Its hard to take the conclusions of such an article seriously, especially with regards to the gender pay gaps, when they aren't normalized for degree program. Unless you are comparing Engineering women versus Engineering men, or College of Eng. in school A versus CoE in school B, it is utterly impossible to meaningfully compare schools A and B as well.
The sinister in me asks "Well, who tends to make shitty decisions?" The innocent asks "How is this legal?" The realist middle-classer I am asks "Are my tax dollars going to be used to fix this shit again?" The Democrat in me says "well we should definitely introduce legislation to fix this." The Republican alter-ego laughs and says "we already fixed it because you can't get rid of that shit, even in chapter 7 and 13 bankruptcy."
>The Republican alter-ego laughs and says "we already fixed it because you can't get rid of that shit, even in chapter 7 and 13 bankruptcy."
That's not Republican at all. Debt that is impossible to get rid of is the entire reason that the market can't price this correctly. People essentially have access to hundreds of thousands of dollar loans without collateral or any proof of the ability to pay it back because of government intervention. It's antithetical to the entire 'free market' ideology.
The Republican alter-ego in you would actually say something like, "treat this like any other debt that can be discharged in bankruptcy and it will be priced appropriately by the market."
Dschargeable student loans, and the subsequent elimination of everyone and their dog automatically getting student loans, would also probably go a long way towards reducing constantly-ballooning tuition in the US.
For any other type of loan, if you have more current/future income, you can get a larger loan. For student loans, you get a larger loan for having LESS current income. This is reasonable since the loans are government-subsidized, but it might help to have some correlation between the loan and your ability to pay it off (i.e. future expected earnings due to your education).
This sounds like an excellent arbitrage opportunity for a startup. Find mispriced student loans (say, some honor roll student in MIT Computer Science paying the same 7% as some fine arts student at University of Phoenix) and refinance them at 4%.
You could even securitize the debt and sell it to alumni! I know I'd buy Waterloo CS Class of 2018 Honour Roll debt at even 3%.
This happens already. There was an article linked here some time about it. The twist was that the article scolded those companies, because it meant that the rates for government loans would have to go up, because their portfolios now consisted of worse borrowers.
If you're good enough to do so I think it's more cost-effective to forgo co-op, stack on the debt, and graduate earlier so you can earn full-time salary and begin vesting stock.
For their studies, they borrow from the state. Then they pay their debt through 50% income taxes, limited to 7 years. If they get a bartender job with their engineering degree, they can still survive. Therefore studies are not free, they still have the responsibility of choosing right, they're not choked with debt and they still get a margin if they get a good job.
As an Australian currently paying off his education, this isn't accurate.
Firstly, there's no time limit. You need to pay back all of it.
Secondly, it's not a 50% tax rate. It's a additional % (4-8 %) on top of your normal tax rate, depending on how much you earn. There's also a threshold, so if you earn less than about $54k, you don't pay it back. At least, not that year.
Edit: Although I do agree with you: The answer is in Australia :)
Anything free creates a perverse incentive. Each year wagons of French students get graduated with History degrees at the free university. What job do they really intend to perform, how do they plan to contribute to society and how do they plan to earn money to give it back? How many historians do we really need? Most of them go straight to unemployment benefits for years. Which I also pay for.
I mean it has to be easy to study, like in Australia, but students need to be responsible with society's money, therefore it shouldn't be free.
It's legal because many people have a belief that the free market will successfully detect and avoid such scams, despite seemingly obvious evidence to the contrary.
If people are willing to spend money on something that is apparently "worthless", then who are we to complain or be "high-morals" about and make illegal? It obviously represents some value to them, therefore they are willing to pay money for it.
Are they worthless, scammy degrees? Who knows, maybe. Are some people told lies and believing in it? Maybe the case, too.
Is that on a simple cash flow basis? The value of the guarantees being made should count as a "cost", since insurance isn't usually given away for free, even if it doesn't pay out.
"Many country and city governments in the United States choose to "opt out" of GAAP practices as they operate on a cash basis, as opposed to an accrual basis."[0]
If publicly traded companies are expected to report GAAP numbers and our governments aren't, it has to make one wonder… it certainly makes it harder to determine how to go about effective resource allocation in a society, especially when we're asking kids to make informed investment decisions about their futures…
Actually most insurance companies operate on a cost neutral basis (i.e., the premiums are designed to match the payout on average). They make money because they are allowed to invest the premiums (often with a lot of leverage). This is why Warren Buffet bought up so many insurance companies. It's essentially a free loan (probably made more sense in the 80's than it does now, but you get the idea ;-) ).
So, I think the only cost you should account for is the cost of having to pay in the case of default.
Where did you get that information from? I spent 2 years of my professional life both designing insurance products for many of the major insurance companies, as well as filing for rate increase in almost all 50 states.
What you said it blatantly false. What your talking about is called the Loss Ratio (or LR because actuaries love acronyms). Insurance companies shoot for long term loss ratios of around 0.6 i.e. for every dollar put in, they expect to pay out in the form of benefits 60 cents.
Where are you getting your information from?
Additionally, insurance companies have a lot of rules on how they invest their reserves, so these aren't going into high risk high reward baskets. Insurance companies have tons of overhead, from underwriting, advertisement etc.. which would completely dwarf what they make from interest alone.
I mean you have to compare like with like, right? If you're comparing the value of guarantees given out, you compare that with the value of the debt received. Or you can compare it on a cash flow basis (money out minus money in).
I did actually have a scroll through that gov tool for comparison yesterday and 90%+ graduation rates were extremely common, even for the highest echelon of US universities.
The top universities can afford to be selective enough that you'd expect most of their students to graduate. The schools being labeled degree mills have similar grad rates, but are teaching average or below average students rather than the top few percent.
The top universities are much more incentivized for you to succeed because they've already invested in you. Comparing friends who went to state schools and never got extensions or mental health help to friends who went to Ivy League schools and finished projects for some classes a year late... It's a little ridiculous how much "help" or outright cheating happens at higher tier schools.
I don't know if this division actually works, but one might separate colleges by how much a student is worth to them before and after graduating. I assume degree mills receive exactly zero from graduates. Ivy schools sometimes receive enormous gifts from graduates, often decades after they graduate. It is in the school's financial interest to keep standards high, in order to continue collecting checks from the class of 1950. Tuition is almost just a down payment on a lifetime of giving.
We've made the college diploma the equivalent of the high school diploma - it's become the minimum bar for many jobs, even when it's not remotely useful. Outside of a few fields, if you want to escape low-paying, part-time service industry work, you've got to have that piece of paper. And a lot of institutions are happy to give it to you, if you (or your parents, or private lenders, or the government) are willing to fork over $50,000-$200,000.
The term "degree mill" refers to unaccredited for-profit college with low standards and almost worthless degrees. It has nothing to do with graduation rates.
As far as regular universities go, the high graduation rate isn't surprising. Only a complete idiot would go through the hassle of getting in, then pay massive amounts of money and spend several years studying, and then give up empty handed. Only people in the most dire of circumstances drop out of college. Most people change majors to something easier, or they keep trying until they get it.
Please don't over generalize those of us who did indeed leave college without a degree. People do it for a large number of reasons, some of which are good and some of which are bad. In most circumstances this does not reflect on their intelligence.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't degree mills typical still accredited? I thought the process was they acquire already accredited institutions and rebrand them.
Do you have any real numbers or other info on "degree mills"? My understanding was that the term applied to University of Phoenix type schools, which are still accredited.
So you're saying that a proper university fails some amount of students who understand the material in order to acquire prestige from the appearance of stringency? Or that a double-digit percentage of admitted students are, for some reason, incompetent?
I posit that a good university has an ethical admissions office, and an ethical admissions office helps students realize this isn't want they signed up for before they get to the "signed up for" part.
Why do you think that a good university should necessarily be incompetent at telling students what they're in for? That they have to pull bait-and-switches?
I knew exactly what I was getting into at my university.
A coworker I know is attending such an online-degree like mill. He is graduating this fall with a Comp Sci degree and a Web Design? degree.
He names his variables atrociously(MethodName(id) instead of something more descriptive like MethodName(organizationID), doesn't know what an enum is,
and so much more.
Gah rant. I wish online-degree mills were regulated well.
I have met a PhD in Computer Science from a major German university who asked what type casting is. Even PhD does not guarantee that the person will have a broad knowledge of everything related to computer science. However, some might argue that type casting is one of those things every CS graduate should know about.
You're right, there's not enough detail here to make any solid points. I wonder how many of these people 10 years later are stay at home moms/dads with little to no income? And is it meaningful to count them if they are?
Isn't the fact that men and women do such differently-paying things after college itself significant? You seem to think the article is arguing something more than it is.
Well, most discussions revolving around this try to frame it as if women are being paid less for the same job a man is doing. It's disingenuous, and needs to be scrutinized so that we can all be on the same page and not make knee-jerk reactions that can cause irreparable harm.
It's rather arbitrary which thread of the two to pick as primary. Arguably it should be the original source, but then the article gives more background, and people have linked to the original source in the thread. We can change it if people feel strongly about it.
I think you must take these concepts into account if you're going to think about how to "fix" or "disrupt" education.
1. Most students who go to elite colleges pay for what they can afford. While there are exceptions and financial aid is not perfect, the college bubble and loan crisis is largely occurring at for-profit colleges, 3rd tier universities, and the smaller liberal arts college.
2. Most students who go to elite colleges are not attempting to optimize their future salary, but are positioning themselves to succeed and obtain prestige in science, law, medicine, politics, or academia. Many graduates of South Dakota School of Mines earn more than the POTUS, and salary optimization is not what many college applicants value.
3. You do not and should not go to college primarily to sit and learn in classrooms. You go for the peer connections, professor mentorship, intellectual resources, and industry connections.
4. Outside of technology, it is almost impossible to correctly learn and succeed in most intellectual fields without attending college. See: science, medicine, law, politics, literature, the arts. In technology, students who go to adequate universities and take advantage of the resources and connections offered there are merely at an enormous advantage.
5. It is impossible to talk about (a) elite universities (top ~20 schools), (b) "top 100" universities, (c) small elite liberal arts colleges and conservatories, (d) lower ranked state schools, and (e) for-profit and/or trade schools under the same umbrella of "education" and have a productive conversation. There are all widely different environments where widely different rules apply and different policies should be considered.
People go to elite colleges for the same reason that you're on HN and not Reddit right now.
Think of the weird kids in football-obsessed small towns who really like school and read classic literature for fun. The kids who enjoy high-brow media like NYT/Economist/New Yorker/Atlantic/NPR in places where reading anything in public would get you accused of being uppity. The kids who want to be professors, surrounded by future business and communications majors.
Admission to an elite college, for these students, is chance to finally be surrounded by people smarter than they are, people who understand them, people who hold their own in debates both inside and outside the classroom and have interesting things to say, people who care about the world beyond how it can make them rich. Gen-ed humanities are tiny discussions around conference tables, and instead of staring blankly and cracking jokes, people actually contribute, erring on the side of too much rather than too little. To the one kid out of 35 who took English class seriously, that's fucking amazing.
Of course, these people exist in small quantities everywhere, but at many elite schools they exist with a density approaching 100%. The ability to come of age surrounded by that kind of crowd is incredible, and it should be available to everyone who has the taste and talent for it. Fortunately, donors tend to agree, and the endowment can usually make it happen.
Just want to tack on to number one, out-of-state schools. When an eighteen year old is presented with the option of choosing a first-rate (let's say top 100) out-of-state school or a second-rate in-state school, it's a hard decision that can lead to a 4x tuition hike.
The words you're looking for are "liberal arts education." The liberal arts are (roughly) fields concerned with the search for truth and the study of human life: math, philosophy, physics, biology, chemistry, anthropology, psychology, literature, etc. Some computer science programs should arguably be counted among the liberal arts, insofar as they're about something deeper than contemporary software engineering practice. Liberal is meant as in freedom: the objects of study worthy of a free person, particularly if you put a Marxist lens on it and consider wage slavery unfree.
The liberal arts do not have salary optimization or the production of skilled workers of any kind as their mission, though it may be a side effect in some cases. Finance, business, management, engineering, communications, etc. do not count, and a proponent of liberal arts education (like myself) would say they do not belong in an undergrad program.
Many people believe that the primary value of undergrad is a coming-of-age ritual where students develop as intellectuals and learn to be informed and rational citizens of the world. The best way to do this is with mandatory and rigorous breadth in the entirety of the liberal arts [0], and a particularly rigorous specialization in one. Those professions that require additional formal training ought to be studied in graduate and/or professional school, as is the case with law and medicine.
This was a mainstream view until sometime in the late 20th century when the "college as job training and investment in future salary" narrative took off. Many people now (coincidentally almost all are liberals) believe this was a mistake. These are the people you'll find letting their children study non-salary-optimizing fields and lending political support to taxpayer-funded higher education, including in not-necessarily-economically-useful fields.
Not relevant. I wanted hard numbers for students that don't take salary into account. I don't care about your apologetics for a field that pretends to take credit for granting the ability to think.
People from engineering fields and hard sciencies are much more rational citizens of the world than someone who spent all of their time on art history because they were required to rigorously think logically.
To the extent that we can infer desire for salary optimization by choice of major, I'd exclude humanities, social sciences, math and physical sciences (research is not particularly lucrative), and education. Those, taken together, are 46.4% of undergraduate degrees in 2011-12. CS, engineering, and business, on the other side, are 28.6% of undergraduate degrees [1].
Consider how arrogant it is to look at the history and present of human civilization, its institutions and customs and art and languages, what it claimed to know and how, what it fought for and why, who held power and how people thought about its legitimacy, what it valued and worshipped, and think "Nope, nothing there could possibly be interesting or important here beyond what engineers can discover in their spare time. Nobody should bother studying any of this." I'm glad there are people who disagree with you.
I never said it wasn't worth studying. Consider how arrogant it is to say that liberal arts are for teaching people how to think critically, implying that hard sciences, math, and engineering are just producing thoughtless drones for work.
I don't know of any polls, I'm simply taking into account that fact that a large percentage of college students want to go into fields which do not have high 10-year salaries, such as science, academia, journalism, literature, and politics.
I think the worth of a college education varies so much from person to person, as well as field to field. If you are becoming a doctor, going to college is 100% necessary for obvious reasons. But for a programmer, it may not be, depending on the person.
More than helping you learn how to code, a college education helps you learn HOW to learn how to to code. You won't get much useful experience until you are in an internship or doing actual work in the field learning from people that are better than you. You can spend forever on theories, but it will never actually get you anywhere unless you put it to use. For the people that need to learn how to learn, the price of college can be worth it. For others, it can be a waste of time and a LOT of money.
Not so; medical schools are somewhat unique in only requiring certain college coursework. One can complete a medical degree whilst never finishing a bachelors degree. The most prominent example of this is the Kentucky Senator Dr. Paul who graduated from Duke with an M.D. and has no bachelors degree.
Sons and daughters of political figures tend to be the ONLY ones to be afforded that. Every few years I hear of a senator's kid getting in w/o MCAT scores or some other requirements skirting.
Does "going to college" exclusively mean getting an undergraduate degree in the US? "Graduating from Duke" and "completing a medical degree" both sound inherently going-to-college to me.
Here in Australia we'd sub in "uni" for "college", but it just sounds weird to "complete a degree" without "going to [tertiary education]".
Without thinking about it too much, I think I'd say "going to college" for undergrad (even at a university), "going to grad school" for a graduate degree, and "going to med school" for a medical degree. (For reference, I'm from Michigan.)
In the US a significant proportion of every undergraduate degree is "general education", ie what in Australia would be an Arts degree. AFAIK, specialized degrees like law and medicine are exclusively post-graduate degrees.
Well I use the term "going to college" loosely, it can be applied to getting any kind of degree (whether it's an MD or a bachelors) vs. self-learning, which is not pursuing a degree at all.
I think it depends on the circumstances of your self learning. In general I think its harder to get a programming/software engineering job nowadays than it was 15-20 years ago without a degree. I mean, if you were self taught on PHP/Perl/Linux in the 90s, then you could've gotten yourself in on the ground floor without a CS degree. Likewise for any new tech stack that gets introduced, immersing yourself in it can certainly make up for not having a CS degree.
While I think it has gotten harder for non-CS degreed people to compete with CS-degreed people when viewed in terms of how hiring used to happen, due to limitations in ways to show experience, I think there are now many more ways to show equivalent experience other than a prior job in the same industry. A good Stack Overflow reputation and/or a Github account with some projects or contributions to known open source projects that have been accepted would go a long want in my book towards asserting someone could function as a programmer.
I'm not sure if it's true or not (and I was one of those self-taught in the late 1990s devs) that it's harder now, but I can tell you that even back then it had challenges even beyond getting a foot in the door: https://medium.com/@opirmusic/why-software-developers-should...
It was possible then, and it's possible now; it is definitely a lot more work than with the degree, though.
Interesting article. If you can go to university on a full-ride scholarship without getting yourself into debt, then by all means, you don't have anything to lose. But when you say that self-learning is a lot more work than a degree, I have to disagree with that. Getting a bachelors in CS is no cake walk, and after you graduate, you'll have to spend years getting actual experience with a company anyway. Either way, to be successful in a field, you'll have to work extremely hard. For some, paying for a college degree can be self-motivation to work harder, but in the end, everyone will have to work hard to make it.
I have several friends without university degrees that are software devs. The difficulty seems really variable. If you get that first job and can stay there for a couple of years, I would say it is often easier than going to University. Personally, I didn't consider comp sci to be a particularly difficult degree (in comparison to physics or pure math for example), but exams and assignments are definitely more stressful than what you normally run into in a job.
There is a lot of risk with going without a degree, though. Take the example of the person who posted a few days ago about working as an intern for 8 months, getting into a fight with his boss over money and finding himself without a job. I'll take the stress of an exam over that any day. Trying to find a junior position without an academic background often means putting yourself at the mercy of unscrupulous people :-(
I got a free ride through school, but I went through in the 80's when it was also comparatively cheap. At that time, I don't think there was much of a downside to getting a degree. If I were to do it again (on my own dime), though, I would seriously think about trying to get an apprenticeship at 18 instead. If you can work for those 4 years, I think you would be considerably ahead financially.
I'm glad to hear you had a more positive experience in that area. I'm speaking from my own experiences, and from conversations with degreeless peers over the years (started in 1997), whose opinions concur with mine; what I've witnessed may be more prevalent than you might think. Consider that not everyone may inclined to discuss it openly. It's not a particularly comfortable subject.
Very true--it does take much more motivation and skill nowadays to get into a job without a degree. But it can still be done. Getting a degree doesn't give you a good Stack Overflow or GitHub profile. It's experience in the field that gives you that. I've interviewed coders for dev jobs at the agency I work at, and 99% of the time, I won't even ask/care about a degree if they have an impressive portfolio.
Carnegie Mellon has salary information for each major. For example, computer science majors: http://www.cmu.edu/career/salaries-and-destinations/2015-sur... have a mean starting salary of $103,608 and median of $105,000. This doesn't include any stock, stock options or bonuses yet. Out of 192 students, 32 joined Google, 19 joined Facebook and 12 joined Microsoft.
> There are two notable limitations that researchers should keep in mind for all of these metrics. First, the
data are not yet available to produce program-level earnings data. Research suggests that the variation
across programs within a school may be even greater than aggregate earnings across schools; for
instance, STEM and health majors frequently earn more than students who study in other fields. Second,
the data include only Title IV-receiving students, so figures may not be representative of schools with a
low proportion of Title IV-eligible students. Additionally, the data are restricted to students who are not
enrolled (enrolled means having an in-school deferment status for at least 30 days of the measurement
year), so students who are currently enrolled in graduate school at the time of measurement are
excluded.
Although, looking at the data, the real problem is that half the colleges have PrivacySurpressed values for those fields.
Can anyone understand the logic of the NYT releasing this article, then going into the wage gap aspect, without mentioning that the data can't be quantified by major?
It also doesn't mention any steps taken to account for the willingly unemployed/underemployed- assuming both partners in a marriage will desire to work full time to maximize their earning potential seems like it's worth a disclaimer.
>Can anyone understand the logic of the NYT releasing this article, then going into the wage gap aspect, without mentioning that the data can't be quantified by major?
It fits a narrative that NYT has been pushing for years.
I really do wonder how much of these gaps can be attributed to the universities themselves. Elite universities are more likely to attract successful and motivated and thus will "produce" more successful graduates than other universities. No name state colleges are more likely to attract the less successful high school students and thus they will likely produce less successful graduates. I bet there is nearly as much correlation between SAT scores and pay as the eliteness of the attended university and pay.
Yup, selection effect bias. There was a long term study on this (sorry no link, I don't remember exact details, just that it was pretty solid, could have been famous Terman study [1] or something similar).
People who were admitted to elite universities but for whichever random reasons ended up not going there ended up being as successful as their cohort peers who did attend elite institutions. What mattered was "good enough for Ivy League" not Ivy League education itself.
... it would really suck if the pro-education policies if numerous countries were all based in a misunderstanding of why education is correlated with success. (To put it mildly.)
Pro-Education is different from pro-collehe, but yes.
And when there is only room for say 10% of the population to succeed , making 100% of the population meet today's arbitrary selection criteria will only serve to usher in new selection criteria.
> Many talented students can't afford or avoid debt in elite universities.
That's actually very very rare. Elite universities will give grants which cover the vast majority of costs for low-income students.
There's a reason the average indebtedness at graduation for Ivies is only a few thousand dollars (and that's not even including the majority who have no debt).
While this is true, many disadvantaged students don't even know this, because they don't even look at these schools in the first place, as they assume they cannot afford to attend. Selection bias.
The ratio of income inequality is immensely higher than the ratio of tuition cost, which is at least kind of interesting.
Also the education bubble is economically sustainable if and only if the population is selected to be elite ivies only. A nation where nobody makes over $10/hr unless they're in the ivy aristocracy (therefore attending for free with substantial scholarships and aid) doesn't mix well with $60K/yr tuition for a non-elite school.
> At Bennington College in Vermont, over 48 percent of former students were earning less than $25,000 per year. A quarter were earning less than $10,600 per year.
Bennington always impressed me as as rich kids' school. I have to wonder how many of these former students are living off of trust funds.
Interesting. He also calls out Bard. That rang a bell for me so I looked it up. 31% of 2014 graduates were in the visual and performing arts. Maybe some of these schools just attract people who aren't expecting to have a strong economic return on their investment.
He calls out schools where the students aren't repaying their loans later. It might be interesting to analyze the data to relate income to repayment of student loans (or lack of loans altogether.) It would be interesting to see if there are schools where the students make no money but pay back their loans on time.
I went to Bennington for two years, and while it has that reputation, and there are some rich kids running around (myself included), there are a surprising number of working and middle class kids going there, and then coming out of school with no prospects.
Anecdotally, there are a surprising number of waiters, baristas, and other people doing jobs that are in no way informed by their years of study.
FWIW my good friend went to Bennington and nothing she studied in school is remotely applicable to life... Let alone work. That said she had a really good time.
I looked at the data and was struck by the fact that the top schools by ten-year earnings were medical schools. This led me to believe that the data doesn't distinguish between undergraduate and graduate programs. If that's the case, then an undergrad-focused school like Bennington is going to be penalized versus a school that has mostly grad students. If your pool of students is, say, 70% grad students, then they're going to be further along in their careers at the ten year mark than an institution where 90% of students are undergrads.
I feel like a tremendous factor behind the numbers for middle-tier schools is simple geography. For example, I make more than double what many of my college friends who I consider at least equally as smart and motivated as I make, and it's pretty clear that the only reason is I chose to move to California whereas they stayed in Nevada.
Colleges in sparsely populated areas will probably always have dramatically lower numbers given the tendency of graduates to stay close to home, regardless of the actual quality of education. The salary numbers should take the region of a former student's job into account in some way.
Does your comparison with your friends take location into account? E.g. if you're in SF and they're in Reno, then expatistan[0] claims your costs are 57% higher.
Cost of living is hard to account for; it's definitely not just some percentage multiplier. For instance, my cost of living went up by about $5K/year to move to Manhattan (rent went up by a lot, which was partially offset by no longer having transportation costs). But my salary went up by over $100K. Yet a cost of living calculator says that Manhattan is significantly more expensive, and that an, e.g., $200K salary is only "worth" $114K in low-cost areas like Reno, which practically speaking, isn't true for me at all. I'm saving more money per year than what my post-tax salary in Reno would be in its entirety, which itself is an unlikely situation because the Big 4 don't have offices in Reno and I suspect there aren't a huge number of well-compensated developer jobs there, even at the $160K or so level that would yield the same savings left over as a $200K job in NYC.
You're always better off making a given salary in a higher CoL area than the equivalent salary in a lower CoL area, because not everything scales linearly with CoL (e.g. ordering goods off Amazon, or going on vacations), and your higher salary thus gets you more purchasing power on lots of goods and services.
>even at the $160K or so level that would yield the same savings left over as a $200K job in NYC.
200k in NYC has an estimated 82.7K tax burden and 160k in Reno has an estimated 50.3k tax burden.[1] That means that you only have about 18k more in NYC. So something is messed up for your calculation unless you are living on <=18k in NYC.
Indeed, not to mention things like sales tax! I recently moved from Canada to the UK, and the VAT being 20% compared to 13% in Ontario is a little jarring sometimes.
It is pretty obvious what most of LACCN grads are doing 10 years later. Harvard has a more economically diverse bunch of academics, authors, engineers, homemakers, and CEOs. Harvard's mean is higher than its medianm
I was thinking the opposite: finally a .gov website that looks good and is easy to use. Who cares if their exact design choices aren't your particular favorite. This page is much better than the average IRS web page. So the real question is: why can't the .gov web pages that really matter get up to speed?
I don't think it's that bad. It's a nice way for people to be able to read more content from the insights if they'd like, while not using a lot of vertical space on the page for those who don't want to read it. It only uses enough space to give the viewer an opportunity to read it.
Interesting article. I graduated from (and interned) at UCLA while the need-based financial aid initiative was rolling out[1]. Obviously, it's the primary factor in minimizing student debt (it's obvious to see that students with well-to-do families have more financial support than poor ones).
An issue I take is conflating public institutions with private ones. I remember UCLA & Berkeley admissions people always struggling to poach students that might attend Stanford/Caltech, but the issue is very complex. Huge endowments are just part of the story.
It makes sense that a wealthy private school (Harvard/Princeton/etc.) has more extra-academic connections that help students get better jobs. Smaller class sizes also make a difference. I just think the article tries to talk about too many things and doesn't end up doing any of them justice. The gender stuff shoehorned at the end is a prime example.
> "students at private for-profit two-year and four-year institutions have high rates of borrowing and their graduates often have large amounts of debt."
Isn't that expected? Students who go to for-profit schools by definition have to pay their way through so it would make sense they have higher levels of borrowing and debt.
I wouldn't say "by definition," but yes it seems for-profits don't often offer scholarships as much as other schools. I think the real problem the article points to with for-profits is that they don't lead to good paying jobs and therefore the graduates are unable to pay off their large debts.
Are people finally starting to ask where the DoE got its earnings numbers to increase student loan tuition caps, the resulting tuition hikes across the board, explosion in the private education market, and the zero risk (except to the tax payers) student loan interest income keg party?
How is grad school factored in? At my school, a very large portion (~40%) of students go on to masters/PhD/law/MD right after graduation. This could deflate salary numbers compared to what those students make when they actually enter the workforce.
The data is not particularly uniform, with NULLs and PrivacySurpressed values everywhere.
I wanted to play around with SAT/ACT data and create correlations with other variables...but the only values reported are 25% quantile and 75% quantile for accepted students (they derive a midpoint between the two...by averaging them, which is wrong). Hmrph.
I love that to support their headline, the article states that at hundreds of colleges many students aren't earning more than high school graduates 10 years after graduation. Then in the next sentence says that those hundreds of "colleges" include barber academies, cosmetology schools, and for-profit colleges.
They're certainly not institutions I would normally consider 'collegiate'. And god knows they're not Universities. They're trade schools.
But, barring the fact that they're an Apples-to-Oranges comparison to typical liberal arts colleges and should be segmented as such in the data, I nonetheless think it's interesting information. Trade school expansion is often touted as a reasonable alternative to pushing more people into the higher education pipeline. To that end, we should seek to highlight and study which trades are actually worth pursuing from an economic perspective.
There are still plenty of traditional liberal arts colleges in that group. For my alma mater (Oberlin College) only 52% of students are earning more than high school graduates. Pretty sad.
That's true, but that's exactly the rhetorical trick they used to make their point seem stronger than it is.
They grouped barber colleges with 4 year schools to make the overall statistics look worse. Then they combine that with anecdotes about a few poorly performing 4 year schools.
To you're point about Oberlin--the data isn't separated by major, and from Oberlin's website they emphasize college and conservatory of music. It's not surprising that musicians aren't making a lot of money.
The Conservatory makes up only 20% of the students, so I don't think that's the bulk of the issue.
Of the College students, most major in literature, art or social sciences. And there's a strong tendency to work in non-profits or academia after graduation.
This would all be fine if it weren't so damn expensive to attend. While I had a great time there and learned a lot, I wouldn't recommend the same path to my kids.
20% is a pretty big number, add to that music, art, theater, dance, and cinema studies and you likely have a pretty big chunk of the total population.
Saying that only 52% of Oberlin graduates make more than the average high school graduate is pretty close to saying that the performing arts don't tend to pay well.
The information they're using is also based on tax returns, and musicians are way more likely to not report their full earnings than, e.g., someone who works for a company and gets paid salary with normal withholdings. Unless you're a huge touring musician playing to thousands, you're usually getting paid in cash or checks that are below the 1099 requirement level.
Just because you don't get a 1099 doesn't mean you earned that income tax free. It still needs to be reported and people are breaking the law if they don't report it as non-1099 income.
Oh I'm fully aware it's income tax evasion, I'm just saying that, realistically speaking, a lot of people tend not to pay taxes when on unreported income.
We believe that we should cram as many people in the country as possible through our current conception of a university.
There are several reasons people want to believe that's a good idea:
* They believe that someone with a B.A., B.S., etc. is a higher class person than one without
* They believe that putting everyone through the system will bring everyone up to that higher class, thus removing the negative effects of classes in society
* They believe that it's the only path to education
* They believe it's somehow immune from various biases, corruption, infighting, trend-following, etc.
* They believe it's a diverse forum for the free exchange of ideas, and that all reasonable ideas are given their due consideration
* They believe that "good colleges" are good and lead to success because of the quality of the education and the insight of the professors
Unfortunately, none of those are true. Until we admit that, we can't fix the problem.
When we do admit those things, we can acknowledge that:
* A person who reads a lot of books and participates in discussions with others who have different opinions has as much claim on "good citizenship" as anyone else (college or not), and it doesn't take tens of thousands of dollars
* Language, history, and art classes can be quite effective by teaching language, history, and art; and not spending the entire time on politics
* Vocational schools are probably the right place for a lot of things, including programming and software engineering (though a university might be the right place for Comp. Sci.). When we figure out software engineering, perhaps it belongs in the university, but for now it's not an established discipline.
* If we really want people to get a more academic education, giving them a loan and demanding them to pay it back regardless of bankruptcy makes little sense. Maybe that makes sense for vocational school, where it's more of a straight investment. But for a purely academic education, it's probably a lot cheaper to provide it anyway, so lots of financial approaches could work.
* "Good colleges" are good because of the kind and quality of students that they concentrate in one place -- in other words, a social club built around an academic theme. (This is really the one that makes it obvious that bringing more people into the university system won't have the same results as the ones who are in it now.)
College isn't the only method to become educated. Going in debt for on College lark is a social acceptable way to spend money, but it isn't the only way to win. If you know what you want to do chase then chase all methods to get trained. Otherwise spend some time traveling the world to figure your life and then consider spending $200K ~ $400K on college education. Don't waster your time on these for profit degree mills. Their product sucks and no employer cares you got a purchased a degree from Phoenix College
"Mrs. degree" assortative mating (+ field of study preferences) make the 'females in college X' implication muddier, but overall it's good to encourage people to look at expected outcomes before opting into $100k debt.
That is, a rational woman would look at expected earnings including child support + alimony, and insist on figures stratified by field of study (so she can choose where + what to study).
This assumes college is what determines salary after college... Sure it might have some effect but I bet other factors are also v important e.g. Parent's income, family wealth, social network, personality, life goals, etc.
Also perpetuates the myth that college is for job training. It's not. It's for education.
> Also perpetuates the myth that college is for job training. It's not. It's for education.
While I agree, the sheer cost of college, and the huge loans many take out to attend, mean that the vast majority are expecting a decent return on their sizable investment. After all, if you're really just concerned about getting an education, there are a lot cheaper ways to do it than college.
Given the point about program : tuition I wonder if different majors should be asked different tuitions. Bio/cs/things that cost more and have more earning potential could charge a higher price than the English lit majors.
Has there been any sort of Marxist analysis about the middle class using the higher education system to entrench their advantage over the poor and therefore willingly going along with ridiculous tuition fees?
I'm sure there has been. Some Libertarians probably add to it with an analysis showing chunks of the working class using unions and professional licensing to further entrench their advantages.
The net result I expect to be the same as every other Marxist and/or Libertarian analysis: no useful outcomes.
This wouldn't be a concern of the Federal Government at all if they'd just stop funding student loans. And there would be a side-benefit of college costs dropping sharply. A win-win for everyone!
No it wouldn't. Tuitions would plummet. And we can certainly make sure we have a good, inexpensive (or free!) community college system with wide access so everyone can get a start with higher education.
I keep hearing this sentiment and I'll be honest I don't understand it. Do you think it's not the pervue of the federal government to encourage access to higher education? Or is your argument that if there were significantly more limited access to funding for higher education that schools would have no choice but to lower tuition?
Edit: Realized I was probably straw-manning you with those questions. Sorry about that. Basically, could you elaborate on your position?
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what's under dispute: whther the funding actually improves access, or whether it just raises prices and debt loads all around while adding one more credential everyone has to get to take jobs that only needed high school in the 60s.
By equating funding and access, you're defining away a critical dynamic.
I feel so bitter. I just graduated 1 month ago. I could have continued with my masters by I am done. I hated every second of being in university.
Not because of any other reason but because of how bleak my financial prospect was. I consider myself lucky that my parents bankrolled me - but looking at the aggregate amount I spent on it - 60,000 pounds.
I paid 60,000 pounds literally to read a bunch of books and write some code that could run on a computer from the 1980s, which I could have done on my own from my parent's basement.
Every-time a lecturer gave a low-effort lecture I felt like punching them in the face, I could feel the the negative acceleration of my net worth everyday I woke up from sleep. How was I to recover it ? Is it even possible ?
Meanwhile there is so much opportunities, so much data to explore, so much work to done.
Its a crime that so many young minds are made to waste their time on meaningless stuff while they would start with small apprenticeship and allowed to grow.
It is always sad when I read this sort of screed. I can assure you that Universities are not a 'scam' in the general sense (and yes there are actual scams by some of them but it doesn't sound like Bristol is such a university).
There are three things a University/College education provides you -
1) Is a rapid exposure to many of the typical problems, techniques, and understanding of a particular major subject. Generally this is about 3x the rate you could get exposed to that in a work for hire situation. So for each year of college you end up exposed to the variety of problems it would have taken 3 years of on the job experience to get to.
2) The people who go to college constitute the majority of leaders in the community. It takes a while to realize this but as a young adult there are "the leaders" and "the followers", and the young adult is generally in the follower group. But over time folks move into the leader group and, by and large, those are the people you went to school with. So you are more naturally considered a part of that group.
3) A personal sense of what you can do, for many folks they reach a point where the requirements on them exceed their natural ability to "wing it"[1], and depending on how "smart" they were in high school this can come as a rude awakening. But once past it, people are much more mature about their skills and how to work at things. My experience has been that people who haven't gone to college rarely allow themselves to be pushed pass this wall as the other side is quite reasonably scary. Without the immovable force of 'you must do this or you will not graduate' the temptation to run away can be more powerful. Without that fundamental understanding of your abilities, and how to get more done than you think you can, often limits how successful you can be.
[1] Take things as they come and complete them without preparation.
What is the expected salary of a MIT engineer ? Last time I checked it was 72,000 dollars per year.
What is the typical tuition in MIT ? I do not remember the exact number but it would take a while before students are able to pay back the amount. For 4 years of study its more than 4 years to pay back - that is how I look at it. Its bad enough for home students and astronomical for international ones.
Yes, there are some students who make it really big. But that is essentially a lottery and we should ignore them.
The most useful skills I learnt were all self taught - as paul graham pointed out - if you put a bunch of motivated people in a closed chamber they will figure out get things.
University life consisted of learning how to game the exams and not really learn anything of sustainable value.
I knew that from high school and also what Paul wrote about education in general. But I didn't fully accept that our education system is so fundamentally broken.
Lets put what you are saying in monetary prespective.
3x - while just working.
so if you study for 3 years you get 9 years of experience ?
But then you need to spend more than 3 years paying back the debt and you also were not able to earn anything during that time.
And also there is no iterative improvement. you do not know how good you are until you have crossed the 3 years period. You might be terrible at your job and there is no way of knowing.
The upfront cost and risk is too high for the expected outcome.
Some people I know who are studying medicine spend until their 30 to finish. How is this sustainable ?
I realize I can't convince you, its part of what makes it sad for me.
> The upfront cost and risk is too high for the
> expected outcome.
I understand this is your thesis but you don't have the data to actually argue it. And those who have done the research have come to a different conclusion than you have, so its a good place to start to understand what they considered relevant versus what you consider relevant. There has been a lot of work done on this so its easy to find papers and articles to read.
I completely understand what you mean - As Neil Degrass Tyson said - you cannot put a price on ignorance.
But the argument I am making is the same argument that people make about healthcare cost. For example its hard to put a price on life but at the same time we need to be realistic.
Also I think there is a stronger argument for fairness.
If you consider me - with parents who were willing to pay for everything - vs students who are much more apt candidate but are unable to find the funding or get the loan.
Do you think society should run like that ? I would hope the best candidate gets placement in all the top schools regardless of their socio-economical background.
But all I noticed while in university are super rich kids.
No one is arguing that average expected value over a lifetime for better higher education is positive when subtracted from the investment. But is that what it comes down to ?
Do we want young people to waste their life's surplus produce paying back their debt ?
Even besides those things - it seems there is increased financialization of education. Should we allow students to gamble with 6+ years of their best years.
Obama famously finished paying back his student debt when he was in his 30s.
Its not so much of question of net positives and net negatives in terms of pure monetary outcome.
Its a question of what we want education to be - a public good or a private purchase like a car.
Vacuuming out surplus produce from young people also means less new young business / startup / etc.
Ben Bernarke is trying to understand why inflation is not rising - its simple, our generation has lost any faith in buying their own homes, cars or having more than 2 kids.
Ok, there are some interesting statements here that I would like to challenge. First there is this one:
> If you consider me - with parents who were willing to
> pay for everything - vs students who are much more apt
> candidate but are unable to find the funding or get
> the loan.
This implies there are students "much more apt candidate" who are unable to get funded. But really there are two things here, one is getting into a college and the other is paying for it. In the US there are a lot of colleges, and in my personal experience I got into MIT but there was no financial aid available, and I also got into USC and they offered me a full scholarship. So I went to USC rather than MIT (my first choice). Four years of "in state" tuition, (tuition at a state school where you already live) is generally less than $30,000 which is the cost of a nice car. Graduate school it gets even better since you can often trade tuition for teaching the undergrads or a lab or two.
Combining that knowledge with the experience of working with people from a wide variety of collegiate backgrounds and you will find that good people are good people, regardless of the status of the school they attended. What is more, smaller colleges tend to recruit people with similar values so when you find someone from a college who fits well with your company, chances are other people from that college will as well.
> Do you think society should run like that ?
And yes, it works as expected. Your statements seem to indicate that if you didn't go to a "good" school you can't get a "good" job, but in the STEM field that really isn't the case. And after you've worked for 3 years folks have a record of what you've done to start referring too and the pedigree of your school becomes less and less important as a discriminator. And if you go to graduate school (which can be cost neutral) you may find you "upgrade" your school pedigree.
So this seems to be your key pain point --
> Do we want young people to waste their life's
> surplus produce paying back their debt ?
And it's a fallacy. We don't want students to feel like they have to go to a "top" school to succeed, because they don't. As a student you have a choice of schools from the very expensive to the very modestly priced. That is a healthy market. And there will always be people who will try to make a status symbol out of where they live or where they went to school Etc. But as you get older you will see that those "values" are entirely artificial. Five years from now you will look back and say, "Gee, I really could have gone to any school and arrived at this same point in my career."
The cost of an undergraduate engineering degree in the US spans the range of $12,000 - $300,000. Everyone who graduates gets to be an engineer, depending on the size and influence of their school they may know people already in their chosen field. But I cannot find any examples of someone who was "held back" from their potential by graduating at a less well known school.
I'm really sorry you got so little value out of the money your parents spent on your education. And I know how "real" your personal experience is relative to your world outlook. However, there are other experiences out there which are very very different than yours and they are very common. You will meet these people in the places you work, and the communities you visit. I'm hoping you will find it isn't as bad as you might think.
I think part of your disagreement is that the original poster is from the UK and you're talking about US education. The systems are similar, but subtly different enough to cause talking past one another.
In the UK you don't pick universities based on price. The government imposes price controls on higher education and (as far as I know) ~all universities charge the maximum amount. Whenever the caps rise, they all raise their prices to the new caps simultaneously. So in effect universities do not compete on price, only on reputation. Students therefore all attempt to get into the "best" universities as determined by basically unchanging perceptions of reputation that exist on a global rather than per-subject level, and the admissions system ends up allocating people based on grades.
So your point about there being a healthy market isn't really on point. For the OP, there simply is no market.
As an additional point, in recent times there has been absolutely massive rises in the price caps and therefore prices. When I went to university it cost me about 10,000 GBP in total. The year I graduated the professors all went on a kind of pseudo-strike where they refused to mark exams (but they still did research and they still got paid their full salary). The strike was because the government had tripled the price caps in order to try and boost capacity, and the staff decided they wanted to keep capacity the same and all get a pay rise instead. Their strike was successful, the (unbelievably weak) administration caved and the entire tripling of their income was immediately passed straight through to higher pay.
The OP claims he paid around 60,000 (about $100k). This sounds plausible to me if it includes costs of living as well. This is a lot of money by anyone's standards, especially compared to the recent past when it was a lot cheaper.
So I sympathise with 1971genocide. I too went through the UK universities system, studying computer science, and had exactly the same frustrations. I went to a university that is considered to be in the tier just below Oxbridge, many of the students there were from very rich families. The universities reputation is good. Yet the staff were incompetent to a degree that was truly mind blowing. Very few of the people who graduated actually became software engineers full time (many went into e.g. generic consulting roles, consultancies, finance), partly because so many people graduated entirely unable to write even basic programs. Many who studied soft subjects there ended up in dead end jobs earning too little to even begin paying back their student loans.
Looking back, I probably should have skipped university. It made me miserable too, and I got a job offer (from Google) before graduating there based on open source work I'd done. If I had gone straight into a job from 18 I'd have probably been much happier and healthier in those years.
Fair enough, I could understand it is a local problem. This web site (http://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/student-finance/...) talks about the costs and points out that many UK schools have 3 year programs rather than the 4 (or 5) year programs in the US. Sort of minimal variation with the limits imposed by the government.
It helps me understand why UK residents come to the US for their college study as well.
> What is the expected salary of a MIT engineer ? Last time I checked it was 72,000 dollars per year.
I don't believe that as the average starting salary, let alone mid-career salary. Your average MIT engineering graduate has the skills to be very successful in the job market, and most often that's exactly what happens. They have a huge leg up over people that didn't go to MIT. The average mid-career salary of someone who got an MIT engineering degree is way, way higher than someone who didn't.
> The average mid-career salary of someone who got an MIT engineering degree is way, way higher than someone who didn't.
This is meaningless. The real question is how much more do you earn as an MIT grad vs. someone who was accepted into MIT and decided to do something even more worthwhile instead.
Its a self-selection bias rather than anything. If a student is smart enough - he shouldn't be forced to shell out 5-6 years worth of his expected earning upfront to maybe add an exponential expected future productivity.
I tend to agree, the Alumni group posts starting salaries here: http://web.mit.edu/facts/alum.html but I can't find their 5 year and 10 year numbers. I expect that the median for 10 years would be north of $200,000.
The vast majority of fields are simply not lucrative enough for the median salary to be anywhere near $200,000/yr. A chemical engineer is typically unable to create anywhere near as much value as a software developer at a leading company and is compensated accordingly.
Yeah, per that site, the average starting salary for all MIT undergraduates is $75K/year. That's really damn good. Filter it down to just the software engineers and it'll be a good deal higher. And there's so much upside left too.
The nature of education is that it's always been an investment. Many jobs require a certain amount of preparation and training, and a college degree helps to make the case of preparation for a variety of jobs - and leads to specific training in accounting, business, law, medicine, and academic research.
One reason American student loan debt is so hard to shake is that students used to take out massive loans for college, declare bankruptcy, then go off to higher earning lives.
I think you need to tone down the bitterness. I'm a bit surprised that you're attaching your real name, actually. People tend to stay away from someone who seems angry. Getting a handle about a war crime is a bit aggressive, too. I presume it's something about the war of independence. Also, don't let on that your net worth matters a lot to you. People tend to be suspicious of that particular (completely understandable) motivation.
When I finished university, I had some similar thoughts. There is literally nothing in any course that's not public knowledge. Practicals are a question of getting people to sign off rather than actually understanding anything. Lecturers often have crappy presentation skills.
But you need to take a larger view of what you got up to. Even though every damn thing can be read in a book, not everyone has done so. Even though you can no longer remember the equations and experiments, you now possess an intuition in your field that will make retrieving the specifics much easier than for some novice. Critically, you've shown that you're able to learn on your own. Stuff you learn at university is a whole lot less structured and generally from a much larger syllabus than in secondary school.
On the upside, I think your CV looks pretty good. Decent skills in something that sounds practical, probably someone who could learn to program anything.
My net worth is not important - but it means soon I wont have money to buy food or pay rent. I could have paid my rent and food for 20+ years on each year of my tuition.
I eat canned tuna for 3 years - and went homeless for a few months while being in uni ( my landlord suddenly decided to sell his house and I had exams )
I am sorry as coming off as bitter - I have been on the job-hunt for a while and literally no replies :(
I think I could have done much more productive things in the 3 years - write a blog, do some data analysis on public data and not have been so stressed out constantly.
I am usually really optimistic when it comes to programming but whenever I read about universities and their high cost, etc - I get reminded of all the pain I had to endure and can feel the hopelessness of every other student who are in much more terrible situation.
Its a thought - I am sure many other students who were taking actual loans would have much more terrible thoughts.
Yes, I realize it was a mistake. When I was 18 I was fed the same garbage about going to university as everyone else and took it without much reasoning - It was my fault, I was an idiot.
There are many other people who are in much more worse situation then I am, A lot of my friends are in much more stressful situation then me.
Yes its disrespectful to my parents and that is why I quit. I felt terribly guilty since it was after all not my hard earned money but my parent's. They also brought into the whole university scam as a road to middle class life.
I have never felt more relieved. Now I can go do some real studying in a much more relaxed fashion.
Sometimes I go through spells like this too. I graduated from a local state university that I purposely chose because their curriculum was entirely in C/C++. I thought learning the language that was behind Java would make me more marketable, boy was I wrong. I didn't really even land a true programming job after I graduated, just a hybrid of linux admin and software dev tasks on an IT operations team. BUT, because I knew C, and Linux, and had a love for Perl and its community, and had the algorithm/ problem solving mind that Uni taught me, I was able to whip up many solutions to our company's problems. It still did not look that great on a resume, but it was something. And the main point is, I enjoyed it (one reason I went for CS major in the first place).
And more recently, I just quit that first job, and I now work from home doing web development and back end work for a couple of small shops.
If you are having trouble getting work, you are probably just aiming too high. You are probably going to have to do 3-5 years grunt work.
I know C really well, but I can't land any jobs in C because the people I am up against are twice my age with twice my experience. And even though I might be cheaper, employers aren't looking for just cheap, they want someone that will get stuff done (quickly).
Think about if you were a home owner and you wanted a new porch or roof built on your house. What freelancer would you hire?
Some kid just out of tech school that says "I think I can do this kind of work" or "I would like to do this kind of work" or "I've kind of done this stuff before"?
Or the old man that says "I've done this a million times, here's how its done, here's the plan, and this is the cost".
I empathize with your post. Myself I went to a top 10 engineering school, went into debt to do so, graduated with Summa Cum Laude with a 4.0 GPA, and learned nothing at all, and spent 4 years fairly frustrated while taking advantage of every opportunity. I did learn a lot about bureaucracy and "the system". About engineering nothing since I had been designing and inventing new things no one else had ever done since I was a small child.
College is not a bad idea at all. But for the exceptionally skilled it is a waste of time to do a technical degree. Better to go it alone in the school of hard knocks, or major in something that you don't already know completely, perhaps world history or linguistics or mathematics or molecular biology.
For the typical kid who learned to program at age 8, a college major in CS is indeed a huge waste of time and money.
So what should you do? Pay off your onerous debt as soon as you can, and then you will be free. With your freedom, pursue your own interests no matter what they may be.
Really makes me feel much better knowing the best of us feels the same way. I am someone who learns by doing and it would have been better to just enter the job market.
Many have disagreed and furiously downvoted you(your text is quite aggressive), but you've raised a valid point.
Young adults waste their time and money often by blindly having faith in flawed system. They could've been more productive, in an individual and societal level, by having more pragmatic experiences.
Beyond programmers, a century ago, you could get started in finance by getting apprenticeships and moving your way up the ladder. You'd have real work experience and have a position only Ivy-MBAs currently do. In your lifetime, you'd been more productive and probably wealthier.
