[antidamage]

I'm 37. At my age a degree is completely irrelevant if you have the skill set. In fact, ten years ago I was approached by a university to start my Master's degree, with the missing Bachelor's degree being credited through time spent working in my industry at the time.

The reality of education in America is that it's an expensive tickbox. It verges on being a racket. While you don't want to be the lone rebel being crushed under the wheels of the machine, if you can avoid becoming indentured to the government with a student loan then do yourself a favour and choose not to waste money on education you can just teach yourself.

[dtparr]

> At my age a degree is completely irrelevant if you have the skill set.

This is a dangerous thing to say without any qualifiers. It depends on the industry, economic conditions in your area, type/size of company you want to work for, etc.

I've known a couple individuals who had the skills and 20+ years of experience who lost jobs at floundering companies and weren't able to find anything relevant due to a lack of a degree. In both cases, they had a few interviews that were basically "Wow, you're a great fit experience-wise and it like you've worked with the same technologies/processes we use here and some we're hoping to go to. Oh, except we can't hire you for an engineering role unless you have at least a BS. Would you be interested in an hourly maintenance job?"

[nsxwolf]

But that's madness! You'd be great for this job but we can't hire you because you don't have a piece of paper? How long can these self inflicted meaningless restrictions continue?

[IkmoIkmo]

I agree.

Although sometimes there are legal requirements. Like a lawyer in a law firm, don't know how it is in the US (probably the same) but here there's no way you can practice law and represent someone in a court without a master's legal degree. And starting your own firm requires a degree above that. Although you can start a legal advisory firm without it.

I appreciate you may still think that legal requirement is madness but I can imagine there are some jobs where you want a government to accredit a university's degree, as a form of consumer protection and regulation. For example say a doctor, or a financial advisor, you may want to have 'audited' and given some level of quality assurance, which is essentially what government-accredited degrees aim to prove.

What would be madness is if that same government did not try to accommodate for people with degree-equivalent experience to get their experiences accredited with a formal degree at no-cost or low-cost. For example if you're a self-taught engineer who, due to work experience, could actually finish engineering courses without going to any classes because of self-education, then you ought to be able to (after demonstrating said experience) pay for the mere administrative cost of examination (i.e. $50 per exam) and take all examinations in a year for less than $1k and get your degree. Without spending years, going to classes, and paying tens of thousands for teaching you don't need and won't make use of.

This isn't always easy but separating examination from teaching in schools is something I think we haven't explored enough. You can do a GED or GMAT without enrolling in any classes, and just taking exams, and if self-taught or skilled by experience somehow, then the test is just an accreditation of your skills. Yet we don't have equivalents for advanced degrees. It's not easy to set this up of course, but I think we ought to try more. Although for legal professions it exist, the bar exam afaik doesn't require you to ever have gone to law school, if you happen to be able to take it due to e.g. working in a legal office and somehow picking up everything in an assistant role.

[jegutman]

I know it's crazy that companies with 10k+ employees want some agree of conformity (read: predictability) out of their workforce. It's not the CEO of these organizations saying "we can't hire you because of this piece of paper" it's a hiring manager saying that. Many large companies are working harder for alternative methods of identifying talent, but it's hardly and easy problem and if you need to screen 2x as many employees to find 10% more good hires that may or may not be worth the tradeoff depending on how productive your employees are in general.

[xerophyte12932]

Reminds me of that guy who posted "The Unemployable Coder" exact same issue with him. a decade of relevant experience but no one hires him because of a lack of degree

[eropple]

> indentured to the government with a student loan

I graduated with under $30K in debt from a state school (with a number of merit scholarships and some but not extensive parental help) and paid it off my second year out of college. One need not take on heavy debt (don't you love the rhetorical phrasing, though? Indentured!) to go to college, and I tend to think that self-styled autodidacts discount the social rounding and educational breadth available at any good university.

[oberstein]

How much under $30k were you? $30k is still a lot of money, even if it's not the even larger $100k-$150k number more and more people are reporting. What were your average monthly expenses including the summer months, and did you work at all?

If you're going to be indentured, then at least indenture yourself for an engineering degree. $30k isn't hard to pay off within a year or two of full time employment, and even $100k-$150k in debt isn't infeasible to pay off in a short amount of time (shorter than it took to accumulate) if your degree qualifies you for a well-paying low-stress engineering position at BigCo.

Do you think that your assertion about not taking on heavy debt will remain true? Debt continues to rise, as does the cost of tuition. If more students seek out the cheaper state schools, or the cheaper community colleges beforehand, the cheaper state schools are going to raise their prices to deal with the increase in load.

[morgante]

$30k is right around the average college debt these days.

$100k-150k is an extreme outlier from people who made the extraordinarily poor decision to attend expensive schools which weren't prestigious enough to provide adequate financial aid.

[IkmoIkmo]

Well consider that a normal person going to university and paying a low amount of $1k on living expenses (i.e. equivalence of living on a $12k annual salary), for a four-year university.

Now imagine he has to go to university full time (the fact full-time is rarely upheld says something about the economic difficulty of spending full-time on school). That means you spend all your disposable non-leisure time on school, either going to class or doing readings, homework, research. In other words: not employed.

That means right off the bat for a 4 year university you're spending $48k, while your income is 0. In other words the mere opportunity cost of a 4 year university instead of working full-time, is nearly $50k.

Then add to that the average tuition annually is $9k at a public local university. (private avg is 3x that, and out of state is 2x that. So the $9k figure is below average, basically the average of the cheapest option). Even with a 50% scholarship you're still looking at roughly $20k in tuition for the 4 years. Then add some for books and such, but whatever let's make it $20k. You're now at $70k.

Now imagine that the average student loan interest rate is around 5%, on the average of $70k for 4 years. And then consider that $1k living expenses is relatively low, and $9k tuition isn't atypical.

So we're now getting close to $80k without the rounding errors and we're not living any amazing lifestyle here at $1k a month in living expenses to pay for rent, insurance, food etc, on a 50% scholarship.

The fact that studying full-time actually entails for most people spending part-time on school, and part-time on work, to offset this financial picture a bit, says something about the economic feasibility of simply dedicating years of time to nothing but study. But even then with a part time job making a few hundred bucks (e.g. $10 an hour flipping burgers 2 full days out of 5 working days a week gets you to $160 a week pre-tax extra), a lot of that goes straight into a modest fun lifestyle above your $12k a year expenses, like a spring break, a college trip, or a semester abroad.

Anyway I don't mean to say that $80k is typical, as you said it's much lower, the average nowadays is actually $35k, nothing close to $80k let alone $100-150k. But I think it's important to appreciate that it's just $35k because of concessions, which means for example not going for certain studies cause it'll be way above the average (e.g. medicine at $100k+), or not dedicating yourself to education because you need to spend 2 full days working part-time besides your studies (some of which you simply have to put in the numbers or you'll certainly fail) while not burning out doing this for years in a row.

So I do believe the $35k figure may diminish that the financial burden of college is a lot harder than the number indicates on face value. To exaggerate what I mean with an analogy it's a bit like observing an extremely dangerous area and seeing very little crime and concluding 'the crime rate is low', when underneath it may hide the fact that people stopped going outside, that the city became unliveable because of this and that there's actually huge problem. In the same way I'm seeing in my own environment many of my peers spend more time working than studying, while enrolled, still graduate with tens of thousands in debt, just for the piece of paper but without having had the ability to fully dedicate multiple years to their craft. This obviously isn't the outcome we want, and represents a huge waste.

[jschwartzi]

When I was in school I didn't take a single vacation or "modest fun lifestyle" trip of any sort. I worked when I wasn't in class, and I was in class when I wasn't working. Anything I had I had had since I had graduated high school. I barely got out with about $30k in debt and a fairly worthless degree in Physics.

[IkmoIkmo]

Ugh, sucks to hear man, I mean I don't mean to rub it in but those are among the 'time of your life' years, I wish you'd have had more leisure time.

Are you in software now? if so, how'd you roll into that? Thanks for sharing :)

[morgante]

I don't understand why you're doing a bottom-up analysis when the data on actual indebtedness is readily available and it's about $30k: http://ticas.org/posd/map-state-data

In actuality, I think even that statistic s overstated because it's the average debt of students with debt when 3/10 students graduate debt-free. Taking into account those with a debt of $0, the actual average debt is closer to $20k.

> This obviously isn't the outcome we want, and represents a huge waste.

Speak for yourself. I personally think it's entirely reasonable that people should work at least part-time to pay for their education and it's been happening for generations. I've personally worked full-time for most of university and definitely think it has enriched my education a lot more than joining some silly clubs or a sports team.

[eropple]

Now you're going the other direction. People used to pay for all of their education from part-time work; costs have gone up, and even $30K is a lot for a degree. I'm very lucky in that I could pay that off quickly, but I know many people who graduated with under $50K in debt who will literally take a decade to pay it off.

And I wouldn't dismiss "silly clubs" or sports teams in terms of turning out well-rounded individuals, which is the entire point of a university to begin with.

[IkmoIkmo]

> don't understand why you're doing a bottom-up analysis

Didn't you? I thought I made it clear in my post. My post wasn't about the level of debt (as I referenced in the post, it's $35k for 2015), it's about the financial burden of studying, which may look not so significant when you see $35k debt, but hides the notion that it's because college students do more than we expect of them.

For example, where I live we have 36 weeks of college. (I've read in the US it varies, but can be 30 weeks, e.g. when you have semesters of 15, or trimesters of 10 weeks). But let's say 36. Also we have 1800 hours of studyload here (i.e. european study credits are valid and recognised everywhere in the EU, and they're about 30 hours of studyload each, and you need 60 per academic term, or 1800 hours).

So now we're looking at 1800 / 36, or 50 hours dedicated to education per week. That's how our education is planned and designed. Again it doesn't mean students practically put in that time, but that's the design, which means if they do less than that, then there are consequences.

Then you add the fact that there is variation among studies, some are easy and you can get away with spending less than that without affecting your learning, some end up harder than average (often the studies we want to steer people to) and can require more than that base level figure of 50 hours.

Then consider you need to work 2 or 3 days extra part-time, and we're looking at a ridiculous burden on students. And you still end up with tens of thousands in debt, going up by $150 every month due to interest alone, on average.

And that, I'd think, has consequences, and I already mentioned that I see and saw this among my peers. I saw people who spent more time working than studying. I saw people pick easy majors so that they could get a degree without having to dedicate more than normally considered full-time on just studying, and then work besides it. I saw people simply choose not to study. And all of these things likely reduce the debt figure to $35k. i.e. I think if we made university 100 times more expensive, the debt figure wouldn't change radically, not even by 10x, because people change their choices.

And yes I do think the things I mentioned above are a waste. I'm not saying working a job is a waste per se, you're misunderstanding. I'm saying spending more time working than studying (not in an office by the way, we're talking about a cafe or nightclub for most students where I live), choosing an easy major, not studying because by design your studies require you to spend 50 hours, and you can't manage that while also working). That's a waste.

And then it pays off to do a bottom-up analysis, the costs and opportunity costs of studying are $80k on a 50% scholarship? And people end up with just $35k debt? Then you can wonder how that affected their studies, if they needed support from parents etc.

> I personally think it's entirely reasonable that people should work at least part-time to pay for their education and it's been happening for generations

Oh to some extent I think it's reasonable. I think you'll also agree with me to some extent the work-next-to-study we require of some isn't reasonable, and that for some it is a waste, for some it does negatively affect their education, for some it does create burn outs and depressions and suicide, for some it does prohibit them from studying all together, and that the $35k figure makes it look as if student financial burdens aren't all that bad, more than it should. That's my point and I think we can agree on that as much as I agree with your point that some part time work is reasonable, and can often be very beneficial.

[redblacktree]

> self-styled autodidacts discount the social rounding and educational breadth available at any good university.

Yes, you learn to use words like "autodidact" instead of "self-taught."

[logical42]

'Self-taught' isn't exactly a drop in replacement for 'autodidact'. You'd have to say 'self-taught person' or something, which is more awkward as a phrase.

[dopamean]

I'm 29 and do not have an undergrad degree. I was recently accepted to a well respected masters in computer science program. I declined to go because I'm pretty happy with my career trajectory at the moment and I think taking the time off work to do that would actually be detrimental.

[ErikRogneby]

Usually to be accepted you need to apply. Why apply if you were going to turn it down? (genuine curiosity)

[dopamean]

Hey sorry for the late reply. I applied at a time when I was unhappy with my job and was unsure of my prospects. During the time I applied I was out doing interviews as well. I got a job at a company I love and am really excited about it. That excitement has more to do with why I declined to go to grad school in the end.

[jamestnz]

I'm not the OP, but I think it's not that uncommon for people to apply for positions/opportunities that they're either ambivalent about, or outright have no intention of accepting. I know I've done it before.

Some feel this helps them to stay "well practiced" at going through recruitment/interviewing, gives them a good reason to keep their résumé up to date, expands their professional network, gives the potential confidence-boost of being offered a position then declining it, and so forth.

[jschwartzi]

There's a good 17 years gap that a non-graduate would have to fill. How did you spend your time after you finished high school?