I run an LSAT prep business. You'd be surprised how determined some undergrads are to go to law school, despite the objectively terrible math.
They'll have a mediocre LSAT score, but say "School X will let me in!". School X is terrible. They have lousy employment prospects, and charge $50,000 a year.
When you add miscellaneous fees and opportunity cost of not working, the law degree costs at least $250,000. And your school might close.
But (some) students still want to do it, despite the stark reality. As best I can tell, they don't see alternative options.
This group is shrinking however, which is why law school enrolments are in free fall. This chart from the LSAC shows a massive drop in LSATs administered.
2008-2009 was the high water mark: 171,514 LSATs. 2014-15 likely will be less than 100,000.
Which is good. The industry's been in a bubble, and it needs to pop. But that means this is a VERY bad time to be going to law school unless you're extremely careful (and ideally have a guaranteed scholarship to a good school that won't close).
> As best I can tell, they don't see alternative options.
Soon this will trickle down to college. In many cases, you pay $250K for that too. In many, many fields, you can learn everything you need to know on the internet, and get the job you want by just hustling (often by impressing only a single person with influence in the field you want).
I'm in biomedical sciences, have a Ph.D. and will be a professor at a very good school soon, but I don't give a crap about somebody's degrees. If this line of thinking is invading my world, then you better believe the rest of the economy is getting there too. (I also only got into MIT because I managed to impress one influential person).
Getting ahead in life by going to college is a dying notion.
> Getting ahead in life by going to college is a dying notion
People with college degrees earn significantly more over their lifetimes. Also, they usually understand the world and critical thinking much better, have better communication skills, etc. These things are valuable in themselves and valuable for their roles as citizens, parents, community members, etc.
To read that claim from someone with a Ph.D., a degree from MIT, and will soon be on the faculty of "a very good school" is a bit rich. It reminds me of wealthy people who says money doesn't matter to them.
HN is a unique environment of generally highly-educated, high-achieving people. Most of the world cannot program computers; many cannot operate them. It would be interesting to hear from members of the large majority who lack college degrees.
I don't have a fancy college degree, but even I can see that you might be mixing correlation and causation. College doesn't necessarily cause people to earn more money, better understand the world or communicate well. It's that intelligent people who are likely to succeed in life tend to go to college, mostly because they are expected to by society. Those people would have probably been just as successful without college, but that's hard to prove empirically without a large control group. Your argument seems different when applied to basketball instead of education. Was Michael Jordan great because he played for a top college basketball program, or was he playing for a top program because he was already great?
I think part of OP's point was that college itself isn't what makes people successful. There are a lot of great reasons to go to college, but advances in communication technology have fundamentally changed the landscape. It used to be that college libraries and professors were the only way to gain access to certain kinds of knowledge. That period in time is obviously over. College degrees will become less and less important in a world where anyone can communicate with everyone. A diploma used to be the only way to certain open doors. Now a facebook account and an impressive resume can do just as much or more.
> I can see that you might be mixing correlation and causation ... Those people would have probably been just as successful without college, but that's hard to prove empirically without a large control group.
There is a lot of research supporting my statement; it isn't something I came up with. I don't see research supporting yours, though it is trendy and often repeated around here.
> College doesn't necessarily cause people to earn more money, better understand the world or communicate well. It's that intelligent people who are likely to succeed in life tend to go to college
I think people who spend four years studying, guided by leading scholars, will improve their knowledge and skills. That seems like an uncontroversial statement. You claim these people are intelligent and motivated; that would seem to backup my claims.
> mostly because they are expected to by society
You may look at it that way, but is there a basis to saying how many others share your view?
On one hand, you can argue that almost everything people do is because they are expected to: Go to high school, listen to their parents, get a job, get married, etc.
On the other, I think most people I know went to college because they wanted to learn and grow.
> People with college degrees earn significantly more over their lifetimes.
While your statement is factually correct, the slogan has been adopted by the sleaziest of the institutions pitching the most useless degrees to drive potential applicants into thinking that a student loan + years of their time = automatic cash further down the road.
"But not all degrees are equally useful. And given how much they cost—a residential four-year degree can set you back as much as $60,000 a year—many students end up worse off than if they had started working at 18."
Not only that, a more accurate statement would have been "People who obtained college degrees forty five years ago earned significantly more than those who didn't."
I'm not at all convinced that will be true for the current generation. The job market used to have room for pretty much anyone with a degree. Even your degree in 17th century French literature was good enough to get you a sales or local government position at an employer who required a degree but wasn't picky about the major. These days there are so many graduates the sales manager can wait for someone with a degree in economics and the local government guy can wait for a candidate that's similarly (sort of) related.
Plus there was always law school. You can still get into law school; it's just that there's no job waiting for you when you get out.
What also goes unsaid: 45 years ago, many fewer people earned Bachelors degrees (edit a smaller percentage of workers had degrees). Using past performance as an indicator of future performance is often fraught with peril.
> Using past performance as an indicator of future performance is often fraught with peril
It's a useful turn of phrase, but not good reasoning. It would be unwise to ignore decades of history because of a lack of certainty. Arguably, college degrees and intellectual skills will become more valuable in the future, as more and more jobs demand it. Demand for unskilled labor is decreasing.
Also, my analysis is that people who spend four years in a guided program to acquire knowledge and skill among the resources of a university (experts, teachers, labs, etc) will be more knowledgeable and skilled. I don't think that's controversial.
What you have to watch out for is the debt to expected earnings ratio. A lot of the data from previous years was based on low (or zero) tuition rates.
Getting stuck with a six-digit loan while being underemployed would still support the "college graduates make more money" statement, as to get that barista job a college graduate probably ranked higher in the resume stack than people with high school degrees, but I doubt anyone is gloating.
By similar measure, getting a mortgage to buy a house and then pay it off was a decent deal for most of the century until people started overpaying by purely believing in the principle, but not running the actual numbers.
Do you have data to back up any of that? The data I've seen says that, right now, unemployment is much higher and income is lower for people who lack college degrees.
People with college degrees, in the past, earned significantly more over their lifetimes than those without. But this may or may not continue, particularly for certain degrees where the person may have been better off learning marketable skill and applying it early.
I have a college degree and have never really used it. The jobs I have landed, the things I have done, none of them in any way shape or form are attributable to that degree. And, I graduated college nearly 20 years ago. College was a good place to drink beer and get laid, but really, I think I would have been better off going straight to work. The sad part is, I knew it at the time but my parents were insistant that without a degree I'd be mopping floors for a living. So I listened to them when I should have trusted my gut instincts. I'd trade the degree back in a heartbeat for tuition and interest and book costs alone...to say nothing of the 4 years (ok.. almost 5, I was having a good time but who is counting?) of opportunity cost.
Have to agree with OP. I believe college to be generally overpriced and over rated. Particularly in certain disciplines. I'm about as sad to see law schools going out of business as I would be to see mosquito breeding pools being drained. Maybe some of the potential attendees can do something socially useful with their lives now. (yes, I know...we need lawyers. we probably need mosquitos too. just not so many of them.)
I'm not entirely confident how things will pan out, but here (Denmark) the value of degrees seems to be getting higher, if anything. Not in the sense that a degree is a ticket to a good job, as in the past, but in the sense that not having a degree will shut you out from a wide range of jobs, because it's just so expected now, that it's become like the new high-school diploma. Employers don't care about high school diplomas per se, but they treat not having graduated from high school as a significant red flag. For many jobs university diplomas seem to be filling that role now.
The monetary context is admittedly different because universities are essentially a continuation of the free public schooling system: zero tuition, and you get paid a stipend if you're a full-time student (about $1k/mo to cover living expenses). There's still an opportunity cost in lost earnings vs. getting a job straight from high school, but the delta is less.
The other thing that has been happening is that outcomes (employment/earnings/etc.) have been rapidly diverging between university graduates and vocational-school graduates. The two tracks used to both lead to good employment—in different sectors, but paying well and with job security in both cases. But in the past 20-30 years or so, the vocational schools' employment statistics are nose-diving compared to those of the universities.
You can make the subjective assertion that college was worthless to you personally, and who can challenge it? But a subjective assertion by one person is not data nor is it representative of any population (I learned that in college).
Also, education has many benefits beyond earning money. It's seems absurdly narrow-minded to evaluate college solely by the marginal income gain. Life is so much more and education benefits much of it. I could not write nearly as well, use mathematics, understand science, understand art, understand humanity, be as creative, etc. etc. without the years I spent studying those things.
I can't imagine doing what I do with my high school education. Can someone waste their time in college? Of course and I'm sorry for those that did, but don't impose it on everyone else. I remember most of my peers' intellectual curiosity and how much they learned. Someone could own a computer or raise kids and gain nothing from those things either, but that doesn't devalue my computer or family, or argue that they don't provide great benefits to humanity.
> But a subjective assertion by one person is not data nor is it representative of any population (I learned that in college).
The opposite is also often true: data about a large aggregate population (across all demographics and generations in this case) might not represent the reality on the ground for a precise sample. Circumstances vary significantly and with rapid technological change smashing straight into global economic instability, everything is up in the air.
> I can't imagine doing what I do with my high school education. Can someone waste their time in college? Of course and I'm sorry for those that did, but don't impose it on everyone else.
Based on my experience growing up in the United States, all effort is spent on imposing $30-50,000/year degrees (and debt) on students, instead of realistic alternatives that might be better suited to circumstances.
> Life is so much more and education benefits much of it. I could not write nearly as well, use mathematics, understand science, understand art, understand humanity, be as creative, etc. etc. without the years I spent studying those things.
You could study and understand all of those without going to college, given the right resources (like books and time). In my opinion, it is a person's intelligence and curiosity that matter, not four years in an institution or a degree (I say this from a the inside of the educational system, currently pursuing a PhD myself).
However, what's missing is access to a teacher who can guide you through the subject material, answer questions, show you the pitfalls, extrapolate on topics and give you a thorough understanding of what you are studying. A good teacher is an invaluable resource that you will not receive through independent study alone.
And peers, and resources such as organization (clubs, teams, classes, etc.); labs, tools and machines, including IT; and the very many information resources that are not yet online.
That's an idealistic view of education. In today's "industrial education system", where each teacher/professor teaches classes of 30-100, I don't think each student gets the attention/discussion time they need. You still wind up doing most of the work yourself (at least I did).
> In my opinion, it is a person's intelligence and curiosity that matter, not four years in an institution or a degree
People do not come out of the womb with their levels of intelligence and curiosity set in stone, and they're still quite flexible at 17/18 when they hit college. Even the most naturally intelligent and curious 18 year-olds do not have the free time, motivation, and access to experts that enrollment in a university provides.
My own practical experience (from looking both at myself and many others) is almost the opposite. I think one of the great fallacies of modern education is the idea that you can take an idiot (for lack of a more appropriate/PC word), put them through school and they'll come out a genius. IMHO, practice shows otherwise.
Part of the reason I am throwing down $60k is to learn from other people, not books.
Plus I get an international exchange in Hong Kong and one year's paid industrial placement, it would certainly be challenging to secure those things by myself (though that would be an education in itself).
The problem is that there are lots and lots of people that comes to you and say "college is not worth it because of..." and you dismiss every one of them by saying "that's just one anecdote, there's no data to support it".
Well, the data is coming to your door, but you refuse to look into it unless it is neatly prepackaged by a figure of authority. I wonder if when you read the prepackaged version of the current trends, 30 years from now, you will say "oh, I was wrong after all... who would have though that back then!"
>People with college degrees earn significantly more over their lifetimes.
This is almost certainly due to people with college degrees having more racial and economic privilege than people without college degrees. Controlling for this I'd doubt the difference was that large.
>Also, they usually understand the world and critical thinking much better, have better communication skills, etc
This is probably the just-world fallacy.
People who can waste money on higher education, especially during a sustained "recession"/depression, are people who already have money and connections.
It's never been about what you know, it's been about who you know. College is a good way to buy those connections.
If you start seeing rosy pictures of the world, you should notice that and correct for it. The world is not a rosy place. For any question that fits the template "Does X fulfill its direct stated purpose?" the answer is almost certainly no.
Notice that the sea change we're seeing doesn't actually amount to a paradigm shift. It's not like people from the economic class prevented from getting college degrees now can afford to fuck around on Udacity and "hustle" to get a job. Don't worry, there's no more equality now.
"People with college degrees earn significantly more over their lifetimes."
This statistic must be based on people who have completed their lifetimes earning. So effectively a lag of 45 years. Work doesn't seem to be paying as much for my generation as it did for the boomers.
There are lots of areas where formal education is a must.
Even when you can self-teach everything, you still need some structure, some meta-learning, to learn what you need to study to build the pillars of your knowledge. And you still need some organization that certifies that you know what you claim you know. Medicine is an obvious example. Engineering is another. No-one would like to live in a tall building made by somebody who claims to know how to build tall buildings, but didn't go to college.
I bet not many pharmaceutical companies would like to hire someone without a degree to design a new drug. Regulations, insurance, credibility, lots of problems.
> Getting ahead in life by going to college is a dying notion.
So, yes... you can earn a lot of money without a degree, but if you want to work in some areas that need a degree, you must go to college.
And I see that with my sister today. She's 2 years older than me. She left university after 3 years, went to live to another country for 6 years, and came back with no money. She worked there, but spent a lot living large, having fun and enjoying her twenties. Meanwhile, I studied and worked (to pay my studies)..
Now, I earn almost 4 times what she earns. And it's difficult to her to find a job that she likes. She tried having her own business, and burned all of her savings. She started studying again, realizing that without a career, she's going to have a really hard professional future.
I know that the choices we both made are based on very different philosophies. She prioritized enjoying her youth, and that's OK. I prioritized investing in my future, and that's OK too.
But a formal education, is still a great tool to help you in your professional life, even when you can learn all by yourself.
But what did she do during those 6 years out of the country? Bartend in beach bars or worked in an office/whatnot learning the skills and tools to have a good career?
I think that is the main problem with people that assume college degree equals more money than not. Because it is either study and get a degree or go work at McDonalds or bartend.
I'll give you the opposite. I dropped out on my 2nd year. Went abroad as well, but went to work in the area I wanted to (game development) and continued to move around and learned a lot in various industries. 12-13 years since then and I'm making more than 5x than anyone in my HS class that got a degree (and I'm talking STEM degrees), and more than double what other friends that got a medical degree are making (which took them around 7-8 years to get).
Sure, if you want to perform surgery, you are going to have to get that degree, but that is a very specific degree you are going to get and not just 'CS because I like computers' or 'English Literature because I don't like math' which seems to be why a lot of folks go to University these days: "you got to have that degree y'all"
I highly doubt crowd sourced, non-industry funding will ever be able to fund R01 or even transition grant level projects sustainably, and among all projects I can only see highly translational projects which are easier to pitch to the public getting funded through this model.
All the existing players have an incentive to maintain the status quo as far as government and industry funding goes, and the infrastructure requirements and regulatory issues associated with practicing biomedical science make it basically impossible to break out of the traditional academic or industry model.
From the research side, academics who have gotten PhDs, post-doced for 5 years, been associate professors for years, and then finally gotten faculty spots would be furious to see scarce grants start going to people who haven't put in that time.
From the government side, I haven't seen many bold ideas in terms of funding come out of NIH or NSF. I saw Francis Collins speak at MIT about a month ago iirc, and he had essentially nothing to say on the subject except that he hopes the situation will improve and that they were introducing "bold" new grants which would facilitate post-doc transitions faster.
> I highly doubt crowd sourced, non-industry funding will ever be able to fund R01
I'd be careful about the "highly doubt" part. This sounds like something the Blackberry or Blockbuster would have CEO said.
> All the existing players have an incentive to maintain the status quo
They don't care what the status quo is. Nobody sings three cheers to their alma-mater US govt. grant agencies. People care about getting money to do their work. Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Cell press didn't exist until they did and then their money and power started talking and everyone listened.
> then finally gotten faculty spots would be furious
The market will have no sympathy for this.
NIH budget is $30 Billion. Many crappy internet businesses, Yahoo, have that kind of money. People spend more than that on iPhones. If the "crowd" mobilizes to any extent like it is prone to do on the internet, the collective purchasing power will have no problem blowing away the NIH. Kickstarter is already crossing this threshold. It has already raised several billion and its only 5 years old and that number is growing exponentially. It's happening. The ivory tower has been warned.
The main problem with Kickstarter is people are intolerant of failure. They see their money as a purchase, not an investment with uncertain payoff. With that kind of attitude in place, how is anybody going to fund hundreds of extremely experimental drugs (or what have you) via Kickstarter?
"intolerant of failure" is almost the opposite of how the majority of people give money through crowdfunding. You really have to use these platforms more. The whole idea is a culture of benevolence.
I disagree, at least for the foreseeable future. The amount of resources and energy needed to convince the general public to fund "difficult-to-understand" research which is needed to solve larger "difficult-to-understand" problems will be too great of barrier to overcome for most research groups. I think crowd-funding in research will be ancillary at best for a long time.
You're absolutely right in saying that we need to increase our budget, and that the citizenry could afford to crowd fund science sustainably if they chose to do so.
Outside of the obvious issues with implementing crowd funded science in an academic setting (Who owns the IP? How does overhead work? How do you verify that the work is being done if there are no deliverables and a high failure rate? How much money can go to salary? etc). The two obvious problems I see with crowd funding science are lack of ROI and ignorant investors.
> People spend more than that on iPhones.
> Kickstarter is already crossing this threshold. It has already raised several billion and its only 5 years old and that number is growing exponentially.
People get ROI at Kickstarter in the form of products. People get ROI in the form of utility from buying Apple products. There is no obvious route to ROI from crowdfunding science. Perhaps a system can be devised where investors are invited to take part in some of the work or can track the progress and get regular briefs, but this would be enormously distracting to the investigators. Maybe I'm just cold hearted, but I simply don't see people giving away billions of dollars per year to fund science (I would love to be proven wrong though!)
The second potential issue with crowd funding science is the difficulty in evaluating the merit of proposed projects. The general public (and most of the scientific community) is not qualified to evaluate the legitimacy or impact of highly domain specific projects. How do people decide what is a good project vs a bad project within a discipline? How do people evaluate projects across disciplines? Sexy translational projects involving novel therapeurics / device development may be easily pitched, but who is going to invest in boring basic science in a zebra fish model? What happens when groups come in to take advantage of this ignorance and pitch bullshit projects and then walk away with the money? This situation also dissuades people from funding young investigators. If people don't understand the projects, they're likely to fund people with established track records and titles because that seems safer, not new people.
As I have espoused in previous threads involving the academic science model, one way to solve our current funding problem and the problem of title requirements may be to augment the academic science model with for profit (or not for profit) institutes. I would envision such institutes immediately granting PhD or post-doc level investigators PI status so that they could apply for all grants, and allowing BS level scientists to do research without having to go through PhD programs. Such institutes might also uncap investigator salaries so that investigators could be paid fairly, and would allow investigators to own their IP. These places could also charge significantly less overhead than universities as they don't need to fund non-science related endeavors. Perhaps crowd funding could be used to establish or augment such institutes, which could then bring in established investigators to oversee how money raised is distributed.
Another solution to the funding and title problems is simply to increase government funding, but tie in rules which stipulate that universities much raise the number of faculty spots or add restricted faculty spots for very junior investigators.
These seem like plausible solutions, but the idea of a crowd funded marketplace for science seems frankly dubious.
> Outside of the obvious issues with implementing crowd funded science in an academic setting (Who owns the IP? How does overhead work? How do you verify that the work is being done if there are no deliverables and a high failure rate? How much money can go to salary? etc). The two obvious problems I see with crowd funding science are lack of ROI and ignorant investors.
I guess we will just have to agree to disagree. I'm of the mindset that the market solves everything and will answer all the questions you pose. Academia/govt. is horribly inefficient and the money is running out there for several the reasons such as no deliverables. It academia/govt was forced to bail space exploration (SpaceX), it seems much easier to understand how this will happen in other sectors.
> I'm of the mindset that the market solves everything and will answer all the questions you pose. Academia/govt. is horribly inefficient and the money is running out there for several the reasons such as no deliverables.
The government funds basic science specifically because the market WON'T do it. A classic example is the work done on early cancer research. This breakthrough work along with several blockbuster drugs came entirely out of government sponsored research and work in academia. Pharmaceutical companies weren't interested in performing the basic research because they didn't forsee a good ROI. It was only after basic research was done and the market developed that pharmaceutical companies became interested in what is now one of the most lucrative drug categories.
Do we want to make research even more winner-takes-all than it currently is? Is is important to conduct research across all disciplines, or only the ones that are appealing to those who might like to fund research via Kickstarter etc.
Call me elitist, but I do not think the wisdom of the crowds will lead to the consistent funding necessary to maintain a base level of expertise across all disciplines.
The structure, organization and ability of the institutions, curricula, and people that shaped your ability to learn independently is non-obvious privilege.
You would be surprised at the many varieties of ways there are to think, of how chaotic a world that world truly is, and how so many variables had to come together for you to get where you are, and how delicate a balance that truly is.
It's one thing to be humble, it's entirely another thing to humble yourself so much you manage to convince yourself you are actually an idiot.
You learned how to learn by having the privilege of having the free time to teach yourself how to learn, how to observe others in a learning environment, and how to get an idea of how to position yourself in a huge organization where you can contribute your specific skill set to a larger whole, and you continue to collectively add to human knowledge without adding a static layer of chaos and confusion.
Please, tell me where I can get a tenured professorship without a PhD by hustling. I'd love to know.
I agree and am a bit disappointed by the prevailing blind spot on HN to exactly that privilege.
I agree there shouldn't be as much emphasis on a bachelor's degree as a requirement - it's ridiculous to need a 4-year degree for most entry-level positions - but to attempt a solution by prescribing the universal cure-all of "learning the material yourself" through eBooks, tutorials, and MOOCS isn't feasible.
Most people don't have the initiative or free time to complete any serious course of self-directed study (why MOOC completion rates are abysmally low). That doesn't mean they're immoral, lazy, or worthy of condemnation - it's simply a very common learning style. Being a true auto-didact is rare.
The notion of going it alone also completely disregards the necessities of non-STEM careers. Although you might be able to at least attempt learning a subject like physics or mechanical engineering in a vacuum (though I don't think you'd get very far), it's simply not possible to grow in writing, rhetoric, or many of the humanities, without a dedicated dialogue between authors and evaluators. Writing for your blog is not enough to improve your style as a writer. The best advice on that front is to have someone savage it. College provides the critical space, time, and learning community to accomplish this. It has serious flaws, but there's a reason much of the West has adopted the (originally German) model of the modern university.
> The notion of going it alone also completely disregards the necessities of non-STEM careers. Although you might be able to at least attempt learning a subject like physics or mechanical engineering in a vacuum (though I don't think you'd get very far), it's simply not possible to grow in writing, rhetoric, or many of the humanities, without a dedicated dialogue between authors and evaluators.
That's if your goal is to have an audience. Art was very successful in the West when Art was declared to exist for the sake of Art. It gave birth to a plethora of new techniques and artistic perspectives - many of which refined themselves in such a precise and beautiful way over time, that it almost seems to be a dance itself.
Regardless of whether you consider a painting of a square to be Art, or a musical composition of silence to be music, well... I think there are always new things to learn. It doesn't always require constant criticism. That kind of persistently critical culture can squash diversity, intelligence, and creativity before it even has the chance to grow. It's like an invisible judge - a line that you dare not cross, but can never see.
No offense, but I think people who went to MIT (and similar) are least-qualified to comment on this matter. People who go to elite schools are generally going to be fine either way, they are highly motivated and high-achieving and their classmates are the same.
But lower down the rankings things are different. Those kids can't even get an interview without a degree. We aren't talking about Google or something, we're talking about jobs working the desk at a car rental office, or being an assistant manager at a grocery store, that sort of thing.
It has absolutely nothing to do with learning skills (which, you're right, can be done online). You don't need any special skills for those jobs, at least none that are taught in school. It is just the piece of paper that matters in this case.
Until companies stop demanding degrees for entry-level positions, college will be beneficial. Maybe that will follow once the bubble pops, but wow is there going to be a lot of pain when that happens.
I can't edit my original post, so I'll write this here. I wrote this in a misleading way:
"But (some) students still want to do it, despite the stark reality. As best I can tell, they don't see alternative options.
This group is shrinking however, which is why law school enrolments are in free fall."
I didn't mean their prospects have improved. I meant that more students are realizing that going to a really expensive law school just because you have poor prospects is a lousy idea, given today's bubble.
Non-technical students are still utterly confused as to what they're supposed to do after college. Though I think more will start figuring out what you've written.
A college degree and a college experience is a nice thing to have, I think. But I doubt it's worth $250K as the price of basic entry to the job market. Something's got to give.
There are entire fields in the professions that could easily be taught by appreticeship. But this would be very risky politically and socially for the establishment. The establishment profits from having all new employees and their families be deep into debt, only for the chance to put Jr on the entry-level job within the establishment. That makes Jr alot more malleable in his/her on the job training.
err no becase aprtiships tend focus on the practical almost 100% in the trade ones - even the so called advanced aprtiships don't go as in depth as a 3/4 year degree.
there is also the unfortunate fact that in the UK at least aprtiships have been debased by alowing mcdonadls and unskiled employers to offer them.
BTW back when I was doning my BTECH if you had called any of my cohort that we where aprtices you woudl have been told to F$%^ off
I spent many years trying to navigate various job opportunities and met quite a few people and yes, you are right, if you meet the right person you can get lucky. But it is pretty much just that, luck.
I work for a state agency and the people around here still view a 4 year degree as an elite status and it drives me nuts. On top of that, the PhD holders get no respect, its as if no degree makes you nothing and the higher degrees were a waste. Its silly given the atmosphere (a lab). And as far as the agency hiring process goes, all applications are put in online. If they even hint at wanting a degree as a requirement for hiring (even if the position doesn't necessarily require a degree, not talking engineering here) they will ask a prelim about having a degree. Answer wrong and a human will never even know you applied, even if you told someone you did; EVEN if they told you to apply in the first place.
The problem with this "college is required" mentality going away is that it is ingrained in a generation. Today's 20 somethings, and tomorrows as well, will have to deal with this as long as the 40, 50 and 60 somethings are still doing the hiring. They were raised with black and white views of requirements to do a job it seems, only from personal experience. And even if they give you the time of day, if the decision comes down to guy with degree and guy without, often times the guy without is going to lose because he doesn't appear to be the best investment of time and energy.
As for me, I gave in. As humbly as possible I will say I saw through the bullshit since before I left high school. I could earn as high as marks as I wanted and knew I could do what I wanted, but the chances were high that without a degree I was going to have to have some luck in finding that one special position. Once leaving the private sector and finding myself in a gov job, as I said, I gave in. I am enrolled in school. I am doing as I figured I would, 4.0 blah blah, but still sort of lack direction. I have picked a path, am going to follow it and see where it goes really.
The reality I have found myself facing is that no matter what degree you have, a lot of times, a 4 year degree means you have a degree and that just makes you better somehow. It doesn't even have to be a relevant degree to the position in which you apply. Especially when a system such as this one counts each year of a degree as an equivalent to a year of experience. (BA required, or AA with 2 years exp, or HS with 4 years exp).
Anyway, I will end my wall of text here. I only wished to share a perspective of someone who tried without, and is in the process of what he ultimately considers concession to the pressure of societal norms.
> As best I can tell, they don't see alternative options.
I think that's pretty much it. I certainly knew people who had majored in "Classics" or whatever--at a good school--but didn't feel they had the ability/connections/whatever to parlay that into a decent paying career. And given that realization, law school was one of the obvious paths--and didn't tend to require full-time work experience as the better MBA programs did.
Two comments: an op-ed piece I saw in the Wall Street Journal the other day[1] made the point that the Department of Education's new regulations on for-profit institutions of higher education define levels of risk of student debt that would also give many "nonprofit" higher education institutions bad ratings. "We know this is true because if you applied the regulation to a law degree from George Washington University, a bachelor’s degree in hospitality administration from Stephen F. Austin State University or a bachelor’s in social work from University of Texas, the programs would all fail to meet the standard." Seeing the George Washington University Law School mentioned in that context made me go ouch, as that is not a completely slouchy law school, and I actually stayed there for a summer for one of my law school internships (I attended a state university law school) and later attended a student conference there. Even reasonably decent law schools are not a good financial risk these days for many students.
My other comment is that the article kindly submitted here, which I've already submitted to my Facebook friends, makes the interesting point that dental school enrollments have fallen sharply since more and more public water supplies in the United States have fluoridation. People today have much healthier teeth than they had when I was growing up. Dentists, by this view, are true professionals, as they are even willing to advocate public health measures that help work dentists out of a job. I admire that.
[1] "Making ‘Profit’ a Dirty Word in Higher Education" By Steve Gunderson Nov. 12, 2014
Because it is (close to) impossible to write an objective measurement system that can tell the difference between a legitimately good school (as defined by the rather abstract things that we as a society want education to be) versus a school that is good at gaming metrics. And when you introduce a direct profit motive tied to metrics, it is highly likely that executives will find a way to maximize profit while minimizing cost, which likely means gaming the metrics and doing little else.
Government institutions and private nonprofit institutions have this problem already (at least somewhat) with U.S. News and World, but they are at least theoretically controlled by foundations/trustees/the state, which have in common the property that they profess an interest in education itself, not education as a means of extracting money from people.
I don't really see anything you've pointed out that doesn't apply equally to profit / non-profit. Given your second paragraph, I'm not sure you have a lot of hope that public schools are doing the right thing.
"they profess an interest in education itself, not education as a means of extracting money from people."
I'm sure counter-examples exist, but the best businesses are not about "means of extracting money from people", that is just a natural consequence of a decently provided service. Governments and Institutions also think in terms of "extracting money from people" although they are less honest about it (why yes, I've worked with both).
Well-regarded nonprofit colleges are mostly doing the right thing, with some stat-gaming around things like number of student organizations, expenditure per student, etc. to jockey for higher positions in U.S. News. Not in their core educational functions.
We as hackers can tell that our $1,500 Macbook Pros are better than $450 Inspirons, so Apple thrives.
The problem is that it is much more difficult to distinguish between high-quality and low-quality education. With vocational training it is easy: do employers like the graduates? Do they get hired at a substantially higher rate than non-graduates? Do they get paid more? But with education it is much, much harder.
There are some objectively observable traits that can (sort of) tell you whether an environment is likely to contribute to certain kinds of personal intellectual growth: do students read and respond to (at least) the Western literary canon? Are classes small enough to facilitate meaningful discussion? Are a wide variety of courses taught? How deep into their respective fields to the syllabi go? Does the school actually own the equipment and materials necessary to perform the kinds of laboratory procedures that a graduate in the sciences should have experienced? Are the classes hard enough that not everyone gets perfect scores all the time? How many hours do students need to spend on the coursework to make good grades?
But all of these can be gamed. Hire lots of cheap, incompetent professors. Have small group discussions where you basically just sit there for an hour talking about nothing and wasting time because the professor is doing something else on his laptop. Force students to write papers, but have an institutional culture where they are mostly bullshitted or plagarized and no one cares. Don't actually take the time to grade students' work, but assign bad grades to the handful of students least likely to make a fuss. Assign lots of busywork. Etc. Attract students with good high school test scores by lobbying to divert government funding that would have allowed them to attend better institutions, and set your own prices cheaper.
Think of any other property of legitimately good education, someone can probably find a way to appear to have that property more efficiently than actually having it.
The only reason this isn't widespread is because administrators are generally people who want to provide good education and have the freedom to spend pretty much whatever they can get their hands on to do so.
If you replace them with administrators who want to serve shareholders instead of students, they will find ways to hit the metrics that actually influence reveneue (i.e. rankings) while spending less than the other guys, and that will probably mean compromising the quality of the education they provide.
I guess I wasn't really clear in my post, sorry. My basic belief is that government / public institutions aren't anymore "holy" then for-profits. The profit motive is transformed into a power motive in public institutions. We can see this with the growing bureaucracy at our public institutions that has raised tuitions and removed resources from students. The quest for grants is in full force and professors are teaching less. The things you list that for-profits can do are done at public universities.
"If you replace them with administrators who want to serve shareholders instead of students"
To the point, I don't believe a lot of administrators are thinking of the student first. I see a lot of "integrity of the institution" which leaks over into free speech and open discussion suppression. Admins do not serve the student first, they serve the politicians and the next step in their career.
As always, their are exceptions, but I don't see many of the dreamers and idealists left.
Because then the goal changes from "raising your ranking by churning out well-prepared grads" to "making a quick buck". If the profit motive is present, making a slow buck will always lose to making a quick buck as soon as people who only wear management hats show up.
Because thats not how the world operates. The financial system is structured such that it rewards year-over-year profits and punishes anything less. A for-profit institution is going to be beholden to investors. Incentives are a strong predictor of outcome.
Most of the state institutions seem to be less concerned with "raising your ranking by churning out well-prepared grads" and more with "attracting enough students to pay for administrative and real estate overhead".
At least with for-profit schools there's no motivation to over-build and over-hire.
Floride doesn't prevent gum disease per se, but it does prevent cavities, which are real money makers for dentists.
You may only brush your teeth 3 times a day, but with fluoride in water you're exposing your enamel to it more frequently especially if you're a child who's drinking water often.
People really underestimate the degree to which public oral health has improved over the recent past. A few decades ago, most children had cavities. In most communities in USA today, that's not the case. Many experts would credit fluoridation for a portion of this improvement, but I think education and access improvements also deserve credit.
Flouridation became widely used in the US in the 1960s. It's hard to discern facts with all the hyperbole from activists against it but I thought flouridation was unnecessary now because of toothpaste and how people brush their teeth more. From Wikipedia, most countries in Europe substantially reduced cavities without flouridation and tooth decay rates remained stabled or declined in Germany and Finland when it was stopped. Though it does say that in-school dental care and more going to the dentist in Europe than in the US may be the reason.
But so many people in the US have home filtration systems, filtered water jugs or drink bottled water that it seems it's more due to flouride toothpaste and better hygiene. While there is some flouride in some bottled water, it's generally less.
Flouridation [sic] became widely used in the US in the 1960s.
Yes but many communities only fluoridated in the 1980s (I know because my father was the concerned citizen who eventually got this done in several nearby towns), and the smallest water districts still don't have it.
Off topic, while I know how to spell fluoride I rarely write flurodiation. And I rely on Google's spellcheck which for whatever reason will show incorrect spellings. And in gmail, it will also do the opposite; indicate a correctly spelled word is wrong.
Haha actually even simple "fluoride" eludes me fairly often. The gmail remark reminds me of the "please advice" idiom that MS-Outlook established. Of course the original, grammatically correct request is "Please advise," which one might expect to see at the end of any issue-raising business email. Because Outlook "corrected" this phrase to "please advice" for so many years, many people now actually think "advice" is correct.
I attended law school in NY starting in 2007. By the time I was looking for an internship at the end of my first year, the economy collapsed. As a result, it felt like the whole premise of law school (at least for most students), namely that you could get decent grades and would have a high paying job at some firm upon graduation, was completely shattered. This turned out to be completely true for the majority of people who attended at that time. Everyone was trying to find internships at the end of their first year, but there just weren't any to go around and people who had received offers in their third year were seeing them slip away.
I remember thinking at the time that given the economy and the massive layoffs that were occurring that applications to my school would be going down, but what I saw was quite the contrary. Every semester, droves of new students packed the hallways. People seemed to be using the economic downturn and poor job market as an opportunity to "invest in the future" and go back to school. But I just couldn't understand how tuitions could stay propped up and I felt there had to be some correlation between the salaries/availability of jobs post law school and the high tuitions. Again, to my shock these facts just didn't seem to matter and it seemed to me that the whole law school thing was just a big ponzi scheme waiting to collapse.
I know this is all anecdotal and my own experience, but maybe I was right and the big correction has finally come.
There was only a temporary surge after the crisis. People flooded into school thinking "school is a safe place to hide during a recession". This led to large crunches every subsequent year.
Word has been spreading for the past four years. Applications have been down each year. We're hearing more now because it's finally reached a crunch point for schools. They've been trying to hold off closing by getting enough students and forcing other schools to close.
It's musical chairs, and the music is now stopping.
>People flooded into school thinking "school is a safe place to hide during a recession". This led to large crunches every subsequent year.
Another data point is NYC Business Schools. Lots of people in finance applied to, say, Columbia business school during the crisis, and thus around 2012 there was a huge plummet in applications there as the industry (a) started to recover a bit, and (b) it became clear that the rewards from a career on Wall Street would be much smaller than in previous decades.
>But I just couldn't understand how tuitions could stay propped up and I felt there had to be some correlation between the salaries/availability of jobs post law school and the high tuitions.
Weren't administrations intentionally masking a lot of their post graduation numbers so that they looked good on the surface to relatively naive applicants?
The law school naysayers paint with too broad a brush. Going to a top 15 or so school is still a golden ticket. I got a six figure job virtually handed to me for showing up and being good at school. Solidly 90% of my classmates did too.
There are also massive opportunities for anyone with a bar card to earn a substantial living representing consumers, employees and the little guy in general (due to absurdly favorable fee-shifting rules) even if you can't get a job with a big firm. People who can't find these opportunities aren't looking very hard.
" I got a six figure job virtually handed to me for showing up and being good at school. Solidly 90% of my classmates did too."
These jobs won't last.
The legal market as a whole is contracting. Lots of stuff currently given to new associates, like doc review, is seriously disappearing, etc.
I went to a top 15 law school, and when I went (2005), there were plenty of 3rd year students who had no jobs. Just an administration willing to BS about it.
"People who can't find these opportunities aren't looking very hard."
This is also just BS.
The idea that there are "enough jobs to go around" is ridiculously naive. Heck, you can find people with 10+ years of experience having to try to find legal work on craigslist en masse.
There are areas of law that have contracted significantly and what appears to be permanently.
I've worked at law firms, from boutique to solidly big law (AM Law top 10) and what you are saying is completely true and why I didn't pursue law school. Parent poster's world doesn't exist in reality.
The big distinction here is "Top 15 Law School". Almost any law school that isn't up there is basically a scam. As the law market contracts, I'd imagine that the employment prospects of top-15 schools will shielded the longest - law firms that previously couldn't hire great lawyers will realize they can hire better new lawyers once it's harder for those lawyers to get a job.
My brother is at NYU Law and has a starting job next year with a starting salary around 170k. From my understanding, kids at NYU are still not struggling (at all) to get decent jobs after law school.
As happy as I am for your brother, he's wrong. I went to a higher-ranked school than NYU, and a solid third of the class depended on post-grad fellowships for employment. When those fellowships expired, you started to see lots of desperate Facebook posts asking if anyone knew of any legal positions open.
Some of my dearest friends were included in that group. They pretended like everything was fine among others, to avoid public humiliation, but your brother's classmates are probably suffering in silence. And it's only going to get worse as legal tasks are automated out of human hands.
And just to follow up, I'm VERY surprised that your brother hasn't seen anyone struggling. NYU Law's shtick is being the most prestigious public interest feeder, where graduates go on to impact work in underserved communities.
Ever since 2008, public interest and government employment has all but vanished. I don't think I've heard of ANYONE getting a permanent position in PI since the recession, with the exception of temporary fellowships or contract positions. I'm sure there are plenty of NYU grads who go on to Biglaw (like your brother), but it's not something the school is notable for.
If there isn't anyone obviously struggling at NYU, that's wonderful news for the public interest community... but it's also completely contrary to what I've heard for the past six years.
NYU's schtick isn't exclusive of feeding to BigLaw, clerkships, or highly selective government positions like Justice. Law School Numbers reports type of employment for 2013 with 64% law firms and 15% public interest. That is a lot of public interest, but it is still (traditionally) the highest-ranked school in the nation's largest market for private legal services. Michigan's numbers, to give another data point in the 14, are 56%/13% for the same period.
People are still hired for public interest work out of law school. My impression is that the number, overall, is very low, and that it always has been.
Simply googling "Should I go to law school?" yields a ridiculous amount of horror stories about people who are hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt with a JD and working retail and/or making less than $20/hour. I would really like to see a ROI for every law school in the nation. I would suspect that most below the top 30 or so have a negative ROI.
Slate is blocked on my work internet for whatever reason.
The article reports that some schools are having to give large tuition discounts to attract a decent class, and the writer predicts closures similar to dental schools in the 80s. The most interesting tidbit was that "the biggest application declines have occurred among students who scored in the middle-to-high range on the LSAT." Confirms my general feeling about people who borrow heavily and go despite the overwhelming evidence that it's a bad idea outside of the top schools.
This makes me feel marginally better about dropping out from law school (correspondence version - the bottom of the barrel) after attending a large conference and realizing just how awful the odds were. It didn't cost me too much financially but I still feel depressed about it.
Don't feel bad. I finished 1.5 years of MBA and dropped out when the university showed how little they cared about me. Originally I signed up to get an MS in Innovation Management (startups, new business tech., corporate finance for IT etc.) because my employer was keen on supporting my academic goals esp. if they coincided with my position as Director of IT. But one week before classes were to start, they dropped the entire program and "specially waived the MBA requirements" just for me and shoved me into their MBA program.
After I spent 1.5 years taking MBA courses, they revived the MS IM degree but wouldn't let me transfer any credits from MBA program into it, even though most of the early classes were same, taught by the same teachers.
It was then that I realized that the past few years of "leadership", "value proposition", and "customer-specific" drivel they had been feeding me was not something they actually cared about. They cared about enrollment, enrollment, and enrollment. I should know. The goal of the last class I took - Advanced Marketing - was to come up with surveys to find out what would increase enrollment into their MBA program.
Initially I felt like a failure even considering dropping out because I was only 2 semesters away from getting my MBA. But then I realized life is too short to be wasting time doing what you don't want to do. Fortunately for me, my career turned out significantly better after dropping out because I decided to dedicate myself to making something I truly cared about and over time, that has paid off way more than an MBA would.
It's not the expense I regret, but not being in the legal academic environment. I really like law and I think I have a good grasp of it, but growing up abroad and not having an undergraduate degree means >95% of law schools are closed to me, to say nothing of the expense of a fulltime program.
Could the Idaho State Supreme Court be doing Concordia University third-year law students a favor by not allowing them to take the bar exam? "Maybe it's better if you pick another profession", is that the message?
(From http://www.nationallawjournal.com/id=1202677723753/Law-Schoo... — lede "The inaugural class of students at the Concordia University School of Law likely won’t be able to sit for the July 2015 bar exam because the new school has not yet been accredited by the American Bar Association.")
I've been reading about this for a while. In the eighties at least, among people I knew, law school seemed to be a pretty natural progression for those with liberal arts degrees looking for a relatively structured, well-paid, and fairly stable occupation. As a JD has become a far less reliable meal ticket (while also becoming a more expensive one), I can't say I'm surprised that the same demographic are no longer jumping into law school as the path of least resistance.
I suspect this is not going to be isolated to Law School. The math is that tuitions have risen so far for so long that at 'premier' schools you don't get nearly the value you should.
That said, it opens up the opportunity for new schools with a different model in mind. And one thing we've seen in Tech has been that when the going gets desperate, it also gets creative. I don't think the answer is going to be MOOCs but I also don't think the ivory tower model of old will survive. Something in the middle, perhaps 2 years of general education requirements online and 2 years of training in your major on campus. Half the cost and the education is just as useful.
When your position could have been automated thirty years ago by vending machines... yeah, pharmacists are in trouble.
Some chains are moving to a call-in model, where your medicine is provided through cheap labor (and eventually machines) -- then if you have any questions, which is the ostensible purpose of a pharmacist, you can Skype with a pharmacist at a call center.
Such a model is probably fairly miserable for the pharmacist, but it seems like the obvious solution for automating the work while still complying with (what I can only assume was intended as) protectionist regulation.
You're conflating pharmacy technicians with pharmacists. There are soft skills involved; it's remarkably hard to automate the person who has to know the weird interactions with drugs that different physicians prescribe--and how they interact with the over-the-counter, off-label, or just plain illegal stuff that their customers are taking.
Pharmacists keep people alive when their physicians try (with the best of intentions, mind) to kill them.
That doesn't sound right to me. Humans are better than machines at the memorization and computation of a database that lists every drug in existence and the consequences of all possible combinations thereof?
Pharmacists may be able to give a soft personal touch when interacting with patients, but the same could be said about travel agents, retail clerks, or taxi drivers. Or lawyers, for that matter. Still, I can't see why six-figure salary pharmacists are essential to vend pills.
If your vending machine misses a drug interaction who's legally responsible? That job can't be on the physicians alone because patients often have more than one and they don't coordinate fully.
If your human pharmacist forgets a drug interaction, who's responsible? It's a pretty pedestrian question that doesn't become impossible to solve once you introduce machines. I would assume the company that manufactures the machine would assume liability for errors that result from their negligence.
In fact, I'm pretty certain that the average laptop with Excel is more than powerful enough to outmatch the most skilled human pharmacist when it comes to memorizing and predicting known drug interactions. If anything, you'd expect malpractice insurance rates to skyrocket for human pharmacists compared to automated vending machines -- just as you'd expect car insurance to go up for human-piloted (and error-prone) cars versus their automated counterparts.
Makes me smile. Keep the small wins against the bullshit jobs coming. A more productive society, may our future be! Hopefully next up to bat is hedge fund jobs and hedge funds themselves.
This is a good thing. I would make a rough estimate that 5-8% of the programmers that I know have their law degree. Most didn't even bother taking the bar because it didn't make sense. The "non-partner" track for attorneys is kind of a non-starter for anyone who wants to make more than minimum wage when you factor in the 70 hour work weeks.
No kidding... It seems to me, outside of a small handful, most lawyers outside of politics aren't going to be raking it in without becoming partners... Paralegals are also cheaper still than new lawyers and can do most of the work.
Not to mention my issues with the legal system becoming to convoluted for anyone... We start with a fairly simple guideline (constitution) and a common-law basis for a legal system beyond that, and it turns into the crap we have today... no bill going through congress should be thousands of pages.
Being a partner at a big city law firm is pretty much where the big money is made. And there's doubtless an OK living to be made as a partner at successful smaller practices. But it's become a tough business.
But at its' core, it is the process of logic to determine an appropriate answer. Affected by past insights. There may be a lot, or a little precedent for the parts of a given case, but just the same, it should follow a logical outcome.
Where things really get wonky is applying those precedents in the context of the legal wrangling that has been enacted into law since said rulings. Combined with some practices it can be made more straight forward, or much less so.
Agreed, it's time for those people to try to learn a real job instead of living off others.
Most of those lawyers are not helping the people who needs legal help the most, they are just feeding around bigco. The most useful lawyers are not wealthy, because their clients are poor, uneducated (so the lawyer provides a lot of knowledge difference) and have a very high legal risk (jail or death).
> Also, hopefully this means fewer divorce attorneys.
Because divorce is bad? Divorce can be a good thing, good marriages don't usually end in divorce, more than likely the bad marriages do. So then maybe because you think people going through a divorce shouldn't have good legal representation? What is your argument?
Yes, most people shouldn't. Unless you've never seen two people piss away tens of thousands of dollars having legal tantrums, fully supported by their lawyers.
Most people, particularly in CA, a community property state, should be able to get divorced for $500 or so. Of course, that requires that they be adult, and that no lawyers get paid (or encourage their clients to fight, all while paying them $x00/hour).
How nice it must be to know what's best for people you know nothing about. I'm sure they love it when complete strangers with judgmental attitudes feel the need to interfere with their private lives.
Community property means person1 and person2 are going to get 1/2 of the assets earned during the marriage. You can get there cheaply or expensively. Lawyers get paid when you get there expensively -- and thus have an obvious incentive to inflame a negotiation between two aggrieved parties. I'm not sure why that makes me judgmental about their private lives.
They'll have a mediocre LSAT score, but say "School X will let me in!". School X is terrible. They have lousy employment prospects, and charge $50,000 a year.
When you add miscellaneous fees and opportunity cost of not working, the law degree costs at least $250,000. And your school might close.
But (some) students still want to do it, despite the stark reality. As best I can tell, they don't see alternative options.
This group is shrinking however, which is why law school enrolments are in free fall. This chart from the LSAC shows a massive drop in LSATs administered.
http://www.lsac.org/lsacresources/data/lsats-administered
2008-2009 was the high water mark: 171,514 LSATs. 2014-15 likely will be less than 100,000.
Which is good. The industry's been in a bubble, and it needs to pop. But that means this is a VERY bad time to be going to law school unless you're extremely careful (and ideally have a guaranteed scholarship to a good school that won't close).