| Your comment about business administration threw me for a loop--I couldn't tell if you were being sarcastic or not anymore. These sorts of articles always strike me as naive, and the discussions sort of disingenuous. I'll go along with this thought experiment when I see places stop requiring MBAs of administrators just 'cause (one of the most useless degrees in my opinion), when medical professionals don't need a license to practice, and when companies actually stop looking at degrees when hiring individuals, instead of the exceptions to the rule you always see on the internet ("hey, I hire for my company, and I don't pay attention to degrees. Great. You're like 1/100). Put aside all the unrealistic assumptions being made, that others are posting, such as that money will just fall from the sky to invest, or that 7% annualized return is actually a value that people can count on. It's still ignoring questions like: will I be able to do what I want just teaching myself? Could I get hired as a civil engineer? For every one of these articles, there's another talking about how comp sci graduates are just better prepared for software development, etc. on average than people from other majors who are self-taught. It's funny to me that these statistics and discussions ignore grad school, when a prereq for grad school is going to undergrad. Believe me, I wish everyone would go along with what someone is capable of rather than what their degree rubber stamps (that is, after all, for all the jokes made, the premise of a liberal arts degree--that you don't need to specialize in school to have any given skill in real life). It would be better in so many ways. But society is more superficial than we let on. |