The thing is now-a-days. Unless you really stand out from the crowd. The interviewing party tends to overlook applications without a college resume.
Going to a school that cost 50K a year is overrated especially for a Bachelors degree. I'm not paying for my kid to go to some private liberal arts college.
It really depends on the field. I decided to leave college after 3 semesters and started working in the IT field. That was in 1999 when the IT market was hot and I was able to gain a lot of valuable experience. 10 years later I think it was the right choice for what I do, because I'm doing better than most people with degrees. In IT experience means way more than a degree or any certification ever will. When we hire people we care much more about what they've done rather than what they studied or didn't study in school. In other industries though, a degree is mandatory. I'm lucky that I got into the workforce when things were good. That said though, for people that don't yet have any experience now is the perfect time to get your education. Because nobody is hiring anyone right now so it will be tough to get any entry level experience.
Just curious, how did you get into IT after only three semesters of college education? Did you teach yourself a particular skill and was hired for it or did you learn on the job?
You and your fancy degree has no sway over my years of expertise in the food services industry. P.S. Only deadbeats and criminals don't tip!
If you're a minority or woman who wants any kind of a salaried, corporate job, this is crap. No one's going to hire or promote you for your leadership or networking skills, or because you're a good fit socially; so you're going to need as many fancy pieces of paper as humanly possible.
All in all, a college degree is still the generally accepted qualifier that differentiates one person from another. It might take way too much money, way way too much planning, it might be too long and way too bloated a process. But its still an indicator that the person has discipline to complete a series of tasks. Got to filter out people somehow. If employers are looking into things like credit scores to gauge a person's worthiness, a college education is definitely still something considerable. Then it can become the level of university, can go by GPA, etc....its not the greatest filtering process. But there will always be a process of some sort I think...It really might be easier to eyeball someone soon as they walk in and judge solely by their mannerisms. Its part why the paper certification is there in the first place, to cut out some of the excess evaluation all that would take.
Agreed, but if you don't have a college degree you won't even be in the running. The college degree has become devalued since more and more people are going to school and more colleges (including those online) have sprung up. This just shifts the importance on where you go to school and post-graduate degrees. So while the value of a degree is devalued, you have to have one to even be in the game.
I think paying exorbitant amounts for a undergrad degree from a supposedly "good" college is stupid. Only a very small select group of schools might actually impact your future simply based on "name" - and most of those are due to networking opportunities, not the perception of a better education. It's a little more complicated at the grad-school level, but it's still generically wasteful, IMO, to spend obscenely larger amounts for a "supposedly" better school.
Back then it really wasn't hard. Me and my friends were big into computers in high school and by the time I entered the work force I had enough base knowledge by learning on my own to be a PC Tech/Desktop Support. I went to college as a music major, so school didn't help me one bit in my career. I've been really lucky. I was able to get some good experience in those early years so that I was able to land some solid jobs and move up the ladder. I've been at my current job for a little over 4 years now, and haven't been unemployed once since I started back in 99. As I said, I've been VERY fortunate.
College could be a TERRIBLE investment if you piss away $120k on some worthless liberal arts degree from some overpriced private school. It would take many years to come close to recouping that investment. Luckily Texas residents have two excellent public universities in Texas and Texas A&M (yes, I know it's rivalry week). I studied Electrical Engineering at UT for undergrad from 98-02 and spent ~$25k in tuition in fees total. What a bargain. My first job coming out of college paid me like $57k base salary back when I was 22.
This. Why in the hell would people spend so much money at a private school for some liberal arts degree? That's a waste of money.
This isn't really true - at the elite end of the scale, a degree from Middlebury or Williams or whatever is looked on pretty highly if you want to go on to graduate or professional school. Choice of major doesn't really matter that much. In addition, networking benefits and all that. I agree that people who pay lots of money at less highly-ranked private schools tend to be wasting their $$$ if they can go to a similar quality public insitution at a lower price.
I went to an excellent university, as did my parents and some of my siblings. I paid living expenses (through loans) which I would have had to do anywhere but my tuition was through a grant. My parents wanted me to go to college because we are in a social class that does that. My father had gone to Harvard for undergrad and lawschool, my mother had gone to one of the few women's colleges. They both had wonderful experiences that did not lead to much financial gain. My mother wanted me to have a prestigous career but wasn't concerned about my making any money at it. My father just wanted me to study whatever I wanted so I studied philosophy and afterwards went to culinary school. No, I don't make much money. So now I'm raising our four kids and they, too, are going the private school route. And regardless of the economy or their job prospects I want them to go to a top 20 school (preferably top 5 but I'll take what I can get). And I am willing to pay whatever the financial aid offices think is our share. If they come out of it with low paying careers that really is fine with me since that really isn't the point. I have to admit I would be a little disappointed if they chose NOT to get a liberal arts degree at a high ranking university. If they choose to go on to get a professional or graduate degree their chances of getting accepted to top ranking schools is considerably increased coming from a high ranking college. If they don't they will still have a well rounded education that will serve them well in every avenue of life. Additionally I think they social aspect is often underestimated. Yes, you make good friends in college and some of them may be more likely to be highly influential (hey, Obama taught at our school!) but even apart from that the truth is that you are "in" with the other intelligencia once you've gone to these schools. This makes a difference in business and social life. If you are more interested in climbing the economic ladder this might not be the wisest choice but if the intelligencia class is what you were raised in and most comfortable in then this is really the best way to go. It opens up a very different world to you and it is the world my kids are growing up in. I suppose my philosophy, as far as parenting is concerned, is to prepare my children for the life they will live. Spanish, for example, is usually the most practical foreign language choice but our kids are legally French and will be inheriting property in France so they are taking French. You can't get them ready for everything but you can make a reasonable guess as to what social, academic and other skills might suit them. I have some friends whose children will inherit tens of millions of dollars. Their concern is to raise their kids to be philanthropic and to understand the arts enough to want to support fine and perfoming arts. They will have financial managers (amoung all the other paid for help) so it is no wonder that they don't think their kids need to pursue the most lucrative path in college. And I agree with them on this point. But that said, I know that statistically our kids have a very high probability of getting accepted to top tier schools and doing very well there. I know what our financial resources should look like when they get out and that they probably won't have to worry about putting food on the table. And I know that they will have our support and not feel like they failed in some way if they don't make a certain amount. But kids who don't have that often are NOT well served by a liberal arts degree at an Ivy League. In many such cases their parents made huge sacrifices for their kids to go to these schools with the misunderstanding that the payoff was guaranteed to be financial. They banked their retirement on their kid's future success. Honestly, not everyone can afford a liberal arts education. You have to bank on additional expense afterwards in either going for another degree or starting a business or just making ends meet while you are finishing your novel. This is a degree that really belongs to a class of people that aren't trying to move up economically and not everyone has that freedom. After that long rambling response, my advice is to be very honest about what your expectations are for your children and to understand that not every mountain is worth climbing. For too long an Ivy League education has been marketed as the obvious aim for every child. You want your kid to go to the best ranked school they can get into, right? Wrong, as many here have noted. But I want to defend the education people get there as well because it IS an outstanding education and it does serve some people very well.
For someone like myself, I don't see any marginal benefit from attending a Middlebury or Williams over Texas or Texas A&M. I don't have rich parents so that was out of the question anyway. My experience has been if you do well in undergrad with a challenging degree, coupled with a few solid years of work experience, you should be able to get into some pretty strong graduate programs.
You could a dumb BS degree from from stanford, harvard, princton. etc. and you could get a good a job, and whether it is right or wrong will trump pretty much any degree from UT when going into consulting or investing position, or at least that is what the impression I got from interviews and stuff.
Well the Texas is somewhat of an anomaly due to its quality/price ratio in the public schools, and I'm not saying that it's a hindrance - I'm just saying that the elite liberal arts colleges aren't totally worthless, as they can get your foot in the door on name alone a lot of the time - provided you can foot the bill. They're not quite Harvard Yale but not that far off. Of course a lot of this effect is regional. Pomona is a top notch liberal arts college outside LA but it's not as well-known in New York as it would be in California... And you can say the opposite thing for a place like Wesleyan. Grad school admissions people though tend to know which liberal arts colleges are the wheat and which are the chaff.
I guess if you live someplace like Mississippi that doesn't have an adequate public university system you might consider going the private school route. I will say that it was interesting attending a few Superdays in NY that combined undergrad and grad interviews at the same time. Some of the undergrads were indeed from places like Fordham.
