One reason that often gets glossed over (including in this article) is how (non-online) Masters programs are huge moneymakers as a ticket to working in the US.
I've seen that in CS programs at University of Buffalo and Yale, a majority of Masters students are from abroad, especially from Asia.
Basically, if you wanted to work in tech in the US, you could either:
- Find a multinational company in your home country, work for them for a year, and request a transfer (highly competitive)
- Find a job for a company in the US while abroad, ask them to sponsor you for a H-1B, and hope you win the visa lottery (unlikely, since companies don't like their chances on the lottery)
- Get a Masters degree. Sure, it's $50,000, but you're guaranteed a 3-year work visa (OPT with STEM extension) during which you can apply for the H-1B multiple times (it's a winner!)
This is actually completely rational, and benefits both the students, the school, and arguably the US since it gets some highly skilled workers who did not take out loans.
Are Masters degrees outside of STEM (and online ones, like the OPM-managed ones this article mentions) that cater to local Americans in low wage sectors a scam? Maybe!
Are Masters degrees in STEM (which definitely are cash cows) a scam? Almost definitely not; in fact, they're a great workaround until the US reforms its immigration system
I would characterize working over talented foreigners in this way as a grift, rather than a scam.
They pay the high sticker price because it's rationally their best choice, but the value they're purchasing isn't in the degree, but rather the favorable status they earn in the immigration labyrinth.
This isn't good for them, except in comparison to other options. It certainly isn't good for native-born Americans, who are (for the most part) stuck paying the same high sticker prices, without getting the features which justify the high cost of the product.
It should also be viewed as potentially disadvantaging people already in the US. If these programs are catering to wealthy foreigners looking to immigrate, then we're not serving whatever need may be inside the country already.
Assuming you're actually smart and skilled - wouldn't it be better to just start your own consulting business, or if you're really ambitious, eventually an agency?
Aren't H1-B visa workers mostly in extremely HCOL areas and significantly underpaid / taken advantage of?
I imagine if you're from India and you really want to get out of India - this sounds like a good deal (although wouldn't $50k for tuition be hard to get?) But, I'm assuming most people just want to have more money / a better life?
Wouldn't the first option be better? And then you could stay closer to friends and family.
Consulting straight out of school is a really tough sell. Consultants are most often considered valuable by their employers because of their experience in a given industry.
I would not want to try to pitch myself as a consultant as a foreigner with little to no American work experience. If you’re doing it yourself, sales will be a challenge.
"Smart and skilled" are only loosely correlated to success as consultant and small business.
This is not meant to be sarcasm. There are many other characteristics necessary and better indicators. I am smart skilled and successful. But I made a lousy consultant when I tried it too early in life - (self)salesmanship, business skills, tenacity and courage, people skills, and a specific view on risk acceptance are far more important. Relationships and a full Rolodex and branding / reputation don't hurt either.
(A specific view on integrity and ethics too. I'm not saying no integrity or no ethics. But the salespersons / deal closers in my area are all honourable truthful people whose job I couldn't do because my view of truth wouldn't necessarily correspond to theirs)
Finally, if we grant your last statement that most people want renumeration and happy life, for many smart and skilled people, stress and risk that comes with consultancy business does not contribute to happiness.
I used to work for a small tech company in the suburbs outside of St Louis, which is definitely not a HCOL area. When I left (to move back to a HCOL tech hub), probably about half of the engineering staff were H1-B visa holders. This was because we often had trouble finding qualified candidates that were either already local or willing to relocate to the area. Visa sponsorship was a much more compelling reason to relocate than anything we could offer US citizens.
The office was near Mastercard's global operations headquarters and it seemed like they also employed a lot of visa holders. So I don't think we were particularly unique in our willingness to offer visa sponsorship in a LCOL area.
That H1-B workers are "taken advantage of" is a myth. Yes some of them are but it isn't the case that if you hold such a visa you are being underpaid. Source: was an H1-B holder.
1. I think you are mixing smart with courageous, starting a business requires some courage.
2. Nope. At least those working for FANGs aren’t. You can see so many cases of folks were for low paying consultancies in India getting masters and then getting a job at FANG.
3. Getting an education loan for STEM is really easy and people are willing to put their parents house up for collateral.
I think with a FANG or good tech job you can be done with your loan in an year or two. Some people go to state schools and don’t get into any debt, or pay it off via internships. The US in most Indian people’s head comes with a better quality of life, a lot more money and better infrastructure. Perhaps some status too.
No, they're also abused in MCOL and LCOL areas. And they might be smart and skilled, but most of the ones I interviewed are lousy software engineers.
If we were talking about people with master's degrees from MIT or Stanford, it'd be a different ball game.
But I can't tell you how many candidates I've seen with something like a "Master of Science in Information Systems from the University of South Central Appalachia".
Well, even then framing a $50k degree as a workaround for US immigration woes, and not as an $50k worth of added value in terms of skills and education makes it sound like a racket, even if the numbers work out in the students' favour.
The gist is right, but details are wrong. Undergraduates can also get a 3-year work visa via OPT with STEM extension during which you can enter into the H-1B lottery multiple times (as many as four times if you time it well). It's just masters have higher chances in that lottery.
> are huge moneymakers as a ticket to working in the US.
Beyond that, the international Masters students are really subsidizing the education of other students. Every time there is some friction added to the student visa process, all but the top schools with huge endowment funds feel the financial pressure.
Most narratives I read about this situation paints the picture of the students buying their way into US residency via Masters program. But it works the other way too - many US citizens are able to get educated at an affordable price because of the money these Masters students bring in to the school.
we've had foreign job candidates with masters degrees in CS from top 50 schools who couldn't pass a simple programming test or who couldn't answer some basic CS questions on O(n) or whatnot.
I'm not talking sadistic google interview questions, these were things that anyone with a BS should be able to answer.
That has happened to me so many times that my last company shreds resumes from foreign students with a prestigious American masters where the undergrad is not similarly prestigious (eg IIT and Tsinghua are good, but not many other schools).
for "top 50 schools", what "top 50" are you implying? top 50 worldwide? top 50 us? or top 50 in their own foreign country?
As a sidenote: a lot of CS/Software Engineering graduates with a bachelor in my own country (Italy) can't pass simple programming tests, because most of the education is (too?) focused on theoretical aspects, and most of the time people is tested with non-practical exams.
I came to post the same thing - sometimes Americans forget that they are a country of immigrants. And one of the routes for potential immigrants is college education.
But with a typically enterprising capitalist mindset, the American system also wants to ensure that talented individual don't go back to their country (or elsewhere) immediately after getting a degree. This is where the high cost of a US college degree comes into the picture - the burden of paying for it acts like an anchor for most students who come from developing countries or econonomically weak background. Even if they get some kind of scholarship and / or do part-time work, they still have to take a huge loans to live in the US to complete their education. And often the fastest way to repay these loans is to work in the US or other developed nations. This may take another few years. The American system hopes that by then the potential immigrant would be sufficiently exposed to the American culture and lifestyle and consider staying here.
(The high cost also ensures quality of education is high in the US, thus attracting talents from around the world. And the money is also pumped into a lot of R&D in the college allowing US to maintain a big tech lead. It's a neat system that seems to work so far.)
The other aspect of ensuring that higher education remains costly in the US is to also ensure that a blue-collar workforce continues to exist, and wage is suppressed among the white-collars. Perhaps the law makers also feel that it acts like an incentive to work more diligently, out of anxiety and worry - after all, people with more qualification, experience and higher stable income often tend to jump around more (which the big tech try to thwart by entering into illegal agreements to not hire each others employee).
One of the key issues I see is that we don’t place a high enough value on adult education. A philosophy professor of mine told me the word “andragogy”, which is the theory of adult education. It’s different from “pedagogy” which means the education of children.
I always thought that learning is learning. It never occurred to me that there’s a difference between how and why children learn and that it could be different from adults.
As an adult, who considers myself a life long learner, I see the differences. The education system hasn’t adapted to adult learning. Most masters classes are simply just repackaged versions of undergraduate classes, maybe with a little more depth.
The schedules haven’t changed either. As the article points out almost all the bad practices are online classes. It’s hard for adults to juggle family, kids, and work while being a student. People feel it’s necessary to further their schooling but don’t have many options. They can’t just take off two days of the week to attend a class. Few schools
offer nights and weekend classes. Online becomes the only option.
In Denmark and some neighboring countries there's this concept of a school you can go to just to learn stuff later in life, as an ongoing thing. There's a whole bunch of themes (sports, history, etc), and often you can book yourself in for whatever amount of time makes sense for you.
ROTFL. This is called "Volkshochschule" in Germany. Hochschule can be translated to University. One guy from former Yugoslavia took an accounting course there, got a certificate and had this translated (to Serbian, Croatian or whatever). The translater did indeed translate Volkshochschule to Peoples University and the guy managed to secure a Professor position with it at a University. Of cause later this caused a scandal...
> In Denmark and some neighboring countries there's this concept of a school you can go to just to learn stuff later in life, as an ongoing thing
We have those in the US; we don't have a general collective name for them, but there are both private for-profit ones with a variety of (mostly narrow) specialities, either standalone or as adjuncts to other related businesses (selling, e.g., products in the field that it teaches people to act in), plus community colleges, public libraries, public parks and rec departments, and museums tend to also have programs that serve this function, despite it not being their sole or primary function.
We have community colleges in America that serve the exact same function. My parents love taking the astronomy courses because they come with an observatory. They have also some some criminal justice classes and a lot of art classes like pottery. They are very old. You also don’t get a degree for taking these courses but they are much cheaper than the classes are for degree track students.
I wish schools got audited for that very thing. Schools are extremely discriminatory against adults not at application time, but when they offer classes. Not only do they not accommodate either, a lot of professors still pull BS where you need to hand in assignments at the end of class! There is absolutely nothing in the education system today that requires you to hand in something with such a short term time table.
I say this as a mid 20s return college student. My experience going back to college without the "stars in my eyes" so to speak, has really left me embittered by the system altogether. Schools act like autocratic bureaucracies that when they make a mistake all you get is an "oops sorry. Now deal with it lol." Also student employment is not only predatory (cause the pay is just garbage), but it's like they don't even train students either. If you want any answers, you have to wait to talk to one of the few people who has actually been hired on as an employee.
Higher education is structured for students going from high school to their institutions. They also assume students don't have full time employment or a family. So basically if you have either of those, the school doesn't care at all about your plight. They know your gonna pay off your loans and complete your degree. They prefer younger impressionable kids who are gonna waste a lot of time and money there instead.
>Higher education is structured for students going from high school to their institutions. They also assume students don't have full time employment or a family. So basically if you have either of
In the US, Depending on your state this might not be true. Many of the 'Elite' schools are absolutely as you describe, but many of the state schools do cater to adult learners. This is particularly true in states which separate their Research Universities from their more teaching oriented Universities. Most of the latter do have night classes and other offerings aimed at adult learners. But the private universities with dreams of grandeur are looking mostly for the "traditional college student"
There are schools that are much more oriented (or have programs that are much more oriented) towards people who are working or are otherwise not attending school full time. I'm not sure I can really fault the average undergrad program for orienting things towards the 95% case situation. (Some schools are also much more commuter-oriented than others are.)
Very interesting to know there was a term for that already.
Slight anecdote, I gave a few geometry lessons to a teen. And witnessing his brain operate was quite staggering. Teen operate at high frequency low depth it seems. He didn't want to grasp the rule or symmetry but ran in many intuitions very rapidly (honestly my brain froze at his pace of change, so vibrant) only to feel defeated or confused. Made me think adult and kids really need different approaches. Our emotions facing a new topic are so different.
Love this story because this has been my experience as well when teaching youth. Children in a classroom scarcely need a teacher explaining things to them. Give them the materials and leave the room for an hour. I guarantee you they'll know what to do and how to to do it when you return. However, they won't have any particular depth of knowledge of the topic. And thats because they usually move onto their own ideas of how to use the new knowledge. They're not interested in how I use that knowledge. So different approaches for youth vs adults has always been something I needed to train either. One approach doesn't really work for the other.
> Most masters classes are simply just repackaged versions of undergraduate classes, maybe with a little more depth.
Depends on the country. Masters degrees can be research which are the first year of a Ph.D. or they can be taught degrees. In the latter they are usually called "conversion" courses where there's intensive focus on filling in gaps in education for somebody moving to the field. E.g. moving from an Economics B.Sc. to a Computer Science degree.
Where I was educated the Computing Science undergraduate degree is the equivalent of any Masters degree in the same subject. There is nothing in the subject matter that would be of value as another degree as it isn't advancement. It would be merely repackaged undergraduate courses like you suggest.
I did a hybrid masters in CS - half the year was taught and half the year was research. Of the 6 classes I was taught 2 of them were undergrad level (and they were 3rd/final year level at that), and the rest were definitely a level above undergrad. Most were actively learning about the state of the art in their areas, or very close to it. Of the 15 or so students, 5 of us had our names on papers from the research we did for the second period. My experience may be atypical, but I definitely believe there is a range available, and it's unfortunately up to a student to try to discern the two.
In the US, those gaps are usually noted and you fill them with upper division courses and if necessary, lower division. Actual graduate courses are quite different from undergraduate even covering the same subject matter.
Lower division is problem sets.
Upper division is problem sets + project.
Graduate is project + research paper.
> In the latter they are usually called "conversion" courses where there's intensive focus on filling in gaps in education for somebody moving to the field.
Well, or they are first professional degrees (e.g., the MBA, MFA, etc.)
As an adult, I don't really have much interest in a complete degree with a certification. (With the exception of very bounded industry-specific things.) So in that respect adult education certainly is different.
I have known people who got PhDs as adults and I think they mostly didn't care for the experience. I know I have zero interest in getting another degree. Even a couple of decades ago, it would have zero value for my professional development and would, in fact, have been mostly a distraction.
However, there are a ton of educational opportunities often oriented to working adults. Community colleges, extension programs, online learning of all sorts...
Where I went (MIT Media Lab) our classes were unique and only graduate level. In fact masters and PhD took the same classes, PhD just took more of them. There were no undergrads, and the knowledge assumptions, type of classes, and speed were very much more advanced than undergraduate. During my undergraduate (UCSD) I took a few masters classes — they were definitely harder and assumed a lot more knowledge with less hand holding. YMMV.
I'm a life long learner myself. I have to agree that the traditional education system is lacking and is very poorly set up at catering for people like us. If you want to take classes as a working adult, you're pretty much limited to night school. Which, for reasons I will never understand, seems to be mostly limited to languages (and oddly specific things like TIG welding). Although some universities seem to be offering philosophy courses on an evening schedule as well.
I get that you need a big enough audience in order to set up any class, and supply/demand is definitely an issue. But I think the demand is much higher than what the supply side seems to cater for.
Things like Khan Academy are great, but they've begun to scale down their offering in favour of university prep. The Open University has some truly great content, but it's prohibitively expensive. MOOCs seem very hit or miss, and often lack a good mechanism for feedback. And quite frankly, I enjoy being in a classroom full of motivated people.
Having lived in a fairly rural area of the US, and having parents who live in a different, very rural area of the US, that the rural areas do not have much of a value for education. Particularly the type of Christians who are the 6-day creation types, although I also haven't found as many 6-day creation believers in urban areas.
(This isn't meant as a dig at those, just an observation. If your worldview places "belief in the Bible" as a high value and your interpretation requires a literal reading, then what would an institution full of people who preach evolution and old-earth have to offer? I have a friend who teaches physics part-time at a local college in one of these rural areas, but he is 6-day creation. I said that you'd have to believe that the scientists are incompetent at their jobs, and he said that of course they were. I was stunned because while I could imagine other people saying that, I didn't imagine that he would. I can't fathom how you can believe that people who have worked years to figure out how to most accurately date something would be so incompetent as to mistake days for thousands or millions of years. Especially when it's physics that underlies all the carbon dating... And to be fair, there are plenty of Christians who think 6-day creation is a rather silly abuse of a poetic account.)
'Andragogy' is not a great name for a theory which tries to describe how all adults, not just men, learn. However, it is a really telling name about the kinds of assumptions baked into the theory [1].
I work in adult education; I don't use the word 'andragogy' to describe what I do, and it's a bit of a warning sign if someone else does.
Firstly, the question needs to be narrowed down. The topic of a master's degree in Europe vs in the UK and in the US varies, hugely:
1) The UK and the US have a great focus on the elitism of the university name. Countries like Germany do not, a masters from a (known) university with good grades, is pretty much as valuable as all the others.
2) Fees in Europe its free (as has been mentioned countless times here) so there's less of a "shopping" market here, in terms of looking for the most elite degree to graduate with, and much more about content
3) It depends on what you want to do as a career. In Europe, scientific and engineering fields do look for postgraduate degrees as a minimum. Companies like Amazon, hire data scientists mostly with PhDs in Germany or on exception, highly talented engineers.
But the main "pro masters" degree argument for me, is the learning experience.
My master's studies, was so intense, so stressful and so unbelievably intellectually rewarding that it shaped me and my character in a way that my bachelor's did not come close to.
It gave me that confidence to approach fields and advanced topics, where I am not familiar with the notation, the terminology and don't know where to start, and it taught me how to dive in deep, in a self-motivated and self organised way. I really felt the whole time like an independent researcher, picking up books where I needed to, learning mathematical tools and programming skills I never thought of using to solve new problems. And participating in the latest SOTA research, in a way that has made me quite intellectually fearless now, going forward in my career.
And which country did you get your masters from? Do you think your experience would have been different had you chosen a different country to do your masters in?
- It's not a legally qualifying degree like studying medicine
- It's academic in the sense that you can use it to gain entrance to a phd, and has academic content that isn't just "how to code".
- And yet you learn a fair bit about how to code. You'll in all likelihood come across actual tools, not toys, that real coders use, eg Git. You might also do some specialist stuff that is directly applicable to an employer, rather than just demonstrating interest. Eg if you do a systems programming course, you might actually understand systems in a way that's useful from the start.
Conversely, I don't even have a bachelor's degree in CS, and I haven't suffered at all because of it. I got a job offer before graduating, and decided my time was better spent earning money than learning stuff I would probably never have any use for.
Rather than focusing on degrees, I think it's a lot more important to focus on learning, however you don't know what's important to learn until you actually start working on real problems.
Funny how those of us who didn't spend more than a couple years in school think the rest of the years are probably a waste, and those that did spend a lot of time and money in school think it was useful.
I spent the first ten years of my programming career without a degree, like you. I got a SoftEng MSc at 30. It was worth it. Sometimes we just don't know what we don't know.
> learning stuff I would probably never have any use for.
I hear this so much, and I used to be one of the people saying it. Until I actually 1) learned that stuff and 2) realized I don't want to just write glue code. I like writing compilers. I like writing efficient data structures. I use my CS education a lot.
Instead those around you, with a degree, suffered. Having to deal with bricklayers that reinvent the wheel simply because they cant grasp cs topics is annoying.
It's probably generally true of engineering degrees. While there's obviously an opportunity cost, there's usually not a big out of pocket expense other than living expenses. In my case, it wasn't so much that I really used a lot of specific things I learned getting the Master's but I still think it was a useful supplement to what I learned undergrad--the thesis in particular.
The same applies to some degree of the sciences in general but, there, you probably have to get to a PhD for the opportunities to be significantly elevated relative to a BS.
In any case, this meme about Master's degree scams is mostly directed at high-cost degrees in journalism and the like where the career opportunities aren't great with or without the degree.
The article is poorly titled - it's mostly about non-tech degrees or online programs.
In engineering, an MS in CS has the least value to employers. However, in other areas of engineering, it has a pretty high value. Many big companies will not let you do EE design work with just a BS, for example.
I think this really depends on your undergrad, the value of masters degree seems to diminish with the following factors:
- A well taught undergrad degree in CS (Masters fill gaps caused by bad classes or different fields)
- Graduated with undergrad degree recently (getting a Masters degree after being out of school for 10 years can be a good refresher and update on how the field has evolved/changed)
- Masters degree classes in an area of CS you are familiar with (Masters degree is a great opportunity to take classes in areas that you care about but don't know well, if you are a great Rails webdev with 7 years experience, then taking a Masters degree class in Rail WebDev is just wasting your time.)
My CS masters was also no cost to me. Working as a half-time teaching and research assistant covered my tuition. I finished in twice the usual time with no debt and valuable work experience.
It's also worth considering the opportunity cost. Usually for more junior candidates, time in school is treated equivalently to work experience. You just get paid more for working those years.
Similar experience here. I did a BA in 'Information Technology'. It wasn't until after I graduated that I taught myself to program through Stanford lectures on YT. The MSE in CS was incredibly beneficial for me.
Also Computer Science but from a much less prestigious state school.
It was also in a region with a much smaller tech sector.
It's actually hard to say how much of the career boost was from moving to Boston and how much from the degree. I did make some very useful connections during the degree as well as actually learning quite a lot in some of the classes.
The base problem is the idea that a given academic degree gives you access to some career. It's messy, because clearly some do work that way. With the film degree it should have been clear that there's only so many relevant jobs going each year, and thus your chance as a graduate is going to be minimal. It would certainly be in everyone's interest to have transparency about the destinations. Master's degrees are also often the kind of thing people do if they did an unspecifically directed undergrad (eg English, History) and then want to get their door in somewhere (eg law conversion), so it's important that people understand what they're buying.
If you look at most things though, there's no connection between what you do at work and what you studied. At best studying some subject means you are interested in some broad area, and you are conscientious enough to have done all the exercises, so employers should perhaps hire you in the hope that you can learn how the online advertising industry works, or how the plastic supply chain works, etc.
Looking back at my degree, it was really a bunch of indexing interesting things in science and math for potential further investigation. And then an exercise in flaneuring: wandering about, coming upon something interesting, and then being able to focus on figuring out that thing as opportunities arise.
Film is actually interesting because I think you'll find that many of the most respected directors, editors, cinematographers, etc. in Hollywood didn't go to film school.
and inability to declare bankruptcy so as to include student loans. Bankruptcy says that the _lender_ has responsibility to not enslave people with debt -- or rather the _lender_ may only enslave a borrower for a limited amount of time, after which it is ultimately the lenders problem that they gave that person too much money and that they should have known that the borrower would have never been able to repay. Debt is a useful tool, but the ability to enslave people with debt should be limited by the law.
"We can’t just rely on the market to provide all of the quality discipline that master’s programs need."
It seems like if the federal government stopped lending for master's degrees, and allowed students to file for bankruptcy to get out of private loans, then the market might very well sort everything out.
Poor people who choose degrees with good career prospects will get a loan. Poor people who want a degree with bad career prospects may not have the chance to waste a year or more of their life pursuing one.
I think immigration laws play a big role too, a lot of people seem to use a masters as a way of getting a visa - I believe having a masters improves the chances of getting an H1-B, and also being in school in the US makes it much easier to apply to US companies.
Yes, having government involved always creates inflation. It's no coincidence that the two areas with most government involvement, education and health care, are the things that have outpaced every other measure of inflation significantly.
> Yes, having government involved always creates inflation.
No it doesn't.
> It's no coincidence that the two areas with most government involvement, education and health care, are the things that have outpaced every other measure of inflation significantly.
The government is less (EDIT: more) involved (proportionate to total expenditures in the domain) in healthcare lots of places outside the US without equal, much less greater, healthcare inflation.
It is the manner, not the mere fact of government involvement that produces inflation.
Here in the UK we have some the cheapest healthcare in the western world with a nationalised system.
I actually agree that the US government often causes inflation. But that's because everyone in the states seems to love government subsidies and no one in the states likes regulation, price control, etc. Whether you're a government or not, subsidising X without regulating consumption or controlling the prices of X will lead to inflation...
An example of what I'm talking about is American high school. State schools have much lower prices per kid than private. Because the state starts with a fixed budget and works from there. Imagine if instead government required "education insurance" like health insurance. And insurers were required to pay for anything the teacher decided was required...
The success of the more socialized approaches to healthcare relative to the partially-private US approach suggest we need more government involvement in healthcare. Much cheaper, better outcomes, more people covered.
And let's not forget housing. (Our government) making large loans more available and cheaper drives up demand for the intended goods/services. That, naturally, drives up price.
It's difficult to understand why so many people advocate for even more government "intervention" (i.e., do more to increase the availability and cost of loans).
The problem is that "government involvement" in the US is synonymous with "throw money at the problem." It's a easy way to get results in the short term, so which gets you political approval, but in the long term, it just creates a money black hole.
I had a friend who was wanting to get a master's degree in poetry, and it cost about 45k a year, back in early 2000s. I strongly advised against it, my friend did not take well to my advice. Hope it all turned out well.
I have no problem with people getting degrees in the arts. My spouse has a Master's in fine arts, from a university in Europe. But she didn't acquire any debt from that degree, while I did in the US with my CS Master's.
But living with enormous debt--debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy (in the US)--is such a burden, and the degree itself may really not offer that much in terms of job prospects (though we shouldn't discount the value of humanities degrees--turns out they often do pretty well in life).
It is hard to see why a poetry program should cost so much.
That said about federal student loans, it is a low interest unsecured type of debt. At a bank an unsecured loan is at least 11-16% depending on the amount.
So if you as a student do have some of that debt leftover, it is much smarter to use that toward a car down payment or a deposit on an apartment. I feel like most college kids don't have even the slightest grasp on budgeting and how all transactions affect the accounting equation honestly.
I did my MFA in poetry in the US. Tuition and living expenses were completely covered by fellowships and a TA position. I think this is the norm. While expensive on paper, no one really pays that. Most programs are not predatory like those described in article.
I think the debt problem is one of a predatory nature. I love music and history, but I came from a family that pretty much only got by because of welfare. I didn't have the time or money to waste getting a degree in something that had zero job prospects after school.
You show a $50k a year degree to an 18 year old from a more middle to upper middle class family, though, and they're not going to understand how much money that actually is. They're going to see one big party that they don't need to pay for until they're done.
I also remember when I was in high school, all the boomer teachers and parents were saying university is a gateway to easy money after. We were sold something that hasn't held true, and I think a lot of people are very bitter about that.
> We were sold something that hasn't held true, and I think a lot of people are very bitter about that.
In what way has it not held true? 33% of Americans have at least a four year degree and earn an average of $1m more than their peers without over their lifetimes.
By all measures, university is a gateway to easy money after. So long as you finish.
MFA programs in creative writing are the most worthless. In my experience as an editor, writers with MFAs were not as a class better than those without.
At least with some graduate programs—in areas of actually value—you might qualify for an RA or TA subsidy. But it’s not worth paying full freight.
On the other hand, degrees are "free" in Europe, and I don't want my tax money spent on people doing masters degrees on "poetry".
The fact that you have to pay for your degree out of pocket may mean that more people will choose to do degrees that are worth something, which is a great thing for society overall. Having said that the prices of degrees in the US are outrageous. A middle ground should be found.
How bleak are our prospects as a civilisation when we reduce the value of a higher education in the arts, such as literature, to something as rudimentary as a waste of tax money. It is short sighted to think that since a "degree in poetry" won't yield a substantial dollar-value return economically, that it therefore has no value. Especially when several of recent history's social and political movements were in fact born of literature, writing and the kind of written articulation that characterises such academic fields.
And to your point about "free" education in Europe. The act of decoupling the pursuit of education and knowledge, from a high financial cost, is a crucial mechanism to ensure that institutions retain the freedom to pursue knowledge for its own sake, and to not be (solely) steered by the industrial interests of the status quo.
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I've seen that in CS programs at University of Buffalo and Yale, a majority of Masters students are from abroad, especially from Asia.
Basically, if you wanted to work in tech in the US, you could either:
- Find a multinational company in your home country, work for them for a year, and request a transfer (highly competitive)
- Find a job for a company in the US while abroad, ask them to sponsor you for a H-1B, and hope you win the visa lottery (unlikely, since companies don't like their chances on the lottery)
- Get a Masters degree. Sure, it's $50,000, but you're guaranteed a 3-year work visa (OPT with STEM extension) during which you can apply for the H-1B multiple times (it's a winner!)
This is actually completely rational, and benefits both the students, the school, and arguably the US since it gets some highly skilled workers who did not take out loans.
Are Masters degrees outside of STEM (and online ones, like the OPM-managed ones this article mentions) that cater to local Americans in low wage sectors a scam? Maybe!
Are Masters degrees in STEM (which definitely are cash cows) a scam? Almost definitely not; in fact, they're a great workaround until the US reforms its immigration system
They pay the high sticker price because it's rationally their best choice, but the value they're purchasing isn't in the degree, but rather the favorable status they earn in the immigration labyrinth.
This isn't good for them, except in comparison to other options. It certainly isn't good for native-born Americans, who are (for the most part) stuck paying the same high sticker prices, without getting the features which justify the high cost of the product.
Aren't H1-B visa workers mostly in extremely HCOL areas and significantly underpaid / taken advantage of?
I imagine if you're from India and you really want to get out of India - this sounds like a good deal (although wouldn't $50k for tuition be hard to get?) But, I'm assuming most people just want to have more money / a better life?
Wouldn't the first option be better? And then you could stay closer to friends and family.
I would not want to try to pitch myself as a consultant as a foreigner with little to no American work experience. If you’re doing it yourself, sales will be a challenge.
This is not meant to be sarcasm. There are many other characteristics necessary and better indicators. I am smart skilled and successful. But I made a lousy consultant when I tried it too early in life - (self)salesmanship, business skills, tenacity and courage, people skills, and a specific view on risk acceptance are far more important. Relationships and a full Rolodex and branding / reputation don't hurt either.
(A specific view on integrity and ethics too. I'm not saying no integrity or no ethics. But the salespersons / deal closers in my area are all honourable truthful people whose job I couldn't do because my view of truth wouldn't necessarily correspond to theirs)
Finally, if we grant your last statement that most people want renumeration and happy life, for many smart and skilled people, stress and risk that comes with consultancy business does not contribute to happiness.
The office was near Mastercard's global operations headquarters and it seemed like they also employed a lot of visa holders. So I don't think we were particularly unique in our willingness to offer visa sponsorship in a LCOL area.
2. Nope. At least those working for FANGs aren’t. You can see so many cases of folks were for low paying consultancies in India getting masters and then getting a job at FANG.
3. Getting an education loan for STEM is really easy and people are willing to put their parents house up for collateral.
I think with a FANG or good tech job you can be done with your loan in an year or two. Some people go to state schools and don’t get into any debt, or pay it off via internships. The US in most Indian people’s head comes with a better quality of life, a lot more money and better infrastructure. Perhaps some status too.
as an interviewer, I see many w/ masters degrees who are neither.
If we were talking about people with master's degrees from MIT or Stanford, it'd be a different ball game.
But I can't tell you how many candidates I've seen with something like a "Master of Science in Information Systems from the University of South Central Appalachia".
Beyond that, the international Masters students are really subsidizing the education of other students. Every time there is some friction added to the student visa process, all but the top schools with huge endowment funds feel the financial pressure.
Most narratives I read about this situation paints the picture of the students buying their way into US residency via Masters program. But it works the other way too - many US citizens are able to get educated at an affordable price because of the money these Masters students bring in to the school.
I'm not talking sadistic google interview questions, these were things that anyone with a BS should be able to answer.
As a sidenote: a lot of CS/Software Engineering graduates with a bachelor in my own country (Italy) can't pass simple programming tests, because most of the education is (too?) focused on theoretical aspects, and most of the time people is tested with non-practical exams.
Not just the US. Most countries in Europe offer international master degrees in english that serve the exact same purpose.
But with a typically enterprising capitalist mindset, the American system also wants to ensure that talented individual don't go back to their country (or elsewhere) immediately after getting a degree. This is where the high cost of a US college degree comes into the picture - the burden of paying for it acts like an anchor for most students who come from developing countries or econonomically weak background. Even if they get some kind of scholarship and / or do part-time work, they still have to take a huge loans to live in the US to complete their education. And often the fastest way to repay these loans is to work in the US or other developed nations. This may take another few years. The American system hopes that by then the potential immigrant would be sufficiently exposed to the American culture and lifestyle and consider staying here.
(The high cost also ensures quality of education is high in the US, thus attracting talents from around the world. And the money is also pumped into a lot of R&D in the college allowing US to maintain a big tech lead. It's a neat system that seems to work so far.)
The other aspect of ensuring that higher education remains costly in the US is to also ensure that a blue-collar workforce continues to exist, and wage is suppressed among the white-collars. Perhaps the law makers also feel that it acts like an incentive to work more diligently, out of anxiety and worry - after all, people with more qualification, experience and higher stable income often tend to jump around more (which the big tech try to thwart by entering into illegal agreements to not hire each others employee).
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I always thought that learning is learning. It never occurred to me that there’s a difference between how and why children learn and that it could be different from adults.
As an adult, who considers myself a life long learner, I see the differences. The education system hasn’t adapted to adult learning. Most masters classes are simply just repackaged versions of undergraduate classes, maybe with a little more depth.
The schedules haven’t changed either. As the article points out almost all the bad practices are online classes. It’s hard for adults to juggle family, kids, and work while being a student. People feel it’s necessary to further their schooling but don’t have many options. They can’t just take off two days of the week to attend a class. Few schools offer nights and weekend classes. Online becomes the only option.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andragogy
In Denmark and some neighboring countries there's this concept of a school you can go to just to learn stuff later in life, as an ongoing thing. There's a whole bunch of themes (sports, history, etc), and often you can book yourself in for whatever amount of time makes sense for you.
We have those in the US; we don't have a general collective name for them, but there are both private for-profit ones with a variety of (mostly narrow) specialities, either standalone or as adjuncts to other related businesses (selling, e.g., products in the field that it teaches people to act in), plus community colleges, public libraries, public parks and rec departments, and museums tend to also have programs that serve this function, despite it not being their sole or primary function.
I say this as a mid 20s return college student. My experience going back to college without the "stars in my eyes" so to speak, has really left me embittered by the system altogether. Schools act like autocratic bureaucracies that when they make a mistake all you get is an "oops sorry. Now deal with it lol." Also student employment is not only predatory (cause the pay is just garbage), but it's like they don't even train students either. If you want any answers, you have to wait to talk to one of the few people who has actually been hired on as an employee.
Higher education is structured for students going from high school to their institutions. They also assume students don't have full time employment or a family. So basically if you have either of those, the school doesn't care at all about your plight. They know your gonna pay off your loans and complete your degree. They prefer younger impressionable kids who are gonna waste a lot of time and money there instead.
In the US, Depending on your state this might not be true. Many of the 'Elite' schools are absolutely as you describe, but many of the state schools do cater to adult learners. This is particularly true in states which separate their Research Universities from their more teaching oriented Universities. Most of the latter do have night classes and other offerings aimed at adult learners. But the private universities with dreams of grandeur are looking mostly for the "traditional college student"
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Slight anecdote, I gave a few geometry lessons to a teen. And witnessing his brain operate was quite staggering. Teen operate at high frequency low depth it seems. He didn't want to grasp the rule or symmetry but ran in many intuitions very rapidly (honestly my brain froze at his pace of change, so vibrant) only to feel defeated or confused. Made me think adult and kids really need different approaches. Our emotions facing a new topic are so different.
Depends on the country. Masters degrees can be research which are the first year of a Ph.D. or they can be taught degrees. In the latter they are usually called "conversion" courses where there's intensive focus on filling in gaps in education for somebody moving to the field. E.g. moving from an Economics B.Sc. to a Computer Science degree.
Where I was educated the Computing Science undergraduate degree is the equivalent of any Masters degree in the same subject. There is nothing in the subject matter that would be of value as another degree as it isn't advancement. It would be merely repackaged undergraduate courses like you suggest.
Well, or they are first professional degrees (e.g., the MBA, MFA, etc.)
As an adult, I don't really have much interest in a complete degree with a certification. (With the exception of very bounded industry-specific things.) So in that respect adult education certainly is different.
I have known people who got PhDs as adults and I think they mostly didn't care for the experience. I know I have zero interest in getting another degree. Even a couple of decades ago, it would have zero value for my professional development and would, in fact, have been mostly a distraction.
However, there are a ton of educational opportunities often oriented to working adults. Community colleges, extension programs, online learning of all sorts...
I get that you need a big enough audience in order to set up any class, and supply/demand is definitely an issue. But I think the demand is much higher than what the supply side seems to cater for.
Things like Khan Academy are great, but they've begun to scale down their offering in favour of university prep. The Open University has some truly great content, but it's prohibitively expensive. MOOCs seem very hit or miss, and often lack a good mechanism for feedback. And quite frankly, I enjoy being in a classroom full of motivated people.
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(This isn't meant as a dig at those, just an observation. If your worldview places "belief in the Bible" as a high value and your interpretation requires a literal reading, then what would an institution full of people who preach evolution and old-earth have to offer? I have a friend who teaches physics part-time at a local college in one of these rural areas, but he is 6-day creation. I said that you'd have to believe that the scientists are incompetent at their jobs, and he said that of course they were. I was stunned because while I could imagine other people saying that, I didn't imagine that he would. I can't fathom how you can believe that people who have worked years to figure out how to most accurately date something would be so incompetent as to mistake days for thousands or millions of years. Especially when it's physics that underlies all the carbon dating... And to be fair, there are plenty of Christians who think 6-day creation is a rather silly abuse of a poetic account.)
'Andragogy' is not a great name for a theory which tries to describe how all adults, not just men, learn. However, it is a really telling name about the kinds of assumptions baked into the theory [1].
I work in adult education; I don't use the word 'andragogy' to describe what I do, and it's a bit of a warning sign if someone else does.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0260691793...
Firstly, the question needs to be narrowed down. The topic of a master's degree in Europe vs in the UK and in the US varies, hugely: 1) The UK and the US have a great focus on the elitism of the university name. Countries like Germany do not, a masters from a (known) university with good grades, is pretty much as valuable as all the others. 2) Fees in Europe its free (as has been mentioned countless times here) so there's less of a "shopping" market here, in terms of looking for the most elite degree to graduate with, and much more about content 3) It depends on what you want to do as a career. In Europe, scientific and engineering fields do look for postgraduate degrees as a minimum. Companies like Amazon, hire data scientists mostly with PhDs in Germany or on exception, highly talented engineers.
But the main "pro masters" degree argument for me, is the learning experience.
My master's studies, was so intense, so stressful and so unbelievably intellectually rewarding that it shaped me and my character in a way that my bachelor's did not come close to.
It gave me that confidence to approach fields and advanced topics, where I am not familiar with the notation, the terminology and don't know where to start, and it taught me how to dive in deep, in a self-motivated and self organised way. I really felt the whole time like an independent researcher, picking up books where I needed to, learning mathematical tools and programming skills I never thought of using to solve new problems. And participating in the latest SOTA research, in a way that has made me quite intellectually fearless now, going forward in my career.
It filled in a lot of gaps that my undergraduate education left, and significantly raised my profile amongst recruiters.
CS might be the exception to the rule about Masters degrees though.
- It's not a legally qualifying degree like studying medicine
- It's academic in the sense that you can use it to gain entrance to a phd, and has academic content that isn't just "how to code".
- And yet you learn a fair bit about how to code. You'll in all likelihood come across actual tools, not toys, that real coders use, eg Git. You might also do some specialist stuff that is directly applicable to an employer, rather than just demonstrating interest. Eg if you do a systems programming course, you might actually understand systems in a way that's useful from the start.
Rather than focusing on degrees, I think it's a lot more important to focus on learning, however you don't know what's important to learn until you actually start working on real problems.
I hear this so much, and I used to be one of the people saying it. Until I actually 1) learned that stuff and 2) realized I don't want to just write glue code. I like writing compilers. I like writing efficient data structures. I use my CS education a lot.
The same applies to some degree of the sciences in general but, there, you probably have to get to a PhD for the opportunities to be significantly elevated relative to a BS.
In any case, this meme about Master's degree scams is mostly directed at high-cost degrees in journalism and the like where the career opportunities aren't great with or without the degree.
In engineering, an MS in CS has the least value to employers. However, in other areas of engineering, it has a pretty high value. Many big companies will not let you do EE design work with just a BS, for example.
- A well taught undergrad degree in CS (Masters fill gaps caused by bad classes or different fields)
- Graduated with undergrad degree recently (getting a Masters degree after being out of school for 10 years can be a good refresher and update on how the field has evolved/changed)
- Masters degree classes in an area of CS you are familiar with (Masters degree is a great opportunity to take classes in areas that you care about but don't know well, if you are a great Rails webdev with 7 years experience, then taking a Masters degree class in Rail WebDev is just wasting your time.)
It was also in a region with a much smaller tech sector.
It's actually hard to say how much of the career boost was from moving to Boston and how much from the degree. I did make some very useful connections during the degree as well as actually learning quite a lot in some of the classes.
If you look at most things though, there's no connection between what you do at work and what you studied. At best studying some subject means you are interested in some broad area, and you are conscientious enough to have done all the exercises, so employers should perhaps hire you in the hope that you can learn how the online advertising industry works, or how the plastic supply chain works, etc.
Looking back at my degree, it was really a bunch of indexing interesting things in science and math for potential further investigation. And then an exercise in flaneuring: wandering about, coming upon something interesting, and then being able to focus on figuring out that thing as opportunities arise.
Credentialism the worship of credentials throughout many industries when other cheaper metrics are available, but may be illegal (like testing for IQ in USA) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credentialism_and_educational_...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
and inability to declare bankruptcy so as to include student loans. Bankruptcy says that the _lender_ has responsibility to not enslave people with debt -- or rather the _lender_ may only enslave a borrower for a limited amount of time, after which it is ultimately the lenders problem that they gave that person too much money and that they should have known that the borrower would have never been able to repay. Debt is a useful tool, but the ability to enslave people with debt should be limited by the law.
I’m not sure any of this helps, though, since it would only prove you’re good at the test.
It seems like if the federal government stopped lending for master's degrees, and allowed students to file for bankruptcy to get out of private loans, then the market might very well sort everything out.
Maybe markets have a difference concept of efficiency than society...
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No it doesn't.
> It's no coincidence that the two areas with most government involvement, education and health care, are the things that have outpaced every other measure of inflation significantly.
The government is less (EDIT: more) involved (proportionate to total expenditures in the domain) in healthcare lots of places outside the US without equal, much less greater, healthcare inflation.
It is the manner, not the mere fact of government involvement that produces inflation.
Here in the UK we have some the cheapest healthcare in the western world with a nationalised system.
I actually agree that the US government often causes inflation. But that's because everyone in the states seems to love government subsidies and no one in the states likes regulation, price control, etc. Whether you're a government or not, subsidising X without regulating consumption or controlling the prices of X will lead to inflation...
An example of what I'm talking about is American high school. State schools have much lower prices per kid than private. Because the state starts with a fixed budget and works from there. Imagine if instead government required "education insurance" like health insurance. And insurers were required to pay for anything the teacher decided was required...
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It's difficult to understand why so many people advocate for even more government "intervention" (i.e., do more to increase the availability and cost of loans).
I have no problem with people getting degrees in the arts. My spouse has a Master's in fine arts, from a university in Europe. But she didn't acquire any debt from that degree, while I did in the US with my CS Master's.
But living with enormous debt--debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy (in the US)--is such a burden, and the degree itself may really not offer that much in terms of job prospects (though we shouldn't discount the value of humanities degrees--turns out they often do pretty well in life).
It is hard to see why a poetry program should cost so much.
So if you as a student do have some of that debt leftover, it is much smarter to use that toward a car down payment or a deposit on an apartment. I feel like most college kids don't have even the slightest grasp on budgeting and how all transactions affect the accounting equation honestly.
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You show a $50k a year degree to an 18 year old from a more middle to upper middle class family, though, and they're not going to understand how much money that actually is. They're going to see one big party that they don't need to pay for until they're done.
I also remember when I was in high school, all the boomer teachers and parents were saying university is a gateway to easy money after. We were sold something that hasn't held true, and I think a lot of people are very bitter about that.
In what way has it not held true? 33% of Americans have at least a four year degree and earn an average of $1m more than their peers without over their lifetimes.
By all measures, university is a gateway to easy money after. So long as you finish.
At least with some graduate programs—in areas of actually value—you might qualify for an RA or TA subsidy. But it’s not worth paying full freight.
The fact that you have to pay for your degree out of pocket may mean that more people will choose to do degrees that are worth something, which is a great thing for society overall. Having said that the prices of degrees in the US are outrageous. A middle ground should be found.
And to your point about "free" education in Europe. The act of decoupling the pursuit of education and knowledge, from a high financial cost, is a crucial mechanism to ensure that institutions retain the freedom to pursue knowledge for its own sake, and to not be (solely) steered by the industrial interests of the status quo.