$250,000 in student debt after 13 years...

If it doesn't guarantee immediate career path, they should be better offered as an associate's degree.
Then the guy can save his time and efforts without having to do master's degree.

In US, if you have 4 year bachelor's in CS from a top university, you can start making $100k per year at top tech companies. That's should be the focus of your life. You don't want to compromise .... if you need music education, do it for associate's ... if you need English education, do it as a minor. If you need history education, you can do it as minor.. but don't forget to get BS in CS and make $100k per year to pay debts, live decent life, and get married by age of 30.

 

i think we should remove liberal arts colleges too

heck, lets remove all private + for profit universities

every state should only have public funded colleges with a fee cap of $500/term

 

No, top liberal arts colleges offer CS degrees too.

The top liberal arts college CS degrees guarantee job positions at Facebook:
https://csci.williams.edu/

I would highly recommend people to try this out.

I'm at an IT company now... I just saw three other non-CS majors got fired.

 

I don't understand. A degree in Microbiology doesn't provide an immediate career path, but offering it as an Associates doesn't improve the degree. Meanwhile, Microbiologists win the Nobel Prize and make lasting contributions to society.

 

but do they make $100k per year to pay debts, live decent life, and get married by age of 30 ?!?!?

 

Ok, the situation you're talking about is for the rich people who can live without jobs.
I'm talking about average people who need to pay off the debts.
If you can live without jobs for a long time, then get a music degree. Try to get Grammy awards.
But more than 90% of people would still prefer to get high-paying jobs immediately after graduation.

 

(Pulls out lecture notes used in teaching about diversified economies and banana republics)

We talked previously about guns or butter. But, what would really happen if an economy only produced guns or butter? Let’s give the economy a little credit, and perhaps they have now decided to produce guns AND butter. But, what about bullets and butter knives?….

 

What if someone does not enjoy computer science? I mean, money can only take you so far in regards to happiness. What is the old saying? "If you love what you do, you never work a day in your life."

 

I fall somewhere in all that discussion. I majored in Sociology. No real career path. I was an Assistant manager in a mall store after I graduated. I went back and got a paralegal certificate and after a little time, somehow shifted to being an Administrative Assistant. Sociology isn’t really something you go get a job in. But, it checked the box to be an admin assistant… and finally a few decades later…. Got me in to an MBA program.
Not sure if it’s related, but after I enrolled, I got a decent pay increase and title change.

Definitely made some choices that did not help my career progression.

 

That’s true, but you can go a step beyond that. There are plenty of people who might love to major in CS or another STEM field, but they just aren’t cut out for it. Math is a gatekeeper for a lot of people who can’t pursue a STEM degree. A person who can’t pass college algebra or pre-calculus can’t just magically wake up and complete a degree that requires calculus, statistics, discrete math, and potentially a lot more math than that, because they want to work for Facebook and get married before 30.

 

That goes two ways:

(1) If you love what you do - it doesn't seem like work OR
(2) You never work a day in your life - because you can't get a job

Both happen.

 

Indeed. Mathematics is a tough subject. Factor in the applied usage of math, stats, etc. and a lot of folks are up a creek without a paddle. It is one thing to learn math and stats but a completely different one to learn how to use them to tell a story that is beneficial to an organization.

 

That 2nd one made me laugh a little because it is sadly true.

 

About what I said:

(1) If you love what you do - it doesn't seem like work OR
(2) You never work a day in your life - because you can't get a job

Both happen. And mysterious things happen with music degrees. I've seen music grads:

(1) Develop fine, well-paying performing / recording careers. They're the exception. And it's NEVER easy.

(2) Teach music in the school system - rise in the ranks, make a very comfortable living, retire early and well.

(3) Some, although very good musicians, have sporadic performing careers that don't sustain them or a family. They play a few gigs here and there -in dives, mostly - and for 40 hours a week they slave for not much money in a music store - selling instruments etc. to low-class people of my calibre. They do that into their sixties and hate every minute of it. On average, these are truly unhappy people. And it shows.

YMMV.

 

I have some experience in the Arts, and IMO the reason people don't get ahead with Arts degrees is because they haven't really studied what matters in getting an Arts degree, and that is....entrepreneurship. If you are going to pursue the Arts (with a capital "A") you need to have a career plan, a budget, and you need to know how business works and you need to know that most likely, you are going to be going into business for yourself - A very specialized business to be sure, and like all entrepreneurial ventures, there is no guarantee of success - but there are more pathways than ever available for those pursuits these days. Also, you need to know that you will most likely have to develop several income streams, and some of them may not be things you enjoy doing all the time, but they can be related to what you want to do. The key is to make sure you know what you want to get out of a particular job. IMO if you are majoring in something in the Arts, you should be minoring in business or entrepreneurship. Also, I'm willing to pay off what I personally borrowed. - but t would be great if the government decided to forgive some portion of loans to help people out. They do it all the time for businesses. I'd take a $10K reduction in what I owe. But if you have racked up 6 figures getting a college education outside of medicine or some other profession of similar rigor, IMO that sounds like a LOT of bad choices. :-(

 

I don't know where you got your information from but I majored in CJ at all degree levels, in addition to my MBA, and I am not struggling to pay my student loan or any other credit obligations. I paid my student debt throughout the pandemic even though I wasn't required to make payments. I am taking a 5k (cash financed) vacation to Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya in a few days. So, no, this CJ major isn't struggling.

 

I was a History major and I'm well, well, well in to 6 figures. Of course, I was before I went back to school, when I had no degree, so maybe that's not a fair statement. I have also worked in tech all of my life (software companies in varying verticals) in customer-facing roles.

History is actually a great major because of the amount of reading, writing, and processing of information you have to do; it can actually prepare you for quite a few things. I would not discount it at all.

 

This would be an ideal ASU CS grad:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-bullock-473378162

He has a BS in CS from ASU. He got a job at Uber as a software engineer right after graduation.
He could get 6 figure salary almost right after graduation.
He could do minor in history if he likes.. but I don't think he could make this work with a BS in History degree. Some BS in History degree holders make it as a software engineer too but their degrees would be seen as downgrading factor to their skills. If they properly finished a BS in CS, they could boost their salary much faster.. and they wouldn't need to look for excuses like 'coding bootcamp', 'edx coding certificates', etc

I highly recommend doing a BS in CS instead of BA in History if you want to get 100k salary software engineer job right after graduation.

 

History, Literature, Languages, etc. are taught in high school, and in more depth at University. @nomaduser Where will we get the next generation of teachers from, if the Universities pack up these degrees? Dude, packing up the humanities is beyond batsh*! crazy - the usual apologies to Batman, of course. Sets us back 2500+ years. Without people well-versed in humanities, there will be so much less humanity. Just mercenary code-trained, under-evolved individuals in daily combat with each other for the $ prize, most competing with their peers at what I consider evil companies, e.g. Meta, Amazon, Google and yes -- Uber.

Of course, any one of them could start their own Super-Evil Company! Ooo! I can hardly wait!

I don't feel the same way about ALL technical education, of course. It would be nice if people over here learned to make things again. Then we wouldn't have to send all our money to China. And a lot of people could have well-paying jobs here - who don't now. And they could probably learn to do those jobs without going into debt $100K or more.

 

I think back sometimes to an open letter to parents of prospective students from the then president of the Berklee College of Music, the jazz/rock/etc. oriented music school in Boston. "The ability to teach an instrument is a powerful form of career insurance," he wrote "—music teachers abound in every village and hamlet on the planet."