patrick.net

thunderlips11 says

What about IBM, Walmart, Apple, Target, TGIF, Larry's Tax and Bookkeeping, and Sally's Sporting Goods? Maybe Silicon Valley and the WebVan/Pets.com paid most or all of the degree costs back in the day, but definitely not now and never in most industries.

I seriously doubt any of the pretender dotcoms in the dotcom boom era ever paid for degrees. There are certainly companies in Silicon Valley that do. IBM probably does in very limited circumstances. Consultant firms sometimes do. There are some firms that do care about career development enough to do it, but sure, it's not everybody. Not every public sector job pays you more for an advanced degree either.

thunderlips11 says

My argument was that the charts that show differences in pay between bachelor degree holders and masters degree holders are flawed because averages, especially across a range of disciplines, can be very deceiving.

Then your argument is that some charts suck, not advanced degrees suck. There are better charts that give a better picture on this. For example, I've seen detailed data on salaries from a single highly-ranked university before that gave detailed survey results on CS graduates for BS vs. MS vs. PhD. You could see quite clearly what the salary results were. Other good charts might tell you salary at entry-level vs. salary at mid-career, which is far more helpful and which I've also seen.

As for the rest, it's not like I disagree with you completely on some of this, as I've already mentioned.

corntrollio says

The reality is that the motivated, smart, ambitious people will generally do well, regardless of what degree they have. Many of the people who aren't motivated, smart, and ambitious will have trouble even with an advanced degree.

Well, there's your problem. If you go to a shitty school, your masters might not be worth the paper it's printed on. Same thing for going to a shitty law school or a shitty business school or other shitty schools. What you should be railing against is not advanced degrees per se, but rather useless advanced degrees.

In both of your examples (the teacher and the business person), they both go to shitty colleges to get an advanced degree. It's probably not going to help them, especially since they got themselves boxed into a particular career in the first place. It's unlikely they will suddenly become motivated and ambitious.

thunderlips11 says

I googled "Fast Food Assistant Manager Jobs" and came up with this right away:
Arturo's Fast Food wants an associate's degree for an Assistant Manager jobs. http://www.jobhost.org/jobs/viewjob/assistant-manager-fast-food-restaurant-miami-international-malldoral-4cfdb4ba36ecdf29?source=indeed&medium=sponsored

I'm sure you can cherry-pick all kinds of random jobs. That doesn't change the general trend -- the vast majority of fast food jobs wouldn't require one. You are also changing your story (although maybe it's a "rhetorical flourish"), but first you said shift manager, and now you're saying assistant manager. In any case, my understanding is that Arturo's is different from the typical fast food place. Whereas the typical fast food place is franchised, Arturo's is Venezuelan and has an owned & operated system, so you're actually an assistant manager within the corporation and have the ability to be promoted within the organization. That's far different from being a shift manager at a McDonald's as you first stated.

thunderlips11 says

"Mountain Buddies" Supervisor - $12/hr. Bachelor's Degree Req'd
http://www.hospitalityjobsite.com/job.asp?id=38462008&aff=AC44BA2E-E3EB-4DBC-8BDB-9FCE01C58B09

Even on the ski-job you gave, while the job is extremely low paying, the qualification makes slightly more sense in context. They are expecting someone as an entry-level job at that salary who is looking for seasonal work at a ski resort, which is why they ask for the degree. They don't want some pot-smoking snowboarder for this particular job, even if they expect that the person might partially want free skiing as part of the job. You expect a degree of professionalism since people are paying big money for services at a ski resort, and that person will likely move on to bigger and better things in the future because this is not a career position and isn't even a full year job. In contrast, someone who had no degree, but had years of experience for that particular job wouldn't take it at that salary and would likely be someone who has no plans to move on to something bigger and better, so they're likely to look for a career position in the field and one that runs the full year.

thunderlips11 says

When unemployment is low, the opposite happens - just like it did in the late 90s. Employers, for the first time in that decade, began accepting HS grads and even dropouts for positions they had reserved for "Bachelor's" or "Some College". Positions they wanted to fill with experienced Master's Degree holders went to experienced Bachelor Degree Holders and so forth down the line. Didn't last long, but for the first time since the 70s we had a brief period of all the boats rising with the same tide!
So yes, having a college degree is like insurance against being unemployed. What form that employment takes may not be conducive to middle class wages, though.

Sure, in good times, more unqualified people are able to get jobs, and in bad times, qualified people sometimes have to get worse jobs than they hoped. That's always been true. However, when times are good again, people leave those low paying crappy jobs for something better. That's how economic cycles work. If you graduated at the wrong time, sometimes it sucks, just like if you're underqualified at the wrong time, it sucks. I'm not really sure what that tells us about whether getting an advanced degree is useful or not.

thunderlips11 says

Easy buddy, this is humor.

Oh, I guess you forgot the humor then. :p

EBGuy says

And after the crash, Thiel insisted there hadn’t really been a crash: He argued the equity bubble had simply shifted onto the housing market. Thiel was so convinced of this thesis that until recently, he refused to buy property, despite his soaring personal net worth. And, again, he was right....
Instead, for Thiel, the bubble that has taken the place of housing is the higher education bubble. “A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” he says. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”
See techcrunch for the whole article.

Except that Thiel did lose money on his house in SF if I remember correctly.

If you read the article, it doesn't actually contradict what I said:

Thiel’s solution to opening the minds of those who can’t easily go to Harvard? Poke a small but solid hole in this Ivy League bubble by convincing some of the most talented kids to stop out of school and try another path. The idea of the successful drop out has been well documented in technology entrepreneurship circles. But Thiel and Founders Fund managing partner Luke Nosek wanted to fund something less one-off, so they came up with the idea of the “20 Under 20″ program last September, announcing it just days later at San Francisco Disrupt. The idea was simple: Pick the best twenty kids he could find under 20 years of age and pay them $100,000 over two years to leave school and start a company instead.

Two weeks ago, Thiel quietly invited 45 finalists to San Francisco for interviews. Everyone who was invited attended– no hysterical parents in sight. Thiel and crew have started to winnow the finalists down to the final 20. They’ll be announced in the next few weeks.

Basically, his goal is to find smart, motivated, ambitious kids. Of course they'll do well. I've said this in other threads too.

corntrollio says

Then your argument is that some charts suck, not advanced degrees suck

That was my argument from the beginning. thunderlips11 says

I believe those charts that compare the earnings of various educational levels are too simplistic.