Somewhere

IT is a somewhat fast-moving field and people who enter that field will in practice usually need to do a lot of self-education even if they do prefer classroom learning. Also, there are low-cost IT certification exams in all sorts of skills provided by Pearson Vue and others. You can sit many of these exams in your lunch hour and they are much more relevant to most work situations than a CS degree. I found working towards those certifications to be a good way to structure my self-education. The social pressure to get a degree is so huge that most young people still need to actually go through the process to experience what a waste of life it is and just how unprepared it leaves you for the world of work, except in certain disciplines such as medicine. The main positive thing that universities provide for most people, however expensively and inefficiently, is structure. Young people left to their own devices often don't know what to do, and if somebody's alternative to going to university is to spend all day playing video games then that's not so good. I think if I were starting all over then instead of going to university I would find one or more mentors who knew the industry I wanted to enter. I sometimes see people advertising online as mentors. I mentored somebody and she moved into a software development job with a good company in a fraction of the time that it took me; it took her 2 years, with part-time study while gaining IT-relevant experience as a software tester, a role she wouldn't have thought of without mentoring.

I think there may be a basic problem with the comparison of the efficiency of government welfare programmes and private charities. The cited source claims "multiple sources" for the surprising claim that "70% of government welfare funds go to bureaucrats". These sources in turn ultimately seem to be based on a single source "Breaking the Poverty Cycle : Private Sector Alternatives to the Welfare State" by Robert L. Woodson (1989) that is not widely available but that seems to have been referring to the shift away from benefits that had been largely in cash in the early days of the US welfare programmes to a situation in which 70% of the benefits were provided in kind, for example payments made directly to landlords and doctors. So the 70% figure doesn't seem to have been an estimate of the admin overhead, but because Woodson referred to the money as going "to government bureaucrats and others who help the poor", what he said was largely misunderstood in the multiple layers of retelling to refer to admin overhead alone. For more detail, see for example this article in the Washington Post and this discussion.

It's a case of concentrated, visible benefits offset by equal but dispersed, less visible harm. Clearly if a country puts up trade barriers like that then they may provide a benefit to a particular industry (or to particular firms within an industry) but at the same time by definition they're providing a financially equal disbenefit to consumers and to other industries within the country, who have to make do with domestically-produced goods that are less than world-class or are priced above world prices. All Ha-Joon Chang's article shows is that growth of the economy as a whole is still possible in the presence of protectionism, not that protectionism is a good thing.

I think a lot would depend on what you'd actually be doing. In the commercial IT world, people don't generally care about your paper qualifications unless you have nothing else to show, or if you go to work for a consultancy where qualifications can impress clients. I'd be concerned that computer science postgrad work might be about using taxpayers' money to produce software that the private sector would be better placed to produce, and without the massive marketing and support follow-through that's generally needed to ensure that the software is actually used. It's not as if nobody's willing to fund private sector IT projects just now. I work in IT myself and if I was doing it all again I would absolutely not have gone to university even for a first degree.

You sound fairly new to IT, in which case there are a couple of perennial ways in that you could consider: Look for software testing jobs. For somebody with aptitude and enthusiasm, these can lead on to other things. Don't let recruitment agents discourage you if you go this route as somebody with not a lot of experience. It can be done. Do something with Excel. If you do this right then it could pay relatively well quite quickly, particularly if you can learn VBA. Not very exciting, perhaps, although it's a start and it can lead on to other things. There are two essential sites if you're looking for IT jobs in London: http://www.jobserve.com for, um, jobs http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk for salary ranges, number of open positions and their trends over time If you would like a chat or a mock interview, let me know. I've interviewed a lot of people for IT jobs. The main thing in IT is not to bluff.