America's Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor's Degree

This article mainly seems to focus on the outcome for the bottom tier of high school students going to college. Top tier students may do much better.<p>A top student who goes to a top law, med, or business school is probably getting a trememdous ROI on education.<p>Interestingly, neither category describes the startup crowd. Hackers represents an unusual group - people who are able to study the hardest subjects in college and grad school, but who choose to work in such an unregulated and loose culture that nobody strictly needs a degree at all.<p>Law or Medicine require a grad degree - and as a result, the grad degree is very valuable (it's a gateway into the cartel that controls these services). Nursing also requires a degree.<p>Programming doesn't require a degree, but can't be done in any innovative way by someone who isn't smart enough to get a math/science/or engineering degree. It leads to an interesting kind of distain for formal education in a group that often has impressive formal credentials.

This article boggles my mind. If you don't think the degree is worth the money then don't go to college. The worst thing that can happen is schools start teaching students to pass some government mandated generic career readiness test.

Having read the article, I think the problem isn't that having a college degree is overrated, just that some people aren't cut out for school, and that this is okay, because there are plenty of good jobs that don't (or shouldn't) require a college education.<p>What boggles my mind is the guy in the article who spent eight years and over a hundred grand, all to end up forty-five units (three semesters) short of a degree? I can understand taking eight years -- that's how long it took me to finish up both of my degrees, because I worked, so that I could finish school with no debt.<p>Mr. Sob Story wasn't going to college. He partied for eight years, washed out, and now wishes he had made better use of his time. Rather than admitting this and learning from it, he makes the university system the scapegoat for his own lack of self-discipline.

It was an easy choice for me. I got <i>paid</i> to go to college. In Georgia, the HOPE scholarship paid for 100% of my tuition and fees, and the Pell grant paid for a decent portion of my living costs.<p>That said, education is one of the most valuable things in the world. If you're thinking of it as a risk/reward based on how much you pay versus how much you could earn, you're doing it wrong.

In IT, I've found that the degree only has any influence on your first job. After that, future employers only care about your work history - no one cares anymore about your degree, your GPA, or the school. So if instead of going to college, you can find an employer who's willing to hire a high school grad, you may be 4 years (and many $$$) ahead of the game.<p>Does anyone know if this is the case in other industries? Does the degree make a difference to a prospective accounting clerk if she already has 5 years of work experience?