[eric4smith]

Unless you’re teaching don’t waste your time.

To me it smells like a vanity play, unless you’re doing it so you can get another 100k per year.

And yes, I can hear the people saying education is always a good thing to have.

But it reminds me of so many friends who have jobs less than 100k per year in the USA and go to take a masters degree. In almost every case, the higher degree did not change the outcomes they wanted in their life. They ended up with debt in their 40’s.

In almost every case it was a waste of time for the person. Imagine you’re 45 years old and you take 2 years to take this degree. The cost is just not worth it.

The world is moving to a place where degrees are no longer worth what they were in almost every profession (barring medicine, law, etc).

Don’t do it.

[specproc]

It's not all about money. I'm not earning staggering amounts more since doing this, but I'm able to do more interesting work and I loved the experience. Life is a very sad place when everything is viewed as an item on a balance sheet.

The one thing I do agree with there is that education is overpriced in America. As a European, I'd go as far as to say it's exploitative.

That OP is considering suggests the cost, where ever they are, is at least roughly within their means.

[dahart]

> To me it smells like a vanity play, unless you’re doing it so you can get another 100k per year.

Hehe, it’s vanity unless you’re only doing it for money? This is twisted! ;)

> The world is moving to a place where degrees are no longer worth what they were in almost every profession

Do you have any stats or data to back this up? This is a common trope here and elsewhere (ala “Joe the Plumber”), but it seems to be largely not true AFAICT. The St. Louis Fed recently published a paper [1] arguing degree holders are saving less over time. The problem is, it was misleading because savings was measured relative to income (they’re suggesting that someone with $100k salary and $1M in savings is better off that someone with a $200k salary and $1.9M in savings.) And in the paper they demonstrated conclusively that in the US, 4-year degree holders earn on average 2x what non-degree-holders earn. And advanced degree holders (master’s, PhD, doctors, lawyers) earn on average 3x what non-degree holders earn (and 50% more than bachelors). Three times! This data isn’t a statistical sampling, BTW, the Fed has data on all US citizens.

As someone who’s generally in favor of education for education’s sake, I was blown away by how high the income premium of degrees is, I thought the bachelor’s degree might be worth something like 15% extra income, maybe. 2x and 3x averages are simply freaking enormous, and TBH a bit concerning how high they are. It’s hard to justify numbers that large, similar to what’s happened to CEO pay in the US. But with this in mind, it’s easy to see why parents push their kids to university, and why the costs have been going up and up and up.

So based on the Fed’s data, it seems like your summary here could be the opposite of good advice? Shouldn’t people know if having a degree generally enables a different lifestyle? I don’t doubt your friends’ experience; it is possible your anecdotal sampling doesn’t match this data. Averages are averages, and degrees definitely do not guarantee any specific income for any specific person. But the part your argument completely fails to address is the credentialism of advanced degrees - the number of jobs not available to anyone without one. The research teams in large corps for example are generally PhDs, it’s very hard to get in otherwise.

https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/revie...

[vitus]

> This data isn’t a statistical sampling, BTW, the Fed has data on all US citizens.

Actually... that report leans very heavily on the Survey of Consumer Finances [0], which is absolutely a sampling (latest iteration was 6500 families out of the 120 million households in the US).

Per page 3 of the report: "We use the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), which covers family heads born throughout the twentieth century, to determine whether the economic and financial benefits of obtaining a postsecondary degree have changed over time."

[0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/aboutscf.htm

[dahart]

Oh, thanks for the correction. I guess I got the incorrect idea that the Fed had access to IRS income data last time I looked at this paper a couple years ago. Hopefully the small sample size doesn’t do too much damage to the accuracy of the “income premium” of college education, and the basic point that people should be aware of the income premium before claiming that education is not worth the cost.

[CoastalCoder]

I think you're over-generalizing from your experience.

I got a PhD in CS around 40. It opened up some job opportunities in software development that greatly improved my career.

[stagger87]

There are still a huge number of industries and fields in the engineering and sciences that require graduate degrees and that will not be changing anytime soon.