> majoring in Underwater Basket Weaving was not a great idea from a financial point of view
I've met many people in places like McKinsey or Goldman Sachs (i.e. "elite" high paying jobs) with degrees from Oxford or Cambridge in Philosophy, English, Arch & Ant or Theology (in "decreasing usefulness"). Many more than, say, graduates in accounting or business administration from Manchester University, although a few might make it. Hell, I know a Harvard philosophy major who co-authored a very useful Haskell library.
My conclusions from anecdotal evidence:
- these universities, regardless of degree, encourage very hard, focused work, and teach and encourage critical thinking; both critical thinking and hard focused work are useful in all jobs;
- people overestimate the "technical" portion of most jobs, and how easily it can be taught (a law conversion course takes a mere few months in the UK, and banks routinely train thousands of fresh unqualified graduates every year);
- people overestimate the marketability of skills taught in most "useful" degrees especially outside its area of specialisation (e.g. is a medical major more qualified a strategy consultant than a philosophy major?);
- you gain access to a vast alumni network and its reputation (which includes world leaders, the CEO of the companies you apply to, etc.);
- the selective nature of admissions sends the market a signal about your "intrinsic" quality.
(edited to be more readable on mobile)
Obviously, if you want to become a specialist and you are sure of it, it is a better idea to study that field in the best place you gain admission to. But that has not been true of the vast majority of my former classmates.
In fact I watched a strange inversion whereby those who were certain they wanted to be engineers are now at McKinsey or banks and those who were certain they wanted to make tons of money in business are now working in "hard" engineering jobs (structural engineering, fluid dynamics for car companies, etc.).
The reality is - more nuanced. Certainly there are many who consider both GS and McKinsey to be very bad things indeed, and not in any way a professional niche that high quality graduates should aspire to.
Perhaps there may be more to "intrinsic quality" than an obsessive work ethic and social connections?
My experience has been the opposite to yours. People who don't have technical degrees but have been trained to consider themselves experts in business management generally overestimate their own skills, and vastly underestimate the skills and insights of those (nominally) "under" them.
When you are on the other side, other variables come into play. For example, elite grads might be generally overvalued and for the same money you can get a much better community college drop out (who is on the tail end of his own talent distribution), because the market undervalues his skills. This is something that comes up a lot in the Valley and the last team I've personally hired was about half no-degree and half not-famous-degree, so you can guess my position (we hired based on technical capability and more or less ignored CVs).
Whether or not I agree with you on Goldman and McKinsey's intrinsic value adding capability, I have observed that people doing a stint at either are basically guaranteed nice employment for life, fast track to the best management jobs, get a premium on hiring, and so on. Which is what the OP was concerned with.
Worth noting that in the UK until recently cost and university were un-related. Indeed, it's one of the aspects of the modern system that infuriates me. I despise the idea of a bright child choosing a mediocre university to save 2-3k of student debt per annum. I can't believe it's good for the state of society.
It's also worth noting that the terms of student debt in the UK are far far less usurious than in the US.
I'll say it: You just hired for cheap.
- I find that just using a hyphen or asterisk for the bullet
- and two newlines to separate items works well enough.
There isn't any specific formatting that will be rendered as an html list.
For a start there isn't a single legal system in the UK - Scotland has a different process for qualifying than England does and NI and Wales might have different processes.
In Scotland to qualify as a lawyer if you already have a first degree in another subject requires 2 years to get an LLB and then another year to get a postgraduate diploma in legal practice (both full time) then 2 years training at a law firm.
From what I can see in England the equivalent of the 2 years LLB takes 1 year but you still have to get a postgraduate qualification and do the training.
The Law Society for England and Wales says 4 years to qualify as as solicitor if you have first degree.
https://www.lawsociety.org.uk/law-careers/becoming-a-solicit...
Qualifying as a barrister (or advocate here in Scotland) ironically may take less time - but that's exceptional.
NB My wife did the "conversion course" route here in Scotland and it took 5 year and she went on to be called to the bar as an Advocate.
Thanks to merit-based scholarships and need-based aid, I graduated with minimal debt, despite attending a private college with a $45k per year sticker price. Thanks to a proper choice of majors, I made good money right out of school.
I'm always puzzled when people claim that one needs to come from money to succeed.
Assuming everyone can do what you did is foolish because there's not physically enough scholarships to go around. There's probably a much greater number of people equally puzzled why they have to go to community college because they couldn't get a scholarship.
Can you please give me a simple, non-racist explanation why this matters? Please explicitly spell-out what is/is not homogeneous (I always assume race), and explain why that complicates things.
Consider the concept of a business cluster, note that the city as a cluster is a reasonable idea [1].
Note that the population of Denmark does not break top 30 in a list of global cities [2].
Conclude that the country of Denmark, with its small geographic and demographic attributes, could specialise entirely in one high-margin economic area and further specialise their laws and social systems to that.
Basically, 5 million people can be sustained by the excess wealth of a strong local cluster. 50 million people cannot be sustained by one strong cluster, and the different clusters may have different needs.
I have no idea about Denmark, but if they /are/ clustered as a country around some high-tech industry, maybe the economically rational equilibrium to give out scholarships to support the local cluster? Maybe they are just nice people? A country with many clusters needs a one-size-fits-all legal and social system that works with all the clusters. The economic equilibriums may be different to a single cluster.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cluster#By_type_of_co... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities
Not all of them but enough that it affects government at the highest levels. It definitely complicates any topic dealing with poverty becuase race usually gets tied to status in various nonsensical ways.
He's right. There's nothing wrong with being brutally honest.
It's also divided into 51 smaller, more localized governments.
US has become a country where profit runs everything. What happens when a large percentage of youth don't get education and make enough to buy a house?
of course, a big part of the problem is employers. Employers place a large value on Ivy league schools and expensive universities, thus creating the consumer demand in the first place.
Anyways after 3 semesters I realized that I really didn't like the major I was in so I dropped outta that school and moved home and went to community college until I got myself together and motivated. When that happened I moved into a local state school that is known for being extremely good for its cost.
I don't regret going to the expensive school even if most of the credits didn't transfer, I met some great people there who will be valuable friends to have made. I also don't regret not going there anymore because it would have been way too expensive.
While some (perhaps many or most in some schools) professors live in the isolation of academia, lecturers or part-time, non-tenure professors often work in a field related to the subject they are teaching, and can be a good source of connections for students.
Sure, simple attendance may not be enough for many students, but most colleges do at least try to give you the opportunities and tools you need to succeed.
I'm not trying to be hard on you, it's just that I'm skeptical about whether new non-academic programs in universities improve outcomes enough to offset their costs to individual students. The check on administrative bloat is very weak in the US, and arbitrary ratings like the US News & World Report have more influence than customers do.
I do see how it can be easy to believe that ratings have more influence than students. At the same time, many ratings include student surveys as a substantial part of the ratings process.
Additionally, I can see how it can be easy to believe that there is significant administrative bloat in universities, even when the reports on funding sources and costs state that the administrative costs have been going down. For many the budgets and administration of public universities simply don't have enough transparency, and even when they strive to achieve transparency there may not be enough historical data to give people any real perspective.
Further, it's easy to point the finger at all sorts of practices within a University as sources of said administrative bloat, regardless of whether the budgets support those arguments.
When you have a significant reduction in state funding for public universities, you drive those institutions to look for ways to overcome those budget shortfalls. Generally speaking, it's hard to get people to accept salary reductions, so cost-cutting measures come from other directions. Where I work, tenured/tenure-track faculty in some colleges are teaching significantly more credit-hours than they would have ten years ago, so there are fewer lecturers, students, part-time faculty teaching classes. Since the tenured faculty don't get paid more for teaching more classes, this is a pretty effective cost-cutting measure for some colleges, but it has its limits, especially since those faculty are also expected to continue with other intellectual contributions (such as research).
Every new staff or faculty member hired anywhere within the University has to be justified. They no longer hire someone simply because a position has been vacated, so when someone retires it's possible that their duties simply get distributed among others and the position goes away.
However, if someone's job is basically fund-raising, it's probably going to be easier to get approval for that position, especially if you can find a candidate with a proven history of improving the budget situation for an educational institution.
Meanwhile, programs and physical things like buildings and equipment tend to be attractive to donors. You can put up buildings and fill them with equipment by demonstrating a willingness to pay for 50% of the cost and then creating a big push for donors, and with the right people working on the project you can end up paying significantly less (or nothing). Further, you can then leverage the new building/equipment for further facilities/equipment upgrades.
Good luck getting someone to pay someone's pension or to pay the salary of any of the staff dealing with the budget, custodial work, IT, etc.
If I had a "small $1 million loan" right now, I'd be able to take much greater risks in terms of quitting my job to create a startup or whatever. Thus I'd be far more likely to be more successful (financially speaking)
... then your fate would be similar to the fate of a typical big lottery winner: having all your money spent in a few years and your life derailed.
Children of wealthy people succeed not because of inherited money, but because of wealth management habits they learned from their parents.
>but it was well understood that majoring in Underwater Basket Weaving
The way you make such a condescending argument and blame the victim takes away any credibility in your comment. The issue is that tuition has ballooned since the 90s. Tuition is outpacing income/inflation and most else, so regardless of what school or major, the ROI is going down for most. Also, even if you went to a top-tier school and had student loans in the 1990s, you could discharge them in bankruptcy--until Bush changed that in 2005. Things really have gotten harder, it's not as you falsely claim that people are picking useless majors.
Ballooning tuition was an inevitable outcome, as was the speculative financialisation of educational institutions, and the relative loss of value of student teaching and post-grad research.
It's really just a form of compulsory loan sharking, and it's politically and economically cancerous.
Not only does it have immensely toxic second order effects, it's almost guaranteed to kill, or at least seriously damage, its host economy.
As for "useless majors" - one of the foundations of any civilised society is personal freedom, and that includes the freedom for cultural and intellectual exploration.
Forcing all activities to compete economically and sweat a profit is not freedom - it's the opposite.
I did not have a single lecture or discussion with any of my professors about how I could use my degree to get a job, what kind of careers I could pursue, and how to use my degree for anything outside of academia.
Humanities education has become "education for education's sake".
That's fine and all if the cost of tuition is low. But when you're spending $30k/year on tuition, your professors believing that "everyone should just go into academia" is just a bad investment.
I agree, this should be something more emphasized.
I also blame (to a degree) my K-12 career for not putting an emphasis on any courses related to budgeting or Home Economics.
http://www.dailycal.org/2014/12/22/history-uc-tuition-since-...
If random internet sites are to be believed, the $630 combined tuition plus fees in 1976 is roughly $2k today. An awful lot of students could manage that without aid.
I set myself with a well-known localized (to the industry) degree (Music Performance), but still couldn't implement it; even in a sense where I could turn it into something a bit more "useful" (Music Education).
Plenty of my classmates have gone on to utilize it effectively.
My major wasn't useless; I was.
The only person who ever told me to consider what sort of job I'd get was the advisor for the law school who said I shouldn't go into law if I ever wanted to make money. At the time I didn't trust her because every other adult in school and my personal life was giving me the opposite advice
It's not something I really know how to explain, except that the modern expectation of "established person" is someone with a degree. So until that expectation goes away,it seems we're going to be culturally stuck here for a while.
/anecdote
But if even the second, third, fourth, fifth, etc, choices also leave you 50K+ in the hole... and nobody will give you a glance without some kind of degree... what the fuck are you supposed to do?
IME you're wildly overestimating the number of people who think they're going to make tons of money with a BA in Photography or similar. They just need to tick that degree checkbox to be employable at most places, and everyone has been telling them to go to a 4 year university their entire life, and they're all stupidly expensive.
this recommendation was always weighed against the 'freshmen experience'.
i think the demographics and expectations of the college-bound is what has changed, not necessarily the advice. getting a good paying job after school was an amazing achievement, even for top schools like university of california's top campuses, not something expected as normal.
The most common undergraduate major is Business. The "liberal arts and humanities" make up about, what was it, 12% of all bachelor's degrees?
It's still understood. It's just that, it's not a very useful piece of information, since _all_ degrees are more expensive nowadays -- not just the basket-weaving ones.