I've seen that in CS programs at University of Buffalo and Yale, a majority of Masters students are from abroad, especially from Asia.

Basically, if you wanted to work in tech in the US, you could either:

- Find a multinational company in your home country, work for them for a year, and request a transfer (highly competitive)

- Find a job for a company in the US while abroad, ask them to sponsor you for a H-1B, and hope you win the visa lottery (unlikely, since companies don't like their chances on the lottery)

- Get a Masters degree. Sure, it's $50,000, but you're guaranteed a 3-year work visa (OPT with STEM extension) during which you can apply for the H-1B multiple times (it's a winner!)

This is actually completely rational, and benefits both the students, the school, and arguably the US since it gets some highly skilled workers who did not take out loans.

Are Masters degrees outside of STEM (and online ones, like the OPM-managed ones this article mentions) that cater to local Americans in low wage sectors a scam? Maybe!

Are Masters degrees in STEM (which definitely are cash cows) a scam? Almost definitely not; in fact, they're a great workaround until the US reforms its immigration system

They pay the high sticker price because it's rationally their best choice, but the value they're purchasing isn't in the degree, but rather the favorable status they earn in the immigration labyrinth.

This isn't good for them, except in comparison to other options. It certainly isn't good for native-born Americans, who are (for the most part) stuck paying the same high sticker prices, without getting the features which justify the high cost of the product.

Typically, community college faculty (and sometimes university lecturers) require a minimum of a master's in the field, and at least the first is as true of physics as it is generally.

I have seen in electrical engineering some jobs advertise that they want someone with a masters, but really what they want is someone who understood and can use at least something from their undergrad and can be relied upon to exercise theory as opposed to someone who just passed.

If the education system was different, more people would want them, and they would be more useful. See commenter below who notes that CS masters are usually quite useful but also are not employment gating and have many reasons to stay competitive with other programs.

Aren't H1-B visa workers mostly in extremely HCOL areas and significantly underpaid / taken advantage of?

I imagine if you're from India and you really want to get out of India - this sounds like a good deal (although wouldn't $50k for tuition be hard to get?) But, I'm assuming most people just want to have more money / a better life?

Wouldn't the first option be better? And then you could stay closer to friends and family.

I would not want to try to pitch myself as a consultant as a foreigner with little to no American work experience. If you’re doing it yourself, sales will be a challenge.

Heck, I did consulting in school to support tuition.

I think there are a few factors to consider.

(1) Ability isn't one-dimensional. Consulting is a different skillset than full-time work. It's not harder or easier -- you just have to be more of a package deal -- finding business, contracts, billing, etc.

(2) Interest. Most people are happier in a full time job not because consulting is hard but because they'd rather not do all those things. If you don't want to deal with contracts and billing, consulting isn't for you.

(3) Consulting goes all the way from cheap Indian contractors, through boutique UX shops, through Caltech professors consulting on esoteric issues.

You definitely don't need to be a rock star. Companies hire consultants for a variety of reasons. Some need some particularly hard technical problem, but plenty simply need a talent for a short amount of time. It's the same difference between in-house counsel (which is good for ongoing legal issues) versus law firm (which is good for one-off issues). Or if you're worried about a tree falling down on your house, you might bring in a random arborist to consult.

I picked up the skillset because I needed to pay tuition, not out of any innate interest or talent. You might not have the skillset for it, but it's not rocket science. You could pick it up too pretty quickly if the situation arose.

Now double the age, I find I don't actually like consulting very much. I need to charge about double to triple my salary to cover overhead, and overhead is all stuff I don't actually enjoy doing. It does have upsides. I do like the variety. The boom/bust of consulting works well if you have a bit saved up and a low cost-of-living -- booms are intense, and busts make for nice vacations. I also prefer not having to worry about things like overarching employment agreements and an employer owning me. But that doesn't outweigh the hassle of having to sell myself, send invoices, negotiate contracts, etc.

It is fun and flexible but not as nice as a steady job. Plus, I have no people skills. :)

This is not meant to be sarcasm. There are many other characteristics necessary and better indicators. I am smart skilled and successful. But I made a lousy consultant when I tried it too early in life - (self)salesmanship, business skills, tenacity and courage, people skills, and a specific view on risk acceptance are far more important. Relationships and a full Rolodex and branding / reputation don't hurt either.

(A specific view on integrity and ethics too. I'm not saying no integrity or no ethics. But the salespersons / deal closers in my area are all honourable truthful people whose job I couldn't do because my view of truth wouldn't necessarily correspond to theirs)

Finally, if we grant your last statement that most people want renumeration and happy life, for many smart and skilled people, stress and risk that comes with consultancy business does not contribute to happiness.

The office was near Mastercard's global operations headquarters and it seemed like they also employed a lot of visa holders. So I don't think we were particularly unique in our willingness to offer visa sponsorship in a LCOL area.

Seems rather unlikely. What I guess you might mean is that you couldn't find qualified candidates at the pay ranges you were offering.

Source: partner was one, doubled salary after, is friends with dozens more who went through the same exploitation now making significantly more.

2. Nope. At least those working for FANGs aren’t. You can see so many cases of folks were for low paying consultancies in India getting masters and then getting a job at FANG.

3. Getting an education loan for STEM is really easy and people are willing to put their parents house up for collateral.

I think with a FANG or good tech job you can be done with your loan in an year or two. Some people go to state schools and don’t get into any debt, or pay it off via internships. The US in most Indian people’s head comes with a better quality of life, a lot more money and better infrastructure. Perhaps some status too.

as an interviewer, I see many w/ masters degrees who are neither.

In software, you DO need a lot of skills. But I think more important than that is having the ability to learn new things/skills quickly (being smart). The industry is always changing and evolving.

College is only going to get you the skills - maybe, a lot of times they teach you things that aren't that useful in the job market and don't teach you the things that are.

If we were talking about people with master's degrees from MIT or Stanford, it'd be a different ball game.

But I can't tell you how many candidates I've seen with something like a "Master of Science in Information Systems from the University of South Central Appalachia".

Beyond that, the international Masters students are really subsidizing the education of other students. Every time there is some friction added to the student visa process, all but the top schools with huge endowment funds feel the financial pressure.

Most narratives I read about this situation paints the picture of the students buying their way into US residency via Masters program. But it works the other way too - many US citizens are able to get educated at an affordable price because of the money these Masters students bring in to the school.

I'm not talking sadistic google interview questions, these were things that anyone with a BS should be able to answer.

I don't think this experience can be used to draw general conclusions on the quality of education across Masters programs in US.

As a sidenote: a lot of CS/Software Engineering graduates with a bachelor in my own country (Italy) can't pass simple programming tests, because most of the education is (too?) focused on theoretical aspects, and most of the time people is tested with non-practical exams.

Not just the US. Most countries in Europe offer international master degrees in english that serve the exact same purpose.

But with a typically enterprising capitalist mindset, the American system also wants to ensure that talented individual don't go back to their country (or elsewhere) immediately after getting a degree. This is where the high cost of a US college degree comes into the picture - the burden of paying for it acts like an anchor for most students who come from developing countries or econonomically weak background. Even if they get some kind of scholarship and / or do part-time work, they still have to take a huge loans to live in the US to complete their education. And often the fastest way to repay these loans is to work in the US or other developed nations. This may take another few years. The American system hopes that by then the potential immigrant would be sufficiently exposed to the American culture and lifestyle and consider staying here.

(The high cost also ensures quality of education is high in the US, thus attracting talents from around the world. And the money is also pumped into a lot of R&D in the college allowing US to maintain a big tech lead. It's a neat system that seems to work so far.)

The other aspect of ensuring that higher education remains costly in the US is to also ensure that a blue-collar workforce continues to exist, and wage is suppressed among the white-collars. Perhaps the law makers also feel that it acts like an incentive to work more diligently, out of anxiety and worry - after all, people with more qualification, experience and higher stable income often tend to jump around more (which the big tech try to thwart by entering into illegal agreements to not hire each others employee).

I always thought that learning is learning. It never occurred to me that there’s a difference between how and why children learn and that it could be different from adults.

As an adult, who considers myself a life long learner, I see the differences. The education system hasn’t adapted to adult learning. Most masters classes are simply just repackaged versions of undergraduate classes, maybe with a little more depth.

The schedules haven’t changed either. As the article points out almost all the bad practices are online classes. It’s hard for adults to juggle family, kids, and work while being a student. People feel it’s necessary to further their schooling but don’t have many options. They can’t just take off two days of the week to attend a class. Few schools offer nights and weekend classes. Online becomes the only option.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andragogy

In Denmark and some neighboring countries there's this concept of a school you can go to just to learn stuff later in life, as an ongoing thing. There's a whole bunch of themes (sports, history, etc), and often you can book yourself in for whatever amount of time makes sense for you.

We have those in the US; we don't have a general collective name for them, but there are both private for-profit ones with a variety of (mostly narrow) specialities, either standalone or as adjuncts to other related businesses (selling, e.g., products in the field that it teaches people to act in), plus community colleges, public libraries, public parks and rec departments, and museums tend to also have programs that serve this function, despite it not being their sole or primary function.

I have a programmer friend that took welding and car repair classes at the community college. He just wanted to learn.

If you are a parent, let your children know about these extension college courses if they are interested!

It gets more complicated in the US because of unions. In many places, you can’t become a plumber or electrician without an apprenticeship, which is controlled by the trade unions. Therefore, community colleges might offer classes on plumbing or electrical, but there’s no equivalent to a certification program, because it’s not possible to become a professional just by going to school.

This source [0] says “non-dentists cannot set up or buy dental practices as an individual or partnership but they are permitted to be shareholders of a limited company which owns the practice” and “the majority of directors of that limited company cannot be non-dentists”.

[0]: https://www.plutopartners.co.uk/post/who-can-own-a-dental-bu...

That said, this isn't what most people are talking about when they are talking about starting a business.

Socially, I’d say that it is respected and regarded as a sign of dedication to ones interests.

Where do you need a degree to open a business?

So getting these qualifications are required for reskilling.

Daycare center, hairstyling and financial advisor are others that require qualifications / lic

People aren't learning these professions at folk high school are they?

So you really need education that leads to recognised qualifications.

Reality is most people wanting to retrain are going to do it as a single person business as a plumber, hair dresser or similar.

I say this as a mid 20s return college student. My experience going back to college without the "stars in my eyes" so to speak, has really left me embittered by the system altogether. Schools act like autocratic bureaucracies that when they make a mistake all you get is an "oops sorry. Now deal with it lol." Also student employment is not only predatory (cause the pay is just garbage), but it's like they don't even train students either. If you want any answers, you have to wait to talk to one of the few people who has actually been hired on as an employee.

Higher education is structured for students going from high school to their institutions. They also assume students don't have full time employment or a family. So basically if you have either of those, the school doesn't care at all about your plight. They know your gonna pay off your loans and complete your degree. They prefer younger impressionable kids who are gonna waste a lot of time and money there instead.

In the US, Depending on your state this might not be true. Many of the 'Elite' schools are absolutely as you describe, but many of the state schools do cater to adult learners. This is particularly true in states which separate their Research Universities from their more teaching oriented Universities. Most of the latter do have night classes and other offerings aimed at adult learners. But the private universities with dreams of grandeur are looking mostly for the "traditional college student"

Now to the legalities. The Age Discrimination Act mandates any institution receiving federal funding from preventing someone from being able to participate[0]. So like a physical disability, if you only make stairs because "99% of people can walk" but cannot accommodate for someone in a wheelchair, you would be in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Same thing with making a website accessible to the blind. By making your courses only available during business hours, you essentially are telling working adults "we are preventing you from participating in mandatory courses because you cannot be at work during the class." Work, mind you, that will pay their bills, support their family, and keep them out of absurd debt bondage upon graduation.

When you make class at 8AM for 1.5 hours, Monday-Wednesday-Friday, you are discriminating against working adults. It doesn't matter if the discrimination is intentional. Your very allowance of not offering a course wholly online without a mandatory attended lecture or just a night class is pure evidence that you do not want non-traditional students. How can an college believe that someone who works full time can make that work? Night classes are at least an accommodation and can work.

What I've found is technical colleges, since they're catered toward people going back to school, they do a much better job all around. Also since they are city funded and not a state run university through tax payers, they can hire real employees. So when I ask an administrative question that is very important, I don't get "uh I'm not sure, let me ask a staff member since I'm only a student employee! Can you hold for 10 minutes?"

https://www2.ed.gov/policy/rights/guid/ocr/ageoverview.html

Slight anecdote, I gave a few geometry lessons to a teen. And witnessing his brain operate was quite staggering. Teen operate at high frequency low depth it seems. He didn't want to grasp the rule or symmetry but ran in many intuitions very rapidly (honestly my brain froze at his pace of change, so vibrant) only to feel defeated or confused. Made me think adult and kids really need different approaches. Our emotions facing a new topic are so different.

Depends on the country. Masters degrees can be research which are the first year of a Ph.D. or they can be taught degrees. In the latter they are usually called "conversion" courses where there's intensive focus on filling in gaps in education for somebody moving to the field. E.g. moving from an Economics B.Sc. to a Computer Science degree.

Where I was educated the Computing Science undergraduate degree is the equivalent of any Masters degree in the same subject. There is nothing in the subject matter that would be of value as another degree as it isn't advancement. It would be merely repackaged undergraduate courses like you suggest.

  Lower division is problem sets.
  Upper division is problem sets + project.
  Graduate is project + research paper.

For example, in my home country an undergraduate degree in engineering is normally 5 years where

- first 2 years are very standard undergraduate courses (your lower division)

- last 3rd and 4th years are the upper division you describe

- 5th year is a graduation project that can be 50 to 100 pages long (almost a thesis) + upper division courses and maybe a research paper (depends if you had a scholarship of sorts)

So when a person goes to do a master in this country, the experience is almost one of a PhD, while the PhD experience is very intense.

Well, or they are first professional degrees (e.g., the MBA, MFA, etc.)

As an adult, I don't really have much interest in a complete degree with a certification. (With the exception of very bounded industry-specific things.) So in that respect adult education certainly is different.

I have known people who got PhDs as adults and I think they mostly didn't care for the experience. I know I have zero interest in getting another degree. Even a couple of decades ago, it would have zero value for my professional development and would, in fact, have been mostly a distraction.

However, there are a ton of educational opportunities often oriented to working adults. Community colleges, extension programs, online learning of all sorts...

I get that you need a big enough audience in order to set up any class, and supply/demand is definitely an issue. But I think the demand is much higher than what the supply side seems to cater for.

Things like Khan Academy are great, but they've begun to scale down their offering in favour of university prep. The Open University has some truly great content, but it's prohibitively expensive. MOOCs seem very hit or miss, and often lack a good mechanism for feedback. And quite frankly, I enjoy being in a classroom full of motivated people.

(This isn't meant as a dig at those, just an observation. If your worldview places "belief in the Bible" as a high value and your interpretation requires a literal reading, then what would an institution full of people who preach evolution and old-earth have to offer? I have a friend who teaches physics part-time at a local college in one of these rural areas, but he is 6-day creation. I said that you'd have to believe that the scientists are incompetent at their jobs, and he said that of course they were. I was stunned because while I could imagine other people saying that, I didn't imagine that he would. I can't fathom how you can believe that people who have worked years to figure out how to most accurately date something would be so incompetent as to mistake days for thousands or millions of years. Especially when it's physics that underlies all the carbon dating... And to be fair, there are plenty of Christians who think 6-day creation is a rather silly abuse of a poetic account.)

Farmers especially respect education a great deal because the states pay professionals to go out and tell them how to make as much money as possible.

'Andragogy' is not a great name for a theory which tries to describe how all adults, not just men, learn. However, it is a really telling name about the kinds of assumptions baked into the theory [1].

I work in adult education; I don't use the word 'andragogy' to describe what I do, and it's a bit of a warning sign if someone else does.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0260691793...

Firstly, the question needs to be narrowed down. The topic of a master's degree in Europe vs in the UK and in the US varies, hugely: 1) The UK and the US have a great focus on the elitism of the university name. Countries like Germany do not, a masters from a (known) university with good grades, is pretty much as valuable as all the others. 2) Fees in Europe its free (as has been mentioned countless times here) so there's less of a "shopping" market here, in terms of looking for the most elite degree to graduate with, and much more about content 3) It depends on what you want to do as a career. In Europe, scientific and engineering fields do look for postgraduate degrees as a minimum. Companies like Amazon, hire data scientists mostly with PhDs in Germany or on exception, highly talented engineers.

But the main "pro masters" degree argument for me, is the learning experience.

My master's studies, was so intense, so stressful and so unbelievably intellectually rewarding that it shaped me and my character in a way that my bachelor's did not come close to.

It gave me that confidence to approach fields and advanced topics, where I am not familiar with the notation, the terminology and don't know where to start, and it taught me how to dive in deep, in a self-motivated and self organised way. I really felt the whole time like an independent researcher, picking up books where I needed to, learning mathematical tools and programming skills I never thought of using to solve new problems. And participating in the latest SOTA research, in a way that has made me quite intellectually fearless now, going forward in my career.

It filled in a lot of gaps that my undergraduate education left, and significantly raised my profile amongst recruiters.

CS might be the exception to the rule about Masters degrees though.

- It's not a legally qualifying degree like studying medicine

- It's academic in the sense that you can use it to gain entrance to a phd, and has academic content that isn't just "how to code".

- And yet you learn a fair bit about how to code. You'll in all likelihood come across actual tools, not toys, that real coders use, eg Git. You might also do some specialist stuff that is directly applicable to an employer, rather than just demonstrating interest. Eg if you do a systems programming course, you might actually understand systems in a way that's useful from the start.

Rather than focusing on degrees, I think it's a lot more important to focus on learning, however you don't know what's important to learn until you actually start working on real problems.

It might be because education is free in my country, but I loved my Uni years and am glad I got 5 of them no matter the use for my career.

I hear this so much, and I used to be one of the people saying it. Until I actually 1) learned that stuff and 2) realized I don't want to just write glue code. I like writing compilers. I like writing efficient data structures. I use my CS education a lot.

If others suffered because of me, it would be because I was once a junior developer with no practical experience -- which applies to everyone, regardless of whether they have a degree or not.

The same applies to some degree of the sciences in general but, there, you probably have to get to a PhD for the opportunities to be significantly elevated relative to a BS.

In any case, this meme about Master's degree scams is mostly directed at high-cost degrees in journalism and the like where the career opportunities aren't great with or without the degree.

In engineering, an MS in CS has the least value to employers. However, in other areas of engineering, it has a pretty high value. Many big companies will not let you do EE design work with just a BS, for example.

- A well taught undergrad degree in CS (Masters fill gaps caused by bad classes or different fields)

- Graduated with undergrad degree recently (getting a Masters degree after being out of school for 10 years can be a good refresher and update on how the field has evolved/changed)

- Masters degree classes in an area of CS you are familiar with (Masters degree is a great opportunity to take classes in areas that you care about but don't know well, if you are a great Rails webdev with 7 years experience, then taking a Masters degree class in Rail WebDev is just wasting your time.)

It was also in a region with a much smaller tech sector.

It's actually hard to say how much of the career boost was from moving to Boston and how much from the degree. I did make some very useful connections during the degree as well as actually learning quite a lot in some of the classes.

If you look at most things though, there's no connection between what you do at work and what you studied. At best studying some subject means you are interested in some broad area, and you are conscientious enough to have done all the exercises, so employers should perhaps hire you in the hope that you can learn how the online advertising industry works, or how the plastic supply chain works, etc.

Looking back at my degree, it was really a bunch of indexing interesting things in science and math for potential further investigation. And then an exercise in flaneuring: wandering about, coming upon something interesting, and then being able to focus on figuring out that thing as opportunities arise.

Credentialism the worship of credentials throughout many industries when other cheaper metrics are available, but may be illegal (like testing for IQ in USA) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credentialism_and_educational_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

and inability to declare bankruptcy so as to include student loans. Bankruptcy says that the _lender_ has responsibility to not enslave people with debt -- or rather the _lender_ may only enslave a borrower for a limited amount of time, after which it is ultimately the lenders problem that they gave that person too much money and that they should have known that the borrower would have never been able to repay. Debt is a useful tool, but the ability to enslave people with debt should be limited by the law.

I’m not sure any of this helps, though, since it would only prove you’re good at the test.

I know of some very, very clever people who do not perform well, and the opposite too.

I'm going to guess you're gains plateau or you get to a near-perfect score pretty quickly. The gains you're seeing are just familiarity with the test.

I'd be surprised to see this pattern in someone a decade older.

It seems like if the federal government stopped lending for master's degrees, and allowed students to file for bankruptcy to get out of private loans, then the market might very well sort everything out.

Maybe markets have a difference concept of efficiency than society...

Isn't this the broad logic behind student loans not be dischargable already?

I don't think the current US system is correct. But I think there needs to be some balance rather than just never being dischargable.

Some of the "equity" based models offered by a few places (where you pay a percentage of income for X years) seem better to me. Or at least suitable in some cases.

Well, no because there are lots of incentives for the people who could pay to not declare bankruptcy, because bankruptcy has adverse impacts on employability, housing, etc. And with income contingent repayment available on federal loans, pretty much everyone can stay in good standing with them (people don't, but that's mostly servicers trying to get people not to take available income contingent plans.)

Also, the main lender is the federal government (since other , who lends because that's what the law says they do. The already narrow space of private student loans might narrow a bit further with easier dischargeability, but that’s about it.

> Isn't this the broad logic behind student loans not be dischargable already?

IIRC, private, non-federally-guaranteed student lending was trending upward, with no graduate-and-declare-bankruptcy trend when limited dischargeability for such loans was adopted, so, to the extent it was the justification it wasn’t factually justified, just an excuse for a financial services industry subsidy. (IIRC, it was later displaced somewhat by expanded federally-guaranteed lensing then hit a sharp cliff around the 2009 financial crisis.)

And for federally-guaranteed loans, private lenders have been excluded for many years, as private federally-guaranteed loans have been replaced with exclusively direct federal loans, and when therr was private lending they had federal guarantees, so encouraging lenders isn't a factor in that space, either.

> Some of the "equity" based models offered by a few places (where you pay a percentage of income for X years) seem better to me.

Those seem to a strictly-worse variation of the income-based plans already available for federal loans.

No it doesn't.

> It's no coincidence that the two areas with most government involvement, education and health care, are the things that have outpaced every other measure of inflation significantly.

The government is less (EDIT: more) involved (proportionate to total expenditures in the domain) in healthcare lots of places outside the US without equal, much less greater, healthcare inflation.

It is the manner, not the mere fact of government involvement that produces inflation.

Yeah, it did; that was an error.

Here in the UK we have some the cheapest healthcare in the western world with a nationalised system.

I actually agree that the US government often causes inflation. But that's because everyone in the states seems to love government subsidies and no one in the states likes regulation, price control, etc. Whether you're a government or not, subsidising X without regulating consumption or controlling the prices of X will lead to inflation...

An example of what I'm talking about is American high school. State schools have much lower prices per kid than private. Because the state starts with a fixed budget and works from there. Imagine if instead government required "education insurance" like health insurance. And insurers were required to pay for anything the teacher decided was required...

It's difficult to understand why so many people advocate for even more government "intervention" (i.e., do more to increase the availability and cost of loans).

Found a per-year table, appears to depend on what degree topic https://student.unsw.edu.au/fees-student-contribution-rates

A 4year engineering degree (likely what the HN crowd is interested in) is about A$32k / US$24k

Whereas law/commerce/medicine is A$60k

I have no problem with people getting degrees in the arts. My spouse has a Master's in fine arts, from a university in Europe. But she didn't acquire any debt from that degree, while I did in the US with my CS Master's.

But living with enormous debt--debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy (in the US)--is such a burden, and the degree itself may really not offer that much in terms of job prospects (though we shouldn't discount the value of humanities degrees--turns out they often do pretty well in life).

It is hard to see why a poetry program should cost so much.

So if you as a student do have some of that debt leftover, it is much smarter to use that toward a car down payment or a deposit on an apartment. I feel like most college kids don't have even the slightest grasp on budgeting and how all transactions affect the accounting equation honestly.

You show a $50k a year degree to an 18 year old from a more middle to upper middle class family, though, and they're not going to understand how much money that actually is. They're going to see one big party that they don't need to pay for until they're done.

I also remember when I was in high school, all the boomer teachers and parents were saying university is a gateway to easy money after. We were sold something that hasn't held true, and I think a lot of people are very bitter about that.

In what way has it not held true? 33% of Americans have at least a four year degree and earn an average of $1m more than their peers without over their lifetimes.

By all measures, university is a gateway to easy money after. So long as you finish.

I don’t think that means we should tell young people to take out loans to buy a Ferrari because it’s a ticket to easy money.

When the only kids going to college were either rich or highly motivated then having a degree made you stand out and could open doors. When everyone gets a degree it doesn’t make you stand out any more. Instead, not having a degree makes you look bad. (And unlike high school, which anyone can attend for free, most kids in the US need to take on a lot of debt just so the don’t get left behind.)

Then let’s talk when we get closer to everyone having a degree. 33% is not everyone and “a degree” is not a single product that can be compared 1:1 across each instance.

> most kids in the US need to take on a lot of debt just so the don’t get left behind

The average student loan debt for undergraduate degrees is $28,950. This is not “a lot of debt.”

According to the valuation analysts at Kelley Blue Book, the estimated average transaction price for a light vehicle in the United States was $37,876 in 2020.

That is to say, on average, students are taking on the debt for a 4 year education, that sets them up on average to earn a million dollars more in their lifetime than their peers who don’t, for less than the average transaction price for a light vehicle — an asset that depreciates ~20% when you take it off the lot.

And you get the keep the credentials a lot longer.

At least with some graduate programs—in areas of actually value—you might qualify for an RA or TA subsidy. But it’s not worth paying full freight.

The fact that you have to pay for your degree out of pocket may mean that more people will choose to do degrees that are worth something, which is a great thing for society overall. Having said that the prices of degrees in the US are outrageous. A middle ground should be found.

And to your point about "free" education in Europe. The act of decoupling the pursuit of education and knowledge, from a high financial cost, is a crucial mechanism to ensure that institutions retain the freedom to pursue knowledge for its own sake, and to not be (solely) steered by the industrial interests of the status quo.

It might have helped that I was too young and stupid to have any well-considered career goals and enjoyed learning for the sake of it.

This was engineering/CS though, and the article seems to be about MFAs.

Despite programming (in GWBasic) since 7 years old, the IT school didn’t transform me into a good developer. In fact most of my colleagues became managers. It’s only 4 years AFTER school that I landed in a famous startup, where I learnt to recompile open-source and use Maven properly and understand the underlying concepts, what to study, what to look into.

And immediately, I created my startup which is now successful.

This whole beginning of career / engineering school has been a terrible waste of youth energy, along with stressing me out because I knew something wasn’t right, and making me intensely depressed. I’m enraged that studying is so hard, and yet, you’re left with absolutely no time to program on your own and discover the scroll of truth.

When very few people had college degrees, they were of high value because the programs were more likely to be rigorous.

As US society said "higher education is the best path to success", it drove up demand where people who never would have considered college otherwise were pushed that way by teachers, guidance counselors, and parents. The high school system adjusted to launch more students in better ways.

Along the way, that morphed into "higher education is the only path to success" and suddenly anyone who didn't go was considered a failure and the entire high school system dumbed down to the point where more and more otherwise normal courses were deemed "college prep."

Unfortunately, it put students who would be below college standards or even just borderline a generation ago in a bad spot where they were underprepared. But colleges get massive cashflow so they introduced more remedial courses in the first year and the average student is graduating in 5 or 6 years. They've steadily devalued themselves and are looking more and more like high school 2.0 but longer with a massive price tag.

(Background: Have a college age kid just going through this personally and watching his friends struggle as some hit these walls. It's sad and ugly and didn't have to be this way.)

This is an unbelievably cynical take on the world. Society and the economy are not zero-sum, and having better education and better skills make someone better off without taking away an equal amount of opportunity from others.

If everyone suddenly everyone got better at maths and critical thinking. Overall the economy would be more productive, and everyone would be better off.

There isn't a fixed amount wealth, to be divided up between people. If you increase skill levels, total level of wealth can increase.

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2018/05/30/book-rev...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education

Lowered standards and devalued degrees is probably a thing though.

A few exceptions:

1) You want to learn something but doesn't want to go through the 90-credit undergraduate. In my university they give you access to a CS graduate diploma that consists of 10 core CS courses under the requirement that you already have an undergraduate degree (non-CS) and pass the entry CS course about programming (usually a Java 101 course). IMO it's a LOT better than a 90-credit second undergraduate degree on CS.

The other exception is that you want to do the research but I'd argue it still doesn't worth it unless it's a prestigious school like top 20 in North America (MIT, Stanford, CMU, Waterloo, those top schools).

That would be true only if all the jobs requiring these credentials were already filled and none were to be created in the future.

There's an ongoing weakening of the signal for people with degrees who can actually do design engineering.

To them, "college is good" is an unquestionable truth, and the systems they build will always give more resources to colleges.

Nowadays, people consider the bachelor enough of an education to join the workforce. And power to them, if they can get their jobs done with only their bachelors', they have no need for more education.

However, it does imply that less knowledge has been transferred to those students than to the students who followed the old system. The vocational education has also shaped itself more to that form, at least here, which is detrimental for the quality of education those people receive.

[0] https://emba.hkust.edu.hk [1] https://rankings.ft.com/home/masters-in-business-administrat... [1]

Also the fees page suggests that it costs at minimum, 550k, and if I'm reading it correctly, 1.5m.

https://emba.hkust.edu.hk/admissions/fees/

Fwiw, those are HK$, so about $193k USD.

Of course, that was from a time when MBAs were probably more of a requirement even in tech for senior exec roles than they are today. These programs obviously still exist but I'm not personally aware of anyone who has gone to one any time recently.

2. In addition to technical knowledge, the students are also exposed to other future executives in other industries. This network can be very powerful.

Scam #1 is the level of executive compensation, particularly in the US.

Scam #2, the EMBA, rides on the back of #1. Cost is "justified" by what #1 makes possible, but nothing else.

There is a business risk if schools try to maintain standards (students have paid for degrees, not learning), but the cumulative effect is that I completely ignore graduate degrees when hiring.

An American undergraduate plus masters is six years, which is absolutely insane.

Let alone their PhDs, which mean you could easily end up 29 before you graduate.

I had a friend in Europe who finished their PhD with top-tier publications in two years - much less mucking around than in the US.

American undergraduate degrees often have plenty of classes unrelated to the major/minor subjects, while European degrees tend to be more focused. In some countries, those breadth requirements are considered a part of secondary education. While an American nominally starts a four-year degree at 18, a European may start a three-year degree at 19.

As for PhDs, they were traditionally considered more like certifications than degrees. You could graduate quickly if you managed to finish your thesis, but it was far more common to continue working on it well into your 30s. This has changed in the past decade or two, as universities started favoring short "American-style" PhDs, with the ideal to graduate before 30. (The British with their short PhDs were always an exception to this.)

It's usually three years + two years.

At least in France there used to be a degree at four years, before the Master's (at five) but I don't think that exists anymore since they introduced the EU-wide new system (Bachelor's — Master's — PhD).

Eg I got a Master's 4 years after high school in the UK.

At any rate - I wouldn't say it's a scam in countries with free university education. It's actually cheap to teach people and it improves the society. Win-win.

University system in US is a scam for the same reason that healthcare system in US is a scam - because it has bad incentives and no taxpayers control over them.

In France, there is the "3+2" system, but that's just on paper. Basically, there are two types of bachelor's: a practical one that's supposed to be the last in line, and another, more "theoretical" one that's supposed to be followed with a Master's.

Students have to choose between the two fairly early, so if your goal is a Master's, you'll take the bachelor that's supposed to be followed by the Master. You do get a piece of paper at the three-year mark saying you've got a Bachelor's, but that's unusable if you want to get a job (as in no-one will hire you).

You technically can go to a Master's after the practical one, but there are extra steps, and it's not as easy.

Mostly in softer fields like marketing and (English) language.

They have all communicated the same thing - it's a necessity for starter jobs.

Bachelor's degree is often enough for a starter job in industry and I don't think it matters that much if it's Master's or Bachelor's even later in your career (at least in software dev), PhD is definitely regarded much higher

A terminal masters program was started by my program while I was in attendance. If you needed the education, it was billed as a professional degree and I think is put to good use. But if you had an undergraduate degree in the field and were not pursuing a PhD then it was just window dressing.

E.g. most industrial fields that include scientist in the title. DS/AS roles in tech, Product management roles etc.

I imagine it's also fairly common for banks, trading firms, and the like to have economists on staff but my point is that they're likely not mostly undergrad (or even Masters) economics majors.

Banks surprisingly hire few economists outside of information/trading groups and, for the more quant heavy, risk groups.

But, I totally understand the issue with a $50k Master's.

What OMSCS offers imo is:

- an elite CS education

- specialize in topics that interest you

- very low cost (I'll have spent around $8k total by graudation)

- the flexibility that naturally comes with an online-first education

What it doesn't offer:

- a starting point for someone with near zero cs-background (if this is you, it will be a hard program)

- job/coop placement

- networking is hard imo

In terms of networking and job placement, I am thinking of applying to in-person masters programs (USC, UCLA, Stanford, and Cornell) but that would put be in some debt (40-50k). After reading this article, I am utterly lost.

I managed two people with a masters degree at a previous position and they weren't any better then the person I hired with a high school diploma. In fact I'd say the death metal guy with the HS diploma ran circles around them.

Doesn't seem like a sound investment from my very limited perspective.

Don't make overly broad statements. This is true for many programs, but false for many programs. It tends to be true for CS, and less true for EE, for example. When I applied for grad schools in EE, the universities that let you in the PhD program with just a BS were a minority. The top 10 school I got into said they would allow it only for special circumstances, and even then, would make you take about 2 extra years of coursework compared to those coming in with an MS (so practically the same as being admitted to a MS first). In my time there, I didn't encounter a single person who got into the PhD program with just a BS.

Googling now, what I say may be less true. My undergrad university, which absolutely required a MS to get into the PhD program, no longer does. Although the grad school I went to hasn't changed - you still have to take about 2 more years of coursework if you get in without a MS, and your qualifying exam is delayed pretty much as if you were first getting an MS.

In terms of secondary education, after a dozen years of schooling young adults are launched into the world with exactly zero marketable skills. Zero.

What is the average US high school graduate good for?

Stacking boxes and, after training, making coffee and a number of other low skill/knowledge jobs.

This, from my perspective, is a travesty, a serious breach of the trust we place on a system of education that seems to have no ability to deliver real value for the money we spend.

At the university level we easily add a year or two to degrees by adding what I call “degree-irrelevant” courses.

An engineering degree should not have —as a graduation requirement— history, social science or non-technical classes.

Please note I said “graduation requirement”. You should not need to pass a class on Middle Earth History and Poetry to obtain an Electrical Engineering degree. This is silly and it wastes a tremendous amount of time and money.

Why do we have this?

Well, our secondary education sucks, so we teach and re-teach that which should have been learned in high school.

Worse than that, because the government is in the student loan business (and they are dumb as can be) the education “mafia” figured out how to fatten-up degrees to extract more money out of the system.

A history class is inexpensive to teach, and yet it costs the same per credit than, say, a chemistry class that requires more infrastructure. Degrees are padded with crap no employer values at all.

If you go to a university that costs, say, $30K to $50K per year, you likely have somewhere in the range of $30K to $80K in coursework loans that is utterly irrelevant to your degree.

The other angle is that, without this coursework we would be able to graduate engineers about 25% faster than we do, which would be a competitive advantage.

These graduates would start their professional lives with about 25% less debt. The lifetime benefits of this cannot be understated.

The opportunity cost, for the person and prospective employer, of taking an additional year or more to graduate people with technical degrees is, in the aggregate, massive in scale.

Someone might say: A well rounded education is important!

Absolutely agreed! Just not as a graduation requirement that adds tens of thousands of dollars to the already abusive cost of education and, in most cases, over a year of time to obtaining a degree.

This is where secondary education should shine. We should demand that young adults emerge from that system with both a well-rounded education and marketable skills.

Society would benefit immensely if we were better at the business of education, from K through university.

EDIT:

As one of many personal examples. Many years ago I hired an EE out of Intel. He spent around five years there designing switching power supplies. That's what I hired him for. He worked for my company for several years doing exactly that, designing switching power supplies. The fact that his US degree required him to take a bunch of irrelevant courses added exactly zero value to what he could do for anyone who might hire him, myself included. This means this person wasted a year+ of his life in school taking courses nobody cares about (and nobody will pay him for). A year later I hired yet another EE to do the same work. His degree was from Europe. He had nearly zero non-STEM coursework. He performed just as well, and in some aspects better, than the US-graduated EE.

I don't understand why we allow the education system to do things that are demonstrably detrimental from nearly every angle. If someone does want to study philosophy or history while obtaining a degree, no problem at all. It should be THEIR decision. And, if they think it might have future value to employers, they would get to highlight the fact that they took and passed such coursework. They could even opt to go for a minor in a certain area of study. Again, this should be the decision of the student and it should self-select based on the ultimate value assigned to such studies by society, not imposed upon every single student by a system with already ridiculous cost structures.

Yes, MS are much more career targeted. That's a feature, not a detriment. In computer science undergrad, I had to take 2 religion, 4 philosophy, 2 history, and 3 language classes. None of those 11 made me a better person nor helped my career. There were 10+ other humanities classes I had to take which left me no room to do what I actually wanted to do: dual major in business and computer science. Note: there were ZERO classes I was given that had any web, cloud, or big data learning in them. I still felt restricted by the 10 courses I had to take for my computer science masters, but I routinely use what I learned in my masters at work. It was extremely beneficial/applicable. There is something to be said for context switching as well. I liked having a smaller-focused course load.

Another thing I liked / found beneficial is the dedication of my classmates. In undergrad, many students wanted to do the bare minimum and move on with their lives. A lot was about partying and sleeping in, which isn't bad, but having classmates who are passionate about the topics and dedicated to putting their best foot forward in class is nice to also have. Its nice having these two separate learning experiences. I've kept in touch with almost no one from undergrad, but lots from masters. The most valuable aspect of a masters is the students, which is why I am highly skeptical of online only masters programs.

In the end, my masters degree doubled my earnings and set my career on a whole new trajectory. Its a great way to energize or restart your career as well.

or the diff between bachelor/engineering degree is barely significant

Also, a STEM masters allows one to do three years of OPT, which is basically a work permit.

A masters was a great choice for me. I did my engineering undergrad abroad, got a very good education for not much money. Doing a masters in the US allowed me to specialize and enter the US market.

Comparatively, the price of a technical masters in the US was on part with that of an MBA on my country of origin. After crunching the numbers, it was an easy decision.

I am happy with the education I got, and the opportunities it opened for me.

IMHO, I learned exactly nothing from my MS. My undergrad classes at a no-name state school were more challenging, and I felt like the grad level classes were a poor copy. The MS project was useless drudgery that I was not interested in at all.

The entire thing was a waste of time, except for the piece of paper that I got at the end. I firmly believe that piece of paper opened several doors that might otherwise have been closed, and has resulted in better jobs and better pay throughout my career.

Arts and U.S. Ivy are missing key words in the title.

If you lift your eyes beyond the U.S., there are countries where the student does not pay tuition and the offered degree program actually contains really useful material with a high quality teaching experience.

But sure, let's just all watch 10min youtube clips and claim it's at least as good.

> For colleges and universities, master’s degrees have essentially become an enormous moneymaking scheme, wherein the line between for-profit and nonprofit education has been utterly blurred. There are, of course, good programs as well as bad ones, but when you scope out, there is clearly a systemic problem.

Cool. Now do the higher education system as a whole.

US/Europe govt should pay people to do research degrees for 12-15 months with some screening as to ability. Run it like a library and/or makespace and remove bloated universities out of the equation. This plus some sort of machine rental or access service (e.g. pay per use) for scientific/fab equipment and open methods for peer review publication would revolutionise adult education in the sciences and engineering.

In employability terms, my master's degree was not a good investment, and these degrees are cheap here compared to the US (I payed 5k for two years).

I do however feel I developed plenty of resillience due to the amount of studying I had to do, a real understanding of what academic life is like by doing my thesis (we are not very exposed to papers in the undergrad), and most importantly, a strong and useful framework and intuition for thinking about the world - but I think that might just be a combination of my degree and innate inclinations.

That was the case for me in Ireland when I did my doctorate.