perfidy

BA Bates College ‘88
MBA University of Southern California ‘94

Was it worth it? Damned if I know. Given the debt I had to pay off over the last 10 years for that second degree, it certainly has not been worth it yet. I have a family I actually like spending time with occasionally so I have been unwilling to commit to the road warrior consultant lifestyle that earns the MBA’s the big money.

Not that we are hurting but… If I had gone to Assabet Valley Regional Technical High School and studied plumbing or carpentry or some other useful trade, I would probably be far better off financially at this point.

I spent about three years in college between 1987 and 1996. I never got a degree of any sort, not even one of those cute associate degrees. I ended up with thousands of dollars of debt and no credentials to show for it. I had the same expectations forced on me, in much the same way. College was for the winners, and only the stoners and retards went to the voke. In the words of the old negro spiritual,

"Fifty thou a year will buy a lot of beer/My future's so bright, I gotta wear shades."

Was it worth it? What did I get out of it? I didn't get fifty thou a year, and I didn't even need clip-on sunshades.

On the negative side, there is that matter of thousands of dollars of debt. Also, permanent guilt for not having completed a degree. A sense of, not exactly - but more like than not - of failure. Exposure to postmodernist thought, which even now, a decade later, still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

On the positive side, I met my wife and one of my dearest friends at college; plus a lot of other good people that I still keep in touch with. In my last bout of college attending, I got to help run a coffee shop and play a truly sick amount of Axis and Allies. I had one truly fantastic professor who exposed me to knowledge I would likely not have sought out on my own - but that has been of great value to me since. In other classes, I studied things I might have read on my own, but in any event less thoroughly. College also introduced me to alcohol; at once the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems. I suppose that last should also be noted in the "cons" section.

Except for one semester, I did not take anything like full advantage of the opportunities presented by being installed in a responsibility-free academic environment, except in the negative sense of not taking any responsibility. That one semester was one of the best three months of my life, until it was ruined when I met Johno in the last three weeks.

I have managed to build for myself a moderately successful career as a technical writer. The lack of a degree has not (noticeably) hindered my relentless drive toward higher pay and a modicum of respect. That I became a techwriter is at once accident and providence, but the real motivating factor was the fact that I got married. The addition of real (and contractual) responsibilities to someone else forced me to make at least minimal use of my talents as they were.

I think if I were to go back to school now, my experience would be more like that one semester. I would be there to learn, and learn thoroughly. The only people with degrees that I envy are those who actually made use of their time and became stupendously learned about something. I am moderately learned about a fair number of things, and fairly learned about a couple of things, but I have never achieved what I would consider excellence in any one area. That's something I would like to do before I die.
For my son, I don't know that I would recommend college across the board. If you just want to make a good living and have time to pursue your interests and raise a family, there are much easier, better and cheaper ways to get a career than college. Plumbing being one of the best. In the near future, network troubleshooting will become a lot like plumbing, and be less messy and at least as well paying. A few credits worth of training will get you started on a relatively high paying, and even moderately high-status career.

College only makes sense if you have a real goal that only college can help you attain. Like for example, being a history professor, or anything in the sciences, or medicine.

For anything else, there are better ways to achieve your goals than college. The military is a good way to achieve credibility, free education credits and useful life experience. Hell, working a shit job for a few years and spending all your income on drinking will do the same at least in terms of life experience, and in certain circles, credibility as well. College is a bad place to try and figure out what you want to be. One, because there are so many options. Two, because there are so many temptations. Three, because it costs your parents, and eventually you, a assload of money. Four, because you're in thrall to the demands and faddish bizarre theories of people who have had no contact with reality in decades.

Right now, I am very nearly priced out of my own career. If I don't move into something else, I will be essentially unable to get a new job at any more money than I make now, except for a token increase for inflation. So that's what I'm trying (with a bit of success so far) to do. Happily, the career I'm trying to move into – requirements analyst – is similar enough to a technical writer that this is feasible. If it weren't I would have to be thinking seriously about retraining, and possibly taking a step backwards as well as sideways so that I could move forward in the future. Perhaps that's what you need to do. Either that, or start being a little more "creative" in how you write your resume, and what kind of jobs you apply to. Find the people to whom a master's degree is valuable, or else find something else to focus on. Like highway robbery, or maybe barratry. Obviously, that's exceedingly general advice, but I can provide more concrete examples if you want.

BA Kent '83
MBA Cleveland State '02
DBA Cleveland State '09 (or thereabouts)

Definitely worth it, but more in the indirect than the direct return-on-investment sense.

In all seriousness, GeekLethal: Find something you really enjoy and see whether you can make a business of it, or find something you can make a business of and see whether you enjoy it. The word of the day is entrepreneurship.

GL, we've talked at length about this offlist, but my short answer is:
Worth it if only for the ensmartening that it did for me. Not monetarily useful, but I know a lot about a lot of stuff and that pleases the Johno.

BA University of Northern Colorado '93
Sociology

I have done nothing with my degree. My first post-graduate job was pizza driver. This was followed by 7-Eleven manager, then grocery store department manager. From there I floated for a few years, temping, lying to myself about what I wanted, and generally feeling lost. Now I'm a warehouse manager for a supplier in the construction industry. It's a job I hate but it's paying me as well as retail management did. My goal: become a published and self-sufficient writer. And win Powerball.

I met my wife in college, and made some friends. Beyond that, I don't feel I gained anything useful from my time there. My wife, with her BA in Music, is working as a booking technician for a county jail. The bottom line is that we don't feel college was a benefit to us. To that end, we've established UGMAs for our children; if they WANT to go to college, they can use that money. If they want to do something else, it's not earmarked only for college. Example: my oldest son wants to be a construction foreman and a race car driver, and my daughter wants to be a deputy (and a doctor, and a scuba diver, and an opera singer). None of these require college.

G:

As a mild twist on what Johno says, there's two types of higher education (three, if you count the rarer one where the first two happily intersect) - the ones that make you smarter and the ones that make you more marketable.

The benefit from each is distinctly different, but they cost about the same. As one of my many kid sisters pointed out, BA, Psychology in hand, "Damn, I wish I'd thought this out completely, realizing a BA in this isn't worth a bucket of warm spit in the market", but her words belie her actual thought on the matter - she's happy she did it, while completely unwilling to lever up to go get an MA.

In her case, she was in her third year before she realized she'd need some serious rationalization to justify the time and money she'd spent, knowing she wasn't going to grad school. However she reached the point, she's comfortable it wasn't ultimately a waste of time, even though it can't be justified in economic, career terms.

I'm somewhat like B in this regard - I started, knew what my major was going to be (MechE), deferred all the "force-fed" electives I could in my first two years and replaced them with "hard science" classes in my major, then ran out of money, unwilling to be seriously debt-ridden. Entered the business world, got fully utilized and moderately successful. When I got a chance to hop onto a slower hampster wheel, I took some time off, completing a B.S., although in business, not ME, while doubling up on classes and focusing completely on each of them, since the whims of my youth were (largely) behind me, I was spending real money on it, and it was all refinement of stuff I'd already been doing professionally.

Would I have done things differently? In retrospect, the only way to look at it, well, that's still a silly question, but no, I probably wouldn't have. While I think it's highly situationally specific, things have worked out just fine for me so far. But (as I said in our Ministerial sidebar on the matter), I'm old enough to be your way-older brother, and your story's not yet fully written, let alone ready to be written off.

Be happy with the prodigious smart you've already got (not all of which came from college), because I'm under the impression it was worth it. Deal with the economics separately, by expanding your field of view. Your opportunities are not limited by your degrees.

p.s. B: "Negro spiritual"? Is that who Timbuk 3 stole that song from?

I never got a degree, although I had enough credits for four different majors (never bothered with the electives or general studies courses). Went to night school for most of my military career, but found I really didn't need the degree because I had years of experience in my field, thanks to Uncle Sam.

Despite the Vietnam-era GI Bill, I was still forking over significant chunks of my pay to take those classes, not to mention "family" time.

Lately I've been thinking about going back to school in a serious way. I mean, seriously thinking about taking classes and being serious about it. Since I'd be doing this on my dime and on my time, I'm carefully considering options and revising plans. At some point I'll be ready, and then I'm doing it.

Let me tell you my experience with the question of whether higher ed was a good idea.

My bestest pal J never finished high school.

You already know where this is going, right?

He's not at all limited mentally in any way. He just didn't like it. And he had quite significant family troubles to contend with, and school fell by the wayside and he eventually dropped out.

He spent about 10 years drifting from crummy job to crummy job. In the same era, I was military and an undergrad, so was basically in the same boat.

But he is smart with all aspects of computers. He taught it to himself, because it was interesting to him, and largely through trial and error on his own machines.

He landed a job in networking at [Big Public Company] and, flush with excitement, divulged his starting salary. It was half again what I make now, and this was 5-6 years ago.

But it was soon after that when he asked me the question I asked all of you:

"Knowing how it would turn out, would you have gone to college?"

Grad school, no fucking way. My biggest motivator for that was, ultimately, personal. For the challenge of it. I told myself and other people it was for other reasons but that's really why, I think.

Undergrad? Probably not. I mean, if I knew with surety that this is where I'd end up? Nuh uh.

And I told him as much. I mean, I sat there and told this man that everything we'd been taught was 180 degrees fucking wrong, and here was the living proof: the high school drop out had the high paying gig; the educated dean's list guy had dick. And in the meantime, his salary explodes and mine is limp.

And there's another angle here, too. With a youngster upon whom to impress all my biases and hopes, what message will I send to him about education? The one I feel like I'm supposed to impart is the one I grew up with, which I've demonstrated ad nauseum as largely false. Yet, it seems irresponsible to tell him, "College? Eh, don't bother. That's for liberal sissies and whiners who can't get a decent job. Go get your CDL", howevermuch I believe that to be the best advice I can give.

Well, I think the advice I'm going to give my future kids is as follows:

- Go to college, but either figure out why by the end of year two, or make sure you take a few basic business courses as electives. A psych degree is nice; a psych degree with basic finance and management skills is nicer.
- Career counselors suck; use them anyway.
- Network, network, network. Glad-handle. It's who you know, more than what you know. (Personally I've never gotten a salaried job where I didn't know someone on the inside first. Never.)
- Go to grad school, but you better damn well know why and think through the possible outcomes first.
- Read as many books as you can, in school or not.
- Plumbers make good money.

Career counseling. That's actually the crux of the problem for me. Not that have always made the canniest use of my time, but the one biggest beef I have with my graduate schooling is that the department made little to no attempt to guide our thoughts as to what we intended to do with our expensive degrees.

Well, in the beginning of the second semester, there was the one bitter guy who told us all we had a snowball's chance in hell of becoming professors. Which turned out to be good advice but not as, erm, constructive as might be hoped.

But I'm a little bewildered as to why this was not the case. A flotilla of smart MAs from this particular program going out into the world armed with good ideas about what you can do with your degree (ideas gleaned from people who've been around a while and know the terrain), who then can focus their time on finding a place in one of those fields and then succeeding, would seem to be a path to glory for said department. A more sure path in any case than relying on all of us who are damn secretaries, security guards, substitute teachers, and coffeeshop managers (respectable jobs all, but hardly requiring a Masters') to bring home the glory, renown, and massive piles of development money that would seem to be the desired outcome for the school.

J,
I never verbalized it quite this way, but your comments bring that home pretty effectively: our illustrious department, which exists largely to perpetuate itself through training grad students, spent alot of time trying to talk us out of being grad students.

Not so much time on the "So you've studied history and think you're smart, now what?" class.

I think the key advice for juniors - yours, mine, and Johno's whenever they might appear - is that college and knowledge may rhyme, but they're not the same thing.

Aside from that one semester where I was actually paying serious attention, college never taught me anything I either didn't know, or couldn't have easily picked up from reading a few books. I am an autodidact. I read compulsively. In my early twenties, as a college drop out, I went to a faculty party at Kenyon College with my Dad (big time ph.d historian) and his friend, a history prof there at the college. At the end of the party, several of the professors asked my Dad's friend if I was the new history prof the college had just hired.

That's cause I read a lot of history. I didn't need college for that. What college can do, if you're willing to put in the work, is allow you to go past even that. As Johno might say, serious ensmartening. By focused study, and discussions with others who are studying the same thing, you can get more out of the reading and thinking.

That's all cool. But have a reason for it. College is good, but it isn't necessary for happiness or even a big salary.

Well, here's a comparison of the lives of some people we went to college with.

E - I'm not sure if he ever finished his computers degree, but now he works for a pittance doing tech support in a job with no promotion prospects. He's working on additional certifications to hopefully escape that place.

B - E's wife. She has some sort of business degree, and now works for the state Dept of Education as a secretary, by far outstripping her husband's earnings. It kills me that you need a degree to be a secretary now.

D - A good friend with a degree in marketing. She works for a park system, scheduling parties and classes around the buildings there. Again, general secretarial work.

Other E - Has a masters in history and some teaching experience. There aren't any positions availalable for a history professor, so he's working at a local casino. He's probably still making decent money, just not as much as he could be and not doing what he wants to do.

Myself - I only went for 3 semesters. The first two, I blew in the classic college ways, though I did make some great friends and meet my husband. The last semester, I really learned a lot, but then I got married, and my husband joined the military. There were no good schools in Hawaii (his first duty station) where I wouldn't lose most of my credits going in and then lose the new credits when I left, so I never went back. We've moved too much for me to finish school (radiology requires too many labs for online education). I hope to go back in a couple of years, now that we are settling down.

My husband - Went to college for 3 years, but due to indecision never earned enough credits for a degree. Then he joined the miltary for nearly 8 years. Now that he's out, his experience there in addition to his computers background (one of his many choices in school) have earned him a $50,000 starting salary at a good company. Realistically, this took as long as or longer than college. The difference is that he was paid for his time, instead of paying someone to teach him. The military is a hard road, though, and I don't recommend it for everyone.

In contrast, I can think of at least one person my husband went to high school with who didn't go to college and is doing extremely well. He started working in computers while still in high school, and is now starting his own company, owns 2 Jaguars, and sells his own paintings on the side. Most of the people I went to school with are doing pretty well for themselves, not making a truely large amount of money, but working vocational jobs and living pretty comfortably.

In my own case, I'm glad I went to college, because I wouldn't trade those experiences for anything. Though I still have some guilt about the money my parents spent on me. Financially, however, to have seen some of my friends work so hard to get their degrees only to find nothing in their fields is really staggering. So, unless you're determined to do something medical (where they always have openings) or something that requires serious specialization, you can get just as far with a few classes in your chosen area and some work experience as you can with a degree - sometimes farther. Oh, and as my husband found out, in computers, certifications are everything, worth far more than a degree.