If this doesn't work out moving to the probability of a windfall maybe desperation but it's not smart.
If people believe this is their only hope that's sad and we should guide them to make better decisions.
If so, I don't necessarily agree. College is an expensive (dollars and time) proposition that rarely pays off. Trade schools, boot camps, etc. are probably better investments for many people. And frankly, saving your money and hoping for a windfall is probably smarter than going to college unless you have a very clear idea already of what you want to study and what career you want to go into afterward.
College is not an automatic positive. For a lot of people, their degree ends up not being worth their student debt.
Or maybe I misunderstood the "it can only improve your chances" part... like maybe you meant "it can improve your chances, but only in certain fields", vs "it can only improve your chances (not worsen them)"?
Wait until the winds of the economic climate change their direction again; until this moment, celebrate and post such texts on HN that will become bad advice.
I got a BS in math and physics, then continued for a PhD in physics. Today I work for a company that makes measurement equipment. We have engineers from most of the traditional disciplines, but they tend to be silo'd, and happy to avoid math and theory. Unavoidably, understanding (and proving) how the product works involves a combination of mechanical, electronics, data processing, statistics, and so forth. My long term role is to be the person who understands how the product works, not only acquiring domain knowledge but creating it.
The deal is that physics isn't an exclusive guild, and there are people in other disciplines with similar inclinations, but they're as rare as physicists. So I can't tell you why you need a physicist at the exclusion of any quantitative engineer with 30 years of experience. I can't promise that you'll get rich at it. I just try to help people and learn new things.
My PhD was sure a very nice to have, but never a life changer.
Would I do it again? Probably yes because of the tremendous joy research brought me (and free time for parties!).
Did I recommend it to my kids? No, they are better off with me specific studies.
Of the 100 or so people in my MSCi physics degree programme there were:
About 40 who went on to do PhDs ... of which about 30 are now academics, the rest went pretty evenly into the categories below, just a few years later
20 went on to some kind of elite professional services: investment banking, consulting, law or into large corporate management graduate programmes
10 are teachers, tutors, or have some other allied role
10 are civil servants or work for think tanks or other NGOs
20 have jobs in tech in various capacities
Start an internet payment, space exploration, electronic vehicle, tunnel boring, or direct brain-computer interface company.
The mean ROI on a bachelors in physics is probably the highest in STEM.
Apparently, they're also popular on Wall Street
Mandatory SMBC link: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
Historically, the most successful examples in each of those industries have a physics degree. I cannot explain the causation.
Elon Musk also drives the mean for physics majors way up.
It was supposed to be a joke, which maybe people missed, about how Elon Musk was a physics major and how mean values on power law distributions are distorted greatly by the outliers.
So I have n clue what the median is, but I assume, like all income and wealth distributions it follows a power law distribution.
I just think there isn't nearly enough jobs in the field compared to the amount of people who are graduating with math degrees. There's only 27,700 actuaries in the US - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/math/actuaries.htm
They are a libertarian thinktank, so take it with a grain of salt, but it's a lot more data than we've had in this thread so far.
TLDR: Engineering pays, computers pay almost as much, art and music are usually a net negative (over 42 working years).
Looking at math, 88% of graduates will earn a 42-year ROI of <=$1,000,000, which means most of them are earning an additional $24k/year on top of what they could've expected to earn without a degree ("counterfactual earnings": https://freopp.org/how-we-calculated-the-return-on-investmen...). Only 3% of math majors should expect a negative ROI (i.e., they would've been better off NOT getting their degree). By comparison, 68% of art & music majors will have a negative ROI on their degree.
There are a whole lot of companies out there fishing for vulnerable people, in all shades from legally shady businesses to pretty much all ad and credit companies.
From the article: "There are other types of car giveaways run by more legitimate parties (charity raffles, event promotions) that do deliver the goods — but if you win, you’re liable to pay a hefty gift tax."
We had a lot to learn about successful execution on the marketing side so the actual number of entries was well less than 100k.
A properly motivated individual may be able to automate finding first-timers like us, and entering via sending postcards, and actually have an excellent chance of winning.
Reminds me of Lazlo in “Real Genius” ;)
Yes, we wanted something in return, in this case, we wanted you to buy a t-shirt or start a subscription (merch+content+events), which gives us essentially all the same info, which would enter you in a sweepstakes to win the car. We also wanted to promote the club, which we did.
We researched it and contracted a sweepstakes company who helped us run the sweepstakes legally.
In the end, we gave away the car to a very nice man and his wife, who we flew in from Minnesota to San Diego for the giveaway event.
Some people did think it was a scam.
But there are several operations that actually do give cars away such a Omaze, Diesel Brothers and many more.
There’s a model there based on the new post-search world we live in that has to do with high engagement increasing Return On Ad Spend and other AdTech voodoo.
No doubt there are lots of scams but there are also real winners out there.
We’ve only given away 1 car. We learned a ton.
I decided to kill the monthly subscription after we gave away the car because we grossly underestimated the amount of up-front ad spend required to achieve a good ROAS and I knew we wouldn’t be giving away another car for a long time.
The biggest surprise to me was hearing from people that were sad that we killed the paid membership/giveaway program.
This was $9.11/mo for membership and occasional swag drops and automatic entry into our next giveaway —whenever that might be. I communicated personally with some of these folks.
The gist of what I learned was that for $9.11/mo, people enjoyed the hope that they may one day win a 911. We literally had people beg us to bring it back. This is probably the same happiness that a lottery ticket brings to many people. It’s not really that they expect to win. As long as someone wins, they’re buying some hope, some excitement… a dream.