Having a degree makes you look good in the job market, compared to someone with the same skills but no degree, so you go get one. Good choice!
Now, many other people wisely do the same. The more people have degrees, the more pressure is applied on those who don't to go get one. Awkward, that.
So, now we have a huge demand for degrees, plus a lot of degree-seekers who (to be honest) aren't really cut out for college. But that's no big deal! The market hears and obeys, as enrollment goes up, standards go down, and bottom-tier schools admit anyone with a pulse. Hooray, everyone's getting educations, isn't this great? Who cares if they're learning anything.
Oh dear, it seems we've stumbled into a Nash equilibrium wherein the competent people are still competent, the incompetent are still incompetent, you can't tell them apart by seeing who has a degree anymore, and now everyone has student loans weighing them down. Alas, game theory, she is a cruel mistress.
As far as I can tell, opening the universities to the masses damages the classes, standards, and student-faculty relations to the point where those who really 'ought' to be at university rather than at technical colleges don't benefit in the same way as previously. Perhaps this is just elitism, but I get the feeling that the 'bright' entering students are still the 'bright' graduating students, but gain much less deep knowledge than in the past. Of course, this applies to all disciplines, not just CS. As famous mathematician S Novikov said in 2002:
"In the West, however, there was also an abrupt fall in the level of college and school education in physics and mathematics in the last 20-25 years, and in the USA the decline in school education was apparently particularly steep. I can clearly see that contemporary education cannot produce a theoretical physicist capable of passing Landau’s theoretical minimum." (http://www.mi.ras.ru/~snovikov/cris_en.pdf)
Basically, this education crisis seems to me to be endemic to developed societies. I don't have a clear thesis on this yet, but it seems that when a society progresses from "Education is a route from poverty to paradise" to the anti-liberal "Everyone should receive fourteen years of education" that the quality of education rapidly declines.
You know it did not use to be like that. Things changed just recently. It is interesting because I went to college exactly as things were changing so I saw the difference first hand.
When I started college in the 90's personal computers and the internet were just hitting the mainstream and people started hearing stories about how computer nerds were getting rich. So of course the computer science and computer engineering majors had huge in coming classes.
The first intro classes that start the cs and ce majors were pretty large. But that did not phase the professors. Just because everyone wanted a degree did not mean that everyone was getting one. So those first classes had some shocking curves. There were rumors that more than 50% were failing the intro classes. And then another 50% of the survivors would fail the next intro class. Huge hordes of pissed off students were leaving cs for econ, bio, social science, etc.
But the professors were unapologetic. They simply said that you cannot pass their class unless you learn how to program and if 50% do not learn than 50% will fail.
The funny thing is that those intro classes were not really that difficult, but you just needed to know how to program to pass them and many people couldn't. After that classes started getting really hard, but then the people that remained knew what they were doing, so the curve normalised after the first year.
Anyway, I started in a major of about 200 people and I graduated with about 30 people. Many people that graduated with me had started earlier than me having taken more than 4 years to finish the major. But of course we all knew what we were doing, and our diplomas meant something.
But for the class years after me things changed. I think someone in industry told the school that they need to graduate 10 times more people each year. They made everything easier. Classes started getting large throughout the major. People were not failing as much. I met people junior to me that were taking the same classes I had taken yet all the assignments they were doing were much much easier than the ones I had to do. They started using a lot of high level tools without knowing what happens under the hood. Nobody even knew about pointers. So then my degree started meaning less and less.
This has to end. The solution they have now is that the really good people are supposed to proceed to grad school, but life is too short for that. I think they may have to use two levels of undergrad degrees -- one really challenging that exposes you to all levels of computer science, and another easy one that is for people that will be the future "X certified professionals."
As a student I agree that there should be a way to differentiate ourselves -- but I think there already is.
I started thinking Med school but I liked computer science so I did a Combined Major in computer science and microbiology. I found computer science as my passion, and more specifically I'm fascinated by machine learning.
Now I'm doing a Combined Honour in computer science and microbiology with a minor in statistics. I'm choosing courses that emphasize artificial intelligence and machine learning.
It will depend on the university but I think any student who really wants to differentiate themselves can do so. If not through their specialization choice (i.e. majors and minors) through course choices as well as activities outside of courses but still within the university system like research.
Of course there is always freelancing, open-source and code contests.
- B.Sc. Learn enough to enable you to get on the job training
- M.Sc. Meaningless, just a stamina test to check if you can focus adequately
on a narrow field.
- Ph.D. A sort of a license to do research.
A 'degree' is just a 'key' to your first job. From there onwards its YOU, your capabilities and most important your character. In many instances a Ph.D. will be viewed by prospective Employers as a disadvantage calling you (theoretical) rather than (practical). The greatest benefit of a PhD to me was it developed my analytical and research skills, which I could apply in different settings (i.e. not just Engineering). Its downside being too analytical screwed up quite a few personal relationships :)
> If the inflation in education continues, I cannot imagine what kind of degree it will take to get a job in the future...imagine everyone being a PhD?
It's the opposite actually - when everyone is doing the same thing, you don't differentiate by doing the same thing plus more of that same thing. You differentiate by doing something totally different. Writing open source software, freelancing, and traveling for four years would lead to much more interesting and better credentials than four years in most universities.
I agree. The people I see at my college are proof that you can get a degree and know nothing. I am getting a degree, but I'm going to rely more heavily on being able to show potential employers that I have practical experience working on different web startups. That is far more valuable than waving around a degree for the simple reason that lazy people have cheapened the value of the degree.
The upshot of all that is that you can expect job hunting to become more time consuming. After all, if a masters (PhD less so) is essentially meaningless (and I believe that's a point that in some branches of science is a thing of the past) then you'll have to prove on the spot that you really know your stuff.
College provides a general sense of accomplishment over a long period of time- a relaxed mental state conducive to growth and figuring out what you would like to do in the future.
As a white male, I felt pretty good in graduate school (for computer science). I was often the only white in my graduate classes. While there were plenty of Chinese, Koreans, and Indians, there weren't any whites. This made me realize what a great opportunity I had. The whites were mainly in liberal arts, business, marketing, accounting, and English. What does that mean for me? It means that my peers, mainly other whites who I'll be competing against, will probably not have CS graduate degrees. Good for me, but probably bad for the overall state of the country.
I worked the entire time during my school career, and that experience is what employers really care about, but I believe it helps that I have a graduate degree when interviewing and getting through the HR door.
I'm honestly asking, what is racist about my comment? It's about race, but why is it racist? I don't mean to be racist, nor do I want to be a racist. I removed the article.
Your post assumes that only "whites" are your peers, and that in competition, non-"whites" are somehow automatically disqualified; and that lack of CS accredited "whites", as opposed to non-"whites" is "probably bad for the overall state of the country", i.e. that the relative status of "whites" has a moral worth.
If his peer group is in fact white, then it's not racist, just a statement of reality. And as for competition, most people only care about competing within their own peer/status group.
And yes, it is bad for the economy if whites are significantly under invested in engineering. It's bad for the economy if anyone or any group is under invested in engineering. Anything "assumed" or implied by his post, is added by you, not by the original poster.
Let's save the racist card/downvotes for when someone actually makes personally disparaging remarks about someone of another race, not when someone just makes earnest and frank observations about society.
See now, you just equated peer group with status group. If you believe that "white" can be a peer group, then that seems to imply that you also believe that "white" can be a status group, which is a far more troubling scenario.
Racism is not about making disparaging remarks about someone of another race. It's about prejudging, i.e. assuming that certain things are true, just because of that person's race.
I'm saying that one's peer group is almost alway's one's status group. People don't personally compare themselves/compare self-worth versus a random sample of the population. We compare ourselves to friends, neighbors, classmates, and co-workers.
I think what he means is that most people from the other countries will go back to their countries once their studies are done, hence most of his peers will be white, and few of them will have benefited from higher education in CS/engineering.
His comment does reference race, but it doesn't sound racist to me.
Why would you assume that someone is going to "go back" simply because of their skin color? How do you know that he wasn't writing about American citizens of various ethnic origins?
What you saw as an implied worth for whiteness was my view that most of my peers in school were not US citizens, while most of the white programmers in the university and workforce were and are. Many of those students didn't plan on staying in the US. My wife, who is Asian and a math major, wasn't born in this country, nor were many of our closet friends so I feel as if I have an inside view of these type of things. Not being a citizen seems to have drawbacks. How many job positions have you seen that say no sponsorships, no H1's, or US citizens only? I see this as an advantage for me, a US citizen, English as a first language, programmer with a CS graduate degree.
My previous positions and my current position with a large US company, have and is, composed of nearly all white developers. In effect, my peers are white, and probably most of the HN's community has a similar experience.
Your peers are developers; the distinguishing criterion is not race. By using one criterion as shorthand for another, as you seem to be doing, is prejudging. The way you write makes it sound like your non-white co-workers are not your peers.
Now, many other people wisely do the same. The more people have degrees, the more pressure is applied on those who don't to go get one. Awkward, that.
So, now we have a huge demand for degrees, plus a lot of degree-seekers who (to be honest) aren't really cut out for college. But that's no big deal! The market hears and obeys, as enrollment goes up, standards go down, and bottom-tier schools admit anyone with a pulse. Hooray, everyone's getting educations, isn't this great? Who cares if they're learning anything.
Oh dear, it seems we've stumbled into a Nash equilibrium wherein the competent people are still competent, the incompetent are still incompetent, you can't tell them apart by seeing who has a degree anymore, and now everyone has student loans weighing them down. Alas, game theory, she is a cruel mistress.