This is a great article from the Tennessean about the dubiousness - and awakening consciousness of said dubiousness - of the four-year college degree in the current economic climate.
Just check out this gem of an excerpt:
Nicholas Holland, founder of Centresource, a Nashville Web design and development company, said he’ll pay a developer who has completed at least two Web projects $50,000 or more starting out, with or without a college degree. But a recent college graduate with less hands-on experience would get $35,000 a year at most.
College graduates “are typically worthless when it comes to programming and worthless when it comes to graphic design,” said Holland.
...
“They’ve spent 90 percent of their time learning stuff not relevant to their trade. And, in addition to all that, they are often taught by people who spent 90 percent of their time doing stuff not relevant to their trade. Show me a Ph.D. who knows how to program in any of the latest Web technologies.”
Sound familiar? There it is, in black and white, with elegant, yet brutal, simplicity: the guy will pay you $15k more if you know what you are doing, and he doesn't give a rat's ass if you go to college or not.
Just so we're all clear, I'm going to repeat the two pillars of my educational advice to 18-year-olds: 1) intellectual stimulation is a worthwhile endeavor, and highly recommended, but it is not synonymous with credentialing; and 2) you should only seek higher education if the expenditure of time and money will be worth it in terms of the benefit to your marketability as an individual.
Employers in the computer sciences have figured out that well-trained grads from the community colleges and technical schools may actually know more than their 4-year counterparts, and they often hire accordingly. (Obviously, the computer sciences need some sort of mandatory licensing mechanism to ensure that their four-year professors are taken care of).
In any event, I found myself nodding multiple times to this article, as it conforms everything I've read about how higher education actually interacts with the economy (rather than how it does in college brochures) and, in some cases, learned the hard way.
And then we get to a student who fights for the value of the degree. You'll never guess what she's studying and where she's planning to go.
Students at Vanderbilt University, which costs an estimated $59,248 a year to attend without financial aid —including $40,320 in tuition alone — said the expense and effort would be worthwhile.
Liesel Burks, a junior from Madison, Ala., said the bachelor’s degree in political science she plans to have on her résumé in 2013 will pay off in law school and beyond.
“It’s definitely worth it,” Burks said on her way to class Wednesday. “Just the education and experience you gain is so applicable to the future. In this economy, getting whatever edge you can is a really good thing.”
Thinking about having an "edge" is a great start (wish more would do that - I really didn't), but why in God's name does anyone think there's an edge in any kind of political science degree? Even from a school like Vanderbilt, the market is horribly oversaturated for employers who actually want to hire whatever skill set that education provides (which doesn't seem like much). And law school is no different.
In any event, the appearance of this article in a newspaper is yet another sign that the facade of educational prestige is crumbling, and that the free market is dictating that grads actually have applicable skills rather than some crap spewed at them by stuffy people who haven't done a truly economically-productive activity in decades. Again, law school is no different.
I'll play the devil's advocate here. In the interests of full disclosure, I am a university professor, although if you read my posting record on the scamblogs I think you'll find it to be fairly balanced.
ReplyDeleteCS is a whole different animal from law school and I don't think it's useful to compare the two, unless your purpose is to draw a contrast. CS is a VERY fast-moving field, where today's "latest web technologies" become out of date in two years. Whereas, on the other hand, law school hasn't changed very much in the last 130 years. Talk about a contrast! (One can argue that legal education ought to be making a greater effort to keep up with modern developments, but even so there's no way law will evolve as fast as CS.)
I thus find that any software or technology company that chases the latest fad as part of its hiring strategy is simply not setting itself up for long-term success. In CS, learning to think like a programmer is a far more valuable skill in the long run than learning today's newest technology. If you try to focus on practical, technical skills in CS, those specific skills will become obsolete in short order. Of course, if you learn enough practical skills enough times, then you can start to infer the theory behind them, but it's definitely more efficient (in my opinion) to learn the theory directly. One can even argue, quite reasonably, that fluency with computer science theory is the most important practical skill for a programmer to have.
Again, the contrast with law is stark. In law, the practice has not changed very much in the last half-century. Maybe there have been some improvements such as the use of automated software for doc review, but these changes are just noise compared to the huge yearly turnover in CS.
Look closely at any of these stories that talk about four-year CS degrees. Take note of the companies that are featured as hiring based on short-term fad technologies. Have you ever heard of any of these companies? Chances are no. That's because, as I said, the companies that behave this way are not likely to achieve long-term success. If you look at the biggest and most successful technology companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.), I can assure you, most of their hires are four-year graduates, and some even have Ph.Ds. A four-year degree in CS teaches you to cope with future unforeseen developments beyond the scope of the latest trends. It gives you a foundation for long-term success which is especially critical in a fast-moving field.
The Tennesseean article repeats the observation that many tech company founders were college dropouts. But it's also important to acknowledge that many others were not. The founders of Google, Amazon, Ebay, Intel, Cisco, and HP all had four-year degrees.