The prevalence of so many strapped borrowers is why I recommend students borrow no more for their educations, in total, than they expect to make the first year out of school.
This rule of thumb won’t work for everyone — heaven knows, you may be the rare literature M.A. who writes a best-selling novel and pays off her debt with one check — but it’s a good starting point for anyone considering strapping herself to more education bills.
Also, I should note that if your undergrad degree was in a non-technical field, a technical master's will be quite worth the price. My undergrad was in music, and without my master's in CS I think I would have had a difficult time entering the field. Sure, I hear it's possible to become a programmer without any formal training, but the degree opened doors that allowed me to start in a much higher position.
I think the original poster was saying that he didn't have a B.S. in a technical field. So getting the Masters gave him the credentials he needed to go after jobs he was intrested in. I do not believe he was saying that he had a B.S. in Computer Science and needed a M.S. in Computer Science to compete.
I think its a good example of one of the points made in the linked articles. That if you have an undergrad degree that's not really what your interested in a Masters lets you correct that.
Yes, that's correct. Not only was my undergrad degree in music, I had virtually no computer/technology experience of any kind (this was back in the 80's and I was still using typewriters to type up papers.) So it would have been pretty difficult for me to enter the profession directly.
As an aside, my master's program probably wasn't the best overall preparation for a career as a software developer, actually. It was highly theoretical/mathy, and I think undergrad CS students probably got more and more relevant programming experience. It was mostly about having the credentials, I think.
Was it difficult getting admitted to a master's program in CS without a technical bachelor's degree? My impression is that technical grad schools only want applicants with top-notch technical skills.
Well, don't think the CS program was that highly ranked, but I did have to take a lot of undergrad deficiencies (including about 15hrs math). IIRC, there were leveling classes (like grad level intro to CS classes) that you could take, but they didn't have a very good reputation and I opted to take a core of undergrad classes with better instructors instead.
Mostly it just took time and persistence to get through the deficiencies. My case was probably extreme because my undergrad music program required no math/science whatsoever, so i had a lot to make up for.
This is certainly true. But it all depends on where you live as well. If you take out $80,000 in loans it makes no sense to live in an area where the average salary is $35,000. Then of course, even in higher paying locations you have to juggle the high cost of living.
At Boeing (where i work) a Masters Degree in an Engineering Field (cs for me) counts as about 2 years experience when promotions are considered. If you get your degree (Boeing will pay for everything) while you are employed here, they also give you a 100 shares of Boeing Stock.
So for some like me, getting an advanced degree is free, and only offers upside. So after reading the articles, I could sum it up as advanced technical degrees can help, advanced liberal arts degrees not so much. Oh and some schools have bills and need more students paying tuition to pay them. There are no surprises here.
As an entirely international aside I got paid to do my Master's degree (EPSRC funding in the UK) rather than incur more debt. With a theoretical computer science BA, my MPhil allowed me to specialise and become more employable within my field, as well as having an easy transition into a related PhD - it was a no-brainer, really.
May I ask for the specifics of your course/field? I wanted to apply for EPSRC funding for a Masters/PhD at Warwick complexity complex but have been somewhat sidetracked by other opportunities. Would like to hear more about other peoples experience down similar roads so I can keep the idea on the back burner and sort out my long term plans.
A grad degree is a chance to be paid to work on a project of your choice, without as strong a demand to make it mass-marketable. It's a chance to work on a project where novelty and interestingness are the lead factors in the viability, and not how easy it is to sell it to end-users.
You gotta go through the article and click on all the "Read more…" links to get the full text before printing and it still has the "Resources" links (as if I can click on them after I've printed out the article, which I'm presumably going to do if I'm looking at the article in print mode).
I expect more from the newspaper that gives such nifty charts, various APIs, etc.
The question is: Who is the customer? You could say the customer is the student who pays the university for the education. Or you could say the customer is the employer who hires the graduate.
There has been the impression in the past that getting a degree meant getting a job, but this is not the case. Employers, who have more at stake when hiring don't have to wait 4 years to learn whether or not their "purchase" was a good one. They are learning that the value of a college degree is not much when used as a predictor of job success. More valid predictors are work experience, internships, side projects, and a work ethic. None of which are gained in college. A lot of students think college is enough, but it isn't.
This is where the problem starts over the confusion about the customer. Colleges want students to be enrolled for 4 years. If college is hard and students don't make the A's they think they deserve simply for attending class, then the student leaves the university for one where an A is easier. The student consumer is buying a product and their product is a good GPA. A low GPA won't get them a job and that's what they are after.
This is a problem with money really. It's a philosophical life issue. Is your goal to receive value from the rest of the world, or to create value for the rest of the world. No one wants to work anymore. We've gotten lazy and complacent. The job has become avoiding work, when all too often, doing the work is easier than avoiding it.
Life has become too easy for too many. The rest of the world is eating America's lunch. Even our president thinks it's fine to "bailout" businesses who don't want to put the effort into producing products the world wants to buy. They are losing out to better innovation, better business models, and harder work from their competitors around the world.
For too long, education has been selling hope for a better life, a better job, a higher income. So students go into debt. Debt has allowed universities to continue charging more and more and more over time with deferred payment plans that yield little consequence to the full time student who doesn't yet understand the concept of debt or even money.
And let's not forget the parents who spend more time at work than at home teaching their children good values, a work ethic, how to care for themselves, the value of money.
America is really in a sad state of affairs. A depression is definitely on the way. Life has been too easy for too long. It's amazing as I think about it right now, I can feel it. I can feel the exhuberance evaporating. I can feel the realization setting in that our hopes and dreams for an easy future are being dashed. Only a few people really get it right now. There is still an air of optimism floating around. People are thinking, "No... no really, we can keep going like this... we can. If only we try."
But we can't. We can't keep going like this and be worth anything. What we are doing isn't worth anything. Who wants to pay for it? What is the value? What's the value of your college degree? What's the value of your employment? What's the value of your iPod and your 6 room house in the suburbs and your SUV and your $20,000 in credit card debt and $125,000 in student loans.
Too many people are falling for the clever sales and marketing strategy of the universities, the car companies, the banks, the real estate agents. The irrational are the prey. The predators are eating your money and you are left empty -- today and tomorrow.
The easy path is the path to destruction. You have to work. You have to think. You have to analyze and predict and learn math.
This stuff is hard folks. It's hard to do things faster, or cheaper, or better than everyone else. Mediocrity isn't valuable. You have to be the cream of the crop. You have to work and practice and strive for perfection every day.
No one said life was going to be easy. It's even harder now that the competition has become everyone in the world.
Well, if we're ranting, I might as well add my gripes:
One of the things people need to realize is that in order to earn $80.000 a year, you have to create say $130.000 for the company to break even on you. It isn't easy to create this kind of value every year. If you're in the producing layer of a company (software engineer / graphic designer) you have to create enough value to also pay for all the salaries of your managers, testers, secretaries and all other non-producing employees.
People focus way too much on what their want to earn, not on how to create value. The reasoning often goes like this "I have to do X, which is much harder than Y, and people who do Y earn $Y, so I should earn more than that!". Almost everybody has this weird concept of a "fair" salary, that has no bearing on reality.
This is a very idealistic approach. There are industries which have not produced a dime of revenue for many years and keep existing and employing a lot of people for political reasons.
Even in sectors actually governed by the free market, what you say only has to be true on average. As a software engineer I know I have worked at places that produced no value whatsoever to anyone. Once I wrote a Perl script that immediately saved the guy I worked for something in the neighborhood of my monthly salary per day. That was the only time in my life that I could actually say that I understood how my work translated to money. Usually you just write code which is a small part of someone's great plan which in a few years time may go somewhere or not depending on things that are outside of your control.
Except... if X is much harder than Y, and people who do Y earn $Y dollars, but people who do X will earn less than Y dollars, who in their right mind is going to go and do X?
If the effort/reward/value equation doesn't balance, the role will go unfilled until it does.
But that's the way it's supposed to work. If nobody is willing to pay more than $Y for X that is harder than Y, then you shouldn't go into it. That's not a bug, it's a feature.
You're looking at an instantaneous snapshot of a dynamic system. If it's a problem that nobody will do X, then people will pay more for it once the feedback propagates through. If it never does, then it wasn't worth it and you shouldn't specialize in it.
jerf, you aren't looking at it from two perspectives. Both employers and employees have options. If an employee could do teaching or job x, and teaching pays $30k and job x pays $60k, which should the employee take? If teachers earned more, then the pool of talent gets larger.
You say, If it's a problem that nobody will do X, when really the issue is, "Nobody will do X for $X, but lots will do X for $Y."
In something as complex as a society, society has to make investments it its future. In our society, we have become so short focused on quarterly reports, that we have forgotten the value of education. The payoff of education to a society takes years, decades, generations... this is beyond simple supply/demand microeconomics.
You've attached extra semantics to X and Y that were not in the original post. I do not apologize for failing to guess what you would read those variables as.
I acknowledge the value of government in tweaking the market values of some things; I'm only a little-l libertarian. However, as an engineer, I observe that in order to do that successfully, you have to start with a correct understanding of how the market works, dynamically, not just statically. Getting emotional about valuations the market gives is not a good start.
It is not beyond supply/demand. If I can see the value of education for my lifetime of earnings is greater than what it will cost me I will do it. If it's not or I can't tell, I will not. Crying about the short sightedness of others on this dimension or many others is nothing new.
You made several points, some of which I agree with, and some of which I don't, but I am just going to address a couple that I consider key.
"More valid predictors are work experience, internships, side projects, and a work ethic. None of which are gained in college. A lot of students think college is enough, but it isn't."
I agree with this statement, but it comes with a caveat you left out. When most people are just starting out, they don't have any work experience with mentioning. The way to get this is to get that first professional job, but having a degree is (for most people) the best way to get that first professional job. Now once you have that work experience the degree matters a lot less, but it is easiest to get that work experience in the first place with a degree.
"This is where the problem starts over the confusion about the customer. Colleges want students to be enrolled for 4 years. If college is hard and students don't make the A's they think they deserve simply for attending class, then the student leaves the university for one where an A is easier. The student consumer is buying a product and their product is a good GPA. A low GPA won't get them a job and that's what they are after."
I largely disagree with this. After going through numerous interviews and hiring cycles as both a job seeker and a hiring manager, I have never asked a candidate for their GPA nor have I been asked for mine. GPA does matter for some things (Grad schools always ask for it, and so do some government agencies) but most employers don't care about it.
"A depression is definitely on the way."
Can you justify this? Most of the economicists I listen to predict that our current recession is going to end by 2010. That of course does not mean we are going to return to where things where. It takes a long time after a recession ends for the economy as a whole (and particularly) jobs return to their previous levels, but it does mean things seem to be getting better, not worse.
Which economists? Most economists I listened to 3-5 years ago thought everything was fine.
I can justify it by looking around at the world. I see an over-abundance of debt. I see too many imports and not enough exports. I see a housing market that is continuing to decline. More layoffs on the way means even more people won't be able to pay their bills. I see that we are spending too much money on guns and not enough money on butter.
I only took micro and macro in college, so I'm no economist, but all the signs are pointing to more decline. I look to history to tell me what the future will hold and it's looking a lot like 1929, years before the depression started.
My question for you is: What is going to pull us up? What value are we going to create that is going to bring us money?
I do not know when the recession will end, but I would prefer a stronger justification before believing that professional economicists like Dr. Duy of the University of Oregon are necessarily wrong about the recession ending around 2010, and saying that we are heading for a depression is a very strong statement indeed.
Yes, the housing and employment markets are continuing to decline. This is expected. We are still in a recession, and even when it ends those are lagging indicators so they are likely to remain bad even after the recession is over. But the rate at which they decline (in other words, their second derivative) has lessened. Also, many of the leading indicators (stock market, bond market) have stabilized.
I do not understand the relavence of your statement about guns and butter, and if this is so like 1929, how so?
I do not know what will end the recession, or even if something specifically needs to end it. The economy is after all cyclic. but you made a very strong and direct statement that we are heading for a depression. Given that this is contradicted by most of the economic experts that are referenced in newspapers, do you have any stronger justification?
Sometimes, less than nothing. I was in the University of Connecticut's graduate linguistics program for a year before deciding it wasn't for me and dropping out. I could have stuck around for one more year and left with a master's, but in linguistics it's generally viewed as a "consolation prize" for students who weren't good enough to complete the PhD. For that reason I didn't even bother.
bottom line: some degrees pay off more than others.
as recent census data shows, advanced degrees in business or engineering may earn up to 15% more, in contrast to degrees in arts or anthropology which face no substantial increase
The liberal education establishment has long maintained the fiction that "all degrees are equal". But no-one should be under any illusion that undergrad is a choice between professional/vocational training in knowledge work or a 4-year vacation (in the sense of spending time pursing a hobby).
I don't think either of those options can be faulted and I don't think the people who choose either of them are the ones with problems.
It's the kids who go to Uni because it's what you do after high school that are wondering what has happened to them.
There's also a group of people who went in intending to become academics and have found that academia is now madly cutting costs, but that's a different and more complex story.
"I don't think either of those options can be faulted and I don't think the people who choose either of them are the ones with problems."
I do. I'm perfectly willing to fault people for going to University, spending tens of thousands of dollars, and walking out with a degree in some obscure postmodern discipline or something. No matter how you may feel about such a degree, the objective value is quite low.
"Shouldn't people follow their bliss?" Well, first of all, no I actually don't entirely believe that, but secondly and much more importantly, have you looked at a real University's course list? You seriously had to pick "French Literature in the 19th century" as your specialization when there are 30 types of engineering, 50 types of science, and a couple hundred other programs with some sort of actual use?
When I went to university, I had two basic interests I could have specialized in: Music composition, and computer programming. That's a no-brainer! In the course of my education, I subsequently discovered that I could have tolerated psychology, mathematics, electrical engineering (though I do prefer programming), and there's a couple of other things on a lower tier below those. Note how those are entire disciplines, each with interesting specialties of their own.
Did I fail to follow my bliss? No, I still minored in music, in fact. But I have no regrets about spending my money to get real skills.
The only people who share the fault with the students are the numerous people who told them to ignore practicality, at a time in the student's life when they still had no actual experience with which to understand the full implications of that and resist. Some might still have chosen to pursue their bliss, and I have no problem with that, as long as it is done with eyes open.
Indeed. Even at 17 contemplating university, it was obvious that some disciplines were massively more employable than others. But there was - is - a myth that employers don't care what degree you have, so long as you have one, and that no matter what the subject is it's just a vehicle for "learning to learn". And that is arrant nonsense!
I know plenty of people with no degree who are working - some in quite highly-paid and fulfilling work. They've got there through being in the right place at the right time, internships, voluntary work and being good at what they do.
I also know a number of very talented people who've graduated university with BA and MA degrees this year - most of whom are currently scrambling over one another grasping desperately at what meagre scraps of low-paid part-time work exist in the radio industry at the moment. You can't put it in such simplistic terms. (I went out with a girl who'd been to Oxford a couple of years ago. She was jobless and living in a council flat.)
The prevalence of so many strapped borrowers is why I recommend students borrow no more for their educations, in total, than they expect to make the first year out of school.
This rule of thumb won’t work for everyone — heaven knows, you may be the rare literature M.A. who writes a best-selling novel and pays off her debt with one check — but it’s a good starting point for anyone considering strapping herself to more education bills.
Also, I should note that if your undergrad degree was in a non-technical field, a technical master's will be quite worth the price. My undergrad was in music, and without my master's in CS I think I would have had a difficult time entering the field. Sure, I hear it's possible to become a programmer without any formal training, but the degree opened doors that allowed me to start in a much higher position.