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My university charges $27K/year and I still had to teach myself everything from YouTube at 2 AM
(lemmy.world)
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2026
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I always tell people who ask me what I did with my PhD: I managed to get a good education and become a trusted professional despite the schooling system.
The only thing my degree did for me was prove to my first employer that I was willing to sit tight for years and go through the pointless motion of getting a degree. I managed to grind through to the end to get an idiotic piece of paper, and that told him I was unlikely to flake out on him after 3 months on the job. That's all my degree was ever useful for.
A degree is a piece of paper that says you’re able to be trained, it comes with a side of “and you’re wildly in debt so you’ll take what you can get”
It is such a stupid barrier to entry.
I went a couple of years but never finished undergrad. That first job tangentially related to what I wanted to do required a personal connection because no one was going to hire a kid to hack code. But after that first job walking away with some (embellished) experience and me listing the university on the CV without mentioning a degree, I was able to break into the field.
Weirdly, you don't need a uni education to do software engineering because of how democratized the information is on computer science and how freely people share their code and techniques online for you to study. You can Good Will Hunting yourself by your own bootstraps in this area, trivially. But places really wanted to know you had that piece of paper. Even when I knew friends with that piece of paper and were incompetent at the actual craft.
Only a few times have prospective employers asked about the degree and it was a problem (some ten years past lol). It ends up being really good signal on if that place is worth it.
Yeah this is not surprising because at the end of the day, the degree is a class signal. The upper class want a system where their kids don't have to put in much work to benefit and that requires increasingly impossible barriers of entry for the lower classes. You having the balls to call the bluff worked out in your favor, and you're definitely not the first to figure it out.
Some of these commenters are so naive. Loads of kids pay their way into Harvard and Yale, then party through them, easily get the degree (because learning and discipline is not the point, the point is the exclusivity and the network), and then get a job through their family or family's connections where they don't actually have to know anything to do it.
PhDs are a little different because they really vary based on your field and on your advisor. (at least in the US and in the sciences.) It's your advisor's job to make sure you learn all that you need to learn to do research. Schooling is just a distraction that you get done with on the side and as quickly as possible so you can get back to research.
In the best cases, your advisor will also introduce you to the research community if you want to be a researcher, or help you get teaching gigs / TAships if you want to be a teaching professor, or help you get internships if you want to do industry. The university is just the context in which you and your advisor work, and the degree tells your peers that you've gained a certain level of expertise.
Consequently, my primary gratitude is to my advisor, not to the university.