In all honestly, I went to a school of minor prestige (not ivy, but similar echelon in my field) and I have had a lot of opportunities come my way based on that. Not through alumni networking or word of mouth, just name checking the school and program has opened quite a few doors for me in my career.
That being said, I don’t think the college experience itself made me uniquely better or more prepared than my peers... and in reality a lot of my peers who’ve skipped college all-together were perhaps MORE prepared for “real work” than me. All tallied up, I agree that I’d like a future where college isn’t a requirement like it seemed to be for me.
You are singling out for-profit colleges, which to me does not make sense. I am not sure I agree -- out of state sticker prices at good public universities are not much different from private ones. And in-state costs are not far behind (and it is not just tuition, add books and living expenses).
Most schools, public and private, moved to the model of charging as much as the family can afford (i.e., putting a huge sticker price and refunding the "unaffordable" portion for each family via a much-touted scholarship).
It's really taken off since the 80's. I like to compare it to minimum wage[0], as that's what your average student can expect to earn while in school, if she has time for a job.
You seem to be conflating "private" and "for-profit." Most private schools that are considered respectable are non-profits (at least on paper). When someone says "for-profit college," they mean diploma mills.
Agreed and thank you for the correction. Diploma mill industry is indeed the predator. But I think the way to stop it is to force disclosure of total costs, average salaries, etc. Once people see what they actually get from those (a piece of paper) they may be more inclined to shop elsewhere.
My plan for my (13-year old) daughter is community college, then a state school for a four year degree, which I should have enough savings for. But, more important than the amount of debt, is which major, which is the great elephant in the room. There is a huge investment in degree programs that don't increase your salary, and this fact is routinely buried by doing the analysis on all majors combined. For some majors, taking out loans to get a degree is still a good deal, and for others it clearly is not. It's like asking if a mortgage is a good idea in order to buy a house, without reference to where the house is and what shape it's in.
Let’s talk some numbers, because while 1.5T sounds scary, something else is going on. I’ve posted this finding before, but it seems relevant to this article:
The median defaulter does so with a loan of Just under 10k [1].
It is worth discussing why the median defaulter is unable to pay roughly $100 per month (assuming a 10y payment plan), and how to address that issue. When viewed from this perspective, the problem does not seem insurmountable.
That's the bailout or not bailout question. We can also just let people discharge the loans without bailing out the people making the loans.
Currently, if someone dies broke after graduation the outstanding loans are paid back by the government. So, basically people are making risk free loans right now, changing that so they take some risk is an option.
IMO, loans should be dischargeable in bankruptcy 20 years after graduation. That would slightly increase the loan interest rate, but not cost taxpayers a dime. We might also see things like higher interest rates for getting an art degree which IMO is a useful feature.
Right now, under US law, you can't declare bankruptcy from student loans. A bailout would imply changing that rule so that we can let people with student debt off of their obligations.
You'd also, natch, be bailing out the people who hold this debt.
I'm really not sure what the path forward is, here. Theoretically, the most important line of defense against a bad loan being made is that the lender doesn't want to lose money, and therefore won't make a bad loan in the first place. This isn't always awesome on its face, because it means that people don't get to buy things they don't have the money for right now. But it's really kind of nice. It also protects people from taking on debts they can't afford, because that translates into default risk. And it protects people from taking on debt to buy things that are overpriced, because that translates into collateral risk.
But at some point we decided that being able to get certain kinds of loans (mortgages and student loans) is very nearly a natural right, because they give access to things that we associate with prosperity (land ownership and a postsecondary education). So then the government sets up programs to greatly reduce the barriers to access to these kinds of loans, by essentially setting up a whole bunch of special rules and programs that make it easy for lenders to ignore default risk. And if you don't care about default risk, you'll make much bigger loans than you would otherwise, which fuels prices getting out of control.
We saw how that went down with housing. Now we're going to see how that goes down with student loans. I'm not sure there are any good answers there. Personally, I like the idea of leaving lenders to sink or swim. They've had a nice long ride on a gravy train fueled by government largesse, and, if they failed to contingency plan for the possibility that someone might turn off the gravy spout, I don't feel particularly bad about that. But the lenders are financial institutions, and, as we've seen, the financial industry is such a horrible tangle that it's hard to anticipate the ultimate repercussions of letting them fail.
But it's also hard to anticipate the repercussions of a bailout - money doesn't grown on trees, so the funds used to make the bailout need to come from somewhere. When it comes to government intervention on this sort of thing, though, I'm kind of inclined to take my mother's advice: "It'll never heal if you don't stop picking at it."
Currently the US taxpayer is on the hook for bad loans. My point is, letting people discharge loans does not require a bailout.
So sure we could discharge loans while also bailing out the people who made these loans, but again they are different questions. As you say their are long term issues with the availability and cost of student loans.
I don't have any great answers, but framing things as only two options is greatly simplifying what we can do.
> My point is, letting people discharge loans does not require a bailout.
In reality, changing the bankruptcy rules around student loans will have to be paired with a bailout of the people holding the loans. Lobbyists will make sure of that.
I managed to work my way through a 4 year program at WGU without any debt. It's been great to be debt free, but the cynic in me wishes I'd have gone to a more prestigious university and taken on debt because I just know that any future political candidates are going to get hammered at the polls if student debt relief or forgiveness isn't one of their main policies.
You can get past HR screening without a degree, experience still often matters more - and in my opinion, a 22-23 year old proving they can do multi year projects is of dubious value - what it is useful for is showing that you know how to learn.
I have no degree, but have a boat load of experience in my chosen field, with a couple of notable exceptions, this alone is enough to get my foot in the door. The notable exceptions are government roles, and government contracts with private companies, they want someone who has a degree in any engineering discipline.
I never had trouble finding tech work without a degree. I did however find the door to more interesting jobs was generally closed without one, and that door opened after I went back to school and finished a BS.
I find the doors which are closed by not having a degree to be ones I probably wouldn't have enjoyed. I have no degree and have had Phd's reporting to me, in Silicon Valley.
The possibility to go to University in some European city for almost $0 in tuition is almost never discussed. Stay there 4-5 years, get the equivalent of a Bachelor+MSc and then come home in the US debt-free.
Would you suggest your kids to think of that possibility? If not why? Language barriers? Far from Home?
The main problem is that if you are thinking of getting a job in the U.S., many employers don't have the experience in rating non-U.S. degrees, so will view them with suspicion at best. My wife had this experience when she tried to get jobs based on her Eastern-European degree (from a very reputable University there).
That being said, we definitely are keeping that in mind for our kids (though we are financially planning for school here).
Also something to consider if you might go for a Master's or above in the US. I worked in admissions in a graduate-level only film school and there were definitely issues with someone's BA being "good enough" for the school. I didn't directly validate anything but I assume there was a master list somewhere for those whose jobs it was to qualify the degrees.
I honestly had never considered this. Siblings to this comment make good points both ways, but regardless I think it could be a very interesting opportunity for my children to not only obtain an education at a low cost, but to also--and just as important, IMO--get another view of the world.
It's silly to say that a student should only go to college if they can afford to do it with no loans. I think a large part of the "student loan" problem is that we don't talk about income enough. It is completely reasonable for a comp sci major from a good school to graduate with $75k in loans ($900 payments). That will not be a burden for them. Likewise, a $20k student loan ($300 payments) should be manageable for someone who makes $40k a year. The issue is when the person who only real prospects pay $40k a year and they have $75k in loans.
I was admitted to a relatively competitive university's (<10% acceptance rate) computer science program, but it would mean I would have to take on just over 100k of debt. After the first year I chose to transfer to a local community college to earn an associates, and then trasnfer to a state school. I was hired after my associates, got my bachelors paid for and completed it online, and graduated with no debt. I'm extremely happy I made the change, rather than paying 100k for a bachelor. Sure, I could've afforded it, but instead I was able to purchase a car in cash and buy a house pretty much straight out of school. I wouldn't recommend anyone go into debt for a bachelor; in my opinion the money could be better spent elsewhere, and it is unlikely to make a significant difference in position/pay having a name brand degree rather than something from a state school
I take a lot of pride in my liberal arts education and how it shaped my world view. I would never in a thousand years trade it in for a car and a house... And it cost less too.
Funny, no one has ever asked me whether or not I own a brand new car or own my own house in a job interview. However, every interview has asked me about my college education.
Maybe you are the one who needs to reevaluate their priorities.
Who are you angry at? My loans will be paid off in less than four years from now (7 total) and possibly as little as two more years (if I can figure out how to not eat out so much...). My college education was a fantastic investment.
I am not angry at all. I watched people around me in the same situation as you, job right out of school with a good payment plan have life happen and suddenly that 4 yr plan turned into 20.
That was with much much lower debt than anyone I see today having.
Ok... lots of state school offer liberal arts programs so not sure what point you're trying to make there. I would hope that it cost a lot less than a house, but I still think going into debt for a bachelors is a bad idea. I'm gaining equity every month rather than paying hundreds of dollars for a degree that provides little to no benefits over what you can get from a state school without taking on debt. Also, my house has appreciated 46.5% since I purchased it which is another financial benefit I would not have had I stayed at the expensive university
I'm sorry I wasn't clear. You are making the world out to be a false dichotomy, either you spend $100k or 0 for a college education. One means you are broke and the other means you can buy a fancy car and a house. My point is that it is a spectrum. My schooling cost me $50k. I got a small, liberal arts environment in a cool city with access to a variety of internships. State schools around me did not offer that combination.
A) I enjoyed my schooling and I don't mind paying $500/month in loans for it and B) it didn't cost $100k and C) I find it nuts that you are bragging about the fact you got to buy a car because you didn't have student loans.
What's silly is to ever allow an institution to take 10% or more of your earnings. Unless they're doing 10% of the work for you, they're not entitled to any claim to the earnings. All that does is perpetuate the gatekeeper fallacy that somehow you need to "pay your dues (to the institution)"
"Should" being a huge keyword there. Labor wage growth in general has barely kept up with inflation, on average. The software industry bubbles have kept it largely immune to this and overall still seems to be seeing relatively strong wage growth in certain cities and sectors, but there's no guarantee that will continue.
Not to mention that with the time value of money, 20% of your first paycheck isn't just immediately a lot (which it is), it's also a potentially much larger chunk of long term savings and investments potential.
But the main argument here remains that a lot of the complaints are the overall slow delay in people with student loan debt engaging with other economic concerns (buying homes, starting families, etc), and all you've done is exactly illuminate why it is considered such a crisis, people are rationally waiting for that "year five" when student loan payments are less than 20% (or whatever high water mark) of their income, rather than starting bigger projects earlier than that.
Those wage growth numbers discussed are an average. It would be very strange to have someone not have any significant raises between year 0 of their career and year 10.
On a bell curve there are as many people below the average as there are above it. Given the overall wage growth in software industry it's very easy to assume that has largely propped the average up over the last couple decades of statistics and that there are lots of people in other industries that have suffered wage loss more than wage growth.
You could argue that wages do not follow a bell-curve distribution, but there isn't a distribution out there without people falling at or below the average. "Significant raises" in one's career seems to be the outlier statistic, not the norm.
I agree with everything you just said, but its also an average across age groups. It would not surprise me to see many 40year old workers getting 1% yearly raises for the rest of their career. What would surprise me is if there are a significant number of 25 year olds only making 1% raises until they are 35. Most industries will pay a premium for an individual with ten years of experience over someone with no experience (a recent graduate).
My continued disagreement is with "most industries". I think software, especially in "tech hubs" like Silicon Valley has been extremely privileged in raises and I think that colors a false perception of other industries here.
Historically, it seems to be a nice privileged outlier for white collar positions, at most; blue collar work has rarely paid a premium for any individual, much less for experience, and in general has worked very hard to avoid thinking of labor in terms of individuals.
Anecdotally, I've yet to see this "significant raise" for ten years of experience in my own career, and among peers I've straw-polled neither have they. Some have only gotten that cost of living raise through complicated job hopping. Admittedly, I've prioritized overall standard of living over raw income for most of my career to date. I could be doing better, but I'm doing alright.
It does very much look from my cynical point of view that industries that will pay a premium for individuals with experience are few, and increasingly disappearing/extinct in an overall marketplace that hasn't respected labor in decades. The only guaranteed "industry" in current American economics with significant raises of any sort is the C-Suite fraternity. Software has been very fortunate to keep getting good table scraps, with luck, in tech hubs, before cost of living and work/life balance are adjusted for. Lawyers and Doctors with collective effort have done okay protecting their wage gains. I don't think there are many other industries beyond those that can claim the same, even (and maybe especially) adjusting the averages for age.
Lots of professionals earn 1-2% raises their entire career. I'd say it's the norm, and also the reason that job-hopping is seen as the best way to increase your salary.
A college degree is used as a way to filter out applicants, the same as a high school diploma is sometimes used. It can be used to show some level of maturity and intelligence. It's not a golden standard, but for the amount of applicants per job, something needs to be a standard.
Some higher paying jobs are asking for master's degrees. Also, my brother can directly attribute his income increase to obtaining an MBA.
Is it worth it? An extra US$10k per year for X years of work? Better job stability? These are the decisions that need to be made, and not every career needs a degree.
There are always exceptions to every rule, but what is your current process for hiring people? How to you take a list of 100-200 applicants and trim it down into a manageable list?
I'm retired now, but in my previous career most jobs required minimum years of relevant experience, with a degree able to substitute for some or all of those years, depending.
For-profit colleges (at least the large ones) are actively predatory in targeting desperate, uneducated people.
Something I learned from the book Weapons of Math Destruction: there's an entire industry around skimming contact information from poor people to target for certain products. People will spend heavily on AdWords advertising for terms like "apply for food stamps," and have a web page that offers the service of expediting your food stamp application for free. Of course, this website is just a form that takes your info and forwards it to the regular online food stamp application. Maybe it's got better UX, but it's not expediting anything.
As part of handling the application, the website operator can save the name, address, and phone number of someone who is highly likely to be poor and desperate. They sell this information to certain companies, predominantly diploma mills and payday loan companies, who will then call these people directly to aggressively market their services.
I don't have the book at my fingertips, but if my memory is right, the contact details for one qualified lead sells for like $75.
I still find the US attitude to college somewhat perplexing (I'm Australian).
Australia had free university education until around ~1990 or so when it introduced HECS (Higher Education Contribution Scheme), which I believe later changed to HELP. The idea of this is that any tuition you receive will incur a cost that will be deducted from your salary (above a certain level) until its repaid. It has interest. Previously you could get a discount by repaying early but I'm told that went away.
The key aspects of this system are:
- You can't student loans for any expenses. This only covers tuition. I think this is a reform that's needed for the US system.
- It isn't a loan. If you don't earn an income you don't pay anything. There's no getting crippled by loan repayments like seems to happen with US student debt.
- It's largely impossible for 18 year olds to get into a situation where they owe hundreds of thousands of dollars (I saw a CNN report on millenials once that, as one example, had a young woman who worked as a waitress now who accrued >$100k in debt studying Theatre Arts at NYU).
From working for large US tech companies (in the US) I see a prevailing attitude that some people who work for these companies feel like they're underpaid if they can't save up and pay for private college education for each of their children, which 10-20 years in the future, may well be >$500k _each_ (which is just crazy).
There are actually lots of good options for getting a college education relatively inexpensively:
- ROTC
- Resident state college education. This may mean delaying your start a year to establish residency but can pay off big time. UT Austin has an excellent CS program an in-state tuition is quite affordable last time I looked.
- Stopping when enough is enough. I see a lot of people getting pretty pointless Masters degrees, for example, which is fine if you can afford it.
- Starting at cheaper (even community) colleges and transferring later. You'll miss out on some of the social aspects of the early years of college but your degree will still say Stanford or whatever.
I wonder if it's not sending the wrong message to your children that they can go to Yale without paying a cent out of pocket. Like what happens when they can't provide that for their own children?
College in the US more than Australia seems to be used as an artificial barrier to entry to a lot of jobs too.
> - Resident state college education. This may mean delaying your start a year to establish residency but can pay off big time. UT Austin has an excellent CS program an in-state tuition is quite affordable last time I looked.
I was curious about this so I looked it up: Full-time students pay roughly ~$5.3-5.6K per semester, or ~$11K a year [1]. Easy to see how one would accumulate ~$50K in debt from just tuition expenses alone.
I would personally recommend 4-year college to someone (assuming their family isn't rich) today if that person has a concrete plan for using the degree to enter a lucrative field. Engineering? Yes, go to college. Corporate-track marketing/accounting/finance/whatever? Yes, go to to college. History/English/I don't know what I want to do? No, you're wasting your money. For everyone else, trade schools, community college programs, and similar "alternatives" should be a starting place to get you pointed in the right direction, then you can decide if pursuing an expensive diploma is worth it later.
Is this view counter to the original intent of college to create a class of people who are well-educated in the humanities as well as the sciences? Yes, but today's cost of education is just too out of control and salaries for most jobs too low for that noble idea to be practical.
I don't disagree, but if you're saying a change needs to be made I think the onus on you is to propose what the change should be and why it would be beneficial overall.
I don't have a degree and I'm 10+ years deep into my career. What has started to stand out for me in recent years is that there are holes in my experience that my college-educated peers don't have to deal with. Granted I never had to deal with student loans so I guess there's a tradeoff. But the problem with these education "holes" is that they hit you right out of left field when you least expect it.
* Stack, heap, queue, malloc (Again, very little exposure to this without learning a low level language.)
* How modern computers work
* Logic gates, clocks, memory, (actual) binary math
* Wifi basics (actual physical data transmission)
* Linux
I can go on and on and on, but these are things you don't pick up at work unless you go out of your way to learn how they work.
Regarding the parent post - I have a very generous training budget. And guess where I will never spend it? At the best University in my state. I got a degree in something other than Comp Sci, and 95% of the classes were useless and way-too-drawn-out. So, you might not be as behind as you think.
A pretty-smart co-worker of mine with a Comp Sci degree said he didn't figure out the point of object oriented programming until he got his first Java job.
This is only related to other comments in this thread, but I do feel that formal education is oversold, and particularly to people who are from poor families with no guidance trying to have a shot at life.
I can second this. Self taught programmer and I am weak in all of the above areas. My math skills (only high school math) are also especially weak which has really bitten me in graphics based jobs (simulation) where I have had to calculate view rotations and similar in 3d. I am lucky enough to have made it to the 6 figure club but I probably could have been here a decade ago with the right education. Also imposter syndrome has been a major limiter at times.
I've interviewed people with degrees that don't know about many of these questions. In fact I make it a point that if someone puts something like "TCP/IP" or "networking" in the laundry-list of skills/knowledge they have, I ask them a basic question about it -- and a depressingly large amount of time people can't even explain the difference between TCP and UDP.
I've also worked with people who can explain what big-O is and yet they'll write completely inefficient nested loops and N+1 SELECT queries, and then wonder why everything is slow in production even though it works great in dev.
Comp Sci can teach you theory and concepts, but as they say: there's no substitute for experience.
Self taught programmer and I'm strong in all these areas. You can read three books and know all of this. It does not require a college education. In fact the TCP/IP stack and Linux I learned back in high school just by reading two books. It wasn't hard. The Data structures and algorithms I picked up a few years later when I was about college age. Again, you can read books about this stuff. It's not that hard.
If anything, a self-study program with a list of books to read and skills to master would save many self taught / self motivated people quite a bit of time, but its absence is by no means a show stopper.
What three books? (Especially interested in data transfer protocols - I got a little bit into it for game development, but never found anything resembling a good source).
I learned a lot of these things from taking Harvard's CS50 online, reading the blog posts I linked (and doing problems), and I would imagine this book (https://bigmachine.io/products/the-imposters-handbook/) would help out - a friend recommended it, but I never got around to it.
These days CS50 lectures are online. The TCP/IP and Linux books I can't recall. That was some 20+ years ago. I think the TCP/IP/Protocols book was from Sams and the Linux book(s) were from O'Reilly. Algorithms/Data was The Algorithm Design Manual by Skiena. Cracking the Coding Interview is great too. Crypto was just a bunch of reading online, I haven't found a good book on that I would recommend, same for data transfer protocols. I didn't just read three books, I'm saying, 20/20 hindsight I could have read about 3 books to garner most of the stuff I didn't learn by skipping college.
Maybe some of us self taught developers should get together and curate a clear path for CS knowledge and ancillary helpful things.
"Maybe some of us self taught developers should get together and curate a clear path for CS knowledge and ancillary helpful things."
I wouldn't mind spending some time contributing to something like that. There is an endless amount of material to read and classes to take, but narrowing it down and prioritizing is the hard part.
Given the timeline he mentioned, the TCP/IP one may have been "Inside TCP/IP". It was an extremely valuable reference at one time, but it's a bit dated now. I'm just about to finally give away my copy.
You might try the two-volume "TCP/IP Illustrated" set, although I haven't personally read those. Otherwise, no, as far as I know there was never an edition of "Inside TCP/IP" published after 1997, and no book exactly took its place.
Which is a real shame.
If you just want to get a good sense of UDP, ICMP, TCP/IP, datagram headers, and a handful of older protocols (like FTP), "Inside TCP/IP" is still valuable.
I started college (Comp E) and didn't finish and I, can vouch for the fact that the classes I didn't take would have taught me nearly everything on your list (aside from the last 2).
FWIW, I learned all these things on my own, including object oriented programming. My blind spot was SQL, and thankfully I learned that in school. I preferred lower level coding and I had to be pushed to see that the performance overhead of SQL was not important compared with the productivity benefits.
I have a CS degree, but I learned basically all of the above on my own. In some cases I also had a class later that taught it, but for most of the networking stuff it wasn't even taught in school.
If you're self-taught and worried about your CS fundamentals, there's a really simple algorithm to get an education better than any CS student at roughly 1/100th of the price:
1. Look up some famous university like Stanford or MIT.
2. Download the course syllabus for the course you're interested in off their website. (Nowadays you can often get the full course, including all the lectures and handouts.)
3. Buy the textbook. When I was in school you could pull shenanigans like buying the European version of the textbook for 1/4 the price or (if you live in a college town) buying the textbook, reading it, and returning it before courses are finalized, but these loopholes have probably been mostly closed. There's now a thriving used-textbook market online that didn't exist when I went to school, though.
4. Read the textbook. Do some of the exercises. Implement the algorithms.
Incidentally, this is largely what CS students do for homework. Most of them kinda gloss over it because it's required, though, while if you're doing this because you really love the material, you've got a big advantage.
What do you feel are the gaps in your education? Do you think taking an online course would help with them?
I suggest learning a little about data structures and algorithms, each are typically one semester courses in undergrad. You might supplement it with operating systems and distributed computing, though data structures should be a primary focus.
I've tried and failed going back school enough times to know it doesn't work for me. Certification courses & clinics have proven worthwhile in the past though.
My mom is a music teacher, and she finds that she often will get new students who were previously self-taught with blind spots. Ideally, one of the main perks of school, which is difficult if not impossible to get with auto-didacticism, is that you get continuous feedback from someone who knows what common mistakes look like.
My technical background is largely from reading books and manuals on my own, but I'm under no delusion that I would benefit greatly from some more formal instruction for certain topics, if nothing else because then I would have someone challenge me immediately when I'm wrong.
> as long as that person has the means to do so without any loans
Which is true for very, very few of the people actually going to college. Which means your advice is essentially "no" for the vast majority of people who would ask.
Yes, that's a good point. I should probably be more flexible. I agree with many other that a very small student loan burden to close the gap between scholarships, grants, work, and going to affordable state schools is also totally reasonable in my mind.
Luckily, you don't get to check off the boxes of what you're willing to pay for when you pay your taxes. You can vote for people who support this idea but it is a fringe idea at best and not one you're likely to find much support for outside of radical circles. Federally subsidized student loans, for all their (many) faults, are an obvious net benefit to society.
I'd separate out health care from student loans as they're completely different. Health care is a human right and America lags the civilized world still in that area.
I really feel like the underlying problem is we expect people to be adverse to purchases that will be a net loss. Unfortunately, "shopping" for higher education is extremely confusing and to make matters worse your lender is guaranteed to be paid. So we have created an environment where people who are the most vulnerable are being taken advantage of. We need to find a way to better protect people from making terrible six-figure investments, whether that is through legislation or education something has to change. Even if there was a website that scraped data from LinkedIn to show where people from higher education institutions get hired and what positions they get would massively help consumers not make bad investments. I would have never paid the money for my degree knowing what I know now.
"shopping" for higher education is extremely confusing
I'm interested in hearing more of your take on this statement.
From my personal experience, as a first generation immigrant (though of Western European background), it wasn't overwhelmingly confusing. Sure, there were lots of options - R1 state schools, Ivies and other top-notch private schools, secondary state schools, etc. But, once I figured out which category of schools best suited my talents (in my case, R1 state school, because I was smart but no clue what I wanted to study), the set of choices was narrowed substantially.
After that, it was really just a matter of looking at the costs, as in my limited experience at the time, all the big state schools were mostly interchangeable, or at least had enough to offer that I didn't fear not finding something to study and hobbies to pursue.
Staying in state, at the time, was something like $16k/year (UVA, mid-90s). Leaving the state was roughly double. Pretty much a no-brainer to go to UVA, VT, or W&M. I ended up at UVA mostly because of ego - at the time, it had the better all-around reputation. Hind-sight being what it is, I might have thrived better at W&M, but I hardly failed to thrive (just wasted my first year partying too hard and not taking academic seriously).
I agree with you more than OP. In-state for me was significantly cheaper than out of state so I applied to both in/out to see offers. I got my dream school with no support (would've been like $50k/yr) but also a good school offered me a huge scholarship that reduced it to lower than my in-state or their in-state so I went there.
I basically said I got into these 5 good schools and there isn't likely a big difference to employers, so, who is giving me the most money?
It is not the fact of choosing between UVA, Virginia Tech, and William and Mary. Anyone of those schools is highly likely to give you a return on investment even if you get a non-stem degree. Why is this? They all have strong brand recognition. They are very selective; even the least selective of those three (VT) has an average GPA acceptance of 3.92. [1] It gets confusing for people who are not the best and the brightest. if you have a 3.0 GPA and 1000 SAT (median scores for high school) you might think it is a good idea to go to a school like Radford University. [2] Both cost about the same but one will vastly decrease your chances of making a return on investment. Now it might not be a bad idea to attend Radford if you plan on staying in southwest VA and you got a marketable skill. However, there is a large number of people who go to Radford get a history degree and move back to Richmond Virginia. Now your six-figure investment is worth about the same as the paper it is printed on. My parents always told me "It doesn't really matter where you go to school or what degree you get, you just have to make sure you get a degree!". This might have been the case at one point, but it is nowhere near the case anymore.
That sounds well and good, but I am afraid will just lead to extending bureaucracy of K-12 education (on average horrible quality, outrageously expensive to the taxpayer) to universities.
US has generally good universities (expensive, but good) precisely because public schools have to compete with private ones on quality and private ones must compete with public ones on cost. Take that competition away (and this proposal will wipe out private universities) and the quality will quickly suffer.
I would much rather gov't required uniform transparency for all accredited public and private schools: acceptance rates; total sticker price, median actuals after scholarchips (so you can compare your "20k scholarship/65k tuition" package to averages); graduation rates; average debt at graduation; first and expected 10-year earnings; etc.
College is very inexpensive but you must major in a degree that teaches you strong technical skills or at a school that signals that you are highly intelligent and socially adept.
Racking up debt with out of state tuition at some unprestigious state school is a horrific idea. Loans should be priced according to the true risk presented by the loan recipient. Majoring in CS at Stanford should be very low risk, majoring in Sociology at Iowa State should be high risk. Free tuition just provides a job subsidy to professors in unscientific fields of dubious value. Liberal artists are royally screwed unless they graduate from Princeton or a similarly notable school.
I'm actually surprised by the amount of people that have an iPhone. I'm guessing it's because of the payment plans that the providers have setup these days but who knows.
Pretty much. This is also why you see a lot of phones with cracked screens. Many people buying these phones through payment plans can’t afford to repair them.
My company offers 'scholarships' to devry. Most of our work force is earning just barely above minimum wage and I shake my head everytime HR promotes the scholarships and discounts to devry as a benefit.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadThat being said, I don’t think the college experience itself made me uniquely better or more prepared than my peers... and in reality a lot of my peers who’ve skipped college all-together were perhaps MORE prepared for “real work” than me. All tallied up, I agree that I’d like a future where college isn’t a requirement like it seemed to be for me.
Most schools, public and private, moved to the model of charging as much as the family can afford (i.e., putting a huge sticker price and refunding the "unaffordable" portion for each family via a much-touted scholarship).
0: https://hornor.space/2020/snippets/tuition.html
0: https://irep.olemiss.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/98/2017/09...
1: https://utexas.app.box.com/v/CDS2016
2: http://ir.uoregon.edu/sites/ir.uoregon.edu/files/CDS_2016-20...
3: http://www.ir.vt.edu/content/dam/ir_vt_edu/commondatasets/CD...
4: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/xls/tabn330.1...
The median defaulter does so with a loan of Just under 10k [1]. It is worth discussing why the median defaulter is unable to pay roughly $100 per month (assuming a 10y payment plan), and how to address that issue. When viewed from this perspective, the problem does not seem insurmountable.
[1] https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-postsecond...
Drop ?% of those as not falling under "working class".
Adjust $??? billion for existing in-state subsidies, since only marginal cost is relevant.
Of course, add $??? billion when quantity demand explodes when price drops.
[0] https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/02/01/number-foreign-...
Currently, if someone dies broke after graduation the outstanding loans are paid back by the government. So, basically people are making risk free loans right now, changing that so they take some risk is an option.
IMO, loans should be dischargeable in bankruptcy 20 years after graduation. That would slightly increase the loan interest rate, but not cost taxpayers a dime. We might also see things like higher interest rates for getting an art degree which IMO is a useful feature.
Right now, under US law, you can't declare bankruptcy from student loans. A bailout would imply changing that rule so that we can let people with student debt off of their obligations.
You'd also, natch, be bailing out the people who hold this debt.
I'm really not sure what the path forward is, here. Theoretically, the most important line of defense against a bad loan being made is that the lender doesn't want to lose money, and therefore won't make a bad loan in the first place. This isn't always awesome on its face, because it means that people don't get to buy things they don't have the money for right now. But it's really kind of nice. It also protects people from taking on debts they can't afford, because that translates into default risk. And it protects people from taking on debt to buy things that are overpriced, because that translates into collateral risk.
But at some point we decided that being able to get certain kinds of loans (mortgages and student loans) is very nearly a natural right, because they give access to things that we associate with prosperity (land ownership and a postsecondary education). So then the government sets up programs to greatly reduce the barriers to access to these kinds of loans, by essentially setting up a whole bunch of special rules and programs that make it easy for lenders to ignore default risk. And if you don't care about default risk, you'll make much bigger loans than you would otherwise, which fuels prices getting out of control.
We saw how that went down with housing. Now we're going to see how that goes down with student loans. I'm not sure there are any good answers there. Personally, I like the idea of leaving lenders to sink or swim. They've had a nice long ride on a gravy train fueled by government largesse, and, if they failed to contingency plan for the possibility that someone might turn off the gravy spout, I don't feel particularly bad about that. But the lenders are financial institutions, and, as we've seen, the financial industry is such a horrible tangle that it's hard to anticipate the ultimate repercussions of letting them fail.
But it's also hard to anticipate the repercussions of a bailout - money doesn't grown on trees, so the funds used to make the bailout need to come from somewhere. When it comes to government intervention on this sort of thing, though, I'm kind of inclined to take my mother's advice: "It'll never heal if you don't stop picking at it."
So sure we could discharge loans while also bailing out the people who made these loans, but again they are different questions. As you say their are long term issues with the availability and cost of student loans.
I don't have any great answers, but framing things as only two options is greatly simplifying what we can do.
In reality, changing the bankruptcy rules around student loans will have to be paired with a bailout of the people holding the loans. Lobbyists will make sure of that.
I have no degree, but have a boat load of experience in my chosen field, with a couple of notable exceptions, this alone is enough to get my foot in the door. The notable exceptions are government roles, and government contracts with private companies, they want someone who has a degree in any engineering discipline.
Would you suggest your kids to think of that possibility? If not why? Language barriers? Far from Home?
That being said, we definitely are keeping that in mind for our kids (though we are financially planning for school here).
Is tuition really free for non-residents? How do they avoid getting flooded with students?
How do you pay for living expenses? I don't believe they'll be able to work (at least, as a non-EU citizen) and living expenses aren't cheap.
Maybe you are the one who needs to reevaluate their priorities.
That was with much much lower debt than anyone I see today having.
Not to mention that with the time value of money, 20% of your first paycheck isn't just immediately a lot (which it is), it's also a potentially much larger chunk of long term savings and investments potential.
But the main argument here remains that a lot of the complaints are the overall slow delay in people with student loan debt engaging with other economic concerns (buying homes, starting families, etc), and all you've done is exactly illuminate why it is considered such a crisis, people are rationally waiting for that "year five" when student loan payments are less than 20% (or whatever high water mark) of their income, rather than starting bigger projects earlier than that.
You could argue that wages do not follow a bell-curve distribution, but there isn't a distribution out there without people falling at or below the average. "Significant raises" in one's career seems to be the outlier statistic, not the norm.
Historically, it seems to be a nice privileged outlier for white collar positions, at most; blue collar work has rarely paid a premium for any individual, much less for experience, and in general has worked very hard to avoid thinking of labor in terms of individuals.
Anecdotally, I've yet to see this "significant raise" for ten years of experience in my own career, and among peers I've straw-polled neither have they. Some have only gotten that cost of living raise through complicated job hopping. Admittedly, I've prioritized overall standard of living over raw income for most of my career to date. I could be doing better, but I'm doing alright.
It does very much look from my cynical point of view that industries that will pay a premium for individuals with experience are few, and increasingly disappearing/extinct in an overall marketplace that hasn't respected labor in decades. The only guaranteed "industry" in current American economics with significant raises of any sort is the C-Suite fraternity. Software has been very fortunate to keep getting good table scraps, with luck, in tech hubs, before cost of living and work/life balance are adjusted for. Lawyers and Doctors with collective effort have done okay protecting their wage gains. I don't think there are many other industries beyond those that can claim the same, even (and maybe especially) adjusting the averages for age.
Some higher paying jobs are asking for master's degrees. Also, my brother can directly attribute his income increase to obtaining an MBA.
Is it worth it? An extra US$10k per year for X years of work? Better job stability? These are the decisions that need to be made, and not every career needs a degree.
In what measurable way? I'd argue that more intelligent person finds a way to learn something without it costing them.
Something I learned from the book Weapons of Math Destruction: there's an entire industry around skimming contact information from poor people to target for certain products. People will spend heavily on AdWords advertising for terms like "apply for food stamps," and have a web page that offers the service of expediting your food stamp application for free. Of course, this website is just a form that takes your info and forwards it to the regular online food stamp application. Maybe it's got better UX, but it's not expediting anything.
As part of handling the application, the website operator can save the name, address, and phone number of someone who is highly likely to be poor and desperate. They sell this information to certain companies, predominantly diploma mills and payday loan companies, who will then call these people directly to aggressively market their services.
I don't have the book at my fingertips, but if my memory is right, the contact details for one qualified lead sells for like $75.
Australia had free university education until around ~1990 or so when it introduced HECS (Higher Education Contribution Scheme), which I believe later changed to HELP. The idea of this is that any tuition you receive will incur a cost that will be deducted from your salary (above a certain level) until its repaid. It has interest. Previously you could get a discount by repaying early but I'm told that went away.
The key aspects of this system are:
- You can't student loans for any expenses. This only covers tuition. I think this is a reform that's needed for the US system.
- It isn't a loan. If you don't earn an income you don't pay anything. There's no getting crippled by loan repayments like seems to happen with US student debt.
- It's largely impossible for 18 year olds to get into a situation where they owe hundreds of thousands of dollars (I saw a CNN report on millenials once that, as one example, had a young woman who worked as a waitress now who accrued >$100k in debt studying Theatre Arts at NYU).
From working for large US tech companies (in the US) I see a prevailing attitude that some people who work for these companies feel like they're underpaid if they can't save up and pay for private college education for each of their children, which 10-20 years in the future, may well be >$500k _each_ (which is just crazy).
There are actually lots of good options for getting a college education relatively inexpensively:
- ROTC
- Resident state college education. This may mean delaying your start a year to establish residency but can pay off big time. UT Austin has an excellent CS program an in-state tuition is quite affordable last time I looked.
- Stopping when enough is enough. I see a lot of people getting pretty pointless Masters degrees, for example, which is fine if you can afford it.
- Starting at cheaper (even community) colleges and transferring later. You'll miss out on some of the social aspects of the early years of college but your degree will still say Stanford or whatever.
I wonder if it's not sending the wrong message to your children that they can go to Yale without paying a cent out of pocket. Like what happens when they can't provide that for their own children?
College in the US more than Australia seems to be used as an artificial barrier to entry to a lot of jobs too.
Tuition is only a part of college expenses. How do students pay the rest?
I was curious about this so I looked it up: Full-time students pay roughly ~$5.3-5.6K per semester, or ~$11K a year [1]. Easy to see how one would accumulate ~$50K in debt from just tuition expenses alone.
1: https://utexas.app.box.com/v/ug-tuition-18-19-long
Is this view counter to the original intent of college to create a class of people who are well-educated in the humanities as well as the sciences? Yes, but today's cost of education is just too out of control and salaries for most jobs too low for that noble idea to be practical.
I don't disagree, but if you're saying a change needs to be made I think the onus on you is to propose what the change should be and why it would be beneficial overall.
* What is big O
* What is value type vs pointer/reference
* How does the internet work
* Binary search trees, tries, graphs - u wut m8 (Thankfully, there's this: https://medium.com/basecs/archive/2017/01)
* Basic cryptography, hashing, etc
* DNS, IPs, HTTP, etc
* TCP, UDP, etc (I still don't know these)
* Stack, heap, queue, malloc (Again, very little exposure to this without learning a low level language.)
* How modern computers work
* Logic gates, clocks, memory, (actual) binary math
* Wifi basics (actual physical data transmission)
* Linux
I can go on and on and on, but these are things you don't pick up at work unless you go out of your way to learn how they work.
Regarding the parent post - I have a very generous training budget. And guess where I will never spend it? At the best University in my state. I got a degree in something other than Comp Sci, and 95% of the classes were useless and way-too-drawn-out. So, you might not be as behind as you think.
A pretty-smart co-worker of mine with a Comp Sci degree said he didn't figure out the point of object oriented programming until he got his first Java job.
This is only related to other comments in this thread, but I do feel that formal education is oversold, and particularly to people who are from poor families with no guidance trying to have a shot at life.
I've also worked with people who can explain what big-O is and yet they'll write completely inefficient nested loops and N+1 SELECT queries, and then wonder why everything is slow in production even though it works great in dev.
Comp Sci can teach you theory and concepts, but as they say: there's no substitute for experience.
If anything, a self-study program with a list of books to read and skills to master would save many self taught / self motivated people quite a bit of time, but its absence is by no means a show stopper.
I learned a lot of these things from taking Harvard's CS50 online, reading the blog posts I linked (and doing problems), and I would imagine this book (https://bigmachine.io/products/the-imposters-handbook/) would help out - a friend recommended it, but I never got around to it.
https://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softw...
^Covers logic gates and the basics of how a computer is built to an incredible degree, but it's VERY time intensive. Still, I really recommend it.
Maybe some of us self taught developers should get together and curate a clear path for CS knowledge and ancillary helpful things.
I wouldn't mind spending some time contributing to something like that. There is an endless amount of material to read and classes to take, but narrowing it down and prioritizing is the hard part.
Which is a real shame.
If you just want to get a good sense of UDP, ICMP, TCP/IP, datagram headers, and a handful of older protocols (like FTP), "Inside TCP/IP" is still valuable.
If you're self-taught and worried about your CS fundamentals, there's a really simple algorithm to get an education better than any CS student at roughly 1/100th of the price:
1. Look up some famous university like Stanford or MIT.
2. Download the course syllabus for the course you're interested in off their website. (Nowadays you can often get the full course, including all the lectures and handouts.)
3. Buy the textbook. When I was in school you could pull shenanigans like buying the European version of the textbook for 1/4 the price or (if you live in a college town) buying the textbook, reading it, and returning it before courses are finalized, but these loopholes have probably been mostly closed. There's now a thriving used-textbook market online that didn't exist when I went to school, though.
4. Read the textbook. Do some of the exercises. Implement the algorithms.
Incidentally, this is largely what CS students do for homework. Most of them kinda gloss over it because it's required, though, while if you're doing this because you really love the material, you've got a big advantage.
I suggest learning a little about data structures and algorithms, each are typically one semester courses in undergrad. You might supplement it with operating systems and distributed computing, though data structures should be a primary focus.
My technical background is largely from reading books and manuals on my own, but I'm under no delusion that I would benefit greatly from some more formal instruction for certain topics, if nothing else because then I would have someone challenge me immediately when I'm wrong.
Which is true for very, very few of the people actually going to college. Which means your advice is essentially "no" for the vast majority of people who would ask.
I'm interested in hearing more of your take on this statement.
From my personal experience, as a first generation immigrant (though of Western European background), it wasn't overwhelmingly confusing. Sure, there were lots of options - R1 state schools, Ivies and other top-notch private schools, secondary state schools, etc. But, once I figured out which category of schools best suited my talents (in my case, R1 state school, because I was smart but no clue what I wanted to study), the set of choices was narrowed substantially.
After that, it was really just a matter of looking at the costs, as in my limited experience at the time, all the big state schools were mostly interchangeable, or at least had enough to offer that I didn't fear not finding something to study and hobbies to pursue.
Staying in state, at the time, was something like $16k/year (UVA, mid-90s). Leaving the state was roughly double. Pretty much a no-brainer to go to UVA, VT, or W&M. I ended up at UVA mostly because of ego - at the time, it had the better all-around reputation. Hind-sight being what it is, I might have thrived better at W&M, but I hardly failed to thrive (just wasted my first year partying too hard and not taking academic seriously).
I basically said I got into these 5 good schools and there isn't likely a big difference to employers, so, who is giving me the most money?
[1]https://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg01_tmp... [2]https://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg01_tmp...
US has generally good universities (expensive, but good) precisely because public schools have to compete with private ones on quality and private ones must compete with public ones on cost. Take that competition away (and this proposal will wipe out private universities) and the quality will quickly suffer.
I would much rather gov't required uniform transparency for all accredited public and private schools: acceptance rates; total sticker price, median actuals after scholarchips (so you can compare your "20k scholarship/65k tuition" package to averages); graduation rates; average debt at graduation; first and expected 10-year earnings; etc.
Inform, not restrict. My 2c.
Most schools should probably just close.