bonus unsolicited advice!)
Avoid taking on debt for school! I’m hopeful that your employer has some sort of tuition reimbursement. Many do! Check into that and find out what the terms and conditions are. Though many have a golden handcuff clawback provision, they are usually limited to 1 year. So if your degree takes you 3 or 4 years to complete part-time, you quit your job immediately upon graduation, at worst you only pay back 1 year’s costs. Further, if you’re laid off you don’t even have to pay back that 1 year! For whatever isn’t covered, pay out of pocket if you can. This is also why choosing a cheaper school is important. You’re at an age you should be contributing heavier to retirement, not taking on student loan debt (again if you have the luxury to avoid it).
I’m not sure if you have done much if any college before, but if you have, its entirely possible that any courses you passed can still be applied to your new degree attempt. I had credits that were over 17 years old (English, History, Math) that fully applied to my new degree saving me time, money and effort. You’ll find out all of this when you pick a school and have your first talk with your assigned advisor.
As for picking a school, this part of the advice may be out-of-date so take it with a grain of salt. Avoid “online only” schools. These target people just like you that are working adults, but they charge a high premium because they know you have money. There is also a bit of a stigma with employers for some of these schools. Most state support schools which are bricks and mortar offer many online-only degrees. This means you can get a mostly or entirely online degree, from an actual accredited (seek regional accreditation only! “national” accreditation is a scam!), while getting low cost schooling from a school that is established and recognizable to employers as legitimate.
Select your 4 year school, and see which Community College credits they accept. Community college be the least expensive courses you can find, and have your advisor at the 4 year school confirm these CC classes transfer 100% into the 4 year school. Your Bachelors degree will say the 4 year school name. Nobody asks or cares where you completed your pre-req courses. Don’t pay high 4 year school prices when you can pay cheap 2 year school class prices! Also, frequently there is an Associates degree with 100% overlap with your Bachelors school. This means you can achieve a 2 year degree without having to spend all the time for bachelors before you have something to show for your work. I got a 20% pay raise with a better job just from my prior IT experience and my new Associates degree in business/marketing.
If I may be so bold, here’s your homework for next week:
100% of the above homework steps have ZERO COST and ZERO COMMITMENT! There is no reason for you to NOT do these things as these are the critical answers of evaluation info I was missing when I was taking too long to get going. The very first time you have cost or commitment is when you enroll in your first class. Start with just one. Use that to get in the grove with what school will demand of you. After than you can ramp up the number of courses at once. Again, I did a regular load of 2 courses at once as I found 3 to be too many.
I hope this is helpful info. If this was too much info, my apologies. If you have other questions, feel free to ask. I want you to be successful in this!
Not that I am suggesting that you do this, but no one checks degrees… especially if they were a while back. Double especially if it’s from an educational institution than has since shut down.
If this is your only setback and you already have the skills needed… 😇
I’m aware, but I am not built for that. Plus, I’m so established as someone without one in the industry that such deception would be instantly discovered.