How Often Is a Degree a Negative
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@Martin9700 said:
Did it help me get my first job in IT? Yes. I also wasn't 10's of thousands of dollars in debt so I'd say the program worked.
Personally I would defined "worked" only if it was able to get you into your first job sooner than an alternative approach. What if you had been teaching yourself and job hunting during the time you were in college.... could you have gotten a job sooner that way? People who go to college them get a job always say that the job helped them to get that first job, and sometimes surely that is true. But they rarely consider the cost of lost opportunity and wonder if they had not gone to college if that would have helped them to get a different first job sooner.
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For example, I worked in hotel management, long ago. Lots of people I knew went to college for hospitality management. When they graduate, universally they would all get jobs in hotels and say "my degree helped me to land this job." But lots of us who didn't go to college also got those jobs, two years earlier than those people and had us in the positions of being the hiring managers hiring them into the positions we had done two years earlier.
To them, college "got them the job." To us, college held them back two years and cost them a fortune.
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@scottalanmiller said:
To them, college "got them the job." To us, college held them back two years and cost them a fortune.
And in most cases the reality is probably somewhere in between.
I didn't do a degree in computers and yet my degree still got me jobs early in my career (you'd probably argue I'm mistaken on that, but hay ho). I think a lot depends on which University you went to. In the UK, rightly or wrongly, going to Oxford or Cambridge opens a lot of doors, followed by other Russell Group Universities, one of which I went to. I imagine it's similar in the US with Ivy League graduates.
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I've Have an AAS degree that along with my knowledge (I usually end up talking for 2-3 hours with people at interviews) Can get me in the door. I probably wouldn't without out it. I still have about $7,200 in debt from it for both tuition & books. I didn't get any tuition assistance for college as the college counted per parent income when I had went rather than household income and my mom made more than most individual people but, being a single parent made much much less than the average family income (And they don't let you not count your parents income until your 26 even if you live on your own).
I have had not having a degree be a negative once. I got told the hiring manager would hire me for a job however the pay would be much less and he would only let me plug in keyboards and mice because he was looking for "higher level employees" for his help desk techs. and wanted me to get a bachelors within 2 years of higher and a Masters within 4 (no tuition assistance). I told them no thanks.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
To them, college "got them the job." To us, college held them back two years and cost them a fortune.
And in most cases the reality is probably somewhere in between.
I didn't do a degree in computers and yet my degree still got me jobs early in my career (you'd probably argue I'm mistaken on that, but hay ho). I think a lot depends on which University you went to. In the UK, rightly or wrongly, going to Oxford or Cambridge opens a lot of doors, followed by other Russell Group Universities, one of which I went to. I imagine it's similar in the US with Ivy League graduates.
Depends on the field. The Ivy League has some universities with reputations similar to DeVry and Phoenix. The largest of the Ivy Leagues is famous in academic circles for being the place that the rich buy degrees for their kids who couldn't make it through community college. America's most important writer of the last fifty years wrote an entire book mocking the university. In some cases, it will get you in a door, in others it will get your resume binned before you ever talk to someone.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I didn't do a degree in computers and yet my degree still got me jobs early in my career (you'd probably argue I'm mistaken on that, but hay ho).
I don't think that college grads can every know when their degree helped or hurt them as they can never see the lost opportunities. It is simply the nature of the beast. Every college graduate things that their degree helped them, because it was part of what got them a job, but none know if they would have gotten a job earlier because they were in college instead.
Those who didn't go to college know that every job that they have their degrees did not get them because... they didn't have one. But they, likewise, will never know if a degree would have opened yet other doors for them.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
To them, college "got them the job." To us, college held them back two years and cost them a fortune.
And in most cases the reality is probably somewhere in between.
I didn't do a degree in computers and yet my degree still got me jobs early in my career (you'd probably argue I'm mistaken on that, but hay ho). I think a lot depends on which University you went to. In the UK, rightly or wrongly, going to Oxford or Cambridge opens a lot of doors, followed by other Russell Group Universities, one of which I went to. I imagine it's similar in the US with Ivy League graduates.
Depends on the field. The Ivy League has some universities with reputations similar to DeVry and Phoenix. The largest of the Ivy Leagues is famous in academic circles for being the place that the rich buy degrees for their kids who couldn't make it through community college. America's most important writer of the last fifty years wrote an entire book mocking the university. In some cases, it will get you in a door, in others it will get your resume binned before you ever talk to someone.
Havard isn't respected anymore. I know that. It's just thought of as a party school now.
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I think Princeton and Yale are still pretty decent. Maybe UPenn. Honestly, outside of odd businesses that have Ivy League grads running them, I know of no business that cares. And the one business I was ever involved with that made a point to hire from there sure paid a price. Completely staff of incompetence. No one know anything about the real world. They were useless. Took ten people to do the job of one normal person in every department.
Problem with the Ivy League is that most people aren't even aware of who is in the Ivy League.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
Havard isn't respected anymore. I know that. It's just thought of as a party school now.
What??? Harvard is still ranked as the second best Uni in the world according to The Times and I think there are 3 Ivy League unis in the top 10
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2014-15/world-rankingAnyway, many top Universities are still at the cutting edge of research in modern technology, so if you want to operate at that level I still think they are the places to be. I work in SMB which isn't generally cutting edge so it would be of little use to me. But if you want a career at CERN or NASA I imagine a good degree is essential for most
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@Carnival-Boy said:
What??? Harvard is still ranked as the second best Uni in the world according to The Times and I think there are 3 Ivy League unis in the top 10
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2014-15/world-rankingYes, it is well recognized that US degrees are inflated around the world. People come here for educations all the time, which we laugh at, because our schools are the worst. We have the best marketing.
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@Carnival-Boy Rankings don't mean a thing. I know many people going there and who have went there recently. It's a party atmosphere now. and most all professors are just giving easy A's since the students were able to get it to the college.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Anyway, many top Universities are still at the cutting edge of research in modern technology, so if you want to operate at that level I still think they are the places to be. I work in SMB which isn't generally cutting edge so it would be of little use to me. But if you want a career at CERN or NASA I imagine a good degree is essential for most
Universities are good for doing research. I agree. That doesn't mean that they have good educations. A major US university became famous when they said they had no mandate to educate students and that students only existed to fund the researchers. So that's why that is the way that it is.
Yes, CERN or NASA. But those are very, very rare programs and I bet even there there are other ways in that people just don't talk about or try. But you are talking about tiny pools of government jobs. If you want the cutting edge of IT, universities are nowhere to be seen.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@Carnival-Boy Rankings don't mean a thing. I know many people going there and who have went there recently. It's a party atmosphere now. and most all professors are just giving easy A's since the students were able to get it to the college.
I attended the college ranked #1 in the world for my program and all but one program that they had when I was there. I dropped out because the educational experience was so poor. We blew the doors off of any Ivy League school when I was there. Not only were we top ranked in educational value, we also had the highest SAT average of incoming students and were the most selective - accepting only 300 each year of 17,000 applicants and because of the kind of school it was only the very elite even applied. Getting into Harvard or CalTech or MIT was considered trivial by comparison. And still, the education wasn't only mediocre.
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There's a guy on SW who constantly speaks up the college to an insane degree, and I've gotten into it with him several times over several topics, even in PM. His views of programming as well are super idealistic and don't really fit reality, and instead fit more what college teach about how things are supposed to be done, than the actual sausage-factory manner that goals actually get met. He's a smart guy, no doubt, but he's super idealistic and I think that's what happens with too much college and not enough experience, speaking of on another thread a while back I recall he and @scottalanmiller got into it because he was saying he deserved an automatic management position because college gave him experience and taught him everything he needed to know, even how to manage people, deal with unexpected issues, etc. I jumped on there too, but since then he hasn't learned anything new in that area it seems.
Aside from that mindset, another I've run into, especially on SW (I run into the above everywhere) is the whole ITT Tech thing (including similar schools), I even had one guy on there threatening to kick my ass because I told him that school was a waste of time and money. The sad part is they actively pull from armed services members as well. There's no reason a crappy college should cost $480 per credit hour, when you can go to a community college and get a more respectable degree for $80 - $150 per credit hour (depending on where you live). Hell, I paid $520 or so when I went to Columbia in the late 90s, and that's a much more respectable school and yet doesn't cost much more than crappy ITT Tech or any other similar school. And yet, if you bring this up, especially on SW, you'll get railed with people saying you're wrong and that having their degree wasn't a colossal waste of money.
One guy even asked what sort of "magical school" cost less than $400 per credit hour, and the answer is a state school, a community college, etc. He never followed up, but from the context I recall he seemed to think college prices in New York were the only prices, but that's typical, as I recall from living in New York, people there don't even tend to realise the rest of the country even exists most of the time.
I've also talked about on SW that if I see they got a "degree" from a place like ITT Tech or ITT Tech, and don't seem to have any experience at all, I'll automatically throw their résumé in the trash (or the metaphorical digital trash). I'm not the only person that does this either, a friend of mine will only hire ITT Tech people at minimum wage, if at all, and he's got loads of them.
Something that strikes me about ITT Tech commercials and IT is that they promise an entry level position, well shoot, you can get that without any college at all, and without wasting the damn money, just don't bring that up to people on Spiceworks, lest they threaten to kick your ass for it.
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@tonyshowoff said:
One guy even asked what sort of "magical school" cost less than $400 per credit hour, and the answer is a state school, a community college, etc. He never followed up, but from the context I recall he seemed to think college prices in New York were the only prices, but that's typical, as I recall from living in New York, people there don't even tend to realise the rest of the country even exists most of the time.
NY is actually pretty cheap. I did my degree in NY and it was trivial to pay for while going to school while working minimum wage style jobs (grocery store cashier, hotel clerk, etc.) Not as cheap as some places, but only a little more for a globally recognized degree.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@tonyshowoff said:
One guy even asked what sort of "magical school" cost less than $400 per credit hour, and the answer is a state school, a community college, etc. He never followed up, but from the context I recall he seemed to think college prices in New York were the only prices, but that's typical, as I recall from living in New York, people there don't even tend to realise the rest of the country even exists most of the time.
NY is actually pretty cheap. I did my degree in NY and it was trivial to pay for while going to school while working minimum wage style jobs (grocery store cashier, hotel clerk, etc.) Not as cheap as some places, but only a little more for a globally recognized degree.
What sort of magical New York is this you speak of?!
People like that only speak from their personal experience and apply it to the rest of the world, if he spent a boat load on college, he assumes that's the only price you can spend on it. Also buying cigarettes and milk in NY sucks, and btw that's all I eat.
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@tonyshowoff said:
What sort of magical New York is this you speak of?!
I went to SUNY Monroe Community College and SUNY Empire State College. Both were super cheap. My wife went to SUNY Geneseo. Not quite as cheap, but still quite affordable.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@tonyshowoff said:
What sort of magical New York is this you speak of?!
I went to SUNY Monroe Community College and SUNY Empire State College. Both were super cheap. My wife went to SUNY Geneseo. Not quite as cheap, but still quite affordable.
I went to Columbia, was not cheap, thank god I made a lot of money off porno, because for a long time I was still paying a lot of debt off for a degree in nuclear science I've never even used.
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Empire State College used to brag about being the lowest cost, accredited university in the northeast US.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Empire State College used to brag about being the lowest cost, accredited university in the northeast US.
I have an Israeli friend who went there. I don't go to a school unless it costs a ton of money and gives me bragging rights, he said smugly.
