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Comment by Brian Sarrazin on December 30, 2011 at 10:51am

MIT is soon to offer free online learning tools and a "Certificate" program.

Comment by Hugh Walters on November 12, 2011 at 3:31pm

Vincent,

There are many true things in what you say especially as I look at ways to support my children as they approach college age.  Unfortunately, debt is a fact of lfe.  However, there are two things that I have not taken off the table to help defray college costs and these are the ways I funded my collge education:  ROTC (undergraduate) and GI Bill (graduate).  Yes, ROTC requires a time commitment but I've yet to meet the officer that regrets her time in the military.  Also, when making hiring decisions, I give points for military service. 

 

Comment by Vincent Granville on November 12, 2011 at 11:14am

There's no doubt that employers only hire college educated people to fill analytic positions, so the degree is necessary to get the job. But the difference between now and 5 years ago is that now, most people will not find a job in relation with their degree and the money/time they spent to get the degree no matter how hard they try to get one of these rare positions for which more than 100, maybe more than a 1,000 are applying.

As an hiring manager you might not even know how many people applied if you have filters that eliminate 90% of the applicants right away: you only see the top ones. For the majority of college educated applicants, the perspective is very different, it's about how will I pay back my student loan when the only type of job I can get pays $15/hr, after having spent a year applying for all the few relevant positions, nationwide, that were advertised. The issue is that you don't know, just after high school, whether or not you'll become one of the 80% who bet wrong about getting a college education. But when odds are become so negative and college cost so high, one should think before attending college.

At the end of the day, it's about re-balancing the output (graduates) produced by schools. Colleges should be more selective, accept fewer students, and delivery fewer graduates. The problem happened before with PhDs: too many of them were produced, and many could not find a good job. The problem happened because the projections about how many PhD's the economy would need in 10 years, were wrong.

 

Comment by Hugh Walters on November 12, 2011 at 10:46am

Amy,

Great thoughts, with one issue, people like me already have a methodology for hiring young professionals and a college degree figures largely into that…for all the right reasons.

I've hired many young people (recent graduates) over the years and the meaning of a college degree has expanded as I've grown wiser (I hope).  Since I always seek to hire the "best" where the "best" can be a somewhat complicated calculation that consists of objective and subjective components, I've always been comfortable using completion of a college degree as one of my more objective metrics.

The degree itself represents a dedication to an objective for a sustained period of time, what I call "sticktoitiveness". Further, since grades are awarded, it is competitive and I can evaluate those grades relative to other graduates and the various reputations of the attended university.  In addition, the student must also submit to the will of the university and follow a prescribed curriculum to graduate.  All of these things point to a level of intellect, discipline, perseverance, and conformance that for me is important.

Since college is an experience with more than just classes and grades, I can also evaluate involvement in other activities including work, internships, clubs, organizations, etc.

Ultimately, a degree is a means to an end and the end is a paycheck (from my sophomore year
epiphany “if you don’t have money you die”).  I and many of my ilk are in hiring positions and we are not looking to hire anybody to solve our problems but to hire the best to solve our problems.  For many of us the college degree is a standard, almost a right of passage, that helps us evlauate and candidates exhibit they are the best in a competitive environment.

Therefore, I would change your advice from become an entrepreneur right out of high school to become an entrepreneur right out of college.

Comment by Amy on November 8, 2011 at 8:54am

@Theodore: a difference with the older generation is that today (with a little bid of guidance from an expert), you can learn almost everything by browsing the Web. 30 years ago, advanced material such as how recurrence relations associated with continued fractions are linked to orthogonal polynomials, fast convergence and random number generators - you had to work on a PhD program to learn that sort of stuff. Now it's available online for everybody - educated or not - to read. By the way, I never had a course on the wonderful subject of continued fractions and their connection to best approximations of transcendental numbers, when I studied maths at the University.

Comment by Theodore Omtzigt on November 8, 2011 at 6:59am

Here would be supporting evidence that the strategy to forgo 'schooling' is fraught with danger:

Stroke of genius comes later in life

 

Young geniuses might have once made nearly all of the significant breakthroughs in science, but nowadays that's doesn't seem to be the case, a new study suggests.

Einstein once said, "A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so." The genius himself discovered that matter was transmutable to energy with his famous equation E = mc2 and helped lay the foundations of quantum theory by that age as evidence for his claim.

That peak age has shifted considerably, the researchers found, with 48 being prime time for physicists.

Einstein-like geniuses 
To investigate this notion further, researchers analyzed 525 Nobel Prizes given in physics, chemistry and medicine from 1901 to 2008. They compared how the age of peak creativity, measured by the average age at which Nobel laureates did their prize-winning work, varied between fields and changed over time within fields.

"There is a lot of interest in transformative research, which breaks through conventional ways of thinking, but we really do not know how important or common it is," said researcher Bruce Weinberg, a labor economist at Ohio State University.

"Businesses, universities and research institutions all must make bets on whom to hire and support in pursuit of achieving scientific breakthroughs — knowing when creativity peaks, and how this relates to the type of research and the state of knowledge in a given field, can provide predictive tools in placing these bets," researcher Benjamin Jones, an economist at Northwestern University, told LiveScience.

The investigators found that great scientific achievement before age 30 was indeed common in all disciplines before 1905. About two-thirds of winners in these fields did their prize-winning work before age 40, and about 20 percent did it before 30.

However, contrary to what Einstein once said, this phenomenon has become increasingly rare.

"The age at which scientists make important contributions is getting older over time," Weinberg told LiveScience.

By 2000, great work before age 30 almost never happened in any of the three fields. In physics, great achievements by age 40 occurred in only 19 percent of cases by the year 2000, and in chemistry, it almost never occurred.

 

 

The world is becoming a very complex inter-related place. Weaving your path through this is not easy, and spending some time learning the basics in history, literature, geography, and even culture and linguistics are increasingly important to be competitive in a global economy. When you start a business right out of high school, it would be very difficult to learn these things fr

Comment by Amy on November 7, 2011 at 3:09pm

Wall Street traders are mostly focusing on very short term strategies. You can't beat them on high frequency trading, but you can beat them in long-term strategies (e.g. being all cash 3 years in a row, and at the right time execute 50 trades in a period of 48 hours, then turn dormant for another few years). If you can gain insider information in a way that you can not successfully be sued (that's where an analytic background can also help) you can significantly increase your return.

You won't be able to beat the casino, but if you pick up the right game (sport bets) in the right country (Australia), you sure can win if you have good statistical models.

Comment by Melinda Thielbar on November 7, 2011 at 2:57pm

@Amy: Wow. Your models much be must better than mine will ever be. I don't have the confidence to try and out-guess the armies of data analysts working on Wall Street, nor do I think my predictive models will defeat the numbers runners in Vegas who do nothing else. I admire your spirit. I hope it works out for you!

Comment by Amy on November 7, 2011 at 2:53pm

@Melinda: getting clients or finding a job is very difficult nowadays. But there are other options - you can be an entrepreneur / business owner with zero client and zero interaction with human beings. Here are some ideas

- be a publisher, earn money from Google adsense or other programs, do PPC arbitrage
- develop stock trading strategies for yourself, play with your money, do Wall Street arbitrage
- win money in horse races and other "gambles" (sport bets) thanks to your predictive models
- participate in data mining competitions on Kaggle (requires minimum human interaction, but no client)

Comment by Melinda Thielbar on November 7, 2011 at 2:33pm

How much time does an average self-employed consultant spend looking for customers?

Answer: If you are an independent consultant, about 50% of your workday is spent looking for that next client. If you have a mature business with an established customer base, you can cut back to 20%-30%. If you’re just starting, you’re spending 100% of your time looking for the first customer. An average pharmaceutical firm spends more on marketing than it does on research and development, and if you’re running your own business, you can expect to do the same.

If starting your own business is really what you want to do with your life, there will never be a better time for it. The job market is tough, and that makes your opportunity costs low. Finding customers right now, however, is also not going to be easy. I would offer that it will be no easier than looking for a job. You might consider job hunting while you’re starting up that exciting business venture.

As for the usefulness/lack of usefulness of a college education, I’ll admit that I’m biased. I took 5 years off from a lucrative job in order to get advanced training. My Ph.D. is worth every penny of my foregone income. Every time I’ve gone looking for a job, even in this tough market, I’ve had my choice of exciting opportunities.

I got out of it what I put into it, however, and I do not recommend higher education for anyone who does not desperately want to learn. If you’re looking at your University education as a business proposition where dollars returned should be X% greater than dollars invested, it is probably true that you’re wasting your time and money.  

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