Is Your Master's Degree Useless? (economist.com) 91
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:4, 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
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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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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:4, 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.
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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
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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
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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 d
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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I fully concur per rank-and-file IT jobs, being in the industry since before rocks were invented. Employers will suspect you'll get bored with their mundane systems and skip. A Masters makes sense if you want to do R&D or cutting-edge. Many want to do cutting-edge for the glory, but the competition to get those jobs is stiff, unless you time the fad-markets perfect
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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 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 t
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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:2)
... 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
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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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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.
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Back in the 1990s, the "golden ticket" was a technical-business combo of one graduate degree and one undergraduate degree. It didn't matter whether it was an MBA with a technical undergraduate degree or a bachelor of business with a technical graduate degree - either way, your long-term pro$pect$ were well ahead of your peers with just a bachelor's degree and a year-for-year of extra experience to match your extra schooling.
I'm not sure how things stand for people in their mid-20s today.
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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.)
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. :)
Should've gotten an economics certificate instead. (Score:2)
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Overproduction of degrees has become a problem in much of the Western society today. Including economics.
Knowledge is its own reward... (Score:1)
Knowledge is its own reward, whether it translates into financial gain or not. If you can afford longer education — or can find someone willing to sponsor you (not the taxpayer forced to do it) — go for it...
Whether spending that time and resources in a formally-recognized graduate school is the best way to learn — that's another question...
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In today's political landscape, knowledge is its own punishment.
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I knew, I could count on you to refill my mug [amazon.com] any time it runneth empty. Not that there is any danger of that at the moment :-)
H1B (Score:3)
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
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Re: Graduate education has more "value" than salar (Score:2)
At least I am doing something usefull now.
Always the victim-blaming propaganda. (Score:3)
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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. It also doesn't help that most of university education has become bloated, curated slop, specifically aimed at minimizing learning useful things and maximizing useless bloat which can be charged as a part of the degree.
When there's five people with Master's competing for one productive slot for perso
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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.
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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.
Yes. it's an investment in future discrimination (Score:3)
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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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).
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
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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 m
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.
Shake your money maker (Score:1)
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.
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.
Earning power is the only measure of a job (Score:1)
Not quality of job, not quality of life. You are a robot to work and produce economic output and pay your taxes so the rich dont have to.
On the other hand, dont tell me that the big three, MBA, JD, MD, dont often result in quite a big jump in earnings.
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
Re: (Score:2)
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