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At NYU (where I used to work), a CS major requires 12 courses in CS and 32 courses total. The degree costs just short of $93,000.

Do you really believe that a liberal arts education is worth $62,000 tuition + 2 years of lost wages (roughly another $140,000)? Particularly when, to borrow a phrase from Good Will Hunting, that liberal arts education is available to anyone for about $4.25 in late fees at the public library?

http://cs.nyu.edu/webapps/content/academic/undergrad/majors

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CS5fT5z...

http://www.nyu.edu/bursar/tuition.fees/rates10/ugcas.html




Well, the CS education is available without the late fees, computer science is probably the easiest subject to learn from the internet.

For one thing, NYU trades on their name as well as their education, that's a big chunk of the money you're talking about.

But the more poignant question to me is whether you're getting less out of the liberal arts classes than you are out of the CS classes. I'm not sure that's clear, you can learn engineering anywhere, but 80% of the people I've ever worked with can't write for crap.


For one thing, NYU trades on their name as well as their education,...

If college is just an exercise in signalling, why bother with classes at all?

Why not just replace classes with final exams, give out the paper, host a few networking events and save billions of dollars?


Hey, you're the one who worked there :)

Personally, I value large chunks of the education I got in college, and think the majority of it had some value. I dunno how that value compares to the cost, and I've never seriously considered graduate school of any kind because the (tuition + lost earning) changes a bunch once you have a job.

I was mostly commenting that I thought a lot of the liberal arts education was just as valuable as the technology education, provided that I actually learned the tech so I could get a job. I learned a lot about music, literature and history that I'll have for my whole life, and that I really wouldn't have gotten off my duff to learn on my own.


Hey, you're the one who worked there :)

What do you think made me so anti-college?


> computer science is probably the easiest subject to learn from the internet.

Only for some values of "computer science". There is a lot of very tough math involved and having a teacher will save you ages.




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