"Let me think about that for a while....."
I saw what you did there!
Posted on 02/27/2015 7:53:40 AM PST by SeekAndFind
In many fields, graduate degrees offer distinct benefits for your extra years in school.
Employees armed with a graduate education are often a more attractive hire and can make a higher salary than colleagues who have only a bachelor's degree.
However, for some industries the benefits of going to graduate school are comparatively low and don't justify the extra investment.
Using the recent "Hard Times" report from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, we examined salary and unemployment data of experienced college graduates and experienced holders of graduate degrees. These are workers whose ages range from 35 to 54.
For roughly 50 fields, we calculated how much more money a graduate degree would bring and the difference in unemployment rates for those with a post-college degree. These figures were then combined to determine which graduate degrees were the most "useless" — basically, which give you the smallest boost in salary and employment.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
hard science:
a science (such as chemistry, physics, or astronomy) that deals with things that can be observed and measured
http://www.learnersdictionary.com/definition/hard%20science
As a guy with a lowly and undistinguished BS in Information Systems who ended up as a Vice President of IT with MBA's and CPA's working for him, I will tell you there are three critical success factors required:
1) Gain perfect command of written and spoken English.
2) Have no ego (1 and 2 eliminate about 95% of US IT workers).
3) Always be good enough in your current role to impress a mentor with the ability to advocate for you and help you move up.
That's it. Do those three things and it doesn't matter if you start as an assistant janitor with a degree in Abnormal Turnip Psychology - you will end up in a job far above what your degree "entitles" you to.
Most of them could, fairly easily, go into the student loan business by tapping just a fraction of those endowments and grow and replenish them as the loans were paid back.
You can bet that, if they did so, they would be charging a lower interest rate to someone studying to be a petroleum engineer versus someone studying to be a xxxx studies professor.
Since they could also revoke the credentials of someone who defaulted on their loan, you could also bet that the default rate would plunge.
Having an engineering degree myself I would disagree with you. The core classes are much the same plus the higher level classes overlap a bit; calculus 1 - 3, differential equations, physics 1 -3, chemistry 1 - 3, organic chem, etc. The “hard sciences” go more in depth, the engineering goes broader. For example, a chem major may have to take organic chem 1, 2 and 3, but not much physics. An engineering major may take organic chem 1, fluid mechanics, and thermodynamics. Just an example. I suspect that chemical engineering is pretty close to a straight chemistry degree.
“Had I got a Masters in Computer Science younger it would be beneficial but waiting until my late 40’s and older would reap small gains.”
This is where my husband’s at. After crunching the numbers, getting a masters at this stage of his life would only add about $10,000 in per-taxable income. Getting the degree while working would make this a slow, painful process.
But now there’s an opportunity for him to take a year off and get his masters without working and it would all be paid for. Now *that* he’ll consider.
I believe their only point is to steer U.S. citizens away from STEM degrees and jobs. They have pushed for H1Bs for years to the detriment of more qualified and experienced U.S. STEM workers.
A friend of mine who is a recruiter received a book of resumes of Masters Degree candidates from a very prominent university in the southeastern US.
Virtually every one of those kids had majored in some sort of green/environmental/sustainability discipline. Wanting to be division commanders in the green jackboot army apparently.
“I myself studied Latin and Greek, and ended up in IT as a C++ programmer.”
I am kind of in the same boat and while CS degrees focus mostly on math, I have found that the Latin I took in school was much more beneficial in understanding syntax and remembering the syntax in various programming languages than math in CS. ;-)
Sure, the math is required but I had the aptitude for math. However, had I not had the Latin and a general interest in languages then programming would have been out of the question.
Hard science deals with the physical world.
Soft science deals with behaviors and the actions of people.
Industrial Engineers will work with efficiencies and the like and might be considered soft. But someone designing structural supports based material properties, shape of beams, moment connections and the like is definitely in a hard science. It does not mean difficulty; hard means the physical world.
Correct.
Engineering is not a science. Engineers are certified to design, build, or maintain things. Scientists study things by using observations and hypothesis-driven experimentation. These are very different functions, and this is clearly evident by the different methods of training and certification in these fields. While engineers and scientists may use similar tools, such as mathematics and statistics, that doesn’t mean an engineer is at all qualified to be a scientist or that a scientist is qualified to design or build something. There are some individuals who do have the training and qualifications to work in both fields, and these people will agree that an engineer is not a scientist, and certainly not a hard scientist.
"Let me think about that for a while....."
I saw what you did there!
Sorry, but scientists and engineers are completely different career paths. The schools are different. The coursework is different. The certification is different. The job skills are different. The job experience is different. You are talking about similarities of the fundamental undergraduate education, which is not the same as a terminal professional degree or certificate.
A person can take a variety of undergraduate science and math courses, and yet go into the profession of medicine or journalism or business or law. None of these professions would be the same as being a professional scientist. Likewise being an engineer is a different profession than being a scientist. Furthermore, hard scientists are a very specific subset of all scientists.
I have to give you an exception. My sister was HR chief for a large state university hospital, and she was valuable to her employer because she was skilled at heading off lawsuits.
My hiring experience shows that the type of degree is most important when getting hired into the first full time career oriented job. And that’s no small accomplishment.
However, once you’ve been on the job for a year or so your boss only cares about:
What you can do
What you a willing to do
Whether you are “a fit” within the organization.
To me, people boasting about their advanced degrees beyond their first year of employment are simply living in the past and hoping that someone will be impressed.
Advanced degrees are also no small accomplishment....but in the end....
It’s what you can and will do... with what you’ve got...that matters most.
my humble .02
I took a philosophy minor because I found it interesting.
There is more to life and education than the merely “practical.”
Yes, but the thing is, that I’m at a loss to understand why a degree in philosophy should be pursued at the expense of a genuine skill.
An English masters does not have a huge payoff, thats for sure. But at least one improves there reading, writing, and language skills.
I’m at a loss to explain why we discourage the study of philosophy, literature, art, music, and the like. The humanities are called that because they’re the things (along with religion) that make us our most fully human.
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