I got my engineering degree way back in 1977. I didn’t go to college “to find myself”. I knew what I wanted to do, and was there to get an employment credential in the most cost effective way possible. Early on I noticed that my classmates were spending an inordinate number of hours on English and History reading lists, while it was Math, Chemistry and Physics that was going to make us employable. I minored in Art History where the reading was light, and the exams consisted of a slide show and “name that painting”. That freed up the time to take a few extra classes in my major and I graduated in 3 years. While the college I attended now costs $90,000/yr at full tuition. Back then, tuition and room & board was about $5,000/yr and starting salaries for top grads was around $15,000/yr, so by graduating in 3 years and earning that big salary a year early, I almost got my degree for “free”.
My situation is similar to yours, John. Although a few decades apart, the approach is almost identical (down to the art history classes!).
I just advised a cousin to NOT go back to school (for AI, data engineering and science) as I believe there is no value there. He would be MUCH better served to simply book paid hours at his current job while building the skills and tools for that company, his skillset and his future employability.
An 8-month certification (with no results and no practical application) is $35,000 tuition only at his preferred university.
You can tell it’s a winner if you see a lot of D1 athletes. There were more than a few Holy Cross basketball and hockey players in my Art History classes.
I had a guy I played golf with that graduated from Georgetown the same year as Patrick Ewing. He got some kind of alumni magazine with the stats on the starting salaries for each major.
Art History topped the list with an average starting salary of $75,000/yr (in 1985) and a median of $12,000. Ewing’s multimillion dollar contract brought up the average.
Fun fact: During my last job before I early retired, I’d managed to streamline and optimize my workflow to the extent where I was reading Time , Newsweek, and US News, cover to cover every week. I suspect I was one of the few individuals in the nation doing so. {{ LOL }}
Economics could also earn graduates significantly more but other subjects, including creative arts, philosophy and languages, offer little to negative financial return when compared to the earnings of someone similar without a degree, the research suggests.
Here in the UK when I went to university when there were no fees and I got a generous grant as I came from a low income household living in social housing.
Now younger members of my family are going to university to study arts degrees and, after three years, will have debts of £50k - £60k!
It all depends. While I had a few electives in my degree, did take a few that turned out to help in the long run. Public speaking - helped with the interview process for medical school, residency training, and job hunting. While I had to have a foreign language, I opted for Spanish as opposed to French (for many Louisianians and easy grade) or German (most chemistry majors). Wound up being handy with the numerous patients I saw that “no habla English”. And the big PR home run when I took care of my business partner’s mother when I could quote “Cultivo Una Rosa Blanca”. They escaped Cuba right before Castro took over.
In the past when I gave talks to pre-med groups I told them to take some fun electives. You are going to get more than enough sciences in med school. The fun electives might give you a better chance at connecting with your patient.
The non-core electives are the ones people don’t put enough value in, IMHO. My alma mater was all STEM, but we had a strong humanities and social sciences department. We were all required to take 3 years of classes in that department, and they still do this. It goes beyond making you well rounded, though that is part of it AND IT DOES HAVE VALUE. It also forces your mind to think in a different way than your core math/science/engineering classes do. It gives you a break from the analytical thinking classes. It exposes you to different topics that you might not otherwise get. Looking back some of my favorite courses in college were in that department.
However, it was all electrical engineering, all the time, and that after studying only Maths, Physics and Chemistry in the last two years of secondary (high) school.
My kids, being educated in the USA, are getting a far broader education. I like that.
They’re all at state universities with academic scholarships. Only Kid 1 is likely to use up her full 529 amount (med school). She got such good scholarships, and the stock market did so well that she graduated with 2 majors, 2 co-majors, and more money in her 529 than she started with. Which she will need…
You take take all the fun courses you like without paying an expensive college tuition to do it. I’m not against studying languages and history. (The “Great Books” are available at the Public Library.) I just see little utility in spending a 4th year in college and forgoing a year’s worth of an engineering income for something I can do for free on my own.
I’ve spent much more time reading and learning outside of a classroom. Unless you are purchasing a professional credential required for employment, you don’t need to pay a college tuition to do it.
My neighbor is a retired doctor who was music major for her pre-med. The music dept. required a certain number of classes outside the department which she filled with her pre-med requirements.
I graduated from high school at age 16, 10th in a class of over 1,000. I had a New York State Regents Scholarship and I was a National Merit Scholarship finalist. But I had almost died of an autoimmune disorder (ITP) in my senior year of high school. I had a fresh splenectomy with a 7" scar and 21 stitches that looked like a railroad track running down my belly.
My mother wanted to keep me close so I went to Brooklyn College. I was in the Scholar’s Program that allowed me to take as many credits as I wanted. I lived at home for all four years of college. I worked during the summers.
I took a double major in Chemistry and Biology. Each class came with a 4 hour lab plus hundreds of pages of memorization. I also took a year of Physics which also came with 4 hour labs. I enjoyed working in the lab so much that I did some Organic Chemistry labs on my own, working on a side bench during another unrelated lab class.
But I’m an artist as well as a scientist. I took Art History, Music History, Classics, Psychology, Acting and Public Speaking. Plus other humanities courses I don’t recall. The humanities were like dessert. I would usually take 3 science classes plus a couple of humanities classes to relax. I don’t see how anyone could make a college career out of humanities any more than I would make an entire dinner out of chocolate cake. I don’t know how many credits I took but always 18 - 21 credits a semester. I didn’t want to graduate early - the college sent me a letter in my fourth year that I HAD TO GRADUATE because I had so many credits. I loved college and would enjoy doing it all again.
I scored in the 99th percentile on the MCAT (Medical College Admissions Test) which was all (rather elementary) biology and chemistry. But then I heard that interns did 36 hour shifts which I don’t have the stamina to do. So I switched to Chemistry grad school. I got a teaching/ research assistant scholarship.
Thanks to public school, including Brooklyn College (CUNY) and Stony Brook (SUNY), and all my scholarships I received my entire education for free. After graduation, my employers paid for MBA classes (Marketing, Finance, Accounting, etc.).
Is college financially worth it?
Obviously, the answer is “it depends.” A smart high schooler (with the advice of a mentor) will read the government’s free Occupational Outlook Handbook and do a cost-benefit analysis. I did this with my mentee and also arranged for her to get a hands-on summer job doing physical therapy with Parkinson’s Disease patients. She got over $100,000 in scholarships and earned her DPT in Physical Therapy.
There was a Costa Rican doctor (galeno) who did his Internal Medicine residency in New York City who was very active on the now defunct TMF REHP forum. Galeno was also a big weed advocate. and ran a medical marijuana practice in California. A man before his time.
Galeno told me that you don’t need a 4 yr degree to get into medical school in Costa Rica. You just need the required MCAT scores and high grades in the required prerequisites (i.e., math through calculus with probability & statistics, biology, chemistry and physics (all with lab courses) and they separate the wheat from the chaff with organic chemistry. You can probably do all that in a good junior college.
Sen. Rand Paul never graduated from college, yet got into the Duke Medical school and obtained a coveted residency in Ophthalmology. He even created his own one-man accreditation agency rather than sit for the exam of the American Board of Ophthalmology. Yet many consider him to be far from a genius.
From google AI
{{ Sen. Rand Paul entered Duke University Medical School and completed his ophthalmology residency without finishing an undergraduate degree. He attended Baylor University from 1981 to 1984 and left for medical school when Duke did not require a bachelor’s degree. He later created his own alternative certification board }}
I had a brilliant classmate from 3rd grade through high school who could have gone anywhere, but chose Cornell because they guaranteed her a place in Cornell’s medical school as an undergraduate Freshman. When I had that rare parotid tumor cut out of my head in 1992 in Baton Rouge, the female ENT surgeon was about my age and mentioned that she was an undergrad Chemical Engineer at Cornell and got 15 offers of employment from Exxon, DuPont Dow Chemical, etc. but decided to go to medical school instead. I said, “Do you know Debbie Downs? I went to school with her from like 3rd grade on” She said, “Everyone knows Debbie Downs,she was one of the best students at Cornell.”
It’s best, job wise, to come out of college with a trade. Engineering, Programming (but maybe not anymore), Accounting, Doctoring, etc. A friend of mine graduated with a degree in biology. Not a lot of call got biologing, so he went back and got a CE degree. He called it conversational biology.
I took a Biology course, with labs, in engineering school. Most of the kids in the class were Pre-Med and they were talking with the post-doc who was running the lab section. "What college major gives you the best odds of getting into medical school?.
The guy says, “I just saw the most recent statistics, there was one applicant with a Civil Engineering degree and he got in.”
Meh, I got a degree in German Language (1983), and that only because my intended major in Spanish Language required me to take two years of a second foreign language, so I tried German and liked it. Took History of Rock N Roll, art history, philosophy, lots of literature (in English, Spanish, and German). Employability never entered my mind. While a student, worked at the university copy shop part time, which led me to a full time job selling and repairing Apple computers upon graduation, as my boss was picked to open a campus Apple store and he brought me along.
Two years later, I realized that I actually liked business and went back for an MBA to learn how to do what I had been faking my way through. Made my living thereafter on the “skim”, first as a consultant for a national accounting firm, and subsequently selling commercial real estate. The MBA taught me to invest the excess skim in the stock market, and my two years selling Apple made me aware of the emerging tech sector. Apple, Netflix, and index funds mean I won’t miss another meal.
A buddy of mine got a degree in Biology and went into environmental consulting, which is sort of an engineering adjacent field. He took the EIT, passed it. Then he took the PE and passed it too. So, he legally practices as an engineer without an engineering degree.
Absolutely! The two shortest paths to wealth are in “skim collecting”, and protecting yourself from the “skim”, and investing the savings in companies that profit from the skim, like Pharma, or Avis Rental Car (insurance companies, too, but that’s a bridge too far for me). The latter takes less time and effort.
And also, a dollar earned, saved and invested at age 21 is far more valuable than one earned later in life because of the compounding. Despite being out of the workforce for more than 30 years, I haven’t lost any ground financially to classmates who kept soldiering on, pulling the cart rather than riding in it.
That takes a lot longer in most states. If you have an accredited engineering degree, you can sit for the PE exam after 4 years of “applicable work experience”. (I had to do a lot of hand waving for the New York Board to accept one year of the paper pushing I was doing at Exxon in Houston as “engineering”. ) Without an accredited degree, you typically need 12 years of “applicable experience”.
from Google AI
Getting a Professional Engineer (PE) license without an accredited engineering degree typically takes 8 to 15 years of combined progressive work experience and education, though requirements vary widely by state. Opinions on EngineerBoards show that while some jurisdictions accept 6 to 8 years, many states require 12 or more years of documented, progressive engineering experience if you lack an ABET-accredited degree. [1, 2, 3, 4]
But to be fair, most engineers are working for big companies under the “industrial or corporate exemption” and don’t need a PE as long as they are only doing work on company property, and not offering engineering services to the general public. By far. most of the PE licenses go to Civil Engineers. It’s less of an issue for other engineering disciplines.
I was a Philosophy major and went to law school solely because I didn’t want to spend another 5 years earning a Masters and Ph.D. For some reason law school was easier for me than undergrad. I guess philosophy classes taught me how to ask keep asking questions rather than memorize answers.
Law school was trade school. Philosophy was learning for the joy of it.