What Teaches Us More: Schooling Or Experience?

I’m facing a bit of a dilema right now. Let me explain. My original plan for my college education was to get a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration with an emphasis in finance from USC and a Master’s Degree in Financial Engineering from UCLA (sorry Trojans). Anyway, that was the plan up until last week. I had some free time at night and I started looking into Financial Engineering and what I discovered was not really ideal. My goal in life is to be be a hedge fund manager and a trader, and it turns out that Financial Engineering prepares you for a career in quantitative finance. Hedge funds hire these people as quantitative analysts or “quants? as they are called. They’re not traders or managers. I immediately started questioning the necessity of a Master’s Degree. I figured that if I was to a get a Master’s Degree it would be for Finance. But then I started to do some research and found out that out of the Top 5 hedge fund managers on Forbes, 3 had no graduate degrees and the two that did had an MBA and a Master’s in Mathematics. That’s where the dilema started.

Was it worth it for me to spend 1 and a half years extra in school or get to work as soon as possible? That’s where the age old question of whether experience or schooling is a better teacher comes into play, and honestly, I still don’t know the answer. There are positives for both. With schooling, you can get a much deeper understanding of the field you’re in but with experience, you get a chance to apply what you’ve learned thus far which most argue is more valuable.

Then there’s the question of whether a master’s degree will significantly improve my chances of finding a job right out of college. And I’m afraid there’s no real answer to that. If I can get the same job with a bachelor’s degree that I can with a master’s degree which is very possible in the finance world, why waste almost two years and God knows how much money?

The what ifs are endless and one could waste an absurd amount of time thinking about them. Unfortunately, this is a problem that a lot of students face and for good reason. The necessity of college has been so engrained into our minds since we were kids that it seems impossible and stupid to consider any other option. That’s where the real problem lies, I believe.