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College education...worth the effort/expense?

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My answer is different depending on the degree. I have a bachelor's and would say it was worth it.

I have almost 12 years of experience in my field and with my husband, run my own company doing the same thing. I am more qualified to do the senior position here at work than the senior doing the hiring is. But she is a PhD and feels very strongly.

She refused to consider me for the senior position because I don't have a Masters. They hired someone with a Masters with little experience and expected ME to help her get up to speed. I was quite disgusted for a while. I do everything the PhD does and am actually relied on for assistance in more areas than just my job title. But I don't have a Masters so I ain't worth squat.

My apps never get bad feed back and never are hard to use. I am constantly being brought in to fix the lack of "ease of use" issues with her apps.

But I don't have a Masters so I don't know squat.

Oops, guess you hit a sore spot.

Bottom line, I'm 12 years into my career and I do all the same things the woman with the PhD does and I run my business with very happy clients; I do NOT want to go back to school.

I think the bachelor degree was worth it but I don't feel the same way about the masters. Maybe this is because I don't see her any more advanced than me so what would be the point. If my salary were greatly being held back, I would consider it but I would resent it.

~ Lisa
~ Do you Rigminder?

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College is a scam. :|



How so?

Sometimes it's necessary. Do you want your Dr to have skills that he/she "just picked up"? Or how about your teachers just saying "well, I don't know for sure, but lets see what happens here"? Or engineers designing a bridge without knowing about harmonics or tensile strength? Shared knowledge is very important for many occupations.

But you are right, not all...

And some programs do just take money and give a piece of paper that is hard to use in the "real world." But that is why it's important to think about what you want to learn about and why. With that, direct your energy and education to that goal.


To back this up, while it won't kill anyone, I have experienced programmers with no degree and they write crap. They missed out on the hows and whys. They write junk code that is hard to maintain. We call it spaghetti-code.

Degreed programmers have been taught more than just syntax. Anyone can pick up syntax.

~ Lisa
~ Do you Rigminder?

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If you HAD the opportunity to go -

and you were too lazy and didn't like doing the homework . . .

Then the probability that you would be a slacker in a job is pretty high.

If you could have and didn't go to college it shows a lack of motivation.
I'm not usually into the whole 3-way thing, but you got me a little excited with that. - Skymama
BTR #1 / OTB^5 Official #2 / Hellfish #408 / VSCR #108/Tortuga/Orfun

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All I'm saying is that i would rather hire someone who got their education and proved their motivation in the real world.



It depends on what you want the person to do. Your approach works just fine if you're hiring someone to clear snow and mow lawns. On the other hand, if I were hiring someone to help design and implement a new multi-million dollar groundwater remediation system, I'd expect the person to have some formal science/engineering education rather than a bunch of "this one time, at band camp" stories.

Blues,
Dave
"I AM A PROFESSIONAL EXTREME ATHLETE!"
(drink Mountain Dew)

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If you own the company, why is one of your employees telling you what to do? :S

Blues,
Dave



Because she has a whip and I'm in the collar . . .

OH - you were replying to LisaM . . . sorry.
I'm not usually into the whole 3-way thing, but you got me a little excited with that. - Skymama
BTR #1 / OTB^5 Official #2 / Hellfish #408 / VSCR #108/Tortuga/Orfun

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If you own the company, why is one of your employees telling you what to do? :S

Blues,
Dave



Two different jobs. I have a day job where I work for a company and then the company my husband and I own.

Maybe that's why I can't have the job; no communication skills. :P

~ Lisa
~ Do you Rigminder?

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Looking back on it now, definitely worth it.

As previous people have said, its a shit ton of work, but if you truly have a goal or want to get to certain place or point in your life, its not going be easy. And in my opinion, I'd rather not do it if there weren't some challenge involved. If there were no challenge and it was easy, what's the point, you're just going through the motions.

I could never do the things I plan to do or have the job I have without my degree. There were definitely days when I wanted to quit or was on the verge of a nervous and/or mental breakdown. There were MANY (by many i mean in the 70-80's range) all-nighters and sleepless weekends spent in front of a computer, or in a lab, or over a circuit board, or in a windtunnel. (And not the good kind of windtunnel either)

But from that, it gave me so much experience that it made it worth it. It let me know that if I can get through that, then I can get through anything.

If you want something in life bad enough....its worth working for and going through hell or high water to get to it....
Puttin' some stank on it.

----Hellfish #707----

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The only thing that bothers me are those people who have no drive other than to live marginally, and look at those who don't shovel shit for a living as effete. I get all kinds of these asswipes living in southern IL. Not my problem they live in a shit town that only exists because of the university. Shitheads. Pardon the fuck outta me if I don't own anything "realtree" patterned...
Illinois needs a CCW Law. NOW.

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This has been a really neat thread to read. Thanks for starting it Dave!

~~~~~

Having a degree will open doors; what you do once your inside is largely up to the individual regardless of the specific degree(s). Without a degree a few doors will be shut, and other doors may take a whole lot of extra effort to budge open.

I’m employed in a field far from that from that in which I was formally trained. Just makes it more challenging-fun.
Am I using my degrees? Unquestionably!
Am I using them in the ways the donors to USC or the taxpayers of the State of Illinois would have imagined? Probably not ... but I highly doubt they would object either.

Every now & then I think about getting a law degree or MPH or doing a doctorate in cosmology, ancient near eastern studies, or neurobiology; it's my quest/path/addiction to more knowledge/learning & compulsion to more letters to put behind my name/longer cv. :D Fully embrace my nerd-girl self!

... Altho’ curiously (to me at least :)(“diploma” is printed on it) that I have framed & hanging in my office is from Army Chem School, but I wouldn’t have gotten the opportunity to get that one if I didn’t have the other degrees and a great mentor.

VR/Marg


Act as if everything you do matters, while laughing at yourself for thinking anything you do matters.
Tibetan Buddhist saying

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The only thing that bothers me are those people who have no drive other than to live marginally, and look at those who don't shovel shit for a living as effete. I get all kinds of these asswipes living in southern IL. Not my problem they live in a shit town that only exists because of the university. Shitheads. Pardon the fuck outta me if I don't own anything "realtree" patterned...



Go Salukis ! B|










~ If you choke a Smurf, what color does it turn? ~

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From a financial perspective - in general, yes.

While there are exceptional exceptions (e.g., rock stars), a 2002 US Dept of Commerce study found that “over an adult's working life, high school graduates can expect, on average, to earn $1.2 million; those with a bachelor's degree, $2.1 million; and people with a master's degree, $2.5 million. Persons with doctoral degrees earn an average of $3.4 million during their working life, while those with professional degrees do best at $4.4 million.”

VR/Marg



There is no doubt that a lot of jobs vanish without a degree, even if it has little bearing on the job role. A lot of big companies (and hiring managers in small ones) will reject out of hand non degree holders. One is definitely at a competitive disadvantage.

But it must also be remembered that there is a lot of corelation going on here. People who succeed at life typically succeed at college admissions as well, and the societal norm is to go to college. But does college (esp the BA) make it happen?

Like a huge percentage, I was exhausted by school by the time I go to college and as a result didn't get the full benefit of learning how to think (as opposed to learning data). It took a few years past for some of that to collalesce. If I had deferred enrollment for a year and wandered the world or just found a nice internship, it would have been better at school.

The downside, of course, is the lost year. In a lot of majors the MA salaries can be lower than the BA ones due to the loss of 2-3 years of working tenure.

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Therein lies the point of this post. My daughter's just finishing up her AA in business and wants to stop with that & just open a restaurant (rather than getting her bachelor degree.) I'd like to have some new arguments in my back pocket when we discuss this again (it won't be the first or second time the subject has come up). :S:ph34r:



Once she leaves school, it gets harder to return, both in terms of admissions and in willingness to put the effort in later in life. (otoh, restaurant owners already show a love of spending long hours for little or no return)

The AA will not help her form business partnerships in the future; many will view it with suspicion about her willingness to see projects through to the end.

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Like a huge percentage, I was exhausted by school by the time I go to college and as a result didn't get the full benefit of learning how to think (as opposed to learning data). It took a few years past for some of that to collalesce. If I had deferred enrollment for a year and wandered the world or just found a nice internship, it would have been better at school.



Good points. It may be an arguable case for the UK & Australian idea of 'gap year.'

VR/Marg

Act as if everything you do matters, while laughing at yourself for thinking anything you do matters.
Tibetan Buddhist saying

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To back this up, while it won't kill anyone, I have experienced programmers with no degree and they write crap. They missed out on the hows and whys. They write junk code that is hard to maintain. We call it spaghetti-code.

Degreed programmers have been taught more than just syntax. Anyone can pick up syntax.



I've interviewed people with a masters degree in computer science who couldn't get that a linked list 100K entries was not a good idea. I've had my pager go off a dozen times between 12 and 7 am because smart people with masters degrees in computer science did not have experience building reliable software. One of the worst engineers I've worked with even had a PhD (the best engineer I've worked with also had a PhD so I know there's not a causal relationship).

The degree just guarantees the person remembered enough to get passing grades on their classes and had enough patience to make it through everything else instead of starting work. Many CS programs do not require non-trivial projects, and I know one professor who was not allowed to continue teaching data structures because she had the audacity to fail people who couldn't write code that passed automated test suites.

Most software engineers just need a solid understanding of complexity, the basic data structures, concurrency, and software engineering - probably half a dozen classes, a little statistics, a few non-trivial projects in school, and a couple things they need to maintain for a few years each afterwards.

For that role I'd much rather have a drop-out who actually remembered something about complexity and knew to look for a priority queue implementation than some one with a degree who forgets that and causes real time constraint violations.

Really interesting things require a familiarity with current research, a proven ability to innovate beyond that, and practical experience with simulation; but such positions constitute well under one percent of what's out there.

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In regards to your daughter...

I think that dropping out of college in my first semester and taking several years off was just about the best decision of my life. It was actually my parents idea that I do this - surprisingly enough they both have their PhD's and are college professors. They've seen so many kids go to college not ready for the responsibilities, not motivated, and with no work ethic. They'd also seen a number of people return to college and perform phenomenally and with much more insight as to why they were there.

I did go back to school after my hiatus, much more prepared to buckle down, work hard and focus. I had a specific reason to get a degree and therefore all the work that I did was actually meaningful to me. I got almost straight A's and was accepted into all of the top graduate programs in my field.

So your daughter wanting to pursue something else may very well be a good choice for her. In my several years off, I was considering working towards opening my own rigging loft. So not that different than your daughter.

Back to the original topic..

I finished my bachelors in June and will complete my masters in a little over a year. For my career, a masters is the entry level position. Because of that, it has a lot of value to me because I couldn't be in the field of speech-language pathology without those degrees. I also love learning, so it is worth it to me as far as the self-improvement aspect as well.

"Life is a temporary victory over the causes which induce death." - Sylvester Graham

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Obviously I know my own answer to this question, but I'd like to get some other people's input. Hopefully I've got all the bases covered. Note, this is for people who are not working on a degree, but I put up an option for you students anyhow. :D

Blues,
Dave



To earn a comfortable living (have a private space to live in, eat tasty food, go on vacation, earn enough to have saved 15-20X your annual salary so you can retire) you need to do something that people want to buy and other people won't or can't do.

I've paid house cleaners $25 an hour although that should take less training than being a Starbucks Barista; it's just not pleasant. I suspect sewer divers get paid a lot but wouldn't want to do that either.

That leaves the can't part, where knowledge and practice from formal training (college, trade school, apprenticeship) or experience (which can be hard to get without formal training to get a job) is needed. I'd _much_ rather use my brain to solve problems other people can't than be stuck doing something unpleasant that other people won't.

The other side is that people spend nearly half their waking hours at work. It's much better when its something you enjoy (I like solving hard problems some where between engineering and computer science; some people like building race cars or going through airplanes) than something you have to do to keep a paycheck coming in.

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I definitely think there can be value in a break, and I got FAR better grades as a "non-traditional" college student then I ever dreamed of in high school.

That said, I'm also "probability" kind of guy. While you went back to school and are finishing up a graduate degree after a hiatus, my belief is that most people who drop out of school continue in that lifestyle, i.e. rarely finishing school, or much of anything else that becomes difficult. Every day life seems to trap people in mediocrity and things like love, broken hearts, children, injuries, etc all get in the way. Obviously every rule has to have an exception (like you), and I wouldn't be horribly opposed to my daughter taking a year off between her AA and the rest of her undergrad work if she could convince me that she will go back and finish at some point, without waiting too long. The problem is that's a tough sell on a good day, and she's not even trying to convince me.

Blues,
Dave
"I AM A PROFESSIONAL EXTREME ATHLETE!"
(drink Mountain Dew)

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