The old axiom that "College graduates make more" is an outdated, meaningless platitude that needs to die (and what this means for junior software devs from a dude that helped pick hires).
Did you know:
0. As of 2010, the amount of people with either PhDs or Master's degrees on food stamps tripled.
1. As of 2021, 16% of folks with just a high school diploma and almost 30% of people with an associate's degree are earning more than half of those with a bachelors degree.
And no, it's not just kids spending $100k on a PhD in underwater interpretive dance.
For what it's worth, the current data suggests (as a population), a significant amount of college graduates might make more dollars overall in their lifetimes.
But more dollars !== more money.
If you're confused, the issue with much of the older BLS dataset is that it doesn't reflect:
- The Debt to Income ratio of graduates. You'd be surprised how many dentists are "making" $170,000 a year, but only come home with about $70k. Consider how many soldiers make <$28k annually, but have $100k in their bank in 2 years. Who "makes" more money?
- On the topic of DTI, the average graduate takes over 21 years to pay off their loans.
- The higher Cost Of Living required in for many jobs with degrees because they require you to live in metropolitan / more densely populated areas.
- People who got a degree, couldn't find a job, and got retrained in something else and made bank (the age old bootcamp success story) are included in the degree salary data.
- It often conflates Postsecondary nondegrees, technical colleges, and trade school salaries against people with just a diploma and high school drop outs. Very recently that newer data started separating these categories and revealed a lot.
- The amount of folks with degrees who are underemployed/working jobs that didn't require a degree in the first place.
- Wealthy outliers. Virtually all C-suite executives making millions have degrees. That's not representative of 99% of people going to college.
⁉ So what's my point?⁉
0. Believe it or not, I don't have an axe to grind against universities. I learned a lot at college.
🛑 But please, stop telling your kids it's a sure bet.
1. The dude who wrote all the code that validates your credit card when you buy stuff online was just a self-taught high school grad. All the data-layer security validation and the SLA reporting extract was written by the bootcamp grad he was mentoring.
We don't care where you went to school or your GPA. We care what you can do. And a lot of universities unfortunately don't teach great software skills. Many bootcamps don't either.
The
big
secret
is:
💥 tl;dr - it's all about your portfolio.
If you can get an interview and demo a full stack web app solving modern business problems in the exact tech stack of the company you're interviewing at + you don't have the people skills of a Durian fruit, you have a seat at the table above someone with just a degree.
Senior Account Manager/Partner, PMP at SBSCreatix LLC
1moI would view that as; not is what has more interest but who has been hiring the past year. The private sector has had a lot of layoffs in Tech and hiring has been slower than typical since the start of 2023 while government spending has risen and they are hiring more as a result. I have worked in both the private and public sector and preferred the private in terms of the typically more interesting work, at least in my opinion, and lower burden of bureaucracy. If job security is someone's primary decision factor then the government role will offer that but with typically lower compensation especially with the early and significant pensions being a thing of the past.