Everyone I know with a good degree is paying off student loans 8+ years later. Universities are having so many issues on so many levels from funding to finding professors both qualified and willing to teach to politics. And on top of all that the global economy is collapsing.
I get that a lot of you spent a lot of money on a degree and will defend that as the right choice but you’re old now. The world is changing and expecting to find a job out of college with an infosec or compsci degree is wishful thinking at best without ivy league nepotism. The world you grew up in is dying, gradstudents with chatgpt are teaching classes and freshmen are using deepseek to do course work. I know a nursing student right now who has seen the curve her class graded on and it’s terrifying.
So that’s my long unpopular opinion. A degree will not get you a job anymore and even if it did the quality of the education has dropped dramatically at most schools. You might as well spend the money on a country club membership, the social connections are a better deal.
A degree is absolutely something I value heavily in applicants. Not because of the specific courses taken, but because what it says about the potential employee.
It says that they can complete a years-long project with disparate, often competing sub-projects, milestones, deliverable dates, and revolving team members while being self-managed. And due to core curricula, they’ve also proven a baseline knowledge unrelated to their specific degree. That may not sound useful, but someone who’s skillet is solely specialized work may have trouble navigating ancillary tasks that are part of the working environment. The best [insert technical skill] person in the world isn’t going to be a good employee if they can’t work in a team, prepare a report, respond appropriately and professionally to emails, document their work, develop/follow SOPs required for project handoff, deliver a presentation, etc.
Getting any college degree requires a baseline skillset that is valuable. Not having a degree doesn’t mean you can’t do all those things, but when I’ve got 40 applications I’m looking at, I can’t interview everyone. It’s a huge bonus to have a degree that tells me you have proven a minimum competency.
The best [insert technical skill] person in the world isn’t going to be a good employee if they can’t work in a team, prepare a report, respond appropriately and professionally to emails, document their work, develop/follow SOPs required for project handoff, deliver a presentation, etc.
And the quality of your candidates will continue to drop. The system is failing you too just slower.
I’m not so much saying degrees are useless as saying they mean less, the ROI for going in general has shifted. We’re at a point where 2 and 4 year degrees look good to employers but are financially foolish for students. If you can afford to go it’s valable. But the proposition of student loans make less sense by the day.
Degrees don’t tell us everything we need to know about a candidate, but they tell us a hell of a lot more than not having a degree does. Candidates are unknowns, and candidates without degrees moreso. If I’m combing through 40 applications then a degreed person is way more likely to get an interview, all else being equal.
I’m someone who has multiple degrees including a clinical doctorate (think similar to optometrist, pharmacist etc). I think that the things you just listed (except maybe working in a group) were less developed or tested in my degree programs than they have been in my hobby spaces. I really wish it were possible for me to submit the afghan that took me two years to complete over my associates degree.
Did your afghan have strict, inflexible timelines for deliverables? Because college courses do. Did completion of your afghan require you to work on simultaneous unrelated sub-projects with shared milestone dates? Because that’s what a college semester is.
Even the PhDs have issues finding work that pays enough to service loans and live. And if you find such a job in the US it’s probably a military contrator or mag7 who are all more on board with nazism than 1930s VW.
Engineering bridges is a good metaphor but the US’s bridges are in rough shape and any money that could be spent on repairs or designing new ones will go to Raytheon to blow up bridges in Iran.
Do you know anything about what the PhD situation is like in other countries? (I’m considering one and am currently located in the US and based on my initial findings it does look similar to what you describe.)
Not who you are replying to, but I’ve found that PhDs struggle with employment because they are overqualified and lack field experience. I am mentoring a post doc right now and he’s unbelievably smart, but he can’t land a job for love or money. It’s a hard go out there right now if you’re specialized like he is.
He is a chemical engineer with 10 years post doc. Does water treatment, pit water modeling, deals with mine tailings, contaminated soils, etc. I would love to rent his brain if I could.
That sucks. Various industries need academic research to function well and innovate, but I guess my country would rather spend all their money on blowing up families in the middle east and let the civilian job market collapse.
My partner has a master’s in a STEM field and has been working full time since they graduated.
After 10+ years of payment on the IDR plan, they owe just slightly more than what they initially took out!
College for the vast majority of people (Millenials at least) was a scam built on lies, exploitative lending, and fear of social stigma. We aren’t just due loan forgiveness, we’re due compensation for long term damages in the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars.
Everyone I know with a good degree is paying off student loans 8+ years later. Universities are having so many issues on so many levels from funding to finding professors both qualified and willing to teach to politics. And on top of all that the global economy is collapsing.
I get that a lot of you spent a lot of money on a degree and will defend that as the right choice but you’re old now. The world is changing and expecting to find a job out of college with an infosec or compsci degree is wishful thinking at best without ivy league nepotism. The world you grew up in is dying, gradstudents with chatgpt are teaching classes and freshmen are using deepseek to do course work. I know a nursing student right now who has seen the curve her class graded on and it’s terrifying.
So that’s my long unpopular opinion. A degree will not get you a job anymore and even if it did the quality of the education has dropped dramatically at most schools. You might as well spend the money on a country club membership, the social connections are a better deal.
A degree is absolutely something I value heavily in applicants. Not because of the specific courses taken, but because what it says about the potential employee.
It says that they can complete a years-long project with disparate, often competing sub-projects, milestones, deliverable dates, and revolving team members while being self-managed. And due to core curricula, they’ve also proven a baseline knowledge unrelated to their specific degree. That may not sound useful, but someone who’s skillet is solely specialized work may have trouble navigating ancillary tasks that are part of the working environment. The best [insert technical skill] person in the world isn’t going to be a good employee if they can’t work in a team, prepare a report, respond appropriately and professionally to emails, document their work, develop/follow SOPs required for project handoff, deliver a presentation, etc.
Getting any college degree requires a baseline skillset that is valuable. Not having a degree doesn’t mean you can’t do all those things, but when I’ve got 40 applications I’m looking at, I can’t interview everyone. It’s a huge bonus to have a degree that tells me you have proven a minimum competency.
Degrees don’t require most of those things.
And the quality of your candidates will continue to drop. The system is failing you too just slower.
I’m not so much saying degrees are useless as saying they mean less, the ROI for going in general has shifted. We’re at a point where 2 and 4 year degrees look good to employers but are financially foolish for students. If you can afford to go it’s valable. But the proposition of student loans make less sense by the day.
Degrees don’t tell us everything we need to know about a candidate, but they tell us a hell of a lot more than not having a degree does. Candidates are unknowns, and candidates without degrees moreso. If I’m combing through 40 applications then a degreed person is way more likely to get an interview, all else being equal.
I’m someone who has multiple degrees including a clinical doctorate (think similar to optometrist, pharmacist etc). I think that the things you just listed (except maybe working in a group) were less developed or tested in my degree programs than they have been in my hobby spaces. I really wish it were possible for me to submit the afghan that took me two years to complete over my associates degree.
Did your afghan have strict, inflexible timelines for deliverables? Because college courses do. Did completion of your afghan require you to work on simultaneous unrelated sub-projects with shared milestone dates? Because that’s what a college semester is.
You’re not wrong with generalist degrees, but degrees where you are something at the end still need that base training.
You can’t just walk into an civil engineer’s firm and start building bridges.
Even the PhDs have issues finding work that pays enough to service loans and live. And if you find such a job in the US it’s probably a military contrator or mag7 who are all more on board with nazism than 1930s VW.
Engineering bridges is a good metaphor but the US’s bridges are in rough shape and any money that could be spent on repairs or designing new ones will go to Raytheon to blow up bridges in Iran.
Stupid times we live in.
Do you know anything about what the PhD situation is like in other countries? (I’m considering one and am currently located in the US and based on my initial findings it does look similar to what you describe.)
Not who you are replying to, but I’ve found that PhDs struggle with employment because they are overqualified and lack field experience. I am mentoring a post doc right now and he’s unbelievably smart, but he can’t land a job for love or money. It’s a hard go out there right now if you’re specialized like he is.
He is a chemical engineer with 10 years post doc. Does water treatment, pit water modeling, deals with mine tailings, contaminated soils, etc. I would love to rent his brain if I could.
That sucks. Various industries need academic research to function well and innovate, but I guess my country would rather spend all their money on blowing up families in the middle east and let the civilian job market collapse.
My partner has a master’s in a STEM field and has been working full time since they graduated.
After 10+ years of payment on the IDR plan, they owe just slightly more than what they initially took out!
College for the vast majority of people (Millenials at least) was a scam built on lies, exploitative lending, and fear of social stigma. We aren’t just due loan forgiveness, we’re due compensation for long term damages in the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars.