I said in another thread around here, "if you're going to get a liberal arts degree, either have enough money to afford it, or be so intensely interested in the liberal arts that you're willing to pay back your damn loans." But really, what I mean by that is a slight bit more direct (yet subtle) than it seems.
It's quite possible that the study of purely academic subjects--subjects which have little chance of improving one's employment prospects--will enrich someone's life tremendously, and that the university is the best place to study some of these subjects. I'm not interested in boring arguments about what those subjects might be, or whether any such subjects may exist, but let's entertain at least the possibility that some do. Isn't lifelong enrichment worth a decade or so of loan payments?
Engineers see the cost of college as a variable in a purely financial cost-benefit analysis, and don't understand why philosophers would even bother because it fails that analysis. But philosophers get something fundamentally different out of college. Is it worth the money? That's a personal question.
I am an engineer. Being five years removed from undergrad, the most valuable parts of college were not electives in mechanics or control theory. They were the professors I interacted with, the football games I attended in the student section, the liberal arts and writing classes I was required to take, and the friends I made.
Really? I never would have learned the math on my own, and liberal arts could cost you $1.50 in library fees. I grew up reading for fun though, perhaps that facet of education is harder for some people?
> "and liberal arts could cost you $1.50 in library fees."
Many subjects cannot really be learned from books. Regardless of how many history books you may read, for example, it will not shed the same insight as a profound discussion with a highly-experienced academic in the field. This is true for many aspects of the humanities.
Which isn't to say self-study is worthless, but rather that it is a poor substitute for interaction with your professors. IMHO to claim that liberal arts can be just as well studied by oneself is myopic and tunnel-visioned, and about equivalent to me claiming that aspiring nuclear engineers should pick up some textbooks instead of going to school.
IMHO the whole topic of the monetary worth of schooling is an interesting and worthwhile one - but discussions on it on forums such as this one is invariably tainted by the fact that many people in our field have incredibly arrogant and misguided superiority complexes about technical degrees over the arts. I personally tend to think that one ought to be responsible for their own academic spending, and that studies of the arts is a luxury that not everyone can afford - but I hesitate to voice this often, since many of my engineering peers hold this opinion out of disdain and trivialization of the humanities, and I really don't want to be associated with that kind of ignorance.
>Many subjects cannot really be learned from books. Regardless of how many history books you may read, for example, it will not shed the same insight as a profound discussion with a highly-experienced academic in the field. This is true for many aspects of the humanities.
My undergrad humanities courses were 100+ students packed into a giant lecture hall listening to a professor talk. There was essentially no interaction.
I've taken those courses also - they are still valuable. Take the same book home, or hell, take ten books home on that subject and you will still miss many salient points that only prolonged formal study of the subject will bring.
That's the trick with the humanities - they are not hard sciences, there is no canonical body of knowledge to be passed on; This isn't a straight download. Many things are a matter of perspective, of experience, and of particular schools of thoughts - all of the above poorly communicated via mere books.
That's the difference between a history book vs. a good history professor. Even without the (invaluable) ability to interact directly, it's the difference between a dry recounting of facts vs. more profound linkages into other areas of the field, or entirely other fields of study altogether. Sure, by reading books you will make some of these connections yourself, but it's hardly as good as what you'd get in classes.
That being said, there are certainly bad profs who do just do the dry recounting of facts, in which case you are basically better off reading the textbook at home. The presence of these should in no way discount the enormous positive influence of college educations done right.
It's not, but you have to go to the lecture to get the transcript, right? The professor may be saying things that don't appear in any book. This is especially so if you're going to a good school and the professor is a leading researcher in his field.
As someone with a philosophy degree I can say that your thought is immeasurably underestimated. Every philosophy 101 course teaches you Plato, but the differene between the Plato you find there and the actual Plato under scholarly anaylsis is immense. Aristotle is even worse: his Attic Greek has almost nothing to do with his common English translation EDIT: when it comes to the key terms.
>Many subjects cannot really be learned from books. Regardless of how many history books you may read, for example, it will not shed the same insight as a profound discussion with a highly-experienced academic in the field. This is true for many aspects of the humanities.
Also, if you're really interested in a subject, talking with an expert is fun. You're really missing out on the good stuff if you keep to yourself and your books. I think this goes equally for the arts and the sciences.
There's a big difference between reading philosophy and understanding it. Understanding philosophy requires some understanding of translation issues, historical knowledge of which philosophers are replying to whom, and (especially in analytic philosophy) a working knowledge of the technical jargon involved. It's much easier territory to navigate when you have a guide.
So you joined College just to play football, write essays and make friends? Can't you just make that within your network? (neighbors, clubs, events...)
>Can't you just make that within your network? (neighbors, clubs, events...)
Many of my friends who didn't go to college (or commuted to college) held on to whichever high school friends also stayed behind. They didn't meet many new people or do many new things. While it's theoretically possible to seek out the same level of novelty and excitement college gives you, it's also hard enough that most people won't do it.
IMO the cost analysis of college (beside personal preference) is largely a function of parent income. In the US, if your family is poor to "middle income" your decision tree is 1. get into a top 5/10 (at least by endowment) school 2. get into best public university (preferably in state) you can 3. learn a trade, and by all means avoid anywhere private and expensive (unless you can get a substantial outside scholarship). If your parents are eff you rich, then eff the cost. The weird bit is the area between middle income and eff you rich where financial aid is less available and it becomes more expensive to go pretty much everywhere. In that sense college expenses are a strange way of equalizing quality of life between the upper middle and the <middle
OK. 50 or 60 percent of U.S. high school graduates in 2009 went directly to college. What percentage of those do you think are studying academic subjects because they feel the subjects are "enriching their life"? 20%? 10%? 5%? 2%?
The American 18-year-old is not a demographic in which you find many philosophers.
I'm not sure how you can tell. It's easy to form opinions like this about undergraduates that you're teaching, but in practice they're based on virtually nothing. You don't know these people, you just interact with them in a very restricted way for a few hours a week. (And you spend hardly any time at all with them on a one-to-one basis.) At least, that's how I fell when I'm teaching.
I don't think first-years are a fair assessment of any institution. Many of the original 90% partiers will either a) shape up, b) drop out of college or c) some other choice. Good luck -- my friend is also a grad student teaching first-year calculus for "business, social sciences and humanities" .. ie kids that aren't interested in math. In his words, "it's painful".
The author sidesteps the issue and answers with (roughly) "education is never a bad thing." That's true enough, but that doesn't answer the question of whether or not a degree is worth the cost. Not a very informative article.
One thing I've never understood about the whole degree v no degree debate is: don't people learn on the job? That is to say: I think the educational value of things other than college are often overlooked. It's the information age! You don't have to go to a university to learn.
A lot of my work is on avionics software. As far as programming knowledge goes, I've learned most of what I need to do my job before college, or at least outside of college. As far as avionics goes, I've learned most of it on the job. My college education has been at best marginal with respect to the work I actually do.
However, it would have been at best very difficult for me to cut through the red tape to get the work I have without a college degree. The sorts of people who do hiring in this industry seem to really want to see that.
The degree itself is valuable if you are endeavoring to work in an environment whose administrators expect you to have one. The education itself you can get on your own. Though, I personally find it helpful to be "forced" to learn some topics more deeply or broadly than I would have on my own (and this is something that I probably wouldn't have really understood until experiencing it in college).
However, it would have been at best very difficult for me to cut through the red tape to get the work I have without a college degree. The sorts of people who do hiring in this industry seem to really want to see that.
Put yourself in the place of a hiring manager, or, better still, the person setting hiring policies for large companies. You have hundreds or thousands of people competing for jobs, sending you resumes, and the like. You only need to make one decision: hire or no hire. When you're weaning down those resumes, you're probably looking for shortcuts, and one way to get there is to filter out a college degree -- which isn't that high a bar, especially for hyper competent technical people. If you're setting hiring policies, you want to stop people from hiring their incompetent brother-in-laws or wastrel friends. And so on.
But in fact there is a second much larger class of judgements where judging you is only a means to something else. These include college admissions, hiring and investment decisions, and of course the judgements made in dating. This kind of judgement is not really about you.
Anyway, this isn't an attack on the parent poster, but it is an attack of the thoughts I often see on HN and other tech sites about the lack of importance of a college degree. If you start your own company or can get others to pay you... great. But degrees are often there not only to show that you've learned and provide learning, but also as a heuristic for people who are hiring. False positives and false negatives exist, but not so much as to abrogate the usefulness of the entire system.
Sure, no doubt. Even hip big companies like Google and Apple require/recommend/suggest a college degree for technical jobs. I don't think it's a bad hiring heuristic, as completion of a college degree does suggest an amount of knowledge and perseverence to complete a goal.
Really, in HN-related industries, unless you are unwaveringly committed to working for a startup or going into business for yourself, the work possibilities that would render a college degree as desireable-for-employment probably vastly outnumber work possibilities for which a degree has absolutely no use whatsoever.
On the flip side, I don't think a degree should be viewed as a guaranteed ticket of entry to employment. If there's a hundred or a thousand people applying for the job, and half of them do have a college degree, you still have to stand out somehow or another. It might be as simple as having solid writing skills, or an agreeable personality at the interview. But the degree alone may not suffice.
That wasn't a court precedent, it was a legal lynching during special circumstances. Plenty of companies currently get away with using aptitude tests as part of interviewing, and this is supported by copious precedents.
I think this is a good point. Has there ever been a point in history where literally anything you wanted to know wasn't locked away in some obscure institution? It's hard to sometimes remind yourself how lucky you are to live in our times (though I imagine they've said that about past decades as well).
Learning on the job is a valid point, but it's often not interdisciplinary. You learn and develop your skills in the areas you work in. Opportunities to expand your skillset and study other topics are difficult to come by in many work environments. Especially if you're in a position that didn't require a degree in the first place.
I agree you don't have to go to a University to learn, but you do have to find willing and qualified teachers and mentors which can be harder than it might seem.
So many people look back and say college was the "best four years of their life." This is usually due to a sense of nostalgia, often aptly described as "a longing for simpler times."
I hated college when I was there. Sure there were fun parts, but there was also loads more pressure and a much greater opportunity to fail than I had experienced in high school. However, now that I'm pushing 40, I look back at college with a sense of fondness, thinking how much easier life was without a mortgage, two kids and the incredible cost of health insurance.
As a result, I think that most people look back at college and consider the money well spent because it was money spent pushing off the pressures of adulthood. So while the college education might not be worth the money, the college experience often is.
It is probably fair to say that a large percentage of the enrollment at almost any college anywhere is there because that is what one does after high school. Henry Adams says of the Harvard of the 1850s "All went there because their friends went there, and the College was their ideal of self-respect."
You can't get a reliable answer from anybody for this question. Academics might tend to say "absolutely!" while those who skipped it would say "who cares?" or something like that.
They key is to figure out what directions you want to grow in and seek out the opportunities that align with them. Acads, biz-world all offer a wonderful palette of such opportunities to pick from.
I work part-time and am a part-time Ph.D. student. I'm enjoying both their contributions to my growth.
1. Education should be good & free(in both ways) . This is essential to a democratic and efficient populous.
2. Whatever you get, you have to make it work for you. Education is no exception - you drift through school - expect it, to make almost no substantial difference to your quality of life.
3. Posing question with so many broad implications from different angle is bating. Listing who gets jobs more is narrowing use of a degree to establishing a career. Degree, as in piece of paper is good for just that.
But education is so much more then just ability to earn on a slightly higher pay scale. Its a tool to change the world, make it better. It is sickening to see all these 'repeat' articles pepper various syndicated publications.
Education is essential and yes it is worth it, if you want to get it to better yourself.
Go to a technical school if you need a paper to get a job. With a piece of paper and a bit of networking you will get a job.
Education is beyond that - its what you can give to your kids. How can you put a price tag on that?
I'm still amazed at the cost of a college education in the US. My computer engineering degree in Australia cost $15k total, then a PhD was free (with many, including myself, getting a scholarship to pay for living expenses).
I'm from Europe, and my electrical engineering degree didn't cost me a single euro. So with me, it was more question like "Is it worth the time? I could spend time on something much more interesting."
I'm from Slovenia, but I think most European faculties (colleges in Europe) don't charge students for degrees. We pay that through taxes. I hope that answers your question.
Most people in the US don't spend hundreds of thousands on undergrad education, just the people who blog about it a lot. I went to Iowa State. Tuition was about 1500 a semester, so 12k total, for a double degree in computer engineering and math. I'm totally satisfied with the quality of the education and social experience.
On a somewhat peripheral note I found this a bit disappointing:
According to the Times, eight out of the ten job categories that will add the most employees during the next decade—including home-health aide, customer-service representative, and store clerk—can be performed by someone without a college degree.
I was kind of hoping we'd be able to use advancing technology to reduce our need for people in the customer service/store clerk fields.
Those kinds of fields require human interaction or flexibility or, more often, both that is incredibly hard to automate. For an entertaining fictional explanation, see Heinlein's Door Into Summer where the inventor of the robots explains why housework is harder to teach a robot than, for example, bricklaying. (I don't know of as short and clear nonfiction example.)
"Particular congratulations are due to aerospace engineers, who top the list, with a starting salary of just under sixty thousand dollars—a figure that, if it is not exactly stratospheric, is twenty-five thousand dollars higher than the average starting salary of a graduate in that other science of the heavens, theology."
The author doesn't mean "science" in the literal sense that implies the scientific method, he's using it in a far looser sense that only implies "the study of a subject". It is the New Yorker--there's some degree of poetic license involved here.
"The author doesn't mean 'science' in the literal sense that implies the scientific method, he's using it in a far looser sense that only implies 'the study of a subject'."
But theology isn't the study of the heavens, it's the study of religious doctrine. I get that the author is trying to use poetic license, but describing theology as a science of the heavens is kind of alarming. Maybe I'm just a little on edge because three different people tried to convert me to their religion tonight.
It's quite possible that the study of purely academic subjects--subjects which have little chance of improving one's employment prospects--will enrich someone's life tremendously, and that the university is the best place to study some of these subjects. I'm not interested in boring arguments about what those subjects might be, or whether any such subjects may exist, but let's entertain at least the possibility that some do. Isn't lifelong enrichment worth a decade or so of loan payments?
Engineers see the cost of college as a variable in a purely financial cost-benefit analysis, and don't understand why philosophers would even bother because it fails that analysis. But philosophers get something fundamentally different out of college. Is it worth the money? That's a personal question.