this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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[–] [email protected] 34 points 8 months ago (7 children)

And what are the apparently majority scam degrees?

[–] [email protected] 40 points 8 months ago (5 children)

You’ll get a lot of people arguing arts degrees where there aren’t jobs are scams.

Frankly, I think there’s a divide between what we expect of education and what education should be.

There’s kind of a spectrum from required credentials like medical, law, or engineering degrees, to things like stem programs which are not required but open job doors, to arts degrees where there’s not really many direct careers being opened.

Charging an arm and a leg for arts programs is a scam because it’s not opening the same economic opportunities as career based degrees. Having or providing arts degrees is totally fine, they just need to be cheaper.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I think the main benefit of an art degree (for the average person) is learning to research, communicate ideas, and think critically. I have a degree in political science and work in an IT/business role but I absolutely don't regret my choice of degree.

[–] WillySpreadum 13 points 8 months ago (2 children)

My Bach degree was in history, and I often wrote off the importance of the “critical thinking” skills we learned in that program.

Boy was I wrong, I know too many people who need nothing more than an unsourced headline to fully convince them of something ludacris.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

So the correct spelling is ludicrous, but I prefer to believe that you really did mean to refer to American rapper and actor Ludacris. So carry on.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago
[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

Arts education (which I mean to encompass not just visual art but also literature, plays, music, etc) is important because without it you get idiots with no media literacy. An arts degree, specifically, may not be important or beneficial for the average person, but classes in which one must think critically about the creator, the creator's intent, the context in which the art was created, and the reception of the art are how you teach people to be well-rounded individuals who don't just vomit out the first half-baked thought their curdled brain cobbled together from propaganda.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

College should be about the pursuit of education, plain and simple. For a specific education to be required for licensure makes sense, not for it to be a resume filter for admin assistants.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's only a scam if they're being misleading. I've never heard anyone say "get an art degree, you'll get rich!" It's not a scam to study art simply because you want to develop your knowledge and talents in a structured way. Should art degrees cost as much as they do? Probably not, but "expensive" and "scam" are two different things.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

People should study the arts, schools shouldn't pretend they yield jobs just because you get a degree and charge the same as a career specific degree

[–] SpaceNoodle 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

The E in STEM stands for Engineering

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I like to think it stands for enlightenment

[–] SpaceNoodle 4 points 8 months ago

Stars, Tarot, Enlightenment, Mythology

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Studying engineering is nothing like science technology or math, so I basically just forget it's there at all.

[–] SpaceNoodle 4 points 8 months ago

I certainly remember a lot of math and technology.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I mean I'd love if my auto mechanic had a degree in ethics and philosophy. The world would be a much nicer place if everyone had a well rounded education imo.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Anything from Trump University?

[–] kryptonianCodeMonkey 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Did anyone ever actually get a Trump University degree? It only operated for like 5 years. Imagine being the poor schmuck with a framed Trump University degree on his pawn shop office wall.

[–] TexasDrunk 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That would absolutely go on my wall of shame along with several industry certifications I have where the software I'm certified for stopped existing (sometimes within a few months of my certification).

[–] SpaceNoodle 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Find any certification that isn't a scam

[–] TexasDrunk 1 points 7 months ago

I've got plenty of those too, mostly Microsoft and Cisco plus PMP, all of which I let expire because I have no use for them anymore.

When I was younger the company I worked for got into installing and maintaining EMR/EHR software at a time when the government was giving out cash to switch over from paper records. So a million little EMR/EHR software companies spun up all with their own certifications and most of which only barely adhered to HL7 to be able to send info to other health systems.

The owner of the company decided to send someone to get certified in a bunch of them that he was betting would pay off. I got paid to sit in a room and get free certifications for a year on and off because I volunteered. He was grooming me to take over a whole healthcare support division he was spinning up. Those companies folded and I ended up supporting Allscripts and NextGen without a team.

The next big idea he had was for supporting Seismic and Geological software. So while my certs for Kingdom IHS are still good, I never used them because all the oil companies had in house people supporting that plus support from S&P.

Plus my certificate from bartending school (for fun, not for money).

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago
[–] pennomi 7 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Computer Science and Business. I say that with 15 years of experience in both those industries.

[–] SpaceNoodle 16 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Business school is for people who couldn't hack it in any other degree program.

[–] kryptonianCodeMonkey 6 points 8 months ago

The limit as a STEM major's GPA approaches 0.0 is a business degree.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (4 children)

CompSci is a legit subject, mostly as an area of mathematics, but doesn't have a whole lot to do with building software systems.

[–] kryptonianCodeMonkey 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

The difference between computer science, computer engineering and software engineering is pretty nuanced in a lot of ways. Same core knowledge base. Sprinkle a little extra math and logic abstraction and you get a CS degree. More principles of development and team based work, and get a SE degree. More hardware and systems, and get a CE degree. And all three of them touch a bit on the other two.

More than a few of my team of software engineers and data engineers have degrees in things like chemistry or business. They just took a boot camp to learn to develop.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Yep. Strip it back to the basic physics of it all and you get an electrical engineering degree.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

I work with code both from people who have a degree in CS and people who learned on the job and there’s a huge difference

[–] SpaceNoodle 5 points 8 months ago

CS used to be the only degree that concentrated on software development.

[–] pennomi 3 points 8 months ago

That may be more true today with more math heavy focuses like computer vision or neural networks. But most everything else is better learned on the job or via YouTube. Unless you plan to specialize like that, it’s almost certainly better to just teach yourself.

I’ve hired dozens of engineers from both university and self-taught backgrounds, and the self-taught ones are by far superior. In fact, it’s not uncommon that I have to break the bad habits taught in university - those courses are painfully outdated and the professors often have self-serving motives that hurt their students.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I agree with Computer Science.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

Any degree that will put you in debt without actually helping you to get out of that debt.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

I'd personally say marketing/publicity is a scam degree, though that's because of a heavy bias I have against advertising and marketing in general