The M.S. Degree vs. Everything Else? 174
salad_fingers writes "It has been said that the Bachelor's Degree is the new High School Diploma: everybody has one. It is taking a greater investment of time, money and effort on behalf of the individual to give oneself that needed edge in the professional world. I have noticed that in technical fields, specifically engineering, employees are flocking in droves to MBA programs to capitalize on the upcoming retirement of the Baby Boomers, and have largely considered pursuing a graduate degree in a technical field as a waste of time and effort. What does Slashdot see as the future of the M.S. degree versus other available and somewhat non-traditional degrees? What path should engineers pursue for maximum future employability?"
Supply and demand. (Score:5, Insightful)
Many people with MBAs (Score:1, Insightful)
What do you want to be doing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do some soul searching and try to figure out what kind of job you really want to do and the kinds of industries and businesses you want to do it. If you can't get a good bead on that then you're just trusting your life to fate.
So, once you figure out what you want to do or where you want to do it, do everything you can to learn about it. Contact professionals in the field/business and arrange informational interviews. If you're still in school, try to get some kind of internship or "special project" with that business/industry - your profs are your friends here and probably know someone in industry who can help you.
For example, if you want to be a supply chain analyst for a sportswear company then you should see if any of your profs know someone at a sportswear company and see if you can do some kind of class-related project. Find out who they use for temp staff and get work there when you can.
Check to see if your school has an alumni program where you can find alumni out in the world and see if any of them are working in a field/company you're interested.
Once you get in, make contacts. Ask LOTS of questions. Find out what THEY look for when they are hiring. My current job at a place pretty much requires an MBA. The previous job I did as a temp employee didn't care what my degree was or if I even had one.
If you know you want to be a software developer for IBM, then find out what IBM looks for. They're the ones you need to impress. That answer is totally different than if you want to be a systems administrator at a university.
But, until you can answer "what do you want to do", there's not much point in going for a higher degree unless you feel like you'll be lucky.
Assumptions (Score:5, Insightful)
Learn agriculture. Seriously, it is looking more and more likely that the post war paradise the baby boomers experienced is an anomaly in the course of human history. Better learn to survive in a post cheap oil world.
Re:countdown to the usual anti-education rants (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Supply and demand. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:My impression (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll put it in MBA terms
The same thing happens in M.S. and Ph.D. programs. You just learn to think better. It sounds silly, but it's real.
MS==Tech Track, MBA==Line Management (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to work on and create technology, go MS. If you want to manage it, go MBA.
If you wnat to know what program to do NOW, before your life responsibilities stack up, and you can hack the program, go MS. Frankly, the vast majority of MBA programs can easily be completed in your spare time, even if you've got a working spouse and a couple of kids, so you can safely put that off until you turn 30 or 35. Then, with both an MS and MBA, you'll be head and shoulders over many of your peers no matter what direction you decide to go (including doing your own thing).
IT has to do with world economics (Score:4, Insightful)
On an international scale, in order to stay competitive economically the US has to be the worlds largest consumer. In order to consume individuals must have enough education that their jobs aren't easily outsourced. So the US encourages higher education.
The generic "here's a spec, design it" engineering can be accomplished by a bachelor's degree holder, as well as most outsourcing companies. The research that is done at the master's and PhD levels is important for new technologies, but that has largely been watered down (fewer skunk works, menlo parks, etc)
If you want to stay competitive in today's industry, you'll have to settle for a bachelor's degree or higher, coupled with management experience. Many companies move engineers into a position to act as liasons to outsourced workers, and still keep a smaller engineering group around for fixing designs, quick proof of concept, and developing new technology.
But in the end you'll be fine and happy with a bachelors degree once you have experience. All a masters does for you is move you up the pay bracket 10-15%, and the reality is that after the two years of real world experience rather than going for a masters, most bachelors are at that level by the time you get your masters.
I did a lot of work while in school, developed a passion for my field, and graduated with a bachelors. I may want more schooling down the road. I'm not certain, however, that a masters of engineering will serve me as well as a masters in business, so I decided to work for a few years to get an idea of the industry and find out where the opportunities that look interesting lie.
What you should do to ensure maximum future employability is do what you love, and love what you do. That is what will shine through - too many people do engineering because they want money, but don't want to be doctors. They make OK engineers, but until they find the passion they end up being lukewarm for 1/3 of their life while at work, asleep 1/3, and bored the other 1/3. Don't do that.
-Adam
Do a M.S. early - leave the MBA to your 30s (Score:5, Insightful)
tech people without having strong technical skills yourself.
Your knowledge will be too superficial to make informed decisions,
and in the end you just won't be respected.
In my experience it definitely pays off in the long run to get
a graduate degree in CS, and it's easier to do it the first time you
are at school. I'm in my early 30s and am working as a
development director in a startup. I find that most of the people
i deal with, other senior tech people, CTOs, senior architects,
generally have a very strong formal education, Honours in BSc,
M.S or Phd. There are some exceptions of course, there are
many IT middle managers out there with no technology skils - but
these are the people who tend to get ignored in meetings when
the real decisions are being made. There are also a lot of people
out there with little formal education but with the smarts to
make up for it.
I see an MBA as something that makes sense to do later perhaps in
your late 20s/early 30s when you have already have some management
experience and are ready to move into a executive level.
Re:My impression (Score:1, Insightful)
Jeezus how do some of you people function.
In SOME CASES an MS is a starting point for a doctorate, but many, many programs exist to either facilitate the transfer into the field from another technical degree or to hone and develop skills in a preferred area of CS. There are major universities that have both a career oriented "professional" masters and the "hey, you hit the waypoint to the doctorate" masters in CS.
If an MS in CS is theoretical it will stand the test of time a bit more than an applications engineering CS program. As far as physics is concerned, sure, it won't go out of vogue so quickly. You apparently haven't worked in electrical engineering though. As far as I'm concerned anybody who wants a decent education to stand the test of time in the CS field should look at heavy duty problem solving degrees like mathematics with a CS minor (at the undergrad level) or computational physics (at the MS level). Problem solving skills don't go obsolete, learning Fuck.Nut.Net does.
MBAs generally know jack shit except for how to present a powerpoint based upon the output regurgitated by MS Project. In many cases they try to shoehorn some of an undergrad in Bus Admin into about four courses and then make the rest a bit more relevant. I've had exposure to graduates of at least seven MBA programs in the field (with at least three being Tier-1 programs) and I'm not impressed.
We're (where I work) already seeing a glut of MBAs who know jack shit and in many cases they are engineers who couldn't make it. You know, the army technique: promote to level of incompetence. Fortunately, most of these bozos get killed when the inevitable tech layoffs start since mid-level MBAs are as expendable as the red shirts on Star Trek.
Enter: the MS in Engineering Management degree. Much more relevant. Look for MBAs managing Pizza Hut soon. And no, I'm not kidding.
I Dunno... (Score:5, Insightful)
What is worse even... (Score:5, Insightful)
The high school basic/standard curriculum that we still use today in the USA is wholly inadequate for the job market in the country. It is entirely based around strict adherence to institutional instruction. We still spend too much time teaching basics that should have been taught in grade school (grammar school/middle school/junior high). Part of the problem is in passing students along up to the next level when they are not ready to move to the next level.
What is the purpose of teaching a curriculum that was designed to produce factor workers in a nation that has so little actual manufacturing infrastructure still operational? We continue to cut the arts in school more and more, but those skills are becomming more and more important in this nation due to the fact that they teach you "how to think outside the box" which leads directly to "innovation" and "invention". We are a country dependent on our creating of "intellectual property". Following directions will not create new technologys, becuase there are no directions for making improvements. Improvements are generated by analizing and creative thinking.
The high school diploma is very close to being a useless document other then its ability to let you start taking classes in a college to start learning the skills that will allow you to get a job. We no longer need 30 million factory workers, foundry workers, miners, metal workers, and carpenters in this nation (we still need some and need highly skilled ones at that). But now what we need are 30 million inventors, scientists, researchers, engineers, programmers, designers, artists (visual, musical, and performance), and story tellers. These are what we need to be prepairing our students to become.
Re:2 year is all I can get. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's programming. But it isn't what you learn when you do a B.Sc. in Computer Science. What you will learn is how to represent, abstract, organize and manipulate information. You will learn what information actually means, and what the limits are (e.g. P vs. NP).
Programming is the tool to manipulate information, but it's not what a B.Sc. is about. When I interview somebody I assume they can program, and that if they need to pick up a new language they will figure it out, as needed. What I want to know is if they understand the concepts. One question that always gets interesting results is "Tell me an application of binary trees." Follow on question: "Other than searching and sorting."
I did my Masters for the hell of it. So there.
...laura, B.Sc., M.A.Sc.
References vs. technical skills (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Many hiring managers are not very good at determining an applicant's technical skills. Especially if HR gets involved.
2. Networking is more about finding out about positions than anything. A large number of jobs are never posted. And it's better to have a several people looking for you, than looking just on your own.
3. A person vouching for a prospective hire's skills gives the hiring manager warm fuzzies. It adds another data point that the person has the right skills, and it also pushes some of the blame on the person recommending the hire, in case things goes wrong.
4. One very important part of hiring a new person is how they will fit in the culture or the group. If they're already friends with one employee, they're likely to fit in in a similar manner.
5. So-called "soft skills" are more important in most jobs than the hard technical skills. Soft skills are all about working with and communicating with others. This is another thing that a reference can show that you are good at. (This is even harder to discern during an interview.)
6. Networking works. I didn't believe it when I was younger, either.
In the case of tech support jobs (Score:4, Insightful)
To put it another way I need to know if your knowledge and learning process are fragile or not. You may have a master's and certificates up the ass, that means only that you know how to pass tests. Sure you might have a shitload of facts stored in you, but if they can't be applied to the real world, I don't need you.
There's no good way to test for that, either, other than having someone do work. I can try and design tests to see but they don;t necessarily show me anything. If it happens to be something you read in a book, you can pass, even though you lack that so-called bithead quality.
The parent's point about fitting in is highly valid as well. Some people just don't work. I remember at one of my student jobs they hired a new guy that I just didn't like. Now at first I thought it was just my being an introvert, you know a new guy intruding on a familiar space. I told myself that I was being petty and needed to just wait and it'd change....
Never did. That guy creeped me out the whole time he was there until they let him go (incidentally he never did any fucking work). He just didn't fit. Later, we hired another guy who was a friend of one of the employees. I liked him almost immediately and he worked out really well.
So you really get to trust references not only because we are inclined to listen to personal anecdotes more than empirical evidence, even though they are less valid, but also because it does seem to work. Where I work now, we hire student workers pretty often. That's the problem with students: They keep graduating. Well if we can, we get them by having our current students refer them, or people we meet since some of us take classes. If not we go to ads on campus. Of the referrals, all that I can remember have worked out. They have had varying skill and knowledge levels, but they were all bitheads, and they all got along. Of the cold hires, I'd say it's less than 50%. Many are not bitheads, many simply don't get along well in the work environment, some both.
For example, we hired a grad student not too long ago. Nice enough guy, but didn't work out. For one his problem solving skills were abysmal. He could only do a task if it was very precisely defined, at which point the amount of time needed to explain it usually made it faster to just do yourself. He had no initiative to try and find things to do, he'd just sit at his computer fiddling with Linux unless given a task. He also fit in poorly, he didn't socialize almost at all with the rest of us, despite our efforts. To top it all off, he never intended to keep the job. He wanted a research assistant position. As soon as he got one, he skipped (1.5 months roughly).
That kind of thing doesn't happen with people referred to us. Maybe it's just luck, but I think it's more that you don't want to ruin your reputation. Sure maybe you talk a friend up a bit, but you aren't going to go and say he's a great reliable guy if you know he's going to bail at the first opportunity. If you give bad references, pretty soon your credibility is shot to hell and people won't listen to you.
The parent is also dead on about jobs that aren't posted. I mean you'll get situations as so:
A technical group is down a person, someone good just left. However they are a large group, he's one in twenty, so they don't go and open a posting right away. His work is absorbed by the team, nobody really wants to go through the trouble of a hiring process right now.
Re:Assumptions (Score:1, Insightful)
Granted, my ex-boss who drives alone in a Ford king cab with a dooley can afford to run his vehicle on champagne if it came to that, but for the majority of Americans (especially the working poor), oil prices are causing some hurt.
And all those SUVs are trickling down to those who can least afford the gasoline via the used car market. That is, those that aren't getting torched for the insurance money so a Prius can be had.
Re:You mean, like.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes (but the key to remember is that Bill Gates's gift is business, not programming)
Re:References vs. technical skills (Score:4, Insightful)
Grab.
Re:You mean, like.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Being "good" at it is not the same thing as having the "inherent gift" the original poster was talking about. Sure, Gates needed to be able to understand what his software did so that he could effectively run the company. However, the success of Microsoft mostly stems from Gates' ability to notice and take advantage of business oppertunities (e.g. buying QDOS and then selling it to IBM for an incredible profit) and come up with extremely effective (but evil) business tactics.
Re:Supply and demand. (Score:2, Insightful)
But, let's face the facts... People with a 4-year degree (and often only an associates) tend to make at least 40-60% more than people with only a high school diploma (according to US Census statistics). That basically means that, on average, about 1/4 of the population are making 50% more than the remaining 3/4 that only have a high school diploma or didn't finish high school at all. To say that a bachelor's degree is "the new high school diploma" is just sick. Sure, it might be that way for people with business degrees, but they've done that by making the market overcrowded with a billion joe schmoes that couldn't cut it in something that was actually challenging.
If you want a degree that's easy, and will pay the bills pretty well *if* you manage to stand out from the rest of the crowds, then I'm sure than an MBA is a good choice. But technical degrees are few and far between right now. That's because a) it's hard work to attend physics labs and take calculus tests. And b) there seems to be a *temporary* decline in engineering jobs in the US right now. It's likely to bounce back. Me? I'll have a BSEE and an MBA (which I can obtain in my sleep). The MBA is a nice "add-on" degree that shows that you've got some jerk-off business education that you can add to your technical experience and education. E.g., it's something that you could probably benefit from if you wanted to manage technical people, and still have a hint of understanding just what in the fuck you are working with.
As for the rest of the people... Government funding of tuition costs has dropped significantly. Students are having to pay larger rates on student loans. Tution costs are going up. Broken homes and single parents are more common than ever. Slave-wage jobs are becoming more the norm for the lower-middle-class than ever before. It's entirely unlikely that more than about 1/4 of people will ever be able to have a college education, and still permit "the system" to sustain itself.
My Experience and Observance... (Score:2, Insightful)
If you watch TV or listen to the Radio or look at the banner ads on slashdot or websites you visit you keep hearing these advertisements for online schools like Phoenix, Devry, ITT and where they are all offering BS/BA degrees in some technical field. This slashdot article is really talking about these types of BS degrees and how there is a huge increase in the number of BA degrees being offered by these schools. All it is, basically, is a marketing tool. These institutions cater to people who are not traditional-college material because the schools offer something specific to the career they are wanting to have. THe BS degrees being offered by these schools are career specific and reflect the current job market/demand that is out there now. For example, if you like computers: you like putting them together, setting them up, and setting up networking, then ITT, Devry and Phoenix offer specific degrees that offer the courses neccesary for that area of expertise.
The reason this is article brings up the question if MS is the new BS is because 10years ago all you needed was a diploma to get most technical jobs that have advancement to go up the corporate ladder, etc. and get a decent salary. Diploma, nowadays, put you in the bottom of the corporate ladder or in a position with very limited pay growth. Fast foward 10 years later and nowadays most employers are looking for some form of certification/degree other than a diploma. Most of jobs out there that require this are good career jobs that pay at the most upper-middle class salary, but a good salary nonetheless. Nowadays a diploma hardly gets you anything and that is just how it is. Then there are those people who have Masters (or gotten them more than 5 years ago) and are working jobs that someone fresh out of Devry with a BS degree with no work experience can get hired for immediately. That is just how it is currently.
You also have to realize that nowadays a lot of classes are being offered online. THis is great for busy people currently working jobs and need that job to pay for the roof over the head. So this makes it easier for people to earn BS/BA degrees and that is why you are seeing more people have BA/BS degrees and why you are seeing employers require BA/BS degrees rather than AS/Certification degrees.
I'm also seeing highschools, especially the one I used to go to, offer classes such as Cisco Networking. Basically they are prepping students for the job market that is currently out there. You will have students in highschool taking the standard classes like physics algebra 2, etc. and these students will most likely go to a regular college. But you also have students who are not that college material but instead they now ahve the option to try something in highschool that they can be successful in. It is not all about SAT scores or what college you got accepted. What matters in real life is if you are mildly happy with the job you have and if you are making enough money to support yourself, a house, and family. That is the testament of life right that proves if you're successful or not. It is not the degree you have or what school you went to. I'm guessing in a way this attributes to why USA is falling behind on traditional test scores the rest of the world is excelling at, however, if that is the case than why is America still the richest and highest paying country than other countries where they have kids who can be as smart as Einstein (but can they apply those skills successfully
My experience:
Looking at this article I'm glad that I switched career paths from the computer industry to the Architecture/Construction industry (about to work on a master in Architecture). Originally I was going for a BS in computer science and get a job in the gaming industry with that degree but I realized that programming or a career heavily involved with computers is not for me. When I was originally in the CS path I was very unwary about my futur
Re:Party Card (Score:3, Insightful)