Often enough, even with the degree, you can end up no better off for some time. If you don’t get a degree and make x/yr, or you get the degree, spend 6~8 years in school and looking for a position that pays 2x/yr but you spend half of the money on paying down your debt for 20 years… That’s a long time to get back into the black, assuming you even went for a degree leading to a position that will pay that much. It is almost criminal that a credit hour learning to work on machine learning systems often has the same cost as one spent learning about art history. Both are valuable to society in their own ways, but they definitely won’t get you the same paycheck, and the cost of entry should reflect that.
Often enough, even with the degree, you can end up no better off for some time. If you don’t get a degree and make x/yr, or you get the degree, spend 6~8 years in school and looking for a position that pays 2x/yr but you spend half of the money on paying down your debt for 20 years… That’s a long time to get back into the black, assuming you even went for a degree leading to a position that will pay that much. It is almost criminal that a credit hour learning to work on machine learning systems often has the same cost as one spent learning about art history. Both are valuable to society in their own ways, but they definitely won’t get you the same paycheck, and the cost of entry should reflect that.