> Nearly half of all students thought their degree offered poor value for money this year according to a survey that sheds light on the scale of student anger with their universities’ response to the pandemic
Emphasis mine on "this year".
> Twice as many students thought their courses offered poor value (44%) than in 2019-20
So it used to be better in non-pandemic years.
Seems that some people is jumping to conclusions about education in the UK when the article is specifically about presidential/non-presidential and other pandemic challenges.
It's embarrassing how many of the comments here are quite obviously based entirely on reading the headline and nothing else. I read the article when I saw it in The Guardian yesterday, it is of course entirely about changes during the pandemic, not a general conversation about higher education.
As in most countries in Europe, the value of a university degree is diminishing because the vast majority of population has it. If back in the day,it used to be 10-20% tops, now in some countries it's as high as 60-80%, while at the same time competing for jobs that often don't require such education to start with.
[Edit]
I still remember how not so long time ago it wasn't uncommon to have masters as a bare minimum when hiring a secretary in my country...
I think you make a good point, but your numbers seem way off. What countries are you aware of that even get close to 60-80% of completed college education? The list below shows the highest at 61% for Canada (between the ages of 35-44) [1]. But that list is also including things like community college, trade schools, and other forms of professional development. It seems to me that a much more accurate range is something like 25-40% for most developed countries.
I think what is really going on with degrees being a poor investment, is that most degrees don't actually teach valuable skills or they do and the students just don't actually put in the necessary work to achieve those skills. Instead treating it as a game of how to pass while putting in as little work as possible. That was at least my experience TAing computer science courses. Most students were just not mature enough to value the education that was being offered.
EDIT: A more generous interpretation to the students would be that they were simply jaded after a lack luster and uninspiring high school education plus a similar experience in probably many of the college classes they were taking.
> students just don't actually put in the necessary work to achieve those skills
While obviously this does happen, I think degrees do teach valuable skills and many students put in obscene levels of work to learn the material, resulting in ever-increasing competition for basically every facet of the job market - from university admissions all the way through job interviews. To me the issue isn’t students not understanding the true value of their education (and who could blame them? How is a 20 year old to know why their professor planned things out the way he did or why they are not learning Python as the blogosphere insists?). The real issue is that - like the article said - the benefits of this extra work seem marginal. Either way you will be competing against hundreds for entry level software development jobs with the greatest discriminator being referrals and prior industry experience. Whether you put in 8 extra hours a week to truly understand Dijkstra doesn’t get you much in the way of an interview.
> If back in the day,it used to be 10-20% tops, now in some countries it's as high as 60-80%, while at the same time competing for jobs that often don't require such education to start with.
The change is because employers love degrees... they prove that a job applicant can reliably get out of bed and do quality work in a timely fashion (and thus reduce the risk for the employer to hire someone who turns out to be a "bad fit", have mental health issues etc.), and especially the IT degrees have a large part of knowledge transfer and training in them that the employer doesn't have to pay for like in a classic apprenticeship.
Academia should be a place for science and those interested in advancing it, not for employers to save costs on vetting and training (by placing the burden on the government and/or the students)!
Which is a good thing. More high educated people is better.
Back in the days only a handful of people with the right background were able to study.
Yes it might diminish the value of a degree. Now actual additional skills and experience are needed to stand out. I am totally fine with this. Gone are the days of arrogant students thinking their degree is automatically bring them wealth (ok not entirely true in lots of countries). But still. We are heading into the right (not always perfect) direction.
It's a catastrophe. Academics have always grossly oversold their own importance and the "value" of what they teach.
The most valuable education is at the primary level (0 to 10 years old); then secondary (to 18); and tertiary education hardly has any effect whatsoever.
By the point you're an adult, you aren't being "moulded" into anything, you're merely acquiring particular useful bits of knowledge that only have value if you're going to use them.
What we have now is people spending tens of thousands to avoid earning money for several years; and thereby avoiding acquiring useful skills.
And this is an economic catastrophe which burdens everyone in society and grossly misdirects public funds.
I would be very supportive of an 12mo "generic higher learning skills" programmes being deployed at this scale. ie., something closer to a teenager-to-gradscheme transition programme which could include higher-level generic maths, writing, humanities, etc. skills.
However what we have now is a gigantic tulip-style bubble that needs bursting or else we will continue to needlessly in-debt the next generations of people.
The emperor really has no clothes on: your* degree really was a waste of money....
That seems like a naive assessment of an education model that is failing across multiple dimensions of analysis. It saddles many students with crippling debt. It monopolises some of the most productive years of a persons life studying subjects often of minimal practical value to their future careers. It drains public funding and resources.
You say more highly educated people is better as if its a truism, it doesn't seem so clear to me. I don't see why, for example, someone spending their early 20s in an apprenticeship, doing vocational training or in an industry learning on the job is inherently worse for them or society than receiving a higher education.
Just about the only unambiguous positive I can see in university is the chance to grow and learn as a young person in a social setting, freshly independent of parents. But surely there are more efficient approaches that could be employed here.
I'm studying for another batchelors with the Open University in the UK. It's a good institution and I completed my computing masters with them a few years ago. I'm studing for fun, not for career. I'm so disappointed to see my peers spend most of their time discussing how to get grant funding, which parts of the taught course they can safely skip and how to formally complain about a tutor that has given them poor feedback for poor effort is just depressing.
I'd be happy with people being simply 'educated'. Too many people barely graduated high school, lack all kinds of skills, have poor reading/writing abilities.
> Which is a good thing. More high educated people is better
That's a dangerous statement in isolation.
For a country with a median income of $35k, imposing debts worth $200k for degrees with questionable employability and no clear resolution (Can't pay off, can't default) is insanely dangerous.
Education is also not a monolith. Some careers need education, in that gaining skills in the profession requires a degree of instruction or apprenticeship (Medicine, Pure Sciences, Engineering etc). But a large number of them end up being paper pushers or knowledge from a single course or learn everything on their first job. For this second cohort, education can be burden with terrible payoff.
A lot of educational fields are also entirely unemployable. This includes 3 type of professions:
1. Pyramid schemes - where the only real job is in instruction of the next generation.
2. Priest - where they create a dogma that mandates them as essential in the system, but have no use in isolation.
3. Professional disk golfer - where there is only 1 employable position, and about a million wannabes.
As of now, progressive society is pushing people to consider all kinds of professions as equal. However, the equivalency is flawed. The risk/reward ratio of getting educated varies massively across professions. It can vary from a ticket to the upper-middle-class to being entirely useless equivalent to homeopath or hucksterism in terms of unsubstantiated merit.
The university system was never created for everyone to get educated. The concept has existed only post GI-bill and seemed to work in a Boomer-era post scarcity America. (Nothing that worked well in America from 1950-1980 should be taken as an example that can be replicated. It was a special time in history. It would be like trying to be Saudi prince without an oil well in your backyard)
I am strongly in favor of higher education for all. However, it needs to either be fully distanced from the present university mafia or the universities must be compelled to produce economically productive graduates across their various offerings. Universities sell a financial product. It is about time we see their variables-controlled return on investment with th fine grained granularity that we evaluate any other financial product. Lest we get stuck with sub-prime graduates bundled into funds that are considered AAA because there are a large enough number of them in it.
Nonsense. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... : 34% of the EU population 25-54 years old has completed education to ISCED levels 5-8, and level 5 isn't even university (depends on what you call 'university', but an academic bachelor's is level 6.)
Additionally, in my (relatively) highly educated country (The Netherlands), selection for university starts in primary school, where about 20% is assigned ('given the advice of going to') to the type of secundary education that prepares students for university. So I think it's fair to estimate that a university education for 20% of the population is realistic, and I have no reason to believe this would be significantly (10 percent points higher or lower) elsewhere in the Union.
I have often felt this. The skills learned are of little direct value, but the qualification is signalling enough. I mean how much different for a middle management position is I got accepted to Harvard and I graduated from Harvard.
"The Case Against Education" by Bryan Caplan lays out exactly this argument:
"Caplan argues that the primary function of education is not to enhance students' skills but to certify their intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity—attributes that are valued by employers. He ultimately estimates that approximately 80% of individuals' return to education is the result of signaling, with the remainder due to human capital accumulation."
Both much of the Eurozone and the UK have particularly poor situations for young graduates because of the economically contractive way both handled the last financial crisis.
The UK has compounded the situation by increasing debt for students, structured student load repayment so that payments kick in at an income threshold, and then embarked on the Brexit adventure.
It's a mistake to look at the supply of graduates without looking at the changes in the graduate labour market.
For a decade+, people have framed "the college experience" as the reason you should attend instead of getting skills online or on your own. Then they promote their great facilities, beautiful campus, state of the art labs, etc.
When THAT is your main value prop and then suddenly take it away, what do you expect will happen?
About 9 years ago I attended a college Q&A session, and I was the only one in the group who was currently at a community college (the rest were HS juniors and seniors).
The community college route was brought up (with my name specifically), and although the presenter brought up the benefits of a 2-year school none of the other students and parents were having it. They were certain that "the college experience" was the only way forward.
I was able to graduate from the CC and transfer to a public 4-year school as a junior. The tuition was minimal (compared to a private university) and paid off without hassle, and if I'd gone the "traditional" college route I don't think I would've been as lucky.
Mine was terrible value for money. Went to a red brick in the UK and studied electrical engineering in the early 90s. My first job on the market was a start from scratch experience. I learned almost nothing of value at university and my personal experience as a hobbyist was far more useful. Turns out 95% of EE work is gluing bits of data sheets together and scratching head over problems where the idealistic mathematical models don’t work out. I found this depressing and ended up slipping out the side into the IT industry which was full of charlatans which were easy to get an advantage over.
My only saving grace was it was free at the time. If I’d had a (larger) pile of debt placed in front of me I’d have done something else with my life.
Discussing value for money on a free degree aside, I'd argue that the value of an EE is immense. I graduated last year studying EEE at a UK red brick uni, had the best time of my life, and learned a good number of skills that have come in handy in the last year having been employed as a professional engineer.
The debt question, at least in the UK, is more academic than anything - I'm currently earning 30k a year (which is already more than I need to live comfortably) and I'm paying £20 a month back on my loan. In 30 odd years the debt will be wiped off and given that you only pay back 6% of income above 27k it's not really like you'd ever notice it. FWIW my friends that went to uni and ended up with non-vocational degrees are earning around the 20k mark if they're working full time so chances are they won't even get close to having to consider their student loans for a good while.
In terms of the specifics I learned on my degree I would have to agree that not much of what was taught is actually helpful in my career but having four years to mature as a person, especially in an atmosphere where you're surrounded by other people who are happy to discuss engineering and related projects, has helped in a way I could never put a price tag on.
That debt is only part of the student finance picture. It’s difficult paying off a credit card, overdraft, commuting, potentially car insurance and rent at the same time. That £20 is a fairly significant amount of cash when you’re in that position. Most people end in that situation and some never escape it.
My daughter is hoping to study medicine next year. That’s going to be interesting on the finance front.
The repayment terms are not set in stone though, the govt can change it at any time. Also if you want to leave the uk and live somewhere else you are in for a world of hurt.
Are UK salaries really that low? I checked the current exchange rate and £20k is what you can get working a minimum wage job at not even full time hours
As someone that studied computing and electronics I'm surprised you found electrical engineering useless.
I found the vast majority of my computer science courses a waste of time, stuff I could have learned by myself. But the electronics stuff was very useful as I had access to labs and equipment I wouldn't of otherwise had.
I don't think you should expect your university education to prepare you to hit the ground running when you get your first job. It teaches you the foundation so that you can then learn to do your job.
Of course I don't know what you were taught in university nor which field of electrical engineering you went into, maybe you truly got nothing out of it.
I have an MSc in microelectronics. All transferable professional knowledge could have been self learned in about six months from a book. They didn’t teach us how to learn. They didn’t give us any guidance on that front at all in fact. It was just lectures, material (some incorrect!) and a framework in which personal growth was entirely restricted. Tutorials were rushed and incomplete, staff were rarely available for help and a lot of people flounced loudly in the first year over it.
As for incorrectness, to this day I am pissed off that one of the principal lecturers who had precisely zero industry experience shot down an email I sent privately to ask for some material to be corrected. How dare I submit errata! When I landed in industry I took this to a senior design engineer who explained to me in simple terms that the guy was a “jobsworth cunt”.
> I found the vast majority of my computer science courses a waste of time, stuff I could have learned by myself. But the electronics stuff was very useful as I had access to labs and equipment I wouldn't of otherwise had.
As another point of view, my university courses were useful to someone who had jsut tried it out the spring before their freshman year. It introduced me to concepts and put me against (at the time) difficult problems that I could tackle along side my peers. My Data Structure and Alg class was the most useful since it allowed me to restructure the way I way I saw CS as a whole. The things I learn now are entirely structured based on how I learn CS and would not be the same had I learned it on my own.
I studied EE in Canada as well in the early 90s. My tuition was less than $2500/year but I had a scholarship that paid for it.
For me it was worth it. I immediately went into programming, and taught myself everything. While being useless for programming, my EE degree gave me a foot in the door and I made the most of it. I started in a bank in IT but was able to move into programming by lying and saying I was a full time programmer. I was doing programming on my own at home so I could legit program (they didn’t have interviews like Microsoft or Google back when I was starting off).
Soon after I moved to Silicon Valley and it’s been pretty good ever since. I’m mostly retired now after 25 years and the pandemic was the thing that convinced me into retirement.
This is my experience too. The best EE I know dropped out of university but knows more about it than anyone I have met. He builds radios, phones and antennas from parts as has since he was a kid in the 1950s. I think the same applies to CS. The best ones have been writing games and code since they were kids. It's something that they love to do.
I'm confused. As someone who dabbled with a basic PCB design. There are a lot of simple circuits that require a lot of theoretical knowledge. Designing the circuit is one thing as you can always copy paste existing designs and modify them. Picking and rating components is another as it requires a complete understanding how your circuit actually works and I was hoping that an EE degree would have helped with that.
I guess there is no need for that and I should just "grind" practical circuits until I understand them.
This is surprising to me because the nature of imperfect components makes EE far more complicated than software development where you do not have to care about choosing a for loop manufactured by Samsung vs Panasonic that is good up to 1000 iterations or that it is polarized so your for loop can only increment, not decrement. Add a hundred components each with their own characteristics and your head will split.
My sister is going to university in Australia. Despite a successful covid eradication and effectively no cases in her state, her uni tried to make them go virtual all of this year (as well as last year). And what can she do about it? If the professors don’t feel like coming to work she’s shit out of luck. No wonder she and her friends feel like it’s a bad deal.
"If the professors don't feel like coming to work" - As if we have much of a say in it! I would love to be back in the classroom. Online teaching is exhausting but we are forced to do it because of COVID regulations. I think blaming academics for the situation is completely unfair and disingenuous.
It's somewhat interesting, but "what students think" isn't really as interesting as the reality of whether a degree is poor value for money or not. It might be, or might not. I suspect it largely depends on the degree and the institution. Also, just because having a degree is pretty normal right now, doesn't mean it's not good value: maybe you need it just to do averagely and without it you'll struggle a lot in the employment market. I'm not saying this is true, I'm just saying the headline isn't that interesting compared to the actual reality.
Thats actually a great point. There are studies indicating what college degreed people earn vs non degreed.
In my experience (as someone who graduated decades ago), the degree, particularly for liberal arts majors, opened a lot of doors for opportunities that might not have happened without them. But I went to a state school for a cost that seemed high in the 90's but now seems like a huge bargain.
> maybe a university isn't the most unbiased resource but..
I'm not sure if anything similar in the US exists, but Stats Canada puts out data on employment by majors in Canada.
[1] shows that graduates of the humanities and social sciences have the highest rate of underemployment whereas graduates of nursing, engineering, CS, and education programs have the lowest rate of underemployment.
[2] performs a comparison of workers from 1991 to 2011 and concludes that underemployment rates (called overqualification here) have not changed much. Field of study is broken out for the 2011 group, however, the 1991 data isn't broken out.
[3] Breaks out salary for graduates of Canadian majors (118 fields of study for men, 123 fields of study for women) 5 years after graduation prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, it does not break this down by university, and it seems to lump computer science in with math. Surveys completed in BC [4] show that for self-reported earnings there is a difference in earnings for the same major across different universities. It also treats math and computer science separately and in some cases, CS majors earn 2x math majors two years after graduating.
I have a community college diploma and a university degree. I can say that the 3 years I spend in community college learning to code; learning systems, design patterns, various languages, etc... it has served me far better than the knowledge I earned at university.
Community college is a second class citizen and it's hard to convince people of its merits to society.
I'm strongly of the opinion that reforms to higher education should start with strengthening the community college and public tech school systems, and push their best practices upward. The CC in my region, and the regional state colleges, are jewels. Everybody at the CC is committed to teaching. They are committed to getting people in and keeping them in, not just to meet some metric, but actually working with each student one on one. And the teachers at our CC are unionized, so there's actually a fair amount of competition for the jobs that open up.
The national news media should declare a two year moratorium on reporting about the "elite" colleges, and spend that time investigating the community and regional college systems.
Just finished my last semester at a CC and I'm transferring to a UC this Fall. I think that CCs will never really be able to shake off their stigma because of the fact that they are an entry point for EVERYONE. Telling someone you go to a CC could mean anything from "I'm a lazy fuck up" to "I'm a bright student who wants to avoid student loans". I feel like a lot of CC students just grit their teeth and accept that they may be looked down upon until they transfer and "prove themselves" so to speak. There's really no getting around this without changing the very nature of CCs' inclusiveness.
> I feel like a lot of CC students just grit their teeth and accept that they may be looked down upon until they transfer and "prove themselves" so to speak.
It's hard to do anything about it, as you pointed out, since the best are those who transfer out.
It's also the most affordable way to start a 4 year degree program. Many US states have guaranteed community college transfer programs into large, well-regarded state universities for engineering, business, etc.
I spent four years on a government-funded binge at university, and am now paying my taxes like a dutiful citizen. IMO anyone who wants to deny young adults the opportunity to make a load of friends and go off the rails before they mature a little and start contributing to society has forgotten what it's like to be an 18 year old!
This is not aimed at you; you just happened to be the comment that crystallize this thought I’ve been having for awhile.
I think this is one of the major problems with everything nowadays. Everything is so bloated and removed from its original purpose.
If we want a space for young adults to let loose and party before having to conform to adulthood, then let’s build that separate from education so my tuition isn’t paying for the frat parties that I don’t go to.
If we want diversity and inclusion, then let that be a separate nonprofit that works with schools so that my tuition isn’t paying for my college to have more administrators than professors.
Furthermore, college sports:
“SHAPIRO: The principles that underlay the NCAA's philosophy seem like reasonable principles. Students should be amateurs. They should be college students. They should not be paid millions of dollars. But so many of the stories you tell seem like distortions of those reasonable principles, like people are just divorced from reality or out to get a student for no good reason. Did you get a sense of what is actually going on (laughter) in people's heads in all of these stories that you retell?
NOCERA: I think I do have a pretty good sense of it. Amateurism, which is the core principle of the NCAA, may have started out as a good idea, but with so much money now flowing into college sports, it's become a sham. And it's become kind of an excuse not to pay the labor force who are brining in the billions of dollars that are enriching everybody else. The NCAA itself is a kind of bureaucratic, rules-oriented organization…” (https://www.npr.org/2016/02/15/466848768/indentured-explores...)
“The solution in my opinion is to do away with college athletic scholarships and preferred admission for athletes. Let school's field their sports teams from their normal student bodies and ensure that those teams are truly amateur and the participants really are "student-athletes". Let the NBA and the NFL field their own semi-professional minor leagues like baseball does.”
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581613)
Admittedly, I am bitter about my college experience and probably wouldn’t have such a harsh opinion if it had been better. Like the other comments here mentioned, I found a CS degree to be a sham and I learned more and better on my own than I ever did listening to professors all of whom were worse at teaching than YouTube (especially considering that high quality channels like 3Blue1Brown exist) and some of whom can’t actually speak or write English well. A CS degree didn’t help me get a job but starting a hardware club did which is where my gripe comes from. There was never funding for clubs (that actually get students doing things they would do at their future job) or for professors to do research projects that students (like me) get to help with and build job experience. But somehow the activities and recreations always got an expansion.
Nope - for many fields you actually get access to top-notch minds on the cheap in comparison to what they would be paid in the private sector. This is not to say I think the current fees based system is the way it should be financed.
Readit News
Emphasis mine on "this year".
> Twice as many students thought their courses offered poor value (44%) than in 2019-20
So it used to be better in non-pandemic years.
Seems that some people is jumping to conclusions about education in the UK when the article is specifically about presidential/non-presidential and other pandemic challenges.
but yeah i totally get they feel they're not getting their money's worth with zoom classes..
Upsy-daisy. It sounds cooler, thou.
Dead Comment
[Edit] I still remember how not so long time ago it wasn't uncommon to have masters as a bare minimum when hiring a secretary in my country...
I think what is really going on with degrees being a poor investment, is that most degrees don't actually teach valuable skills or they do and the students just don't actually put in the necessary work to achieve those skills. Instead treating it as a game of how to pass while putting in as little work as possible. That was at least my experience TAing computer science courses. Most students were just not mature enough to value the education that was being offered.
EDIT: A more generous interpretation to the students would be that they were simply jaded after a lack luster and uninspiring high school education plus a similar experience in probably many of the college classes they were taking.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...
While obviously this does happen, I think degrees do teach valuable skills and many students put in obscene levels of work to learn the material, resulting in ever-increasing competition for basically every facet of the job market - from university admissions all the way through job interviews. To me the issue isn’t students not understanding the true value of their education (and who could blame them? How is a 20 year old to know why their professor planned things out the way he did or why they are not learning Python as the blogosphere insists?). The real issue is that - like the article said - the benefits of this extra work seem marginal. Either way you will be competing against hundreds for entry level software development jobs with the greatest discriminator being referrals and prior industry experience. Whether you put in 8 extra hours a week to truly understand Dijkstra doesn’t get you much in the way of an interview.
The change is because employers love degrees... they prove that a job applicant can reliably get out of bed and do quality work in a timely fashion (and thus reduce the risk for the employer to hire someone who turns out to be a "bad fit", have mental health issues etc.), and especially the IT degrees have a large part of knowledge transfer and training in them that the employer doesn't have to pay for like in a classic apprenticeship.
Academia should be a place for science and those interested in advancing it, not for employers to save costs on vetting and training (by placing the burden on the government and/or the students)!
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Any place in it for the Arts?
Dead Comment
The most valuable education is at the primary level (0 to 10 years old); then secondary (to 18); and tertiary education hardly has any effect whatsoever.
By the point you're an adult, you aren't being "moulded" into anything, you're merely acquiring particular useful bits of knowledge that only have value if you're going to use them.
What we have now is people spending tens of thousands to avoid earning money for several years; and thereby avoiding acquiring useful skills.
And this is an economic catastrophe which burdens everyone in society and grossly misdirects public funds.
I would be very supportive of an 12mo "generic higher learning skills" programmes being deployed at this scale. ie., something closer to a teenager-to-gradscheme transition programme which could include higher-level generic maths, writing, humanities, etc. skills.
However what we have now is a gigantic tulip-style bubble that needs bursting or else we will continue to needlessly in-debt the next generations of people.
The emperor really has no clothes on: your* degree really was a waste of money....
(* perhaps less so for HN readers )
You say more highly educated people is better as if its a truism, it doesn't seem so clear to me. I don't see why, for example, someone spending their early 20s in an apprenticeship, doing vocational training or in an industry learning on the job is inherently worse for them or society than receiving a higher education.
Just about the only unambiguous positive I can see in university is the chance to grow and learn as a young person in a social setting, freshly independent of parents. But surely there are more efficient approaches that could be employed here.
I'd be happy with people being simply 'educated'. Too many people barely graduated high school, lack all kinds of skills, have poor reading/writing abilities.
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Dead Comment
That's a dangerous statement in isolation.
For a country with a median income of $35k, imposing debts worth $200k for degrees with questionable employability and no clear resolution (Can't pay off, can't default) is insanely dangerous.
Education is also not a monolith. Some careers need education, in that gaining skills in the profession requires a degree of instruction or apprenticeship (Medicine, Pure Sciences, Engineering etc). But a large number of them end up being paper pushers or knowledge from a single course or learn everything on their first job. For this second cohort, education can be burden with terrible payoff.
A lot of educational fields are also entirely unemployable. This includes 3 type of professions:
1. Pyramid schemes - where the only real job is in instruction of the next generation.
2. Priest - where they create a dogma that mandates them as essential in the system, but have no use in isolation.
3. Professional disk golfer - where there is only 1 employable position, and about a million wannabes.
As of now, progressive society is pushing people to consider all kinds of professions as equal. However, the equivalency is flawed. The risk/reward ratio of getting educated varies massively across professions. It can vary from a ticket to the upper-middle-class to being entirely useless equivalent to homeopath or hucksterism in terms of unsubstantiated merit.
The university system was never created for everyone to get educated. The concept has existed only post GI-bill and seemed to work in a Boomer-era post scarcity America. (Nothing that worked well in America from 1950-1980 should be taken as an example that can be replicated. It was a special time in history. It would be like trying to be Saudi prince without an oil well in your backyard)
I am strongly in favor of higher education for all. However, it needs to either be fully distanced from the present university mafia or the universities must be compelled to produce economically productive graduates across their various offerings. Universities sell a financial product. It is about time we see their variables-controlled return on investment with th fine grained granularity that we evaluate any other financial product. Lest we get stuck with sub-prime graduates bundled into funds that are considered AAA because there are a large enough number of them in it.
"Caplan argues that the primary function of education is not to enhance students' skills but to certify their intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity—attributes that are valued by employers. He ultimately estimates that approximately 80% of individuals' return to education is the result of signaling, with the remainder due to human capital accumulation."
The UK has compounded the situation by increasing debt for students, structured student load repayment so that payments kick in at an income threshold, and then embarked on the Brexit adventure.
It's a mistake to look at the supply of graduates without looking at the changes in the graduate labour market.
For a decade+, people have framed "the college experience" as the reason you should attend instead of getting skills online or on your own. Then they promote their great facilities, beautiful campus, state of the art labs, etc.
When THAT is your main value prop and then suddenly take it away, what do you expect will happen?
The community college route was brought up (with my name specifically), and although the presenter brought up the benefits of a 2-year school none of the other students and parents were having it. They were certain that "the college experience" was the only way forward.
I was able to graduate from the CC and transfer to a public 4-year school as a junior. The tuition was minimal (compared to a private university) and paid off without hassle, and if I'd gone the "traditional" college route I don't think I would've been as lucky.
My only saving grace was it was free at the time. If I’d had a (larger) pile of debt placed in front of me I’d have done something else with my life.
The debt question, at least in the UK, is more academic than anything - I'm currently earning 30k a year (which is already more than I need to live comfortably) and I'm paying £20 a month back on my loan. In 30 odd years the debt will be wiped off and given that you only pay back 6% of income above 27k it's not really like you'd ever notice it. FWIW my friends that went to uni and ended up with non-vocational degrees are earning around the 20k mark if they're working full time so chances are they won't even get close to having to consider their student loans for a good while.
In terms of the specifics I learned on my degree I would have to agree that not much of what was taught is actually helpful in my career but having four years to mature as a person, especially in an atmosphere where you're surrounded by other people who are happy to discuss engineering and related projects, has helped in a way I could never put a price tag on.
My daughter is hoping to study medicine next year. That’s going to be interesting on the finance front.
I found the vast majority of my computer science courses a waste of time, stuff I could have learned by myself. But the electronics stuff was very useful as I had access to labs and equipment I wouldn't of otherwise had.
I don't think you should expect your university education to prepare you to hit the ground running when you get your first job. It teaches you the foundation so that you can then learn to do your job.
Of course I don't know what you were taught in university nor which field of electrical engineering you went into, maybe you truly got nothing out of it.
As for incorrectness, to this day I am pissed off that one of the principal lecturers who had precisely zero industry experience shot down an email I sent privately to ask for some material to be corrected. How dare I submit errata! When I landed in industry I took this to a senior design engineer who explained to me in simple terms that the guy was a “jobsworth cunt”.
As another point of view, my university courses were useful to someone who had jsut tried it out the spring before their freshman year. It introduced me to concepts and put me against (at the time) difficult problems that I could tackle along side my peers. My Data Structure and Alg class was the most useful since it allowed me to restructure the way I way I saw CS as a whole. The things I learn now are entirely structured based on how I learn CS and would not be the same had I learned it on my own.
For me it was worth it. I immediately went into programming, and taught myself everything. While being useless for programming, my EE degree gave me a foot in the door and I made the most of it. I started in a bank in IT but was able to move into programming by lying and saying I was a full time programmer. I was doing programming on my own at home so I could legit program (they didn’t have interviews like Microsoft or Google back when I was starting off).
Soon after I moved to Silicon Valley and it’s been pretty good ever since. I’m mostly retired now after 25 years and the pandemic was the thing that convinced me into retirement.
I guess there is no need for that and I should just "grind" practical circuits until I understand them.
This is surprising to me because the nature of imperfect components makes EE far more complicated than software development where you do not have to care about choosing a for loop manufactured by Samsung vs Panasonic that is good up to 1000 iterations or that it is polarized so your for loop can only increment, not decrement. Add a hundred components each with their own characteristics and your head will split.
If I was 18 now I wouldn't bother going, I would admit that I'm lucky in how much my parents and grandparents could teach me.
In my experience (as someone who graduated decades ago), the degree, particularly for liberal arts majors, opened a lot of doors for opportunities that might not have happened without them. But I went to a state school for a cost that seemed high in the 90's but now seems like a huge bargain.
Here's Northeasterns stats on degree what degree earns what (maybe a university isn't the most unbiased resource but..): https://www.northeastern.edu/bachelors-completion/news/avera...
This studies does neglect the huge debt that students accrued because college is crazy expensive now.
I'm not sure if anything similar in the US exists, but Stats Canada puts out data on employment by majors in Canada.
[1] shows that graduates of the humanities and social sciences have the highest rate of underemployment whereas graduates of nursing, engineering, CS, and education programs have the lowest rate of underemployment.
[2] performs a comparison of workers from 1991 to 2011 and concludes that underemployment rates (called overqualification here) have not changed much. Field of study is broken out for the 2011 group, however, the 1991 data isn't broken out.
[3] Breaks out salary for graduates of Canadian majors (118 fields of study for men, 123 fields of study for women) 5 years after graduation prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, it does not break this down by university, and it seems to lump computer science in with math. Surveys completed in BC [4] show that for self-reported earnings there is a difference in earnings for the same major across different universities. It also treats math and computer science separately and in some cases, CS majors earn 2x math majors two years after graduating.
[1] https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/as-sa/98...
[2] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2014001/article...
[3] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-626-x/11-626-x2020018...
[4] https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/data/statistics/people-po...
Community college is a second class citizen and it's hard to convince people of its merits to society.
The national news media should declare a two year moratorium on reporting about the "elite" colleges, and spend that time investigating the community and regional college systems.
It's hard to do anything about it, as you pointed out, since the best are those who transfer out.
UK universities mostly exist to print money at the moment...
For many students, university is a 3-4 year government funded (student "loan") binge.
I think this is one of the major problems with everything nowadays. Everything is so bloated and removed from its original purpose.
If we want a space for young adults to let loose and party before having to conform to adulthood, then let’s build that separate from education so my tuition isn’t paying for the frat parties that I don’t go to.
If we want diversity and inclusion, then let that be a separate nonprofit that works with schools so that my tuition isn’t paying for my college to have more administrators than professors.
Furthermore, college sports: “SHAPIRO: The principles that underlay the NCAA's philosophy seem like reasonable principles. Students should be amateurs. They should be college students. They should not be paid millions of dollars. But so many of the stories you tell seem like distortions of those reasonable principles, like people are just divorced from reality or out to get a student for no good reason. Did you get a sense of what is actually going on (laughter) in people's heads in all of these stories that you retell?
NOCERA: I think I do have a pretty good sense of it. Amateurism, which is the core principle of the NCAA, may have started out as a good idea, but with so much money now flowing into college sports, it's become a sham. And it's become kind of an excuse not to pay the labor force who are brining in the billions of dollars that are enriching everybody else. The NCAA itself is a kind of bureaucratic, rules-oriented organization…” (https://www.npr.org/2016/02/15/466848768/indentured-explores...)
“The solution in my opinion is to do away with college athletic scholarships and preferred admission for athletes. Let school's field their sports teams from their normal student bodies and ensure that those teams are truly amateur and the participants really are "student-athletes". Let the NBA and the NFL field their own semi-professional minor leagues like baseball does.” (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581613)
Admittedly, I am bitter about my college experience and probably wouldn’t have such a harsh opinion if it had been better. Like the other comments here mentioned, I found a CS degree to be a sham and I learned more and better on my own than I ever did listening to professors all of whom were worse at teaching than YouTube (especially considering that high quality channels like 3Blue1Brown exist) and some of whom can’t actually speak or write English well. A CS degree didn’t help me get a job but starting a hardware club did which is where my gripe comes from. There was never funding for clubs (that actually get students doing things they would do at their future job) or for professors to do research projects that students (like me) get to help with and build job experience. But somehow the activities and recreations always got an expansion.
"We are a non-profit making government-owned organisation that administers loans and grants to students in colleges and universities in the UK."
In many cases, it's never paid back in full, and the students don't ever need to worry about it.
From the perspective of many students, it's free money.