Measuring 'Return on Investment' of Various College Degrees
This whole discussion is based on wrong assumptions.<p>You don&#x27;t go to uni, learn about thermodynamics, and then go and build turbines. It&#x27;s certainly possible to have such a career path, but you won&#x27;t have actually learned the thing you need to know in uni and then applied it at work for the next 40 years.<p>What you do in uni is demonstrate that you&#x27;re interested in certain things and you have enough work ethic to learn the exam answers. That&#x27;s all.<p>I had a guy with a biology degree at an HFT debug a threading issue. Really smart guy. He didn&#x27;t learn how CPP works in his PhD, he learned it in his own time because he had an interest.<p>I actually did study thermodynamics as part of my engineering course, and guess what, it&#x27;s not in itself useful in finance. It&#x27;s just a demonstration that I might be able to learn certain mathy things, not even the same things.<p>So coming back to this idea of ROI on a degree, there&#x27;s only broadly two things you can demonstrate. I&#x27;m more of a lumper than a splitter, so you might have more. But the two things for me are whether you can do technical cave diving like figuring out what happened to that threading issue, and whether you have the capacity to read and understand a large amount of text, like being a lawyer or political science student.<p>The thing to remember is you don&#x27;t just gain some skill in uni, chances are you mostly have personal preferences that are revealed, and that that is far more important than what you learned.<p>ROI in this case would seem to just mean &quot;the kids who studied business did so because the are interested in business and  so went and got high paying MBA jobs&quot;. Similarly for kids who liked building robots or kids who read a lot about history.<p>Finally I&#x27;d like to say we all need to learn broadly about the world, I don&#x27;t condemn people who happened to not be technical. But education itself is worth pursuing just for it&#x27;s own merits.