Is Your Master's Degree Useless? (economist.com) 138
While master's degrees are increasingly popular -- with 40% of U.S. bachelor's degree holders now having postgraduate credentials -- new research reveals many don't deliver improved earnings despite soaring costs.
Analysis from the U.S. and UK indicates that about 40% of U.S. master's programs fail to provide positive financial returns, with some even leading to financial losses for graduates, as captured in a new Economist story. Similarly, British master's graduates earn no more than bachelor's holders by age 35 after accounting for background factors. This is particularly significant because U.S. students now average $50,000 in postgraduate debt, triple the real cost since 2000, while UK fees have risen 70% since 2011 to $12,000 annually.
Returns vary dramatically by field: computer science and engineering show strong gains, while humanities degrees often lead to reduced earnings compared to bachelor's-only peers. Women are more likely than men to see earnings increases, succeeding in 14 out of 31 subject areas compared to men's six. Choice of institution impacts outcomes, though data shows no strong correlation between program cost and graduate earnings.
Analysis from the U.S. and UK indicates that about 40% of U.S. master's programs fail to provide positive financial returns, with some even leading to financial losses for graduates, as captured in a new Economist story. Similarly, British master's graduates earn no more than bachelor's holders by age 35 after accounting for background factors. This is particularly significant because U.S. students now average $50,000 in postgraduate debt, triple the real cost since 2000, while UK fees have risen 70% since 2011 to $12,000 annually.
Returns vary dramatically by field: computer science and engineering show strong gains, while humanities degrees often lead to reduced earnings compared to bachelor's-only peers. Women are more likely than men to see earnings increases, succeeding in 14 out of 31 subject areas compared to men's six. Choice of institution impacts outcomes, though data shows no strong correlation between program cost and graduate earnings.
Useless to whom? (Score:5, Insightful)
Useless to you in terms of earning power perhaps, although things like greater opportunities to do work you are interested in, move abroad etc. are harder to quantify.
Useless to employers? Probably not, it is unlikely that the knowledge and skills gained are of no value to any business. It's just that they don't have to pay more, because of the situation post-grads find themselves in.
Re:Useless to whom? (Score:5, Interesting)
Useless to employers? Probably not,
This is highly variable across industries. In the tech industry, when I'm interviewing candidates I don't even bother glancing at their education. It just doesn't factor into our hiring decisions at all. And this has been consistent across employers, with my colleagues all agreeing that degrees mean absolutely nothing to us.
But try becoming a civil engineer without a degree and that's a completely different story.
Re:Useless to whom? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm similar, I don't really care much about education, only what example work they can show me and how they come over when talking to them. Getting a post-grad degree is a decent way to build up some examples of work, especially in subjects where the university gets you access to stuff like labs and networks of people who you don't have access to by yourself.
It's a bit different in areas where there is a lot of liability or you need certain qualifications, like your example of civil engineering, or medicine.
Re:Useless to whom? (Score:5, Insightful)
I look to see whether a candidate has a degree or two. What the degree is in may or may not matter.
Someone who is filling a technical role needs technical training. The training may have come from job experience or self-teaching, not school. But aside from that, a degree is an indicator that you spent some time in an academic environment doing research, writing papers or essays, solving problems, creating projects, and so on.
To me, a degree in literature or art history may not show technical creds, but at least it shows you spent some time thinking and defending your thoughts in front of others. Like others who have commented here, I have worked with some fine technical people who did not pursue a technical track in their education. It is somewhat rare to find them, though.
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but at least it shows you spent some time thinking and defending your thoughts in front of others.
We use the interview process to gauge that. Depending on seniority of the position, the candidate may need to meet with several people during the process. One of those interviews is what we call "culture & values" and it's one of our directors getting to know the individual and how they think and operate.
But even in the technical interviews, we can very quickly gauge whether the candidate is able to explain why they took a particular approach, whether they can defend that decision, how they arrived ther
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but at least it shows you spent some time thinking and defending your thoughts in front of others.
We use the interview process to gauge that. Depending on seniority of the position, the candidate may need to meet with several people during the process. One of those interviews is what we call "culture & values" and it's one of our directors getting to know the individual and how they think and operate.
But even in the technical interviews, we can very quickly gauge whether the candidate is able to explain why they took a particular approach, whether they can defend that decision, how they arrived there, what the alternatives are and the tradeoffs of each.
I suppose if we saw any data, any what-so-ever, that suggested that a large number of individuals were slipping through the HR screening phase, who had the technical skills but failed miserably on soft skills, and if we could correlate the good soft skills candidates with those who have degrees... then and only then would we start asking the recruiters to focus on education as a screening metric.
But there is zero evidence that that correlation exists, and we would be throwing out MANY excellent candidates because we figured that we were saving time and energy by filtering on education if we did that.
This right here.
When interviewing controls people for gas liquefaction I have approximately zero concerns if the person doesn't know the first thing about critical points or computing density for flow compensation. It is easy to determine within a few minutes if the person has the technical background required to learn the needed skillset for the job, the attitude and cultural fit are immensely more important.
Almost anyone can be trained to do a job, even a highly sophisticated and technical one, but if the
Re:Useless to whom? (Score:4, Insightful)
Its also more than "to do a job". Often I want to do if they can do more than the job. Do I want them to stay a technician for the next 30 years, or do want to see if they can do more, become a leader, a designer, adapt their job on their own when technology and science changes, do more than just following instructions.
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Do I want them to stay a technician for the next 30 years,
There are some that simply want to earn a living, then go do their passion.
There are some willing to sacrifice their lives, family, and happiness for their employer.
I'm not one. As long as an employee is competent in their role, there's no need to "push them along" to be more if that isn't their cuppa.
It isn't that I'm not able, I did manage over a thousand at one point. It's not that I'm poor at it, the team increased profit substantially without raising prices or having layoffs. It's not that I alienated
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I'm not saying I want to push everyone along. But when hiring for a mid or senior level position it would be nice to have someone who can do a mid or senior level position.
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but at least it shows you spent some time thinking and defending your thoughts in front of others.
We use the interview process to gauge that.
This is all fine and good. However, you still need a way to look at a resume and decide if you even want to interview that person. How do you figure that out from a piece of paper? Some things need to pop out. Keywords? Schools? Degrees? Past companies or titles or projects? All these items on a resume need explanation to truly evaluate their worth to you and even if and how true they are, but that true evaluation only comes with an interview.
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Right, you need to know that the candidate can think. Not just do the rote skills. Especially with computing where so many skills today are rote - low-code/no-code, cut-and-paste, etc. A good candidate should be able to do MORE than the particular job we need done this year. Is the candidate going to be able to expand and do other stuff, will they become a leader, when some new tech comes out will they be able to dive in, and importantly will they be able to see the big picture of the product, company,
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I'm similar, I don't really care much about education, only what example work they can show me and how they come over when talking to them. Getting a post-grad degree is a decent way to build up some examples of work, especially in subjects where the university gets you access to stuff like labs and networks of people who you don't have access to by yourself.
It's a bit different in areas where there is a lot of liability or you need certain qualifications, like your example of civil engineering, or medicine.
My experience both as a worker and a manager mirror yours.
An anecdote so take it for what it is worth, working in industrial controls for chemical plants, gas liquefiers, power plants and other critical infrastructure for the last 20 years, many of the best electrical engineers I worked with had no degree, but all of the worst ones were degreed.
A degree could equally indicate that you had a particular interest in an area of study or that you saw dollar signs and decided that you needed to get your slice. Co
Re:Useless to whom? (Score:5, Informative)
100% this.
Some of the best software engineers I've worked with have art degrees, degrees in English / language arts. One guy even has a profile on IMDB because he was an actor before going to a coding camp and upending his career.
We can get away with this in software / tech because everything changes so rapidly, so recent experience writing microservices hosted on Kubernetes tells far more than what you learned about COBOL in the late 90s.
Other disciplines are very different. My cousin just got a masters in mine engineering, and he's being recruited by companies around the globe.
Re:Useless to whom? (Score:4, Informative)
The big extraction industries are heavily dependent on recruiting engineering master's students because they need them, the pay rate is in line with what you'd expect, given the hours and danger involved, and people don't tend to stay in those jobs once they have enough money to get out and do something more inline with their dreams.
Oil is still the biggest industry in the world, and mineral extraction is not far behind. If we ever transition away from oil, mining and materials are going to be the next big oil. Lots of engineering and automation goes into that, and it pays very well up to a certain point.
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Sure but those people are truly the exception to the rule. They would make up a very small percentage of professional programmers.
What do you suppose to be the majority of professional programmers?
Just in my single specialty of programmable logic controllers, there are probably globally from the high hundreds of thousands to a couple million programmers in the field, everywhere from chemical plants to power generation to water purification to pharmaceutical manufacturing to bottling my beer for the weekend. Oil and gas is literally the largest industry in the world as far as I know.
I actually think embedded programmers probably make u
Re:Useless to whom? (Score:4, Interesting)
If you want to reset your career and break out of the path that you are currently on then a masters degree can help. It can open doors into management or other more advanced technical tacks that your previous on the job experience might make you seem less qualified for.
In talking with some of my coworkers born in other countries they have used masters degrees for two reasons. The first is to get a degree from an institution recognized here in the US. The second is to get a visa status other than H1B that allows them to stay here longer so they can find an employer that might sponsor them, or to allow them more time to navigate the immigration system.
Useless but Equivalent (Score:2)
This is highly variable across industries.
I suspect it is also highly variable across subjects and institutes. For example, historically Cambridge's undergraduate degree was a master's degree because it predated Bachelor degrees. Some time ago the UK government restricted student funding (this was when tuition was free!) anything other than a Bachelor degree so Cambridge changed the name of their degree to Bachelor but then made it so that any one getting a BA could automatically get their MA three years after graduating.
So technically I have a
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In the tech industry, when I'm interviewing candidates I don't even bother glancing at their education.
I don't either, but for a different reason. If they got to the interview they already meet the education requirements. You say it doesn't factor into your hiring decision but if you work at a place with more than say 20 employees then it absolutely does, HR just hasn't told you.
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Most employers would probably prefer a bachelor's degree plus 2 years of applicable work experience to a master's degree with no experience.
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Not necessarily true.
My oldest son got a masters degree in computer science. It did help him get a job at a large financial clearinghouse, and I believe it helped weather a couple of rounds of layoffs.
My younger brother got a masters degree in geophyisics, and in my opinion he would not have got his eventual high positions at major oil companies if he didn't have it
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Well...that's all that matters really.
I mean, most people in their right mind would NOT work, if they didn't have to make money to live and do things they actually like to do in the world.
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Well...that's all that matters really.
I mean, most people in their right mind would NOT work, if they didn't have to make money to live and do things they actually like to do in the world.
You ignore people who work just because they enjoy working, not for the money. I have a family member who is retired and rich, yet he still goes to work in his eighties, and earns little money, if any.
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Oh sure, the world is big and filled with all kinds...
However, I doubt the number of people in that category are in any statistical meaningful numbers for the most part.
I know if I won the Powerball tomorrow, I'd leave skid marks out of the proverbial "door"...and never look back.
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[...] I doubt the number of people [who would work for joy and not money] are in any statistical meaningful numbers for the most part.
Then I think this might surprise you. [hbr.org]
Granted, it's not exactly the same point as mine. I was talking about people who enjoy working despite the need for money, and the study talks about people willing to earn less in exchange for work that is more meaningful. Still, consider it. Money is not the be-all and end-all for many people.
Work makes life sweet. -- attributed to Volga Germans
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Exactly. "Earnings" is a deeply flawed metric when used alone.
Re: Useless to whom? (Score:2)
As far as the USA is concerned - Unless one is wealthy, otherwise has the cash to pay, has an employer sponsored tuition discount/payment plan, or gets substantial scholarships higher education must be a business decision with ROI based reasoning. Nothing is wrong with learning for the sake/enjoyment of it. But economic reality is economic reality. We cannot expect taxpayers to subsidize personal interests.
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In some fields a master's is useful, like CS, where it indicates high level engineer versus a PhD which indicates a focus on pure research. In others, like chemistry, a master's is an afterthought, and a PhD is the only thing that matters.
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Yes, the "paper" of the Master's might not be valued like it once was, the knowledge you gain and work you did to earn one is still valuable. "Learning on the job" is not at all the same thing, because those who learn on the job don't learn the stuff they're not interested in (the theory or math), and it doesn't drill the brain into thinking in new ways.
Having a B.S. marks one as average. They'd better have a damn good interview or good work experience to stand out. With an M.S. then I think that this per
Re:Useless to whom? (Score:5, Insightful)
First half of the equation is that people with specific degrees are not useless to employers, but of strong negative value. Because there's now a rapidly spreading understanding that when you're hiring such people, you're not hiring someone trained to work, but trained to
...go to school.
do Marxist activism. We have lectures by professors from these institutions openly stating that their goal is among the lines of "infecting students with an ideological Marxist virus and then sending them into work force within companies to infect them from inside, turning them into agents for Marxism that will tear the society down from inside so that Marxist utopia can be built on the ruins".
Bullshit. Sorry, I meant, "citation needed."
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Bullshit. Sorry, I meant, "citation needed."
Make a suggestion and that is to sit across a desk from these candidates during their interview process while asking such revealing questions as:
1. What are your expectations for the working environment?
2. How do you expect the company to gauge your success?
#2 is the most revealing...and scary.
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Luckyo is Dunning-Kruger personified, with a self-styled PhD in Trolling Badly. You'd best ignore him. That's what I have decided to do.
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Any employer that actually believes that is probably headed for bankruptcy anyway. Look at what happened to Elon Musk and Twitter.
Right- and left-wing indoctrination exist, but ... (Score:5, Insightful)
... it's typically not found at the institutional level in large universities.
trained to do Marxist activism
There are schools at all levels that proudly see themselves as ideological training grounds. It may be a left- or right-leaning school or it may be a school that strongly subscribes to a given school of thought/intellectual tradition [wikipedia.org].
Examples "proudly activist" schools include many religious-training schools on all sides of the political- and intellectual spectrums (spectra?). You also see this in some (but far from all) smaller-ish (low-thousands of undergraduates) "conservative [usually Christian] liberal arts colleges" in the United States.
But most decent-sized universities are far from this. While individual professors or sometimes entire departments may lean strongly in one direction and make it obvious to their students where they stand, most aren't in the business of "breeding fill-in-the-blank activists" as you suggest. Quite the opposite: Most decent-sized universities (other than perhaps religious seminaries) would rather have students that can think for themselves and contribute to their field in novel ways rather than just parrot existing dogma.
Re:Right- and left-wing indoctrination exist, but (Score:5, Insightful)
Great post. I'd add this: colleges and universities encourage their students to practice critical analysis. One side of the political spectrum tends to suffer more from such analysis than the other. Figure out which is which, and you'll be on the way to understanding why higher-education is perceived to have a "bias."
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universities encourage their students to practice critical analysis. One side of the political spectrum tends to suffer more from such analysis than the other. Figure out which is which
Actually I'd find it interesting if you had a study or some data on that instead of a guess.
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Actually I'd find it interesting if you had a study or some data on that instead of a guess.
Well, you challenged me, and I'm working on it. Here's what I have so far, after a quick google-search, and read. [aei.org]
TL/DR: The article I linked was written by two co-authors, one right-leaning, the other left-leaning. They looked at data from three institutions. Not a huge sample-size, but let's just start with this. After a brief skim, here's what I gathered:
- There is a skew to the left in the population of individuals at the institutions studied: moderately-so in the student-population, more strongly in the
I've never 'needed' my BS (Score:2)
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Just because you don't work in the field you studied in doesn't mean you didn't need the degree.
A lot of employers require a college degree - they don't necessarily care what you majored in or studied - they just need you to have A degree.
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Right and that kind of non-personal analysis is exactly what studies like in the summary are for.
And now we know, statistically speaking, an MS/MA/MBA is useless for improving your lot in life. So people like the GP for whom it is personally useless shouldn't be a standout case.
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Right and that kind of non-personal analysis is exactly what studies like in the summary are for.
And now we know, statistically speaking, an MS/MA/MBA is useless for improving your lot in life. So people like the GP for whom it is personally useless shouldn't be a standout case.
And indeed I don't think he is a standout at all. I haven't been asked about my education past my first or second job interview. When interviewing applicants over the last decade or so I've never asked a single one about their educational quals either, it is about whether they have the correct attitude and can fit in with/work with the group and have enough of a grasp of technical matters to learn what we do and how to do it.
I am one guy, but the experience is spread out over a couple decades of work and do
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What I got out of my bachelor's degree in computer science: COBOL syntax, FORTRAN Honeywell CP-6 basic job control commands, UCSD Pascal with IBM graphics extensions, submitting jobs via punch card reader. Guess how much of that I still use?
What I got out of on-the-job training and personal study that still serves me 40 years later: Structured programming, troubleshooting, error trapping, reusability, future-proofing my code, dBase, Clipper, VBscript, C++, Powershell, MS-SQL, git, Azure Devops administratio
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What I got out of my bachelor's degree in computer science: COBOL syntax, FORTRAN Honeywell CP-6 basic job control commands, UCSD Pascal with IBM graphics extensions, submitting jobs via punch card reader. Guess how much of that I still use?
What I got out of on-the-job training and personal study that still serves me 40 years later: Structured programming, troubleshooting, error trapping, reusability, future-proofing my code, dBase, Clipper, VBscript, C++, Powershell, MS-SQL, git, Azure Devops administration, bash, REST API design... probably more but I ran out of fingers to count on.
My daughter got some good hands-on training in PC repair, but... that was 10+ years ago and technology moved on without her.
We really need a return to trade schools. You don't need a college degree to do most of the work that keeps the world turning - whether it's plumbing or engine repair or even laptop repair or Azure Devops administration. Getting a bachelor's degree for that stuff is... B.S. rimshot
I know this was meant to be facetious, but FORTRAN is still used relatively widely in some disciplines. If you use one of the open-source Unixlike operating systems for any kind of analysis odds are you are using a BLAS library that is mostly written in FORTRAN. :)
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Should've gotten an economics certificate instead. (Score:2)
H1B (Score:4, Insightful)
All things being equal a master's or equivalent will help your prospects (for people on this site) but a vibrant github will help more.
And in BigTech an H1B willing to live in a bunkhouse sleeping twenty will fill your slot for 40% less.
I avoided saying "do your job" because the MBA cartel is perfectly fine with enshittification.
And if you want to be in that cartel you need the master's; same with occupational licensing.
Good news is an MBA can be replaced by an LLM in most cases.
A PMP or other real certification is probably worth more in the long term.
Dunno... (Score:3)
I have a Masters in Electronic Engineering. However, I live in Canada and got it a long time ago when tuition was pretty cheap, plus I was on a scholarship that covered tuition and my living expenses, so I ended up essentially getting it for free.
I don't think it helped increase my earnings much, but it possibly gave me an edge in getting hired over other candidates who didn't have a Masters.
Graduate education has more "value" than salary (Score:4, Insightful)
"Is measuring the value of your Master's degree purely in terms of salary increase useless?"--Alternate World The Economist
Re: Graduate education has more "value" than salar (Score:2)
At least I am doing something usefull now.
Re:Graduate education has more "value" than salary (Score:4, Funny)
Always the victim-blaming propaganda. (Score:2, Insightful)
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You have a highly-educated workforce not being getting proper compensation, whose fault is it? Why it's the employees for not trying hard enough, or the universities, for not emphasizing this or that in cirricula...it's never, EVER business that's just cheating its most valuable asset. Which they are obviously doing.
How is the business cheating anyone? At least in the United States, nobody signs employment documents with the goon squad standing over them or else they get their legs broken, companies pay what people will work for.
When you produce a lot of lowish-grade college graduates, there are a lot of people competing for a small pool of jobs. Supply and demand my guy.
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Then where does the constant "skilled labor shortage" propaganda come from? Business refuses to pay what will get them the labor they need, but somehow it never changes: Companies just stay with their hand out to government, pointing fingers at education and their own workforce. Only everyone else has to pay what things cost.
The government has trained them to behave this way, by rewarding the behavior. If the supply of cheap labor from overseas in the form of H1Bs were choked off, and sufficiently punitive financial or regulatory barriers were put in place to discourage outsourcing work overseas, then local wages would rise.
Also most of the crying about skilled labor shortages seem to come from silly valley startups and tech consultancies, not normal businesses. The startup and VC culture operates by getting kids in cheap, burn
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The purpose is either service to makind or to a field of study. Business is allowed to participate, but any time
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The actual problem is that there's a massive overproduction of degrees. There's no way for productive economy to absorb the amounts of degree holders being pushed out of the door by modern Western universities.
The only way to measure that is the number of people with degrees taking jobs that didn't require them.
Meanwhile, most good jobs still require a degree whether they really need it or not. That's not the university's fault.
If you want fewer degrees, stop asking for them, duh.
Yes. it's an investment in future discrimination (Score:5, Interesting)
But we also have to think of the human consequences of higher education. The more we force people to sit in school, the longer they delay starting families and thus are more likely to have kids with birth defects, autism, or health issues. We really need to stop this race to see who can sit in school the longest and carefully consider if we're getting a return on our investment or just creating a contest to see who can jump through the most hoops...at great cost to society.
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People want to live after college (Score:2)
The more we force people to sit in school, the longer they delay starting families and thus are more likely to have kids with birth defects, autism, or health issues.
This argument might make sense if people got their last pre-full-time-career degrees after age 30 (and, consequently, waited to have kids until they saved up a nest egg, meaning late 30s or later) but that's not the case. Most people getting advanced degrees today either are already well into their "earning career" (and may already have children) or they are in their mid-20s (masters-level) or still under 30 (Ph.D.-level).
Not everyone can get an advanced degree and meet spouse at the same time. OK, you have a masters at 24...few pump out kids at 26. Kids harm your career and it often takes a few years to get established. It takes a lot smarter planning than most can handle to get a degree, meet the love of your life, establish earnings and a career, start a family...in parallel. Many do succeed, especially those with meddling families, but for most of us, we do things one step at a time.
Whether you delay someone star
It's not when you start, but when you end! (Score:2)
I've already conceded your point when the parents are in or past their late 30s.
But for younger parents, either the illness is so rare that the odds of a child NOT having the issue is very close to 100% at age 35 even if the risk of the child is several times as high at age 25, or the risk for parents under 35 is considered "average" or only somewhat above average.
Two examples: Autism [abtaba.com] is considered "average risk" for parents in their late 20s to early 30s. Down Syndrome [floridahealth.gov] is still less than 0.29% risk for mothers age 35-39.
I will grant that further study is needed for both of these and other congenital issues. I will also grant that other researchers may have found results that are different from the ones I presented. But my overall point stands: The potential genetic risk to children by their parents delaying having kids for several years to the early 30s so they can get more formal education isn't a major concern.
The concern is when you have your last kid. If you don't start until 35...well, that means 37 for 2? 39 for a 3rd kid?
You also have to factor in the expectation that in order to have a middle class life these days, both parents had to work.
In 1950 (really even in 1980), the guy could get a masters, marry a woman 5 years younger and they could start having kids when he was 30 and she was 25. Now, most women get educated and work and that pushes the baby-making out another 4-5 years.
Don't get me
No. (Score:3)
If you immediately get a Masters then you are probably fucked.
Companies don't want to hire you because they expect you're gonna work for them a bit, get some experience, then quit for a better job.
If you're here on an H1-B then sure, but your "Masters" is just there to make it so they can replace an American worker and comply with the "no qualified Americans" law.
But otherwise you have to get 2-3 years of experience first and then go back for your Masters or Doctorate.
There are several articles of kids who went straight to their masters and found out the hard way why that's a bad idea.
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This is field dependent. Master's straight out of school is the norm for accountants (for example) because it gives you enough credits to sit for the CPA exam.
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If you must be an expert in court... (Score:2)
...the a Master's Degree is the floor. Other than that, YMMV.
I have a PhD from way back when (Score:2)
and you know what diploma I passed later in life that landed me the job that paid me the best in terms of dollars per hour? Machinist / fitter.
I have gone back and forth between white and blue collar in my life, depending on which type of job was most in demand and what I fancied doing at a given moment, and the time I spent behind a machine tool or a file is the best time of my life.
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I see tool & die shops still in operation that were there 25 years ago when I switched from mechanic/fleet maintenance to software/programmer. If I was switching jobs now, I'd probably go back into mechanical/machine work. If there was a nexus of shipyard and clean energy, I'd want to be in there. Clean energy ships? Sail power? Idk. I like big boats and I cannot lie.
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I like big boats and I cannot lie.
Ha! Good one.
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Time behind a file is hard to beat.
I too have a PhD from way back when. I've somehow wangled a job that's 20% supervising people on the kind of topics I did my PhD (and much of my career) in and the other 80% behind a file or equivalent.
Hard to beat making stuff. I've been away from 3D printing for a decade and wow it's got easy in the mean time. I'm finding a 3D print and some drill bushings, silver steel pins and/or HSS inserts are a fantastic way of making surprisingly good jigs, with a minimum of fuss.
I
There is no "master's degree" to speak of (Score:2)
There are degrees in humanities, degrees in business, degrees in science, technology, etc.
Lumping them all together is lazy any and incorrect. Is an MA in English as useful or useless as an MA in math? Idunno. But I'd guess that if you're trying to make yourself look good applying to a job as an english teacher or a copy editor the math degree would be working for you less than the English degree.
Now, if you're applying for a job as a shelf stocker at Barnes and Noble, or a plumber's apprentice, you're prob
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Depends on the university. I have an MA. It's not an MA in anything. (Technically neither is my BA, but I could get a transcript for that which shows that I took some CS exams). It's not entirely useless, but to really benefit from it I'd have to move back to the city where I studied. On the other hand, it only cost me a couple of days to travel, because I was able to borrow my father's gown for the graduation ceremony.
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I wonder if we went to the same university. I got some weird ceremonial MA for free a few years after graduation, though I didn't really care as I already had an MSci from the same place. I didn't even have to travel back to UK for it. We also wore gowns for formal events, not just the graduation.
In fact, I didn't even care about the BA side, as I went straight for the MSci without taking a separate BA first. This was a common option in natural sciences as well as engineering. They just had to throw in t
Teachers (Score:2)
In the school district where I grew up, having a post-grad degree automatically boosted your pay. Neary every teacher had a masters or was getting one. My civics teacher completed his masters degree in art history while I was taking his class. It had absolutely nothing to do with what he taught in school, but he got a $10,000/year raise for it that, most importantly, fed into the calculation for how much his pension was.
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My mom was a teacher of the hearing-impaired. She had a BA in teaching, with a specialization for that. Due to changes in qualification requirements, she had to go back to school (night classes) when she was in her late 30s/early 40s in order to qualify to get full pay for that specialty, otherwise they were paying her as a full-time substitute.
This is the wrong way to look at it (Score:2)
The purpose of education is to train the mind. A trained mind can do anything.
The value of a degree is directly proportional to the amount of effort you put in.
A degree obtained by slouching through school with minimum effort, socializing, binge drinking and cheating on exams is worthless.
Working extremely hard in school, with obsessive focus and discipline results in a well trained mind.
It's truly unfortunate that some miss the point
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A masters is just a bachelors with extra classes (Score:2)
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In my Masters, I learned....pretty much the same as in a 400-level undergraduate class. It's not qualitatively different, the way a PhD is. But, sometimes you can get an employer to pay for a Masters, which is less common for undergraduate.
In addition to this, unless you want to work in academia, going above the masters and getting a Ph.D can actually harm your ability to later find work that is not directly related to the field because of the "overqualification" trap.
Career Dependent (Score:2)
Any degree, but especially a master's degree, needs to have some purpose (unless you are wealthy and just doing it for education's sake).
I have a JD and an LLM (master of laws, not large language model). The LLM was only an additional semester with the law degree, and it was a semester I wouldn't have been working on anyways. Its primary purpose was just showing employers that I was dedicated to my specialty. If I were looking for a job today, it probably wouldn't make much of a difference because I have a
apples to oranges (Score:2)
When comparing Masters degrees collectively, you're really comparing a lot of very different things. It's hard to generalize that way. There are likely some degrees that are an order of magnitude more valuable than others (at least by some metric).
Stepping back, the question should be: Are skills and knowledge value in the market?
The answer should be YES. But it depends on which skills and which knowledge. That's your first principle. From there a degree related to those skills and knowledge is valuable, if
Other than an MBA... (Score:2)
Which should be banned, mostly useless. And it's not new - a co-worker in the late seventies had a master's in microbiology... so she was working as a library page, because she couldn't get a job in her field.
I never went for one in computer science, because some arshhole in HR would decide I was "overqualified".
A guy with only an undergrad degree's 2 cents (Score:2)
I think I would have benefitted from getting a Masters. My father encouraged me to get an MBA and I did take the GMAT and did well, but I wasn't excited about that and was enjoying my first "real job" after graduating from college. I have a similar undergrad degree as my father, but he did get an MBA and has done better financially than I have, but I'm not unhappy.
If I could I'd advise my younger self to do a few things differently I'd have probably gotten a Masters, but maybe not an MBA. I might have want
It's a disadvantage that can be overcome (Score:2)
When I hire programmers, my rule of thumb is
- A bachelor's degree is a good thing.
- A master's degree is one strike against the candidate.
- A Ph.D. is two strikes against the candidate.
What I've found is that IN GENERAL, those who have advanced degrees are better at studying and taking tests, than creating software. Yes, there are exceptions. But after hiring a number of developers with advanced degrees that had trouble completing projects, I've started to recognize a pattern.
For OTHER lines of work, I have
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usefulness (Score:2)
Usefulness might be measured in more dimensions than just earning power. For example, with master's degree you might land a more pleasant job, even if you don't earn more.
All MAs? (Score:2)
- Did they report variations between universities, e.g. a Cambridge/Oxford University MA vs a University of Loughborough/Leicester MA?
- Did they report variations in whether the MAs were acquired on presential courses vs online? Presential MAs are often by requirement because they feature learning to do stuff that you can't learn online.
- Did they report variations in discipline, e.g. MBA vs MSc chemistry vs MA English lit. vs MA art hist
We've been deceived for decades (Score:2)
“The number-one reason people get these degrees is insecurity,” reckons Bob Shireman of the Century Foundation, a left-leaning think-tank in New York. “The feeling that if they are going to get a job—or keep their job—they need a master’s degree.”
Bob is an idiot. It's not insecurity at all. It's the fact that society has said for decades, "Get a degree to get a job" And now they're saying, "Get a masters to get a job."
It's the fault of people in HR and on hiri
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Bob says the market demands particular credentials.
You say that Bob is an idiot, then immediately turn around and blame the very segment of the market (HR and hiring committees) that makes those demands Bob is citing. That peer pressure is also doing the same is true, but peer pressure wouldn't survive without being re-enforced by those with the authority to hire and fire. If society deemed wearing a chartreuse tie as the key to employment, you may see an uptick in sales of chartreuse ties but it would leav
Nice to have, but not necessarily (Score:2)
I started working before even entering graduation. When I finally ended it, I already had a nice job and salary.
Then after some years I started to fancy a postgrad, wondering it would give me better opportunities and a bigger income.
While I acknowledge that it could definitely provide me some advantage if competing for a job offer with other candidates, the calculations for ROI never really added up. So I finally gave up the idea and just went ahead with my life and work as usual.
Today, approaching my retir
It depends. (Score:2)
I've hired engineers with master degrees, and it doesn't seem to offer any *vocational* benefits above spending the same amount of time working. The master's degreed engineers weren't any better than engineers who'd had a couple of years of actual experience.
But that struck me as a missed opportunity. There were certain advanced topics that, after years of working in the field, I would liked to have the luxury of a year or two of advanced study to explore. But when I asked people with masters about thei
It's worth it if you enjoyed it (Score:2)
I did my masters because after I finished my MSc I had a taste for more. I never cared about the job prospects. I could have gotten work even without the BSc, and in fact worked during my masters.
In terms of work, I don't think that the masters added much to my knowledge. The BSc stuff was a lot more important. Still, it was an interesting experience to have a paper published and talk about it at an international conference. (I was stressed and the talk was crappy, but it was still a worthwhile experience.)
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That should have been "after I finished my BSc...".
I got mine for me (Score:2)
MBAs (Score:2)
I've never finished uni. (Score:2)
Yet, I've also never had any issues in interviews and earn a 6-digit salary. People are more interested in my experience and what I can do for them rather than in a useless piece of paper that boasts about my perceived, irrelevant achievements from 2 decades ago.
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So ... tell your story. Why did you do it this way, and not the more common (?) way (i.e., get a BS in EE and then an MBA.)
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As an MBA holder, I would say that an MBA is WORSE than worthless, it is toxic!
The current MBA program turns people into cost items, that are regularly eliminated to increase shareholder value
Pensions, that's a cost item to be eliminated
Civic involvement, that is a cost item to be eliminated
Scholarships, or educational funding to support workers, those are cost items to be eliminated
And so on, and so on
Any recognition of employees as human has been denigrated in the MBA program and destroyed in practice
This
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In today's political landscape, knowledge is its own punishment.