A bachelor’s degree is a ticket into a lot of jobs, no matter what is in. That doesn’t mean you have to go to an expensive school to get one.
Co-worker pretty much put himself through school just going to community colleges. Graduated without debt and I’m sure he makes more than I do (I have a Masters degree from a University).
While it’s hugely lagging, the US higher educational community is slowly accepting that for most people a bachelors degree is nothing more than a quasi-mandatory general purpose professional credential. Many community colleges now offer a couple of 4-year degrees, and many more reputable schools are opening extension campuses and offering remote degrees or hybrid programs that skew strongly towards remote learning.
For 90% of students, there is no specific, identifiable benefit to a traditional college experience, and dear god (most) people need to stop going into mountains of debt for little private schools or out of state publics. I didn’t take on any significant debt until law school, and while I noped out of that career path because it’s awful if you don’t have a passion for either your clients or defeating your opponents, it still paid for itself versus my original plan at 22 to teach high school English. If I’d had 6 figures of undergraduate debt, though, I would have been miserably trying to make lawyerin’ work out for me financially.
I will say, contrary to what I see online a lot, that a degree actually is a nice credential to put on a resume, though it’s often TERRIBLE value for the money outside the social expectation. It shows that you had the motivation and/or support structure (which is its own inequity vector) to stick with a 4+ year project and pull it off. It should have introduced you to outside people and ideas that could show you’ll be more adaptable in the work environment. You will have had to make it through subjects that may not have interested you and provide “deliverables” to a “manager” at an acceptable quality level. You will have been asked to do formal communication, both written and oral. Then, finally, to one degree or another, and whether explicitly or not, you will have received training in critical thinking and justifying arguments with evidence. Even the biggest blowoff freshman comp class will force you through the exercise of writing a thesis and finding quotes from the book to back them up, and even “Rocks for Jocks” has the scientific method as an underpinning for the labs and the information taught.
Given how many people have degrees, it’s an easy and not unreasonable filter for HR and hiring managers, though as with anything institutional, it ends up used well beyond its value. If you aren’t getting a very good deal to go to a place with a name that will do networking for you, though, there’s no practical sense in paying extra for anything beyond two years of CC gen-ed and two more at the nearest public university. If Bumblefuck & Dickwash Wesleyan Presbyterian College (est. 1833 and a half) is the only place you’re going to actually manage a degree, then I guess it’s worth the debt, but that population seems… small.
Getting a BS in Computer Science was huge towards my success. I had to work while in college due to lack of funds. My job as a programmer paid very little before I got my degree. Even with years of experience, I had a hard time getting a dev job with an employer that paid better without my degree. With the degree, it was significantly easier.
I’ve heard of stories of folks that “made it” in dev without a degree. I did not have the charisma or whatever other skill they had to do it…
I will say I have quite a few student loans because my scholarships weren’t enough (I was an average student at best) and my family made a lot of money but didn’t help me so I didn’t get other aid I would have normally qualified for. For me, my very well paying job outweighs the student loan payment. My gamble paid off. (It was a fairly safe gamble, but one can never really know in the uncertainty of life.)
However, even in the last few years school has gone up in price A LOT so that may change the calculations for future folks.
I’ve made a career out of website development, despite not having my degree, but it was a very hard path in the beginning. Things have changed a lot, and it’s easier than ever to get an engineering job without a degree, but I used to strongly advise people to get their degree if they want to enter this field. The amount of work I had to put in to build a good enough portfolio to land a corporate job was ridiculous. There were times when I was working 15-17 hours per day, 7 days per week, for months on end, and still broke as fuck. That was after spending years acquiring the skills, and building the connections required to land that work in the first place. The way I see it, you can either go have fun in school for a few years, and then land a bad-ass job at some fortune 500 company, or you can bust your ass for years on end, starving and being broke, while never knowing if it’s actually going to pay off or not. In my case it paid off, in many cases it doesn’t. Of the two paths, school is the far easier one.
I managed to get into web-dev without a CS degree, but I definitely consider myself one of the lucky ones.
I got a bachelor’s in Chemistry, but realized very quickly after graduating that there are precisely zero decent paying jobs for a bachelor’s in general chemistry. Literally the only place that even called me back was offering $14/hr to do urinalysis… working the graveyard shift.
I ended up getting a job doing content review as a contractor for the largest video sharing platform (you know the one). A lot of the work was really monotonous, mostly just copying and pasting stuff. We had a quota that once we hit, we could stop working (and still be paid a full day). I could already hit the quota in around 3-4 hours, but I realized if I didn’t have to copy/paste, I could cut that down to only 1-2 hours.
So, in my spare time at work I ended up learning JavaScript and making a chrome extension to do just that. I showed my bosses and they ended up putting me in a full time programming position.
I don’t use my chemistry degree at all, but my math minor definitely comes in handy.
It changed my life. I encountered so many new ideas that challenged my upbringing. I was also able to travel through exchange programs.
I hate recommending to people that they should put themselves into crippling debt for a college education. Unfortunately, I don’t know another way to rigorously challenge your beliefs, ideas and skills outside of college. You have to be somewhat special to read diversely and vociferously to do that.
I am a huge advocate of formal education, and I think there is some undefinable benefit to “going away to college,” but in general I would say never, ever go into more than the absolute minimum of debt (based on your situation) for a bachelors degree. If you engage with the material and your professors and your classmates, you can get the real benefits a university degree actually provides.
I’d also say that while there is a certain danger in getting trapped in musty old college attitudes about what is “worth” studying, going the other way there is at least as big a risk in falling into the autodidact traps of either having no breadth of exposure or, god forbid, not having someone guide you through and out of some crazy rabbit holes (cough-ayn-rand-cough).
Went to school for environmental engineering almost twenty years ago and graduated with one of the first accredited degrees in the field.
For the last twenty years I’ve traveled the country helping clean up the environment or prevent land from being further contaminated. Yeah the system is fucked up, lawyers and politicians and society don’t value the environment over a quick buck. But I’ve done some good as opposed to wave a sign around at a protest.
Built up enough experience that I’m now part of a specialized team with the EPA that goes to all states and territories to help with case development on complicated or high profile sites that states and regions don’t have the resources to handle.
Doing exactly what I wanted to do for my career, and directly because I got a good education that opened the doors to do it. I make a decent salary and have a skillset that makes employment easy and secure.
Thank you for what you do for all of us!
- it absolutely helped me land my first job in a better position than I would have gotten otherwise. A degree was a prerequisite in my industry, that has since changed, but there was no way I couldn’t get the degree at the time.
It was a shit job, but it still got my foot in the door.
- no employer gave a flying F about my education after my first job other than ticking the box by “has degree”.
I had a very similar experience. I had a degree, didn’t do anything with it. Got a cheap certificate and it got me into a good admin job. Since then I’ve done absolutely nothing to do with my actual degree but it works great when applying for internal positions for upward mobility because I check the “has degree” box.
That being said, I absolutely loved my college/university experience and wouldn’t trade it for the world. While I don’t think anything that I learned in the curriculum helped me significantly, everything else I learned has.
It helped massively. Before I was a web frontend Dev and despite me trying to get more waried work they didn’t want me to learn new stuff because I was very good at what I did. So no possibility for my for any better job.
After I got into the automobile industry worked as a programmer, integrator and had so many opportunities for different career paths. I went on business trips to the US and Korea, found love here and moved. Now I’m partially in management and make so much more money which would all not be possible without going to university (in Sweden).
My masters degree in statistics has been instrumental in my job, both in getting the job and using the skills I learned on a daily basis.
My degree 100% improved my life and opened doors for me that I wouldn’t even have known about without it.
What do you do?
I’m a data scientist for a mid-size finance company.
Ah yes, a statistics degree would certainly help there. I’m glad people like you exist, because I love software engineering, but I hate data. Thank you for dealing with all of that.
Tldr, get a basic associates degree. Do more later if it will prove advantageous.
My perspective is from living in the US.
It’s always worth going to a local community college, even if you have no idea what you want to do, and taking basic classes (writing, speech, etc.). You can come out with a general associates degree without any specialization, low cost, and learn a ton of skills that are broadly applicable in any profession. And if you decide to get a specialized degree later, those classes should transfer in, saving you time and money in the more advanced/specific degree. But there are currently lots of jobs that don’t require a specific degree, or any degree at all.
I personally feel like much of my time in college was wasted. I spent 6 years in college (4 is typical) pursuing degrees because I felt pressured into going to college, rather than working some basic jobs, saving money, and figuring out what I wanted in life. I was fortunate to come out without debt (thanks to some fortunate scholarships and hard work), but also with no money, a 2-6 year lag behind all my friends, and a degree with very little earning potential that I’ve ended up never using. I was fortunate enough to stumble into a great career where we do look at what degree someone had on their resume, but only as a point of conversation - it’s fun to see what studies someone had, and ask them to share what they learned. For the job, we don’t care what the degree is or if they even have one.
I went to university, and I currently work at university. Unless you know what you want to do, and that absolutely requires a degree, and you are 100% certain to get a job in that field, then go to university.
Otherwise, go learn a trade and join a union. By the time your friends are graduating college, you’ll already be well established in your career and making much more than they likely will straight out of school.
The income ceiling is lower without a degree, but you get there much faster, have great benefits, and get to retire a lot earlier.
Also, there is nothing saying that you can’t eventually go to university and get a degree.
That might be true in the US, but that is certainly untrue in other parts of the world, where college/university is way cheaper/free and the pay difference a degree makes can be huge.
I live in Germany and I think it almost always pays off to ge to university, at least if you are interested in anything even close to MINT.
And even in non MINT areas a higher degree opens many doors that otherwise are really hard to get into.Otherwise, go learn a trade and join a union.
My kid fell for this. They promise you’ll get paid while you learn. What they don’t tell you is that IF you manage to pass the entrance exam (he did) you get put on a list for open apprenticeship positions, waiting to be called in at any moment. While you’re on that list you don’t get paid. If you do get a spot, contracts only last a couple of months. Then you go back on the list. Rinse and repeat. And the longer you’ve been in the union the higher up you get placed on the list. So the older members get placed before the newer ones no matter what number they were in line. This “join a trade” push is similar to the charter school scam, siphoning up state and federal training funds without delivering results.
I think this is a bad take.
First of all, there are very few guarantees in life.
Second of all, I think society’s way of expecting 18 year olds to know what they want to do with their lives is not realistic. Going to a university and meeting and interacting with new people you haven’t just spent the last decade with can help shape what those ideas for the future should be.
Learning a trade and joining a union is a great option for some, but I think it takes a special type of person (the same way it takes a special type of person to work with kids, or in the medical space, or with technology). I would never discount that as an option, but certainly not encourage 18 year olds to default to that either
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My bachelor’s was pretty useless, but it was the key to getting my much more useful masters degree.
What major? I don’t think my masters has ever directly benefited my career (maybe it helped my ability to do my job).
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Both. I studied journalism (strike 1) and graduated in 2008 (strike 2). I chose “print” as my option (strike 3).
Consequences: never worked a day in journalism in my life. Judging by the state of journalism globally in 2024, I can’t say that I mind. Having “a” degree is still a necessity for most non-menial jobs, so in that regard it always came in handy. Cost of the education wasn’t through the roof, didn’t have to take on any loans or such. To this day my only debt ever is my mortgage to the bank, looking to keep it that way.
I graduated university with a Bachelor of Science in Biology. It was probably the most difficult thing I’ve done in my life but I learned a lot, not only about biology, but critical thinking and debating ideas.
I had a hard time finding a job with such a general degree so unfortunately I needed to to back to college for a 2 year diploma necessary for a licenced job. College was a breeze after university.
I eventually quit that licenced job and now work a basic job in manufacturing that requires only a high school education. It’s the most money I’ve ever made despite it being the easiest. Figure that out (hint: I’m in a union now).
Despite not really needing my education for my job, I still feel like it has drastically improved my life. Ever since university, learning new things has been easy and calling out bullshit even easier.
For me, I wouldn’t say it held me back, but the benefits were not direct either. There was never the, I got x job as a result of y degree. My path was a bit more non traditional than most, but it’s my path.
For context, I just turned 40 a few weeks ago.
I went to community college after high school for finance because I was good at math and wanted to make a lot of money. I made it through, got an associates degree and went to a 4 year university after to finish. I dropped out after a semester or two because I had a lot of stuff going on in my life.
I ended up getting new jobs and eventually starting a business doing web dev and digital marketing many years later. I decided I wanted to finish the degree for no reason other than I felt like I was the type of person who should have a degree, so I did.
Fast forward 5 years and I’m tired of the business. I decide I want to sell it and get a masters degree in cybersecurity. In order to do that, I need to take another course first - it’s essentially a condensed cs degree. I learned a ton, got into the masters program and finished it.
The problem now is that I kind of fell for the schools marketing. It’s not easy to find a job in cybersecurity. And I’m also finding that being a cybersecurity engineer or a pen tester or a soc analyst or any of these “desirable” jobs are not really that interesting to me. After I sold the business, I found a direction, career wise, that I like. It’s in a technical space but not as an engineer and not in cybersecurity. And I think I’m ok with that. Getting my masters, I learned a lot, technically.
So to answer the original question, I don’t think either of the degrees helped me in a traditional sense, but they overall did more good than ham by a lot. Given the chance to do it again, maybe I would study something different, but I wouldn’t skip either of the degrees, even if I’m not directly using the skills today
It reinforced the idea that I love learning. I also reinforced the idea that I don’t learn well by sitting in a lecture hall and listening to people talk to me.
I am somewhat reluctant to say it, but if you get into a top-branded school, it will absolutely help you as it will open doors that otherwise would be closed. People will look at you differently, expect from your differently, and you’ll expect from yourself differently.
OTH, look at Bill Gate, Steve Job, Michael Dell, etc.; extraordinary people will be extraordinary given the right circumstances, ideas, and perseverance.
Also given a lot of money and not having to worry about bills can help quite a lot with creativity.
