First, since I have a career already, I'm free of the pressure to go to school for career purposes and can focus on something I enjoy, which also provides immense value to what I'm doing every day (I chose philosophy, much more relevant and practical than I think many realize).
Second, I enjoy the experience and get quite a bit more depth from it than I would have in my 20's. It's a richer, more meaningful experience now that I'm older, have a strong sense of who I am, and am not put off in the slightest by naysayers or influenced by people's opinions of what I should or shouldn't be doing. I have more maturity now than at any other time in my life, and this has served me well in the sense of approaching topics with intellectual humility and just enjoying the process of knowing nothing to knowing a little. I do all the reading and then some, reading far and wide as well as doing deep analysis, writing all my notes, reviewing, and doing practice essays, and I enjoy every bit of it rather than seeing it as a chore.
So, some initial thoughts for you, hope they're helpful. The only advice I can give is to enjoy it, realize it's a wonderful opportunity, be structured and disciplined with your time, and use your hard-earned experience to your advantage.
You know what's relevant and interesting to you and what's not.
I'd rather have open ended assignments. Ones that give moral dilemmas, and challenge their solutions. Make me think about something In a perspective I haven't thought of before. That's a powerful tool.
But that's how academics works, the culture wants tests and assignments with check boxes.
As others have already asked, could you expand on this? Very interested.
Philosophy gives you a set of meta cognitive skills that help everywhere. It teaches you how to think. It shows you what class of problems are soluble, and which are things where we just have to accept tradeoffs. And it’s really focused, in a funny way, on economy: does your argument actually do something? Does this theory offer clarity and bring us closer to truth? If not, well, why are you wasting your breath on it? Philosophy teaches you to see that some avenues are fruitless or just kinda not worth the effort.
Also, non-practically, it shows you the full depth of wonder in the world. Wherever there is capacity for thinking to be done, philosophy says, you can elucidate something important to our human condition.
- Intelligently entertain various perspectives
- Effectively imagine "possible worlds" where positions may be held or refuted
- Formalize language and all of its "fuzzy" characteristics into clear positions
- Hypothesize generalizations and abstractions to map across domains
- Think from first principles and explore their logical conclusions in conceptual and foreign territories
These were my big takeaways from philosophy undergrad and I find them increasingly important in my various technical careers.
I don't think this crowd would get much out of it.
I started undergrad in my 30s, and also majored philosophy for similar reasons. It really is the most rigorous non-STEM undergrad degree you can get. And for people (like myself) who can’t pass calculus, but are still fairly intelligent, it can easily be parlayed into a more technical graduate program.
I also found that I could consistently get As in humanities courses with ~20-40 hours of work per quarter (the time to write 1-3 papers) once I picked up the skill of "writing like an academic", vs my CS courses which continued to be challenging and require a ton of effort to succeed in up until my graduation. My senior year, for example, I had some core-requirement course about theater -- I attended zero classes and did zero readings until I sat down to write the paper, and I got As with compliments from the professor on how well-written my papers were. YMMV.
She actually brought up this Harvard philosophy professor who had a story about keeping track of parantheses. I took advantage of the opportunity to show her the connections to Curry and from there to Lisp and the Little Schemer. She got it. She can reason, formally. That's important.
Perhaps things would be different for someone in their 40s, who has a wealth of real world experience to draw on, philosophy would be valuable. But for the average 18 year old kid, studying it seems to create a set of terrible habits that take years to undo before the student can become a properly integrated adult.
Sure, you can live on the bland essentials, and you cannot live on toppings alone, yet who doesn’t like a little… sauce with that?
She said that she did see ageism, mostly in the form of people just assuming that she'd be incompetent (she's not she was in the top 5% or something when she took her board exams). She said she struggled with the memorization aspect: some things are just easier when you're young but if you work hard you can do it. This may or may not apply to you but late nights doing work (in her case being OnCall at a hospital) became very hard for her. Her young classmates had a much easier time. The truth is that school does kind of assume you're young. It's possible to overcome it but it isn't easy.
Fwiw my mom is the happiest she's ever been and said she would do it all again.
After being diagnosed (32) I was told I could have gone to university had it been diagnosed at school. So when I had a secure enough job with enough money to try I did.
My experience of starting this later in life is that you are more focused, patient with yourself, and dedicated. It's been hard working a full time job, with kids, and other commitments but has been worth it for me.
My imposter syndrome has decreased, as my confidence in my abilities has increased.
I will finish it soon but now realise, for me personally, academia is not for me. I like practical useful stuff and with a few exceptions most of these academic courses aren't useful.
I did the B.S. and M.S. before I was 40, but went back later to do the Ph.D. in my 40s.
I did not have family support. My SO was totally against this. As an engineer, sysadmin, physicist, I feel like I have a problem solving mindset. It took a lot of problem solving and ignoring to get over the problem of no family support (I do not mean financial, I mean "hey, don't go do that, its a waste of time, what is it for, you are too old, etc, etc". Find out early on if people around you support this, and what mindset you will have if they do not.
Financial. Can you afford this? You figure it out.
Academic... As I have worked at three universities, I feel like this is probably the biggest advice or question I would ask: Are you of the academic / research mindset? I am assuming you are going into a tech / STEM field and not philosophy or the arts, so this can make or break you. Some people are 4.0 students and suck miserably at research. Some people can teach well, and do not do research well. Some people do research well and can not teach. This brings about two questions:
1) What is your goal after the Ph.D.? 2) Are you good at research? Most Ph.D. programs are going to have you do a pretty significant breadth of research to graduate.
My advice: What is your main objective? Does that coincide with getting a Ph.D.? Are you good at research? Do you have support for this (if you have a SO / Family / Partner), as that can make it doubly tough.
Finally, when you figure our your main objective be SURE your advisor KNOWS what you want as your goal. Most of them either think "you are going to finish and teach" or "you are going to finish and do research" or "you are going to finish and go get a job". The courses you take, and the amounts of research/papers/teaching you do will impact which path you take. Do not that that for granted. Tell your advisor "my goal is X". Remind them of this from time to time, as they will forget. You do not want to end up graduating, looking your advisor in the eye as they are telling you they have a job lined up for you and saying "but I really just want to go be a professor at a university" (which is what happened to me, and frankly, I am not a professor, I am a staff person that teaches when we are short professors, but I can not get a teaching job, as I have too few papers written).
Hope that helps some.
I paid out of pocket and it has financially been worth it. A lot of companies will pay for it, but I wasn't in that position. If a company pays for it they might want you to agree to work for them several years after you finish.
If you don't love learning and being in school, it's going to be a long unenjoyable slog. If you're only doing it for money or vanity, that may not be enough to carry you through the hundreds to thousands of hours of study and homework you will have to do.
You will encounter a lot of naysayers, as you have already seen in this thread. This includes family and friends.
You will also get better advice in a different forum. A sub reddit dedicated to your industry for instance?
If you wouldn’t mind - could you elaborate how it was instrumental in your career and how long it took?
It took about 3 years to complete the degree.
I did have a 4 decade career as a programmer, but who knows what might have happened if I had taken the time mid-career to do the doctorate.
Generally speaking, the professor's advice from 25 years ago is still solid: don't get a PhD unless you are interested in an academic career, research, teaching etc. Due to the prestige of such a career, it tends to have an oversupply of applicants - the majority of which will not get a commensurate payback for the efforts required by a proper PhD thesis. So they will either flunk / present a low effort thesis, or worse still, they will invest a few years into a good thesis but never develop their career and skills gained into a full academic job.
So getting a PhD for the sake of it might not be a good investment of your time and effort career-wise; If you want to do it for the intelectual challenge on a topic you are very interested in, that's always a suficient motivation.
Google hires people without PHD by truckloads too, if anything they hire more ppl without phds.
Some profs (usually younger!) have this attitude that if you come back to school you should be prepared to live just like the other students. They can have a bad attitude to you out of the gate, especially if you are financially more successful than them and have to occasionally make other things a higher priority. Unfortunately insecurity can be found anywhere. These people can be a real pain in the ass as a mature student and are best avoided.
So whatever you do, make damn sure your supervisor(s) want mature students! I am fortunate that mine are great - they love having me, and we've had frank conversations about how I will hand in A+ material every time, but sometimes I have adult responsibilities I have to deal with instead of making a class.
It's really nice not to be beholden to anyone else's funding. I pick my topics, I pick my thesis, I don't owe anyone anything there.
Students starting after 40 is actually fairly normal at the Native American colleges. Our TCU (tribal college or university) has a lot of almost independent work classes to support this. If anyone needs a suggestion to help single mothers, find instructors willing to teach remote / zoom classes starting a 9PM.
In terms of people talking about debt - I went to a decent state school, took one class a semester or much of it and paid as I went - so there was not much financial strain. I work in IT and am in a higher tax bracket after all. On the other side of finance, during interviews I can talk about my college experience if asked about it. Also Leetcode interviews and the like seems to be a test if I remember what I learned in college - dynamic programming, big O notation, how to implement a stack etc. So you pay in terms of time and money but you get paid back in terms of possibly greater opportunities.
Insofar as people talking about learning on your own - as far as I see, most self-taught people tend to have gaps in knowing more theoretical stuff like pushdown automata, or concurrent critical sections, or abstract syntax trees or Goedel numbers or second normal form or that kind of thing. You're supposed to spend at least three times as much time studying as in class, so if a Bachelors is four years, those three years are similar to self-study, minus things like the chance at the chance of questions during and after class and during office hours. So the only difference from self-study is not four years but one year, minus the benefits of classmates, professors and the rigor of a more theoretical curriculum than most self-taught people do, if they even know they should learn about things like the pumping lemma.
[1] https://minireference.com/static/excerpts/noBSmathphys_v5_pr... [2] https://minireference.com/static/excerpts/noBSLA_v2_preview....
The full books are 600pp and 700pp respectively (on small paper format 5.5"x8.5")
It's not just the hours of work to be done, the biggest challenge for me has been the pieces of work that need to be done on specific days at specific times, like one-off lectures, workshops, and so on, where I've had to say to my kids I can't take them places or play with them that day.
I've also had three years of not working due to looking after my children while my partner worked. That was incredibly rewarding and incredibly tiring. Now with them in childcare it's a great time for me to go back to university for a masters with the intention of finding a PhD place after that.
For me, the goal is to get more rewarding work. Personally, that means working for what I feel is a better goal that purely making money for a company owner. I plan to take a masters in Software Engineering and then use that skill to transfer to a subject in Earth Science (or similar) where I can use programming to fulfil research needs and hopefully continue in that vein for a rebooted career.
Luckily now I'm living in Norway means that a masters is free and as my partner works I can concentrate on study without needing to worry about money.
Advice from my thinking so far would be: - know what your aim is. Education for it's own sake is great but if you have a different goal in mind then consider whether higher education is the best way to get there. If you know other people in a position you'd like to be in, ask them what the current best route to get there is. - try and discuss with potential course supervisors in advance whether or not you will be accepted. With 20 years out of education, I've found it interesting to consider whether or not my industry skills will be valued as much as the school/university level education. I'm definitely not as sharp on lots of things but that experience does count for lots. - if you're behind on what current "feed in" courses teach fellow masters students, sit in on lectures and read the course material as much as possible so you're not behind when you start. - the academics I know love to talk about academia and are a great source of knowledge on the education routes that are open. Being an older student will probably mean you're better able to approach them and get this knowledge. Everyone I've spoken to has wanted to help so take advantage of this.
Good luck, hope you find the right route for you!
The lion's share of general "entry-level" opportunities for newly-minted technical masters/doctorates will struggle to value whatever experience you had before going to graduate school. This is less true for certain industry-specific positions, which is why identifying those positions before starting is a good idea.
If you're comfortable restarting your career as a junior researcher in your late 40s, be aware of the unusual place you'll occupy in the academic hierarchy.
I'm in a very similar situation as you and want to jump into grad school, but it looks like that's not possible w/o undergraduate degree.
Prior to the pandemic my partner and I were thinking of taking our family to Italy, I'd begun lining up a remote part-time job, and was looking at doing a masters in Italy at the university of Padua, one of the world's oldest universities, you can study in English and it's cheap.
You already know why that didn't happen.
I decided to start over with an undergraduate degree in biomedicine, because that's what I wanted to do. If you want to go straight to a masters, I wouldn't discount the possibility.
Here are some sites I found useful:
https://www.unipd.it/en/ https://www.unibo.it/en
https://www.mastersportal.com/ https://www.distancelearningportal.com/countries/
During the pandemic local universities that normally have large numbers of foreign students were desperate for new students, fees were lowered on a number of subjects and everything went online , and they got very loose about deadlines - everything was asynchronous, so I was do all my school work after hours and on weekends, and I used leave to take time off for exams - in Australia we have a minimum 4 weeks annual leave. I live outside Melbourne, which had the longest sustained lockdowns anywhere, maybe it's been surpassed now, officially there were ~260 days of lockdowns, things are only really starting to open up again now. I used this time to do the introductory science subjects that normally have long in-person lab sessions. Classes are still only partially back on campus, and will probably remain mostly asynchronous forever. So that's how I have been able to study and work. As to how I made the transition, I applied for jobs, but it's was through word of mouth that I got to speak to the biomed start up I'm now working for. I think it was pretty novel for them to meet someone who had a strong software background, and was interested and contributing to a discussion about physiology so we hit it off and now I'm working with them full-time, and more productive and satisfied with work than I been for, well ever actually.
It’s wonderful to have someone listening because of a conscious decision rather than just following the obvious next step. Interact with your professor, ask questions, I’d hope most will try to be supportive, especially when you’re their age or even older. Best of luck to everyone doing this, it’s amazing.
Context: moving to a new city with my wife and dog for a 1 year masters.
First of all, I absolutely loved it, particularly the course and the study. Getting up every morning with the main goal being learning is magnificent. My main piece of advice is that this is (in my experience) an excellent thing to do.
I've taken a whole new and highly satisfying path with my work since. All in all it's been one of my better life choices.
I was initially worried I'd struggle to keep up with my peers, based on the assumption they'd be more into the academic mindset, brighter and more energetic. Quite the opposite, I was pretty much top of my class.
I found I was able to use a lot of unexpected stuff from my career, and that treating it like a 9 to 5 made it easy to organise my work and get through the material.
You'll find some frustrations. I particularly hated the rigid course structure, and didn't see why I had to put up with modules I found irrelevant to my learning goals. YMMV depending on your course, but it's worth really kicking the tire on the non-optional stuff.
My favourite courses were hands down the optional stuff I was taking from PhD programs and other departments. My core stuff sucked for the most part.
It was also a little tough socially. I had course mates I really liked and respected, but most were in their twenties. I'm a happily married, mostly sober guy. We all had a very different idea of what a good time looks like. Probably different on a PhD program.
The lecturers will be your age or younger. I had a few good nights hanging out with them, but that was rare.
All in all, I wasn't that bothered with the social life because I was far too into the study to notice most of the time, but my wife (who was working remotely) found it hard.
I hope you go for it. It was an amazing experience for me.
I was a lecturer of CS, and the (very rare) older students were the most interesting to interact with.
EDIT: I'm married and have kids, which add some unavoidable appointment clashes. But I'm able to manage them mostly studying either at 5:00 or after 21:00...
In the past twelve years or so, I have supervised about fifteen master’s and Ph.D. students, and I have served on committees for maybe two dozen more. The fields have been linguistics, language education, lexicography, translation studies, etc. Most of the students have been in their twenties, but some have been in their forties or older. One of my students who finished his Ph.D. successfully earlier this year is a year older than me.
Overall, the older students who were admitted to our programs have been more successful at sticking with their studies and eventually finishing. Younger students seem more likely to hit roadblocks in their graduate studies: they might become disillusioned with academia or the prospect of an academic career, or marriage and childbirth might make them need to focus on supporting their family. While life events can interfere with older students’ studies, too—several of my students had to take breaks for a while to take care of an aging parent—overall the older ones seem to have been better able to balance their studies with their personal lives.
The life and work experience that the older students bring with them is, overall, a plus both for them and for the younger students they interact with. It often takes time, though, for older students to learn how to think more abstractly and objectively about issues they dealt in the workplace. Often their motivation for graduate study is to study some practical problem they dealt with at work, and they often think that they already know the solution. Getting them to think about the issue as a researcher and to realize that their research should contribute not only practical solutions but also deeper theoretical insights has sometimes been a challenge for me. But, overall, the older students have been quite successful, and I have enjoyed working with them.
In my case, I was good at software and had opted for masters in business. In my free time I explored more on that area while on campus like - hacking groups, startup weekends, inter university competitions (Princeton, Penn, CUNY) and such. By the end of my masters I was able to start my own startup and we got picked by Techstars.
PhD's I'm not sure. Although, I would love to explore it yet again, perhaps in my 50's :)
To give you good advice, it would be helpful to know where you are in your life: What country or region are you looking to do a MS or PhD in? Expectations for what you have to accomplish vary geographically. Are you financially supporting others? Are you independently wealthy? Why do you want to do a PhD or MS? For a PhD, what is your career objective (tenure-track professorship, teaching professorship, researcher in industry, etc.) An MS is often just a bunch of classes over about two years, whereas a PhD involves about four more years (in the USA) where you establish yourself as being capable of conducting and communicating independent research.
Myself and many of my peers treated the PhD program a bit like being in a monastery: you are taking a vow of poverty and there is little time for much more than your research once you complete your coursework. A PhD program will give you a modest stipend, but this is rare for MS programs. I've seen it done, but it is extremely hard to complete a PhD when also raising young children. I worked 60+ hour weeks most of the time, and often a lot more than that around deadlines. Now that I have a young child, it is hard to imagine working that way, unless my partner was almost entirely responsible for childcare, but that's going to be hard to do with the stipends given in the USA.
Keep in mind, just getting into a PhD program is challenging. In computer science in the USA, top-50 programs typically expect you to already have some experience in conducting research, as evidenced through having authored one or more peer-reviewed publications.
Also I wouldn't even consider doing it without a proper full-time wage as part of the deal, so you can just concentrate without having to worry about other work etc.
I had tried to do a PhD when I was younger, but financially it was too hard. Now I'm senior enough that I can live off consulting gigs that aren't full time.
Your partner's support is the most important. Second most important is to have something that you want to research --- if you have spent most of your career doing software development, research that, because you already have some hypotheses about practices that work and don't work. In my case I had already worked out most of what I wanted to write about long before I started.
Further on the plus side, it's only ~$6400 for the entire degree and you can take just one course at a time.
I keep circling back to the premise that I want to do a graduate degree in Philosophy or maybe History. Something that really interests me, rather than an MBA or a STEM degree (undergrad is STEM).
Looking forward to seeing the comments here.
Began my introduction to academia as an undergraduate at 36 years old I started my masters degree when I was 40 for a further 2 years. I am now 64 years old.
The main contributor of a successful adult education is life experience, something you do not have when you are 20 years old starting out as an undergraduate. You cannot buy or learn from any tomes about life experience. It must be a lived experience.
I found I had a focused commitment and an enthusiasm for the subject I studied.
A PhD is philosophising in your choice of subject, whether that be the sciences or in my case psychotherapy, and not a post graduate degree in philosophy.
I'll probably take some Physics and Math courses to reach a solid understanding of General Relativity after this one.
I'm more interested in learning things I'm interested in instead of pursuing a degree. Degrees IMHO mean very little (I already got a Master's anyway) while knowledge is more important. To obtain a degree one have to take many courses that are deviant from the objective, which is a huge waste of time and money, neither is abundant.
2 years later: finally finished, and built a nice network of codevelopers and industry professionals. I'm 43 this year, and a few others were my age or older. I submitted a week early due to summer holidays, and still got a distinction. (That doesn't matter to me, though, as the real proof in the pudding would be whether my games will sell or not.)
I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it, and built strong friendships along the way, and even sent the staff a crate of cider, because they're so awesome.
My motivation to stick around and do the work was very strong, as I really do want to phase out webdev and do more gamedev. It's sooo much more creative and suited to me as an individual. If I have to sit in a meeting where someone bikesheds how to connect a database to a website one more time, I'm going to scream, so it had to happen.
My partner was onboard with it, and I could afford to (as a contractor) take the odd day off to do more masters work, which really helped, as it was part time at 20 hours per week.
If you subscribe to my RSS feed, I'll be writing a post mortem on the programme soon: https://juanuys.com
My main advice is to do it for you, and really be sure you'll have time and passion for it throughout. A few of my cohort realised that it took too much time, or they didn't like the critical reflection element of some of the modules, and gave up. So, also check exactly what the modules entail, what needs to be delivered, etc. E.g. some of the younger students were disappointed that they weren't going to be "taught" Unreal Engine , for instance, but rather had to maintain a blog and write about their own learnings (as is the nature with master of arts, as opposed to science).
Obvious advice from me: if you can afford it and want to go back to school, go for it! I would take some care in choosing a field with good future employment prospects. Good luck.
School – in all of its forms – has different rhythms, patterns, and timing than most work Be sure you can work together to rebalance your lives.
My kids were 5 y/o and 2 y/o when I started.
I'm 52 now and just started a job that has tuition reimbursement. I was (am) all excited about getting another MS but right now not sure. The soonest I would start would be next August, I want to get my feet under me at the new job.
If you have the means and determination I say go for it.
If you already have a successful career in a non-credential field it’s unlikely getting a vanity credential like a taught Master’s will do much for you, unless it’s a finishing school proof of class habitus like an MBA. A Ph.D. like an MBA is good for changing fields and perhaps social class entirely but it’s unlikely to pay off in monetary terms.
I think students with experience are great for courses, and applications from these sorts of candidates look great amongst piles of identikit young over achievers.
https://www.london.ac.uk/courses/international_type_of_study...
I went through one myself and am currently working on my PhD. If you have a relevant career or just come off as pretty mature a master's program will be happy to have you even if there were issues in your undergrad, but very few institutions worth going to will admit you without a bachelor's of any kind and the circumstances would have to be something truly remarkable.
Advice: 1. Get buy-in from your spouse (if you have one) before starting. 2. If you need an entrance exam (e.g., GMAT, GRE, etc...) consider applying for an exception from admissions. (I wrote a letter explaining how my practical work/life experience qualified and it worked.)
I'm allowed up to 5 years to finish, but I'm cramming it in to 2.5 years altogether. I could take fewer modules and spin it out, but I don't want to be studying forever. The workload this last 6 months has been insane. If I'd had kids or had had to do any real work in my day job there's no way I'd have managed. The last 3 months especially have just involved pretty much constant studying, coursework and revising.
While they pitched the course as being flexible, the reality is there's limited flexibility once you've started a module with my uni. I asked whether I could postpone one of my 3 pieces of coursework by extending one module by 3 months and was told no. The online support from the university has been, frankly, shit. Any questions beyond the most basic (such as being able to see high-scoring past exam submissions to try to improve my marks) were met with delays of several months. I've had multiple instances where my questions have only been answered after contacting the formal complaints team. However, support from tutors/teaching assistants has been good, although I've rarely needed to contact them.
So my advice is to be clear about how much time you're willing to give to studying, what your motivation is, and to do your research on how good any support is likely to be. Related to the first point is how much of an impact you mind it taking on your social life.
In my case, studying online means I won't build any kind of network, which is one of the most touted benefits of an in-person MBA. Still, it's costing me £20k all in. Full-time for 2 years isn't really an option since it'd cost me so much in lost income, so I'll have to build a network later.
Having said all that, as a senior developer, I've found the MBA to be very interesting. I've tried starting multiple side projects in the past and haven't really got anywhere. I now have a much greater understanding of business and am confident that my odds of being able to start a successful business have massively improved. It's helped me clarify my life goals, understand the world more, will make me a better investor and open the doors to more interesting work if I decide not to start my own business. The combination of top-tier technical skills and an MBA will inevitably be powerful and give me more options. I'm looking forward to it all being over this time next year though.
- Pick a school based on what learning management system they use. All your coursework is going to be done on these systems, so you should think about which one your prospective school uses. Canvas and Moodle seem to be well-liked, Blackboard is in the middle, D2L Brightspace sucks. At least, that seems to be the general consensus. [1] Other questions might revolve around whether your school actually keeps their solution up to date. I think that this is possibly important enough to be a deal breaker if your school's LMS solution sucks.
- If you are at all good with computers, do asynchronous classes online. Don't mess with in-person learning or virtual time scheduled lectures unless you're trying to do a prestigious program or something involving laboratory work. Online is going to be cheaper and the whole "fall asleep during lectures" model of learning sucks. You're probably still working so you want flexibility on your time.
- Closely inspect your prospective programs' curriculum. How many options do they have for electives and specializations? What are the course schedules like?
- Consider whether you actually want/need school for anything. My employer won't notice or care that I am getting my master's degree, and I'm going to guess yours won't, either. It's for my own knowledge and personal enjoyment.
- Obviously don't mess with unaccredited/poorly accredited programs and for-profit schools. For online schools I mostly considered long-established state schools that had a good history of running online programs. Other than that, I didn't really consider ranking or prestige.
- School is very easy for adults. It's all about showing up and putting in effort. I got terrible grades in undergraduate with all the distractions of young adulthood, the masters has been comparatively easy.
- !!! Very Important !!!: Along with the above, do you actually need or want school in the form of a full degree program? It's a commitment once you get into it and it's usually expensive. Lots of ways to learn these days.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/ik76kq/whats_yo...
If someone's trying to change fields into one that requires a credential (I was recently looking into a pivot into becoming a psychologist or a counselor for someone), it doesn't really make any difference if the material could be learned another way, even if it could be learned better that way.
If you need credentials then somebody needs to care about those credentials which means that you will be someone's employee. You will be stuck on what MJ DeMarco calls the slow lane. Even more so if you get into debt because of it. Howerver, I think big discoveries, money or writing a bestselling book do not care about your credentials. You can achieve higher education and big success on your own.
To me it smells like a vanity play, unless you’re doing it so you can get another 100k per year.
And yes, I can hear the people saying education is always a good thing to have.
But it reminds me of so many friends who have jobs less than 100k per year in the USA and go to take a masters degree. In almost every case, the higher degree did not change the outcomes they wanted in their life. They ended up with debt in their 40’s.
In almost every case it was a waste of time for the person. Imagine you’re 45 years old and you take 2 years to take this degree. The cost is just not worth it.
The world is moving to a place where degrees are no longer worth what they were in almost every profession (barring medicine, law, etc).
Don’t do it.
The one thing I do agree with there is that education is overpriced in America. As a European, I'd go as far as to say it's exploitative.
That OP is considering suggests the cost, where ever they are, is at least roughly within their means.
Hehe, it’s vanity unless you’re only doing it for money? This is twisted! ;)
> The world is moving to a place where degrees are no longer worth what they were in almost every profession
Do you have any stats or data to back this up? This is a common trope here and elsewhere (ala “Joe the Plumber”), but it seems to be largely not true AFAICT. The St. Louis Fed recently published a paper [1] arguing degree holders are saving less over time. The problem is, it was misleading because savings was measured relative to income (they’re suggesting that someone with $100k salary and $1M in savings is better off that someone with a $200k salary and $1.9M in savings.) And in the paper they demonstrated conclusively that in the US, 4-year degree holders earn on average 2x what non-degree-holders earn. And advanced degree holders (master’s, PhD, doctors, lawyers) earn on average 3x what non-degree holders earn (and 50% more than bachelors). Three times! This data isn’t a statistical sampling, BTW, the Fed has data on all US citizens.
As someone who’s generally in favor of education for education’s sake, I was blown away by how high the income premium of degrees is, I thought the bachelor’s degree might be worth something like 15% extra income, maybe. 2x and 3x averages are simply freaking enormous, and TBH a bit concerning how high they are. It’s hard to justify numbers that large, similar to what’s happened to CEO pay in the US. But with this in mind, it’s easy to see why parents push their kids to university, and why the costs have been going up and up and up.
So based on the Fed’s data, it seems like your summary here could be the opposite of good advice? Shouldn’t people know if having a degree generally enables a different lifestyle? I don’t doubt your friends’ experience; it is possible your anecdotal sampling doesn’t match this data. Averages are averages, and degrees definitely do not guarantee any specific income for any specific person. But the part your argument completely fails to address is the credentialism of advanced degrees - the number of jobs not available to anyone without one. The research teams in large corps for example are generally PhDs, it’s very hard to get in otherwise.
https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/revie...
Actually... that report leans very heavily on the Survey of Consumer Finances [0], which is absolutely a sampling (latest iteration was 6500 families out of the 120 million households in the US).
Per page 3 of the report: "We use the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), which covers family heads born throughout the twentieth century, to determine whether the economic and financial benefits of obtaining a postsecondary degree have changed over time."
I got a PhD in CS around 40. It opened up some job opportunities in software development that greatly improved my career.
