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tl;dr - education ROI is tough to do well because you're asking an 18 year old to commit to a career when they don't know all the options and have limited experience to choose, and what looks like a "good" decision now could turn bad in 30 years.
So, a bit on ROI and education:
Interestingly enough, my father graduated from a "prestigious" school with a Sociology degree.
That said, he then went to a top law school and got his degree, even received an award for being the best tax law student there, and then went to work for a prestigious BigLaw firm - that proceeded to put him in a different area of law, and he never practiced tax law in his life.
He did do fairly well for himself financially, not surprisingly. That said, nowadays getting a law degree is much more of a cr@pshoot. The entire field of law has changed, with lawyers outside of the BigLaw firms finding it more difficult to make a living as "traditional" attorneys. BigLaw takes almost exclusively from "T14" schools (the ones who are always in the "top 14" in the law school rankings that come out annually), and I believe almost exclusively from the top half/quarter of those classes. Even there, competition among associates to make partner is fierce, and even very bright and hard working people often fall short, and their options outside of that are not as attractive as they used to be.
In sum, legal compensation is highly bifurcated. Somewhat like athletics - the people at the top can make very good money, others notsomuch. And this change is something that nobody would have foreseen 30 years ago.
Although I totally get the "don't go to SuperExpensive School for a basket-weaving degree" view, the problem is that people at age 17-18 haven't had enough experiences to really know what options are out there in their lives, much less make an informed decision about their careers. In fact, a major reason to go to college is to become educated not just in math or science or history or whatever, but to have four years to learn more about the world and people and oneself and be exposed to lots of new things and find out what one is really, truly passionate about. To my mind, if you go to college with tunnel vision ("I'm here to be an architect!"*), you're limiting your education and yourself. Sometimes people change a lot in four years, and what they think they'll be when they go in is much different when they come out the other side, and there's no way to really predict that.
The best value (to my mind) out of getting an education is not the pure technical training, but improving one's overall skills/abilities/critical thinking, so as to be able to apply anything they learn to ANY situation. Sometimes learning "stuff" in an unrelated field can be helpful down the road in ways you never would have guessed.
So, it's two issues. You may not really know what you want to do and can do when you choose to go to college (even if you think you do), and the field you choose may appear to be a good ROI when you start but could turn out not to be in the future.
Having said that, I agree that spending $200K on an underwater basket weaving degree because "hey, I might be able to apply my increased knowledge of fluid dynamics at some point, or maybe hand-woven submerged baskets might become all the rage in 20 years" is silly.
*- My closest friend from high school is an architect. He always wanted to be one, he went to college with that intention and did well, he also did learn a whole lot of other things while there. He would also say that the field has changed a lot in the last 30 years, not necessarily for the better. He would likely still be an architect because it's what he's passionate about. He's also had mixed professional success in spite of being very bright and disciplined because sometimes that's just the way things go, and one could always second-guess some choices along the way but you make the best decision you can with the information you have at any given time.
I find this notion funny that doctors do more for humanity than others. I think everyone does their part and makes this world go round. No matter you are connecting world with IT, telecom or air travel, doing urban planning or building highways to keep life moving, taking 911 calls, testing water quality, directing chaotic traffic, cooking food to feed hungry stomachs or helping folks find jobs to support their families, everyone does their part to keep it going. Where would doctor be with no phone, car, no drugs, no diagnostic machines or no power. Everyone helps others and saves others in ways not so obvious. Doctors just get more glory and make more money.
Agree. An air traffic controller is responsible for saving more lives in a day than a doctor is his life.
Yeah I decided to become a pharmacist because at the time there was such a high demand for them that not only were they making six figures but new grads were getting huge sign on bonuses. The flexible work hours also was a plus. But now things have changed so much. Unlike medicine the pharmacy colleg board doesn't put a limit on the number of pharmacy schools or grads per year so pharmacy schools have been opening left and right for the past several years resulting in an oversupply of pharmacists. Now there are no bonuses and also the pay is ever so slowly decreasing. Never could have guessed this would happen. It's unfortunate pharmacists aren't able to control their field better the way doctors are able to. In our field everything is controlled by the big businesses like cvs and Walgreens. They are the ones pushing for all of these new schools in order to make the supply and demand more in their favor. Pharmacists are worked like dogs at these places. I can only hope that the new push for clinical pharmacy will eventually lead to higher salary in that niche.
I find this notion funny that doctors do more for humanity than others. I think everyone does their part and makes this world go round. No matter you are connecting world with IT, telecom or air travel, doing urban planning or building highways to keep life moving, taking 911 calls, testing water quality, directing chaotic traffic, cooking food to feed hungry stomachs or helping folks find jobs to support their families, everyone does their part to keep it going. Where would doctor be with no phone, car, no drugs, no diagnostic machines or no power. Everyone helps others and saves others in ways not so obvious. Doctors just get more glory and make more money.
Agreed.
I've worked in IT for 19 years and I've affected the lives of probably hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, with the work I do. That's not an exaggeration. The work I've done has moved stock prices up or down, moved the price of services up or down, moved rents up or down, moved insurance premiums up or down, enabled people to be paid on time, etc.
I find this notion funny that doctors do more for humanity than others. I think everyone does their part and makes this world go round. No matter you are connecting world with IT, telecom or air travel, doing urban planning or building highways to keep life moving, taking 911 calls, testing water quality, directing chaotic traffic, cooking food to feed hungry stomachs or helping folks find jobs to support their families, everyone does their part to keep it going. Where would doctor be with no phone, car, no drugs, no diagnostic machines or no power. Everyone helps others and saves others in ways not so obvious. Doctors just get more glory and make more money.
This is all true. There are many career paths that make a positive impact on the quality of life.
ETA - And as a point of order there is nothing wrong or deficient with circular arguments per se so long as each plank of an argument stands as valid. Sort of a play on Descartes certainty, division, orderliness and review.
I find this notion funny that doctors do more for humanity than others. I think everyone does their part and makes this world go round. No matter you are connecting world with IT, telecom or air travel, doing urban planning or building highways to keep life moving, taking 911 calls, testing water quality, directing chaotic traffic, cooking food to feed hungry stomachs or helping folks find jobs to support their families, everyone does their part to keep it going. Where would doctor be with no phone, car, no drugs, no diagnostic machines or no power. Everyone helps others and saves others in ways not so obvious. Doctors just get more glory and make more money.
I absolutely agree that everyone does their part and all jobs are important.
But as the wife of a resident in freakin' year 8 (12 if you include undergrad) of medical training, I have to respond a bit. There is a huge cost of becoming a doctor--in time and money. My husband will have spent 14 years total since he started undergrad preparing for his career. Only in the last few years has he made any income...and I made significantly more as an IT grad right out of college.
We are the lucky ones with *only* 100k in med school debt, mostly because I worked and paid for living expenses and Texas blessedly keeps med school cheap(er). Most of our friends have closer to 250k. I know a few with 350-400k.
Then there is the lifestyle. You get the beauty of the match system--we paid for my husband to do 26 interviews in 5 months and let a computer algorithm decide where we were going to be for 5 years. Again, we were lucky in that he matched at his #1 choice here. We know a family that had to move from Dallas to Boise for 1 year and then to Missouri for the next 4. They told us they had to clean out his wife's 401k to fund the moves. Depending on the specialty, your residency will be varying degrees of hellish. Again, we were lucky and it hasn't been so bad for us, but it isn't uncommon for him to have to work fourteen 12 hour days straight. If you are in something like internal medicine or surgery...God help you and your family. The one year of internal medicine my husband had to do was hell. We've both never been so burned out or depressed in our lives.
The rewards at the end can be great (after you've paid off the $250k--accruing interest at 6.8% for 8 years--that is), but they have to be to make up for what it takes to get there. I feel blessed that we have the opportunity and my husband loves what he does and loves helping people, but there are very few careers that require that much to practice.
I absolutely agree that everyone does their part and all jobs are important.
But as the wife of a resident in freakin' year 8 (12 if you include undergrad) of medical training, I have to respond a bit. There is a huge cost of becoming a doctor--in time and money. My husband will have spent 14 years total since he started undergrad preparing for his career. Only in the last few years has he made any income...and I made significantly more as an IT grad right out of college.
We are the lucky ones with *only* 100k in med school debt, mostly because I worked and paid for living expenses and Texas blessedly keeps med school cheap(er). Most of our friends have closer to 250k. I know a few with 350-400k.
Then there is the lifestyle. You get the beauty of the match system--we paid for my husband to do 26 interviews in 5 months and let a computer algorithm decide where we were going to be for 5 years. Again, we were lucky in that he matched at his #1 choice here. We know a family that had to move from Dallas to Boise for 1 year and then to Missouri for the next 4. They told us they had to clean out his wife's 401k to fund the moves. Depending on the specialty, your residency will be varying degrees of hellish. Again, we were lucky and it hasn't been so bad for us, but it isn't uncommon for him to have to work fourteen 12 hour days straight. If you are in something like internal medicine or surgery...God help you and your family. The one year of internal medicine my husband had to do was hell. We've both never been so burned out or depressed in our lives.
The rewards at the end can be great (after you've paid off the $250k--accruing interest at 6.8% for 8 years--that is), but they have to be to make up for what it takes to get there. I feel blessed that we have the opportunity and my husband loves what he does and loves helping people, but there are very few careers that require that much to practice.
Good points, but I do wonder when it comes to medicine whether the barriers to entry (both from an academic, and to a lesser extent, training standpoint) are higher than they need to be. Combine those factors with the costs to physicians to protect from legal risk, and I think we have made medicine more exclusive to practice and expensive to procure than it needs to be.
There obviously needs to be significant thresholds required to practice medicine and platforms to protect patients, but I think in both cases the system has evolved to make both prohibitively expensive.
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