Is higher education still valuable?
Hi friends,
Given the current state of AI and other technologies, do you consider higher education to still be worth pursuing? For those of you with children, will you be advising them to go to college?
I’m asking because I am enrolled in a masters program for statistics and have ~2 years left. I’m concerned that by the time I’m finished, the degree won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on. Like many of you, I work in software. Some days I think I should be learning an entirely different skill set in a non tech related field to diversify my value instead of doubling down on a potentially dying field.
I am not really interested in “you should pursue education for the sake of education”. While this is probably true, at the end of the day I need a way to make money to survive and education is the historical way of increasing one’s value in the job market. Furthermore, I can educate myself for far cheaper if education from a university is no longer considered valuable.
Anyone else in the same boat? Am I being dramatic? Would love to hear your thoughts.
You don't have to be interested in the education for it's own sake for it to be a valuable contribution. You are not the arbiter of worth, any more than I am. It is common for those who have STEM backgrounds to denigrate education in non-"practical" areas; I say this as a STEM professor with a liberal arts BA complementing my BS. In a commercial education environment, it is understandable that you think in terms of financial gain, as it is truly a humongous investment of time and treasure that you want to pay off, but education is beyond the limited here and now.
Though many degrees - indeed nearly all at the Bachelor's level - are geared towards employment in the field, it is a categorization error to claim this is the principal (or only) good of education. Fundamentally, education is about reasoning, so please reason through the following scenario:
Imagine a world where "full luxury gay space communism" exists - STAR TREK with Pride Parades. Nobody has to work, all labor is automated and abundant resources are not limited. Technology is advanced and universal and inequalities of birth are treated as diversity in humanity but do not harm opportunities. It is, very literally, a Heavenly existence. Let's imagine one more thing; let's imagine that AI in any form greater than Clippy doesn't exist.
What value does education have there, by your standard? In an "ideal" world, no advancement matters, no employment matters, no struggle matters, no effort matters to any person other than the one making the effort. The lack of AI doesn't make a difference. This is not an original thought - The Good Place has a similar plot line - but it is a very interesting one. AI being there would make no difference. The answer, instead, is that one must construct ones own meaning, struggles, mischief, etc, simply to have any value in life.
Now let's address our world, but with a twist. Imagine a wealthy relative you never knew died. Imagine they leave you Scrooge McDuck swimming in gold amounts of money. Now imagine that they say you have to spend it all on yourself, and cannot give it away. Sure, you probably don't finish your MS, but what else changes? What struggles do you face that disappear in a moment? What meaning do your efforts to this point have? How do you spend your life? Any passion, any challenge, any finite problem - no matter how great - dissolves to nothingness in an infinity.
Education in either world helps one delve deeper, imagine new worlds, and think new things. It enables the exploration of reality and fantasy and the pursuit of new human experience. Perhaps STEM degrees would lose some of the urgency in such a scenario, but the arts and humanities would remain. That's not to say STEM is unimportant - I would directly disagree by both my actions and words - but only that its utility beyond its own good disappears.
You see, modern education has dual responsibilities: the propagation of knowledge and the development of new knowledge. Through the BS and MS, you typically only touch on the first. It is typically in a PhD that you add new knowledge to humanity's stores. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." (Hamlet) Education is the way to dream a little bigger.
I would argue that education is more important than ever, BECAUSE of AI. If AGI is ever developed, it will be an alien species, and it will need understanding from human intelligence. In the interim, education is the human bulwark against lies, distortion, and Dadaist lunacy brought on by indiscriminate AI usage. This is the greatest crisis of reality and truth in our history, and how we respond will determine our ability to live in a shared and moderately real world. Even if everything goes perfectly, meaning in our lives will have to remain - education is one way to open the door to new experiences and live a meaningful life.
I'll add that anyone who is fortunate enough to retire will have to figure out what they want to do with their life, so this isn't an uncommon problem, though it usually happens to older people.
Sometimes classes can be fun. Is it worth getting a degree? How much should you pay for one? However much you value the intangibles, I think it's pretty clearly a lot less when you don't have a plan to earn the money back somehow? Taking out a loan seems irresponsible under those circumstances.
Also: "is education worthwhile" is a very broad question. "What should I study and why" seems more relevant and "should I keep studying statistics" directly relevant. I don't have an answer for that, though.
In hindsight, my question was too broad. This was an intentional decision because I wanted to have the discussion be broad but I certainly could have focused in more.
Nobody knows the future, but it seems like software is going to become increasingly important even if we conjure it up instead of hand-crafting it the old way? Also, there will be plenty of interesting phenomena to gather statistics about.
It's a time of change and there are probably going to be new kinds of jobs that you can't directly study in school for, and formal credentials will likely be less important for them.
But what are the alternatives? What would you study instead?
Great question. I would probably try to diversify into robotics or maybe electrician work. Something with a physical component. I suppose that sort of alters my question though because I’m implying that those fields might still have some value…
This is a really good point. 20 years ago, it was common to find professional software developers who didn’t have degrees. I even knew a couple that hadn’t finished high school. CS degrees existed, but were uncommon enough that requiring them meant a much smaller pool of candidates.
Som companies taught interested employees programming, switching them away from things like admin. Everyone won, you avoided bad habits and the employees got a valuable new skill. Pay wasn’t yet so much higher than other office jobs, but it was higher than whatever the employee had been getting.
All of this is pure speculation and conjecture so take it with a large grain of salt. Is paying for a university degree going to be worth it? There are multiple variables here. There is an opportunity cost (what else could you be doing with your time). There's the direct cost of paying for the classes. There is the uncertainty around if the degree will still open doors otherwise shut to you.
In my opinion getting a degree is a way to check a box when applying for jobs. Actual work usually requires skills not taught at uni. So the question is if employers in the future will keep requiring degrees from the people they recruit OR if they will filter people by some other means. More importantly might be the question if there will be a job market at all in your chosen profession? Now, the ai hype is in full swing and it's easy to get swept up in doubt about future prospects. Perhaps that is the case. Perhaps there won't be a need for statisticians to the same degree. Will having an understanding of statistics be beneficial for whatever you end up working with? I do believe so. It may not be as profitable as it once was since lots of white-collar jobs may become semi-automated. But, the reasoning that you learn will be still be good.
If I were advicing young adults that mainly want to find a stable job, then I'd advice them to go into healthcare or some kind of skilled labour. If they want to do intellectual work then getting an education is still basically mandatory and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
My youngest is less purely academic than my middle kid, so I am actually leaning towards pushing for something healthcare or skilled. I don't foresee jobs like nursing or similar ever losing viability.
Yeah at least geriatrics is going to be a major field with an aging population. Not very glamorous, but likely very stable.
I think this, far more than anything to do with the current state of tech or the economy, is the root of why higher education's value is in question. I'm not saying you're wrong for that attitude - you're sensibly following the incentives as laid out, after all - but the cycle of "a degree is rare, and therefore valuable -> more people decide to get a degree -> a degree is common, and therefore less valuable" seems pretty clear.
That's simplifying a ton (it's something I've talked about at length before), but if you're not going for the education, and if you're confident you can educate yourself more cheaply anyway, then it really does come down to the value of the piece of paper.
At that point you're looking at networking, prestige, personal branding (ugh), and similar factors that come down far more to "which university did you go to?" than "did you go to university?" or even "what did you study?". [Edit: Probably a sprinkle of "will you need a degree certificate to bypass recruitment gatekeeping?" in there too, if you're not planning to avoid that by starting your own company, brute forcing your way in on sheer charisma, or doing an apprenticeship - and if that's the primary reason then presumably the rational choice is the cheapest, easiest option that doesn't raise red flags for being perceived as too cheap or easy.]
As a more specific side note on this, if we go down a path where code generating LLMs have that big an impact on the industry, it seems like masters-level statistics is a pretty solid foundation to understand and improve the models themselves? At the end of the day, the basis of the whole "AI" industry is applied statistics, and I'd argue that's more relevant than ever as a skill if we end up in a world where the actual code for user-facing application development is predominantly the domain of ML models.
I actually already work in the field of ML. One would think that would offer me a feeling of security, but it does not. The role has also become insufferable since all the corpos are obsessed with AI now, but I digress.
That’s fair - it’s my field as well, but I’ve been at it since the late 2000s, long before the whole industry exploded, so I won’t claim to really know what it’s like on the ground for someone just hitting their stride in their career now.
What I will say is that ejecting at high speed from the standard job in the big corporate world is a decision that quite probably literally saved my life. I found it absolutely soul destroying, and for all the stress that the startup (and, later, freelance and consultancy) world has caused me, for all that I’d have spent the whole time a lot more financially secure if I stayed at the desk in the big glass skyscraper, I have never once regretted leaving that path.
What do you do now, if you don’t mind my asking?
Not at all! For a bit of context: after the brief attempt at a corporate job straight out of my own master's, I bounced around the world of (mostly academia-adjacent) startups for more than a decade - as an early employee a couple of times, and then as a cofounder alongside some people I'd met in the course of that work.
That most recent startup collapsed a couple of years ago (it's definitely not all been sunshine and roses, but I've learned a ton a long the way and I absolutely don't regret the attempts!), and I decided to try and make a go of things independently. Nowadays I do specialist consulting, mostly on a short term contract basis, and it's great - I've described my niche as "guy who knows how to make GPU code run well", and the day-to-day is sometimes helping companies and research teams get their own models optimised and deployed in a way that's actually usable, and sometimes building/running custom models and analyses for companies that don't have that kind of capability in house.
It's worth a huge amount to me being able to choose what I work on and who I work with, changing things up frequently to stop them getting stale, and actually having the ability to make wider calls like "yeah, I'm going to take the money from that contract, reinvest it in a bunch of hardware so I'm not burning so much on cloud costs for the custom work, and then I'll have the capacity to run blue sky research on there as well in the downtime and see if anything worthwhile comes of it".
The interactions even with larger companies are way different in the context of being a supplier whose services they're paying for, rather than an employee they feel like they own, as well. The power dynamic, both real and perceived, is a hell of a lot more balanced.
My lad is already at college - I think we have a different idea of what that might mean in the UK. College is for 16-19(ish) years old. He's doing IT.
His last year of college qualifies him for a 1 year discount off of his upcoming degree course. He wants to do cyber security at University, which I think is a decent enough field to get in to these days. So yes.
It's gods be damned bloody expensive though.
For the purpose of 'going to' or 'being at', college and university are somewhat interchangeable terms in the US referring to being at a university-level institition, though university tends to be used for larger institutions and college tends to be for smaller ones. Being 'in/at college' is probably more common than 'in/at university' colloquially in general however, even when referring to students at places called universities. There are some specific cases where one term is preferred, for example, universities following the 'liberal arts college model' of small size, small classes, and a focus on discussion and liberal arts are more consistently referred to as colleges.
Within US academia, 'college' tends to have similar varied uses to what it has in traditional UK academia, which is also not what college means generally in UK outside of academia: colleges are constituent parts of universities, in some cases specifically between university and department level in a hierarchy (where other universities might use 'school' or 'faculty'), in some cases simply different parts with different requirements/traditions/membership/etc (eg, like Oxford or Cambridge). And then of course there are the universities that simply refer to themselves as colleges, even internally, either for the liberal arts model or historical or technical reasons, though in UK academia this is more often the historical/technical side of things, usually institutions that were or are constituent parts of a university, but a university that was either a rather loose association (for UCL, for example) or simply only had one college that mattered or was formed (UCD, TCD), and with the notable exception of TCD, I think essentially always have "University College" in their name now to make the distinction clear.
I did my undergraduate at a university in the US with the different-parts definition, and so went to a college that was at a university, but in practice no one outside of academia in the US would understand or care about the college in that situation.
I think cyber security is a field that should hold up and scale with the rise of AI threats. Seems like a solid choice.
I actually think cybersecurity is going to be one of the most vulnerable fields to have many of its jobs "AI-ed" out of existence. A lot of the security surveying, auditing, vulnerability scanning, pen testing, etc. is automated. Integrating AI to perform the report evaluations, mitigation, network element reconfiguration, and other traditionally human-led tasks is going to be fairly easy. Undoubtedly there's going to still be a need for higher-level cybersecurity strategy performed by humans, but those positions are going to be few and far between.
Edit: I should add that I'm not directly in the cybersecurity industry, but I deal with it a lot in my position, working with an MSSP. It's a lot of audits, check-the-box stuff, and is already heavily automated. I feel the money spent on MSSPs is largely a waste after the first year or two. But it's basically like another tax one has to pay in business. But I digress.
I have children a couple of years shy of making this decision now and I would say that even if you take the "AI" subject out of the equation, it is definitely no longer a guaranteed yes like it used to be. A college education used to be far more affordable and get you a lot further in your career than it used to. The vastly increased cost of even four years at a University really needs to be compared to anticipated future salaries (as best you can) at this point. It used to be that simply having a bachelors degree in any subject heavily correlated to significantly higher lifetime earnings. I am simply not sure it makes sense for many degrees anymore. The looming threat of "AI" relegating many well paid white collar jobs to something that is closer to unskilled entry level work is jarring. I'd be both furious and terrified at the state of things if I was finishing up a CS degree right now.
We simply have no idea how it will go, but my answer for my kids is to try to get them as many grants and scholarships as possible and to try to guide them into a education path that will be more able to pivot to a wider range of careers in case one niche gets wiped out.
I have a few counter points to your statement that I'd like to bring up. I do believe that higher education is still worth pursuing today, assuming you do it in a reasonable manner, and pay reasonable amounts for it (in state tuition, getting any grants and scholarships possible, and trying to use any employer programs available).
I have been hearing this since I started college myself in 2005. The Graduate came out in 1967 and deals in the background with the listlessness of being a recent college graduate, having to live with his parents, and not being able to land a career. There's always been a ton of uncertainty. I'm not trying to say that there aren't new problems that we have to deal, but I don't believe those problems have made higher education worthless.
As of 2024 this still seems to be the case, according to [this post by the Bureau of Labor Statistics](https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2025/data-on-display/education-pays.htm]
Anecdotally of course, any one person's mileage may vary based on their personal circumstances. It's impossible to tell in your life if the job you get would have been available to you if you hadn't earned a degree. It's impossible to tell if you would have been hired if you didn't have that on your resume, or if you lacked the knowledge you gained through education. But, also anecdotally, I can tell you that my spouse's company will not promote her above a certain level in the organization without a college degree, and she has been forced by the company to hire degreed candidates with less experience over more experienced candidates who do not hold a degree. In my experience, climbing the ladder is easier with a degree.
Also anecdotally, it varies wildly on the field you're in. I am currently pivoting my career from construction/Project Management into elementary education. Because I have a BA in English I can go back to school for 1 year, get a graduate degree in education, and be certified to teach in my region. If I didn't have that, I would have far fewer doors open to me. It has also allowed me to substitute in my local school system, and find out that I am truly passionate about that work. I wouldn't be able to do any of this at my age if I didn't have my bachelor's. I'm not saying this is the best financial choice for me, that part is up for debate, but when I'm currently laid off and earning no money the teacher's pay scale in my state certainly looks sufficient for me. But again, this varies wildly based on region.
I think your rebuttal is more agreeing with me than you realize. That was the entire point. It used to be more or less guaranteed that a degree was the way to go if you had the option. Now you need to look at what degree you are getting and how affordably you can get your degree. Your degree is from twenty years ago and is likely vastly cheaper than a degree today. Getting a degree to go into education is actually one of those paths that I am not sure is quite so viable based on todays prices. Teacher's simply do not get paid well enough to justify a degree that isn't discounted by grants and scholarships anymore IMO. My wife was a teacher and got her degree about the same time as you. While she had both grants and scholarships, she did her past two years at a local private University. It took 15 years to pay it off and I ended up paying most of it with my much higher salary. Many of her friends are still paying on their degrees.
The teaching salary in her previous school district now is about 25% higher than she she was there and the cost of her degree based on my quick Google searches would be about 250% higher if she went to those same schools.
I am not saying degrees should be disregarded, I am simply saying you need to look hard and long on it before signing up for a massive financial obligation that even bankruptcy cannot free you from.
One strategy that used to be common was going to a community college to save money and then transferring to a four year school. Is that still viable nowadays?
I used that strategy myself back in the day as I didn't have financial support. I don't know how viable it is now, but we'll definitely be looking into it.
It can be, but it’s very degree dependent. If you are studying chemical engineering and took a bunch of AP classes, it isn’t going to be as helpful compared to if you are studying CS or business and didn’t take any AP classes.
I took a few community college courses about a decade ago and was really surprised by how expensive they were - a little over $3k for a single class. This of course will differ by area, but while lower in cost, they aren’t necessarily affordable.
Most of the community colleges in my area have removed the word “community” from their names. I can’t help but think this is related to the increased cost.
As far as I can tell, the advice to just go to college and figure the rest out later has never been correct. There's a lot of discourse about how nowadays a lot of college majors aren't worth it, but the narrative was the same 25 years ago for people paying attention. They were publishing stats on average income by major showing that many degrees were not worth the money back then too.
What has changed is the trend to require more and more education over time, but I guess that's an expected result as society and technology evolve and the complexity of valuable work increases on average.
I think the best thing to do is the same as before, although even more important to consider as educational requirements increase:
So, for your personal situation, what are your plans for that stats degree? I'm in a similar situation myself, getting an MS in CS despite not working in software. For me it's half hobby and half for professional development. Work is paying for it, so there's not much consideration as far as monetary cost for me, just the consumption of my spare time. I'm starting to angle myself as a person with domain knowledge that also understands things about AI and computing in general, which might result in good opportunities as companies sink more investment in use of AI techniques. On the other hand, if it doesn't result in a huge impact to my career immediately, Plan A to get a reasonably valuable degree, then a job in that field, has worked out fine so far. That path was not as linear as I hoped it would be, but that's another story.
edit: To kind of argue against my own point, the unemployment rate for recent college grads is pretty high relative to historical values, while the unemployment rate for all young workers is historically low. Underemployment seems fairly steady though. So, if you can get a job, the degree is probably still worth it. I think this might support my point that a blanket statement on whether more school is worth it, and a personal analysis is more important than ever, though.
I just recently got my bachelors in winemaking. If I had paid what a California 4 year charges for it, I would definitely say no. But it does seem to be opening some previously closed doors. I am still job hunting, and the wine industry is in a terrible place, so I can’t say for sure yet. Keep in mind that I got my degree at a huge discount compared to the US. Believe it or not, it was far cheaper for me to live in France for a year for my degree than it would have been in the US. Cost for tuition and housing for a year was less than the cost of dorms housing in a CA state school for a single semester, not including tuition. Also, a European bachelors degree is 3 years instead of 4, so less tuition and less time away from the workforce.
The answer to this question depends entirely on the context. The two most important bits of context are “how good is the school” and “do you have a plan.” Ideally there are positive answers to both of those, but there must be a positive answer to at least one.
You can go to a world-best university (one of the collèges in PSL, Harvard, Oxbridge, etc.) without a plan and it’ll be fine. The degree itself (and everything associated, like networking) is good enough to open doors for you; it’s quite difficult not to have the degree pay for itself. To your point about pursuing education for the sake of education, world-best schools are the exception (the only exception, in fact): you have opportunities there to learn that you would not have on your own. Even an autodidact will be well-served by attending a top research university. The point is that attending a world-best university is always worthwhile.
It’s also usually worthwhile to go to a mid-tier school, as long as you have a plan. The plan needs to be concrete and realistic, with more detail required the farther away you get from a directly applicable course of study like STEM. If you are studying to be an engineer, that is valuable at most any university, even ones that aren’t ranked, so you don’t need too much of a plan. But if your plan is to study art history, you had better already know exactly where you are planning to work - not just what - and ideally your mid-tier school has special connections in that industry (even better if it is with the specific institution with which you plan to find a job). I am skeptical that there are opportunities for learning at a mid-tier school that surpass what a talented autodidact could find for herself, but I may be wrong here.
But going to a lower-tier school is basically always a mistake, doubly so if it’s a private school, trebly so if you don’t have a concrete financial plan as to what you’re going to do with the degree.
A masters’ degree (I am assuming under the American system) in statistics is right in the middle of all of this. I would not say that statistics is part of the “eh, you don’t really need a plan” cluster of jobs and I am slightly concerned about it being a masters’ degree and not a doctor of science. But that matters much less if the school is a world-ranked university.
So if the question is “should I continue”:
I got a BA twenty years ago. For me, my college experience had four purposes:
Good times with great friendships, treasured memories, formative experiences, and so on. I got involved in a couple student organizations and got plugged into a pretty fantastic social life. My friends and I did everything together, had some hijinks, it was just a really great time that I look back on fondly. For me, entering a university away from my hometown, where no one already knew me, gave me a clean slate to reinvent myself for a new group of peers, on my own terms. Of course this chapter of my life only lasted a handful of years (seemed like forever at the time) and I haven’t kept up with any of those people since graduation.
A training-wheels transition to adulthood. My campus was a little microcosm of the real world; I lived in a dorm, went to class, visited my friends, and worked my job all within its borders. Coming directly after growing up under my parents’ roof, it was a gentle way to adjust to independence and responsibility.
Education. I really, really value the fullness of the curriculum. That was my first serious exposure to the humanities, philosophy, new moral and political ideas, as well as basic nuts and bolts like economics, accounting, and post-HS math and science. I don’t use all of these things that much but I am grateful for the way they broadened my perspective on the world and my place in it. The college also gave me access to resources and experiences I couldn’t have had otherwise. I honestly think I’m a better person today because of it.
The degree. I majored in Communication. It’s been absolutely useless to me. In my entire adulthood no one has ever asked to see it or a transcript proving I earned it. I launched a tech career with titles evolving from webmaster, to web designer, to web developer, to software engineer. The Communications degree was and is irrelevant. I put it on my resume and maybe that ticked a box for interviewers reading it, but I think my real hireability was always demonstrated through my work history and the tech interviews themselves. All the knowledge I needed to do the job was stuff I taught myself and getting real-world job experience under my belt. That said, I’ve often wished I had pursued a formal CS education; maybe that would’ve laid a stronger foundation and taken me further, faster. Hard to say for sure.
Full disclosure: I was very fortunate to go before tuition prices absolutely exploded everywhere, and also very fortunate to have most of my costs covered by scholarships. I knew the student debt problem is serious today and I feel like I dodged a bullet. I did take out a tiny student loan at the very end but it was easily paid off within a year or two. I did not have any kind of college fund set aside for me as a kid, and my parents did not foot any bills.
What’s my verdict? Haha, all those words to say I don’t really know. If we’re being transactional about it, if the end goal is really just “I pay school money, school gives me ticket to lucrative job,” I can’t say that’s gonna be the way things pan out. At least not in my line of work, especially today. I’m sure there are exceptions, mainly for people who go on to get graduate degrees in specialized fields. The most rewarding parts for me were the intangibles, the personal growth, and so on. I can’t make a case for going into a decade of crippling debt to pay for that though. If I had needed that kind of loan to fund the experience I had, it frankly would’ve been a very bad deal.