A recent submission on Reddit asked if it was better to quit a job to attend a top 20 CS program or to keep the job and commute part-time to a local school that’s ranked 60th or 70th.
First, setting aside all of my misgivings about how poorly the common school rankings fail to measure the suitability of a particular program for anyone, if you’re already employed in the field of IT or in a technology position, it’s my opinion that leaving a paying job that you enjoy to take up an undergraduate or graduate course of study is a mistake, no matter what the school. Your situation might differ, but once you’re in the field, the name on your diploma begins to matter less and less. The common refrain is that your school pedigree is only important in landing that first job. I have to say that my experience mirrors this sentiment.
From a response to the submitters question:
If you have your heart set on academia then as the other poster said you should probably quit your job and go for it at the ritzy school. But getting an academic job is hard and is typically a long, very competitive, haul. Are you being realistic about what you think your life as an academic will be like? Talk to some existing academics first and/or visit their blogs if possible. In particular, be careful if you are married and/or have kids. A PhD in particular can be detrimental to your relationship.
How important is money to you? If it’s important then you should consider avoiding grad school completely! What is it about grad school that you need? Information? Maybe you can pick it up from a book or the web for much less cost. I don’t mean to discourage you from achieving your dreams and goals just some food for thought from someone who has a PhD (although not in CS) and ended up not using it very much….
There is a lot of good information in that post. Let’s talk about some of the points more in depth:
Understand What Your Goal Is
It matters whether your ultimate goal is to improve your marketable skills to boost your current career prospects or embark on a new one where pedigree matters.
If your goal is to transition careers then getting the best possible education you can if going to pay big dividends. In much the same way that your education matters in getting your first job, it matters in getting your first new job in a different field.
Such dramatic career shifts are rare. Its more likely that you will move into a related field to the one you’re currently in or expand your range of skills to new applications in conjunction with your existing ones. For instance, you might move from nursing to entrepreneurship in the health-care sector. You might go from leadership in the technology industry to teaching science in high schools.
Once you know your goal, you can decide how education fits into achieving those goals. Are you interested in new skills or a great name on your resume? If it’s new skills, then you should carefully consider where you can best obtain those skills and it isn’t always the top names in post-secondary education.
For Computer Science, Harvard isn’t ranked number one. It’s ranked 10th. Number one is Carnegie Mellon University. Not that it matters. If you want to study cryptography (as I do), then it’s more important to find a school program where mathematical and theoretical treatments are given more focus than programming languages or operating systems research. In those aspects, Harvard is a better fit because they actually teach the things that I want to learn.
If you need a great name on your resume, Harvard certainly fits the bill. Just be sure that you’ll get the mileage out of the name that you think you will. You might find that people are less interested in your educational history than you think. If you can’t back up a fabulous pedigree with actual skills that you can market, how useful is the name?
Consider the Opportunity Cost of Leaving Work
If a one-year masters program costs $20,000 per year and you leave an $80,000 per year job to enter it, then the cost to you is $100,000 per year.
Think about that for a moment. Is that masters degree worth $100,000? Will it pay for itself in new opportunities or increased income?
On the other hand, if you can do the same program part-time over two years, then your actual cost is just $40,000. That’s a big savings.
Don’t forget that if you acquire new skills in your field, then you can start to put them to work almost immediately if you are in the workforce. That might translate into new opportunities or increased income without the sacrifice of forgoing current income.
It used to be the case that this choice was made for you. Part-time programs were rare and of poor quality compared to their cost. High quality programs meant sacrificing enormous amounts if potential opportunity and were very inflexible. Times have changed. It is now possible to earn a high-quality degree part time at a very reasonable cost. Don’t think you have to choose one or the other.
By pursing a degree part-time, you contain the risk but preserve much of the benefit that a better education affords.
Don’t Underestimate the Value of Work Experience
People tend to think that learning stops when you leave school. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the only thing that formal education provides is an introductory template for acquiring the knowledge specific to your particular field. In essence, it’s a jump-start or a primer for a career of learning.
If you’re already in the field you plan to study, there is a good chance that you already know most of what you might learn in school as far as basic skills. As a result, you’ll be able to pull more value out of the material because you have some real-world experience with the subject.
Experience matters in more subjects than it doesn’t and you shouldn’t forget that a lot of learning happens after you leave school and work at your career.
Don’t Assume That A College Degree is a Magic Fix
People tend to assign too much weight to the value of a college education when thinking about reasons for the success of others. It’s important to note that whether you are successful or not matters much more on who you are and the work you put into your endeavors than where you went to school. If you think a Harvard diploma will transform you overnight into a superstar, you’re probably going to be disappointed.
If you somehow manage to take on the challenge of a difficult program and acquire the skills and work habits that these programs demand then you might very well see more success. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking it was the school that did it for you. In almost every case, the will to succeed is the result of a conscious decision by an individual to rise to the challenge. If you don’t possess (or develop) the desire to meet the intellectual and time management challenges you’ll face, then the school won’t be able to do it for you either.
To put it another way: a better instrument won’t make you a better musician; you’ll still have to practice and practice hard to earn that distinction.