Is a university degree basically a form of "Vo-tech school"?
That's what a lot of students and employers seem to think.
At the same time, many people do just fine in their careers after college even if they majored in English Lit or philosophy. Perhaps we should consider the possibility that "an education" is a separate thing from vocation training?
> many people do just fine in their careers after college even if they majored in English Lit or philosophy
Yes, but many, many don't, and they take out loans expecting "jobs" of one sort or another to be there upon graduation. I can't count the number of friends I have with $50K+ in student loans working at minimum wage jobs with a worhless degree on two hands.
If you really _just_ want "a good job" there are easier ways to do it than going to a 4 year university.
I think that students who major in something like philosophy or literature are aware of what awaits them after college and are going into it with open eyes. Those that expect more than entry-level jobs immediately after college are simply failing to grasp reality.
That said, a good education, whatever the subject matter is DOES HELP people in their lives in ways which are hard to measure. Bright English lit majors who end up as waiters after college, don't necessarily remain as waiters for the rest of their careers.
The weird thing is, if you replace "want \"a good job\"" with "want \"a good education\", that sentence is still true.
You can get a good education at a library, a bookstore, fucking around on the internet, and more recently, MOOCs.
Universities are still useful if you want to advance the state of the art, discover something new, and so on. Not so good if you just want to learn things already known by others.
For people with different interests, there is a trade-off.
Perhaps in the future things will be different, the resources just aren't there right now.
There might be a sweet spot if you are dedicated enough not to just go through the motions at college and actually take advantage of it, and yet you are not motivated enough to do that outside of college.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7549106.stm
I've also seen it on the top 10:
http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/these-are-the-10-best-...
Although there's a 5 year difference.
I'd like to think I'm not that uncommon for a geek. I love coding. (I have been coding since the 80s, and professionally since the late 90s. You will find my name in a handful of credits files, and a number of mailing list and usenet posts.)
But I won't start using centralized services just because you or some recruiter decides it's the new cool place to be. Sorry.
Never mind people who do business degrees. It's almost expected that they are in it for the money.
It's also amazing how many CS majors waste their 3-4 years addicted to video games (LOL seems to be the big one right now). Those 1000's of hours are better spent building that portfolio that will net you $100k day 1 out of your degree.
Video game addiction is serious. Google for solutions, it can be fixed. It does not improve your resume to mention your lol rank.
This viewpoint is garbage. Outside of work hours, a person has no obligation to be career-focused. Tech shouldn't require someone to be about their career in their free time as well.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you. I sure hope I am because this expectation to make CS your hobby to be a valid CS grad in the workplace is awful.
Similarly, I used to have a crippling envy of accomplished coders who were same age as me, which has long since evaporated.
Probably a symptom of ADHD, my life consists of many short distinct phases where I hyperfocus on an interest. Knitting, woodworking, programming, reading, etc. I do have several projects that I wish I could just dedicate a couple of months too, however! Seeing how far I could get in a dedicated week always makes me long for another month of intense focus.
Developers come in many different shapes and forms :-)
I think part of the problem is the pace of change. That's both the reason for the bad data and the time lag issue. It's just impossible to make a decent guess at the necessity of acquirable skills on a useful timescale. Even technical skills that have a fantastic outlook from todays vantage point… Our visibility is not really that far, 15-20 years at a stretch.
For example, it seems like a good bet that for the next 15-20 the skills that allow you to write programs for a living will still be marketable, assuming a non trivial amount of re-skilling along the way. past that, who knows. For a 20 year old, that's one third of a career.
Take the skills required to be employed in the enormous and affluent financial sector. Accounting, finance, data analysis, math.
Can you imagine that over the next 15-20 years something happens (bitcoin?) that turns this business on its head and makes a big chunk of its employees obsolete?
For the opposite, can you imagine that 15-20 years from now gene-tech has created industries that demand geneticists the way programmers are now in demand?
Pace of change is itself a meaningful change.
Another metric you could use is value for money. There is not a lot a CS course provides that you couldn't do yourself if sufficiently motivated. Whereas a Chemistry course provides a lot of facilities and kit. One of the reasons I went for EEE rather than CS. Pretty tricky to build a clean room or giant laser at home.
If a four-year lag has any chance to eat your job, what's the point of getting a degree for it? A degree should land you jobs for several decades to be worth the investment.
A more subtle point is that the more specific the degree is the more vulnerable it is to obsolescence or changing market conditions.
People keep saying "we need more STEM graduates", but without being more specific about exactly what degrees people should do it's just going to result in more of this kind of problem.