I really have little sympathy for somebody that attends an out of state or private school and racks up $100K in college debt getting a sociology degree. My son just finished up his freshman year as a history major. However, he is going to the perfectly good public school located 15 minutes from home, and living at home. It's costing me $5000 a semester in tuition, which isn't chump change, but isn't going to bankrupt me either. If he had to take on some debt to get his degree it would be manageable. We could have made it cheaper still by having him spend the first two years in community college. College costs are out of control in the US, but that doesn't mean we have to blindly pay them.
If your child goes for 4 years at 2 semesters a year, you will be spending $40k on tuition. Your child is almost certain to move out before then, so there will be an increase in that for rent. There is also food cost.
A LOT of families can't drop that kind of money for one child, let alone several if they have more than 1 kid. The availability of loans means that most students will take on debt to get that degree to some extent. When you are paying what seems to be a huge sum of money, a lot of people get taken in by the false premises and marketing that expensive or ivy league schools provide and get caught up in trying to get that school.
Overall this situation is totally unsustainable and harms more people that it helps. Blaming folks for not having what you have or doing what you did is ridiculous, your life isn't a template for everyone elses needs.
I agree with you, but you're neglecting to realize how little some people understand about the college process.
My dad and I we're definitely in the upper quartile in the college application process, yet even I got stuck with 100k of debt from a private university. Why didn't I go to a public college instead? Who knows! All I can say is that I would have done it differently back then (graduated 2007).
Now imagine you're NOT that informed of the college process, your school's guidance counselor doesn't know anything or care, and your parents don't really know anything about it other than the US News top colleges report. You're more than likely going to enroll in an overpriced university more-so out of ignorance than anything else.
You don't need any help, its math that any high school student should be capable of. Its the same as any time you borrow money to buy something like a car or house, except with this one your ability to ever discharge the debt is quite limited!
When I was starting college none of my friends really knew what they wanted to do. Many switched degrees. Some more than once. While I had only a rough idea at the time, in general terms it matched what I ended up doing.
I don't know what the answer is here, but it starts with high school students getting a good deal of real life experience. Football, tennis, cheer leading, and prom are not real life experiences.
This has nothing to do with what major or direction high school students want to pick. I'm talking about the decision of where to go to school, and specifically highlighting the fact that uninformed kids/parents (at least in my case) picked the more expensive, private university because all signs pointed to that being the correct choice.
The answer here is to push lower cost, public colleges to kids who don't know what they want to do (or to even to those that do) instead of accruing 40k/year of debt trying to figure it out. The idea of going to a public school was out of the question when I was applying, when it very much
should have been a key option.
A lot of this is simply that life is risky, and completely unforeseen circumstances can drastically change life outcomes.
I went to an expensive private college. My parents racked up over $100K in debt between my sister and I. Neither of us had any idea what we wanted to do when we went. Our parents were just like "Go to the best college you get into, and we will figure out the money."
The debt was paid off in full 4 years after graduation.
And the real reason it worked out were a variety of circumstances that could totally not have been foreseen when we matriculated. I flunked out of physics twice, and in my scramble to pick a new major and graduate, picked...computer science. And used a lot of the time I spent avoiding my physics homework to learn a bunch of cool programming languages, make contacts with real programmers on the Internet, and pick up internships. So when I barely-graduated, I already had a job lined up at a financial software startup that I'd interned with twice. If I had not flunked out of the physics major, I would likely be just barely finishing my Physics Ph.D now, having lived on $20K/year for the past 7 years, and would be coming into an uncertain job market with few marketable skills, no work experience, and a lot of debt.
My sister happened to go to school in Houston, at a school where her geology department had close ties to local oil majors, and so ended up with a bunch of oil industry internships before graduation. She had two of the majors bidding against each other for her after graduation, and got a lucrative job that way.
The interesting thing is that we both went into college knowing very little other than "Go to the best college you get into", and came out of it with that being the right choice but for reasons completely different than what we thought they'd be. A degree helps, but skills and contacts help more. Maybe the right move for entering students these days is to go to the best college you get into, but think carefully about what you want to do afterwards and put yourself in situations where you can rack up advantages for getting there afterwards.
You have little sympathy? So for someone who doesn't live near a university, doesn't have daddy pay his tuition for him and provide free housing and food, it's just tough luck? Like another commenter said, that's $40k in tuition, probably another $40k for housing, food and other expenses during that period of time. Your attitude is not productive, and sounds to me like the typical "fuck you, I've got mine" attitude.
Noooo, not what the GP is suggesting at all. The GP is saying that local public schools generally pay subsidies to instate students, so that's not a very expensive proposition. He's saying that it shouldn't be $40k + $40k, but rather $10k + $0k (live at home with parents). Racking up an unnecessary $70k/annum debt is something of a self-infliceted wound if that more expensive option isn't going to pay itself off through increased earnings later in life.
Exactly, and thank you. There are a lot of options between borrow 100% of a 4-year degree at the most expensive option available, and don't go to college at all. I think most people that want to go to college can find an option that works without burdening them with life-crushing debt. It might not be 4-years of the typical undergrad experience at State U though. You might spend a couple of years at community college. You might take 8 years to finish because you are working your way through school. There is nothing wrong with any of those options.
The key phrase is getting a sociology degree. While racking up $100K in debt for a Petroleum Engineering degree [1] arguably isn't necessary, it's much more defensible.
At the University of Waterloo where I went we had a co-op program where people would get (usually) reasonably well paid internships. We switched between work and school every 4 months, so when you were done you had a 4-year degree and 2 years of work experience.
This both drastically increased the value of the degree—it was very common to end up getting a job in one of the places you did a co-op term—and gave you some money to help cover your costs for each upcoming school term. It also helps that Canada subsidizes its universities, but I still would have had 30k in tuition alone if it weren't for co-op. As it was I left with ~13k in debt and I had lived reasonably comfortably and chosen to never work while I was in school.
I really don't understand why co-op hasn't been adopted almost universally. It's hugely beneficial to all parties.
Waterloo's co-op program has been absolutely incredible. I'm fairly confident that most of my classmates will graduate debt-free (or very close) and already have several job offers on the table.
> I really don't understand why co-op hasn't been adopted almost universally. It's hugely beneficial to all parties.
I completely agree. I went to a much more traditional school in the US, but recently got the chance to visit Waterloo to do a guest lecture. It feels like the university of the future. In the classroom, students were having discussions with opinions backed by actual work experience. After spending the day there I wished I had known about it or looked for a co-op when I was looking for school.
I get that paying for your education is pretty bad, but as someone who is enjoying free bachelor level education in Finland I can tell that the amount of quality teachers is pretty low, our small campus has maybe 4 teachers I'd consider competent.
I'm also the kind of guy who'd enjoy extracurricular clubs, but sadly out of the few hundred students at our campus total of 3 of us (me included) are interested in club activities and only student body event that gets more than 10 people attending is yearly "drinking cruise".
I can't say for sure that these two things are related, but I have a hunch that since people aren't actually paying for their education most don't take it as seriously and thus people just do the bare minimum they can get away with. Or maybe it's just the general level of education which is so much lower nothing feels "real" at least considering how much I read U.S. based engineering students whine about...
Go to most of the small colleges in the US and you'll probably see the same thing. I don't know what it's like in Finland, but from what I've experienced at Swedish universities it also varies a lot. Uppsala, Lund, KTH etc have great student life and I didn't feel that people took it less seriously than at the american university I've been at.
Sure, we don't pay tuition, but usually parents don't pay for their childrens' living expenses during college either. I have about $50k in debt (very low interest loan), all from living expenses for 5 years. That plus the loss of income during this time means you can't really slack off.
Yes, it is true that most students in Finland do take the government backed student loan, but I for 't taken it. I get few hundred euros student welfare from the government and rest I make up with part time jobs and working summers + living in a student housing is pretty cheap.
You won't get that free education at Cambridge any more; it'll set you back £9000 in tuition fees every year, because successive British governments deliberately copied the US system.
? I went to Uni in Oz in 1995. We had then the exact system the English just put in place ( called HECS )
Students pay nothing up front... Not a penny. And you pay nothing until you get a job. Even when you have a job the repayment is tiny ; esp in relation to to other taxes like fair dinkum Income Tax
How is this a bad thing ? Tax payers were nice to me to provide me the loan in the first place, and were nice to let me pay it back at my own pace.
In England and Wales it's a bad thing, because it's another example of the "pull the ladder up" generation doing what they do best.
The people who, in the 1970s&80s, benefited from grants, free tuition, and the ability to claim unemployment/low-income benefits in the summer holidays are the same people who are implementing these policies.
They are the same people selling the lie of "get a degree, get a good job", then offering unpaid internships to new graduates, or insisting that even the doorman needs a degree.
These are people who had "jobs for life" with year-on-year inflation matching/beating pay increments if they stayed still, or decent career progression if they didn't. They are now telling us that we can't expect that sort of treatment from them, and implementing "up or out" pay policies (even if they don't have any "up" positions to offer, because they are "flattening management structures").
These are also the people who will retire in 5-10 years time with Final Salary pensions from the schemes that they, themselves, have closed to the rest of us (because they took "payment holidays" in the good times).
They are also the people who bought up all the housing at prices that a normal (at the time) middle-class single income young family could afford, then sold it on at prices that only better-off mid-30s DINKYs could afford.
Just because we can't win all of these fights (and have already lost some), and just because some of the individual fights might seem trivial, it doesn't mean we should just roll over and take it without complaint, either for ourselves, or the current generation of schoolchildren and undergraduates.
Luckily, we still have the best universities in the world and despite the headline figure, what you actually pay is dependent on your earnings, so it's still well worth going. However, choose your university carefully. I was lucky,I went to Warwick and did well. Don't be taken in by the all degrees are equivalent rubbish.
Not to mention that the government has changed the interest rates[1] on loans for courses starting in '12. It's still lower than the interest rates that banks offer, but it's edging pretty close.
Although to be fair it's different depending on where you go in the UK. Scottish degrees are distinctly more subsidised, and the situation in Wales is unlike England and Northern Ireland.
I'm class of '13 for grade school, entering college this fall at a state university. I've been programming since I was 8, and from what I can tell, my self-teaching has put me at a level above people fresh out of school with a flashy degree that says "hire me." I'm not good with words, but my point is this. I find it terribly concerning that I'm paying $50k to go to a school to learn something I already know, and know well, to take classes on subjects somewhat connected to what I'll do in a future career, to get a job full of incompetent idiots who get the same paper as me.
I'd appreciate some critiques on my thinking process
Actually, you're in a position to get more out of university than most of your peers. So let's say you're going for a CS degree, and you already know a lot of programming. Cool.
Ignore the intro programming classes and take higher-level courses. Treat prerequisites as suggestions, and don't be able to ask for permission (if needed) to skip courses or take grad courses. Grad-level cryptography, machine learning, PL theory, etc. can be great. Choose classes based on how good the professor is. Try to do some research work as soon as you can find a good professor. Working alongside upperclassmen and grad students is a great chance to learn and get tips from them. Chances are, you don't know as much about algorithms/unix/Lisp/HPC/graph-theory as you thought.
The fact that you can skip or breeze through some of the basic undergrad classes gives you flexibility to really explore new things. Hell, get that linguistics/history/art second degree you've always wanted. Go on backpacking trips or play intramural lacrosse or whatever. You should be the least concerned about the piece of paper at the end (but make sure you get it anyways).
If CS intrigues you, sign up for the most advanced courses you can handle. Also, be sure not to shortchange yourself when it comes to a foundation. Lots of people can "write code" without a good understanding of datastructures and algorithms. Get as much there as you can, as it only pays dividends as you grow your software skills.
Another advantage of having a headstart is you can diversify your education. I'd recommend some electrical engineering / hardware classes to complement software; understanding memory access patterns, CPU caches, multiple cores, busses, interrupts, and basic circuits are all useful things to have in your back pocket.
Be curious! Be proactive! Reach out to professors you like or that other students rave about. Trust me, they are flattered when students take an interest in them and their work. Build those relationships as they can lead to:
- independent projects in a mentor/mentee capacity
- research opportunities
- internships
- teaching assistant opportunities (I got paid $15 / hour to assist students with assignments. I once did this for a class I was taking alongside them because the prof needed help and he trusted me and my skills.)
A relationship with a professor is such a good idea I'd say it's essential. You will one day need a letter of reference for something, and you want it to come from faculty who knows you, likes you, knows your interest, etc and can write glowingly and convincingly of your skills and personality. Too many people I knew hit up someone they took a class from and got an A in, and it was a superficial and shallow thing that didn't really get them that far.
I'll stop here, but feel free to message me for more if interested.
I've done hiring in the software space for a long time and I can virtually assure you if I saw your portfolio and your resume, even if your code was great, I would be very leery of hiring you. It will because I will assume you don't have the theoretical grounding that I want my employees to have. Having the paper doesn't assure me that you have it either, but not having it will make me think you don't.
You haven't mentioned any OS level programming you've done, or compilers, or graphics, or AI. No set or category theory, or complexity analysis or data structure analysis. These are all things that a basic CS graduate will have at least encountered (if their program is at all acceptable). It is entirely possible to learn these on your own but the more obvious way to learn them is to go where they teach them.
Further, you need to learn a big lesson that I learned at undergraduate. There are tons of people smarter than you. That isn't a bad thing, it's a good one. If you're the smartest person in the class (including the professor, TA's etc), get out of the class. Worst case scenario is that you realize that the early classes are too remedial for you and you get a professor to let you into the upper ones early. I and many of my friends did graduate level course work as undergraduates. If you can't be intellectually engaged at a major accredited university, you aren't trying.
That's not to say you can't be a good programmer without a degree. Some of the very best I know don't have a degree or not one in a computer field. But almost to a person, they feel the sting of that lack of intellectual grounding and wish they had done a degree in the subject.
All that said, the cost issue is a very real one. So working to mitigate your debt should also be a priority. I worked in the software field all the way through college. It's a field that allows for paid internships, and I even TA'd some classes as an undergraduate. Things are more expensive now than when I was in school so you will have to work harder at it than I did. Good Luck.
Six years ago, I felt similar to you coming out of high school. I had been programming for a long time, picking up whatever interested me. I was going to UCSD for Computer Science, and I already knew so much. There are a few points I'd like you to consider, though.
I didn't really know what to expect other than, "UCSD's CS program is ranked 6th in the nation." So I considered it an opportunity to learn even more, not just to prove what I already know. I looked forward to a fresh start in a new area, learning from people who obviously were very intelligent.
When I first took mandatory introductory classes, I thought, "This is so easy, I've been doing this forever." In high school though, few shared my interests at all. Here, I could make a study group and tutor others, and as some saying goes, "You can learn more by teaching."
When I finally got to upper-division classes, I saw yet another opportunity for growth. I knew what I wanted to focus on, but I also knew that I was smart enough to pick up something I was interested in without taking a class, if I put my mind to it. So I branched out, chose some classes that sounded interesting, even if they weren't directly related to my path. Machine vision, computer architecture, etc. Each one ended up teaching me new ways of looking at problems that I would never have considered if I hadn't taken that class.
University also provided me opportunities to branch out in another important area, social interaction. I joined the Ultimate Frisbee team, giving me a physical activity, new friends, and access to parties, things I never even tried in high school. I joined the student council (as the web designer) and gained insight into how bureaucracy worked.
My advice to you is this. Treat everything as an opportunity, perhaps a challenge to do something difficult, or something new, or something different. Working in the real world, I can say it would be much harder to find these opportunities with a full time job. University will prepare you for the real world in ways you would never expect, but only if you take an active role in that preparation.
Wow, thanks for all the thoughts! Really appreciate it when people who have already dealt with my problems can provide insight. I guess that's a perk of being young.
You're right, though. It's an opportunity, and my goal needs to be to make the most of it, even if it feels unnecessary from the outside.
I find it terribly concerning that I'm paying $50k to go to a school to learn something I already know, and know well, to take classes on subjects somewhat connected to what I'll do in a future career, to get a job full of incompetent idiots who get the same paper as me.
Then why are you doing it? No one is forced to go to college. Nothing is stopping you from doing anything else.
If you want a "job" and a "career" working for someone else, then you probably will need a degree — there just isn't any way around that. You don't want to do it, but that's just what you will have to do because that is what is expected by the majority of people doing the hiring. Of course, if that's what you want, you should probably just get used to it because having a job means that someone else will be deciding what you do long after you are out of college.
If you want to chart your own course and be in control of what you pursue — then go do something on your own. Start something.
I wouldn't go to college with this mindset: "to learn something I already know". If you do, you won't learn anything, because you've already predisposed yourself against it. Go with an open mind. Look for opportunities. Collaborate with others. Find the best and the brightest — those in your class that are on your level — those that are ABOVE your level ... and learn from them, work on things with them, and learn everything you can not only about code, but people.
And never stop learning outside of your official classes. Keep pouring yourself into the things you love. Become an expert.
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” ~ Mark Twain
Can you find a school that costs less that $12K per year? (In California, the CSU system is about half that for residents, I think, although UC is pretty close to that)
When you go, be prepared to learn about more than computers. Learn to write and speak. Learn History and Philosophy. Lean Psychology and Biology. Learn Art and Music. Learn how other people outside of the sciences think. Take in the abstractions that come with the Math classes that will go with your C.S. studies.
I also knew I was going to do C.S. before I started my freshman year at CSU, having spent some time looking into it before hand, but there is a lot to explore while you are there. (my family couldn't afford a computer in the late 70s / early 80s, so I didn't learn any programming until senior year of high school. I did manage to learn about binary, BCD, fixed precision arithmetic, simple encryption, hex math and a few other things in our grade school and middle school libraries, though, as well as wiring and soldering electronics at home) Use that as an advantage to make sure your class selections are progressing towards your major and degree.
To the author's point, though, when I went to CSU starting in 1983, it was about $500 / year in fees, going up to about $1000/yr when I finished in '88 (yeah, it's been a while). Now, for my university bound daughter, I'm looking at about $7000/yr in fees for CSU. Choose how and where you spend your money wisely
I wouldn't be so critical about your peers, but that comes with your age. Also, you seem to be fairly good with words. Look at the next several years as an opportunity and attempt to extract as much value as you can (but do so in the most time efficient manner as possible.) Also, don't get to sucked in to the party scene, it's over-rated.
You're right, I was wrong to be so critical. I suppose my point comes from a percentage, perhaps small, perhaps large, of free riders in the industry. But that comes with every career.
My life plan as of right now is to go off to college as planned, but focus time on both schooling and working on my real world experiences. I'm still too young and naive; hopefully stress and general education can fix some of that.
About parties, though: I've never been the type. I don't have time for much leisure, and had to give up TV/games to focus on current school and hobbies. Partying doesn't sound overrated, just sad.
Eh, not necessarily. In the 30-35 age range, if you're looking for an actual serious relationship and not just a fling, you'll find there are a lot of girls who spent their 20s getting their careers in order and amassing life experience, and now find they want a husband but all the decent guys were taken in their mid-20s.
I'd say that the teens and 22-28 range are hardest for guys, and 28-35 and 65-80 are hardest for women, with college being about equal for both sexes. In your teens most girls cluster their attention on the hottest or most socially confident guys, and from 22-28 guys have to compete with older, more established males for girls that are still somewhat attracted to the trappings of success. But once they get to their late 20s, most people realize that a.) if they want to start a family of someone roughly the same age, they better do it soon b.) the superficial things that most people like in a partner - hotness, money, success, popularity - don't really matter much when you spend every day with them and really get to know them, and what does matter are things like kindness, character, emotional stability, etc. and c.) most of the people who realized this earlier dropped out of the dating pool and got married in their 20s. Women have a much stricter time horizon than guys do at this point, so guys tend to have the advantage in the dating pool.
I've heard dating past the mid-30s is weird, with a lot of divorcees and a lot of folks with baggage from past relationships. I see a lot of age-unbalanced couples in this range, with guys in their mid-40s coming off a failed marriage dating girls in their mid-20s, or single mothers having a string of not-too-serious boyfriends while juggling childcare and a job. Then once you get to 65, guys again have the advantage, because women tend to live longer and so there are a number of widows while very few widowers. I've heard that single guys in retirement communities get so much ass, but for some reason nobody wants to talk about that...
> you'll find there are a lot of girls who spent their 20s getting their careers in order and amassing life experience
yeah, in other words, they spent their best years on someone else (probably LOTS of someone elses), and now that they're hitting the limits of what their youth/sex appeal can get them, they want some guy with a paycheck who they can slowly mold into a schlub, only to divorce him later.
if you read your post carefully you say the exact same thing, just in 3 or 4 different ways.
if you want to land a good relationship you HAVE to expose yourself to women at an early age and actively work on attraction/improving yourself, or else you're going to be the fucking sucker who picks up the tab later on in life. the illusion of dating being "better" in your 30s is simply women with fewer and fewer choices settling for less favorable selections, which is a recipe for disaster.
the problem is so many guys, especially in IT, are completely CLUELESS to this dynamic and just go all-in the first time a reasonably pretty woman 'chooses' them.
if she wouldn't have dated/slept with the you in your 20s, you sure as HELL don't want to get involved with her when you're in your 30s.
I second this. Take the first professional job you can get (and you can start freelancing and putting stuff on github to help you get that job), you can use that to bounce into a higher paying job after a year or two. Once you're inside the industry people won't bother looking at your piece of paper or lack thereof.
I spent 3 years at University doing a completely non software related degree, gave it up, was doing feelance web design, then luckily managed to get into a professional software developer position (for relatively low pay). After 16 months I moved into another job with a 40% pay increase and much better environment/conditions.
After reading some of the insightful comments above, I'd like to add that it would be good to round out your skill set beyond web development. Learn C, it will teach you great things. Learn Linux (and read the source code), you'll learn a lot about how complex systems work.
If you do go down the path of university, then make sure you stray outside what they teach. Challenge yourself, because that's how you improve, and you'll also differentiate yourself when someone is looking to hire you.
I consider myself pretty good; I honestly have no baseline, but I've spent several years working with PHP, HTML5, JavaScript, I've learned Node.js, and I've built several working prototype projects over my high school years. They're clean, follow standards, and have been great learning experiences for me (trial and error beats lectures, for me).
This being said, I have a bad feeling that my portfolio won't outweigh a degree. I don't know why degrees are valued more than actual knowledge, but that seems to be what the data shows.
> I've spent several years working with PHP, HTML5, JavaScript, I've learned Node.js
It sounds like you've learned something about one domain, using high level languages to accomplish similar tasks. There is an awful lot more to learn, trust me. Hopefully you will take courses on operating systems, data structures and algorithms, building a compiler, etc. Learning different paradigms like functional programming and logic programming will give you different perspectives on computing and make you a better programmer.
I teach computer science to undergraduates and students like yourself sometimes have problems to start with (hopefully this won't apply to you). This can be because they've picked up bad habits (PHP?) or because you breeze through the first year and get bored or get in the habit of thinking they know it all.
Anyway, computer science and software engineering are definitely subjects worth studying at university level. There are deep intellectual challenges involved in mastering the material and universities are the place to tackle them. If you just want to get a job (programmer as tradesman, like a plumber or whatever), do that instead. There are some situations in which the tradesman might have an advantage over the scientist, but if you're going to write a system for me I want to know that you understand complexity and so on and so on.
> I consider myself pretty good; I honestly have no baseline...
This is your only blocker to success. I also had a lack of self confidence -- I put this up to the pedestal we put university degrees upon.
By what you've done so far, it sounds like you are better than most 90% of people finishing with Computer Science degrees. There are employers who can see that -- but most recruiters do not (though they do latch on to buzzwords).
Demonstrate your passion and your skill and you'll easily get a job somewhere in the industry.
jaxbot, I was a hiring manager at a major Silicon Valley semiconductor company for many years before I retired.
Unfortunately, the CS degree really does open doors. If you're good, you can skip the degree. But you must be really good. Honestly, the best engineer I worked with in my whole career (and who was on my staff) was a high-school dropout. But he was incredibly great, and devoured books on languages and software engineering. He is the kind of guy that would have a relevant input about "Is Haskell or Lisp a better language?"
But not having a degree did limit his career. He always had work because everyone loved him and knew he was brilliant and humble. But doors that might have been open to him were closed. Every choice in life has a cost.
There really is some benefit to doing the degree. It will force you to dig into some areas that you might not have dug into manually. Algorithms, data structures, discrete math, linear algebra, calculus, compilers, languages, computer architecture, etc. You need all that stuff to be a great SW engineer.
My advise to you is to get the degree but treat it as your "day job." Then, do what you're really passionate about. Take grad level courses, or just do random stuff that you think is cool and put it in github.
I interviewed thousands of new college grads. About 75% of them absolutely suck. The guys who I made offers to were almost always guys who did stuff on their own. Right before I retired, the last guy I made a job offer to showed me an app he had written for his iphone that simulated how particles diffuse in a solvent, and his resume showed a link to the code that he wrote.
His GPA was only a 3.5. But I totally got him: he was great because he had a passion for digging into stuff, and not just for jumping through professors' hoops.
In general, the correlation I found between GPA and competence was this:
< 3.0, something is wrong, don't hire this guy
3.0 - 3.5, this guy isn't good at jumping through hoops, but he might be great if he has a passion for programming and has done lots of side work.
3.5 - 3.9, this is the sweet spot. Lots of great people in this category who did both great and school and also did stuff in their spare time.
3.9 - 4.0, oddly, the quality seemed to go down here a little bit. These are the people who spent all their Friday and Saturday nights studying instead of developing social skills, and didn't really do much besides strategize about how to jump through the professors' hoops and get an A in everything.
Obviously, I'm generalize and there are always exceptions. But if you interview thousands of candidates you see the trend.
"You have just paid about three times as much for your degree as did someone graduating 30 years ago."
Aren't more people going to college these days than people were 30 years ago? The "conspiracy" doesn't exist, the fetishizing of higher education happened in the open. It is a tragedy that a great system of learning (liberal education) has been so watered down and over-sold.
As the parent of a college freshman, let me say that this is one significant reason we've relocated to Budapest. (Not that this would be a help to most, as our daughter is bilingual in Hungarian.)
Australia is similar in the regard, except the Federal government covers part of the full course cost, the rest being covered by a CPI indexed loan (HECS) which needs to be paid back once employment income exceeds $38k per year (taken from tax refunds -- we have tax deducted every payday).
That said, a typical university student will accumulate $9000 a year of HECS debt.
And yet Universities continue to cry poor, cutting student services and teaching staff, despite increased revenues from full fee paying international students over the past decade.
I'm perplexed as to why this is.
Edit: Just found this: http://www.nteu.org.au/library/view/id/3828 --
RMIT University spent $8.2 million on 19 "senior executive and council members".
That's ~$431k a head, or according to the Union "125 HEW 6 academic staff."
> In all institutional groupings—public and private—tuition prices increased faster than education and general spending per student. This suggests that both public and private institutions are becoming more dependent on tuition as a source of general revenue—not just to pay for education and related expenses, but as a general subsidy for all functions, including research and service.
Page 33:
> The primary cause of tuition increases in public institutions is not increased spending, but rather cost shifting to replace losses in state appropriations and
other revenues.
What would you rather have?
1) Low tuition subsidized by higher taxes when you're working
2) higher tuition but lower taxes later on
The market seems to have chosen (2). Whether or not taxes are actually lower is another question.
Personally, I think it's horrible to graduate with 80K+ in debt. To put it into perspective, my parents graduated with minimal debt. Their first debt was the purchase of a house, for about the same amount as student loans are now.
What would you rather have on graduation? Student debt, or no student debt and a house?
30-40k of debt seems a lot less than many people I have known are in with degrees that will never be meaningful to employers. Parents need to adjust for the world as it is and teach their kids that degrees can be profitable to them in the right fields and without debt. I've known several people who had 100k+ worth of college debt and very little to actually show for it.
The debt is the real problem here. If you have a degree that isn't going to do anything for you then that's bad but with debt everything is so much worse. Debt makes any problem you have so much worse.
This article is completely wrong. The basic claim of the article is that according to the College Board, the amount students actually spend to attend college has increased 300% over the last 30 years. Is this actual true?
College Board does track the amount students spend, they call this statistic net sticker price -- that is, sticker price minus all grants, scholarships, and tax credits. However, they only track net sticker price back to 1990.
The figure that this article is citing is sticker price, which isn't the amount that students spend, as the article claims, but rather it's just the list price. (This guy is basically quoting the fake price that's crossed out on Amazon that no one actually pays so that they can trick you into thinking you're saving money.) Here is the difference, with both statistics carried as far back as they go from the College Board data:
"The average sticker price for yearly tuition and required fees (not including room and board) at private non-profit 4-year institutions increased from $10,378 in 1972-73 (2012 dollars) to $29,056 in 2012-13. At public institutions the cost increased from $2,225 to $8,655.
The net yearly tuition and required fees (sticker price minus total grant aid and tax benefits) at public 4-year colleges for in-state residents increased from $1,840 in 1990-91 (2012 dollars) to $2,910 in 2012-13 . At private non-profit institutions the net price increased from $11,060 in 1990-91 to $13,380 in 2012-13."
This isn't to say that it's impossible that the net sticker price has increased by 300% -- it may have, or may not have, there's no way to know. But the College Board data certainly doesn't doesn't show this, which is the claim the author is making.
Similarly, the author claims that the average student this year at a private college spent $29,000 on their education. This is also a blatant lie. As you can see from the actual College Board data, which this guy claims is his source, the real figure there is $13,380. And it's not like this guy doesn't know the difference, since the data for both is on the same page -- this entire article is just a bunch of blatant lies designed to promote whatever his bullshit agenda is.
The only problem with the article is overly emphasizing the "you are being scammed" angle. The article actually covers it from two angles, and the "net sticker price" is only the right metric for one of them (an individual student evaluating the ROI of their own personal education). Looking at the system as a whole, average net sticker price is the wrong metric. That's hiding real costs in the system. "Why is there $1 trillion of student debt?" "Why does education cost so much?" "How can we reduce the cost of education?" You can't answer any of those questions if you ignore subsidies.
Many grants and all tax credits especially are funded by the government and contribute to demand inflation just like any other customer. Other grants and scholarships are funded by charities and 3rd parties. If you're looking at the system as a whole you can't rule out those sources of funding as not being part of the cost. Colleges still treat that as demand and set their prices accordingly
I posted these a while back on another thread, but these seem highly relevant to getting some insight to where the demand from state/federal government is going.
The difference between sticker price and net tuition (I don't understand what you mean by "net sticker price", that seems to conflate both metrics) is usually the result of price discrimination by the colleges. They raise sticker price so they can charge wealthy applicants more, and then offer generous financial aid so they can charge poor applicants less. It is a subsidy, but it's a subsidy within the organization.
Similarly, many of these financial aid grants at elite institutions are often funded through alumni donations and investment income off the endowment. This is also a voluntary transfer payment from rich to poor.
If you want to measure the incoming tuition flows into college, the metric you probably want is net tuition + government funding. That excludes transfer payments within the organization from rich to poor and donations to non-profit scholarship corporations, but includes funding from tax revenues.
It is a subsidy, but it's a subsidy within the organization.
The original version of my comment explained this but I removed it for brevity. But yes you are right. From what I understand the money flow, especially at elite institutions, can be very complex.
Also "net sticker price" was the term used by the commenter I was responding to.
From the article: "Consider this: You have just paid about three times as much for your degree as did someone graduating 30 years ago. That’s in constant dollars — in other words, after accounting for inflation. There is no evidence that you have received a degree three times as good. "
The assumption is that you would expect the cost of higher education to track the CPI. As a good that we get through labour-intensive means, in fact you should not expect that, but expect the cost to depend on the amount of face-to-face time students have with instructors and the growth of real wages.
I thought the WSJ was supposed to get these kind of things right.
> expect the cost to depend on the amount of face-to-face time students have with instructors and the growth of real wages
I'm a college professor. I don't believe that the amount of face-to-face time has increased (I'd be interested to hear otherwise). Is there evidence that real wages have increased for people who teach? (I haven't gotten a raise in some years, and I hear all about increases in adjuncts which would tend to drive down average pay.)
I think the labour cost of university teaching has increased in the US:
1. I think (I haven't tried to dredge up numbers) that in the US, face-to-face time with professors has reduced for each student on average, but face-to-face time with more junior academic staff has increased greatly. To make a comparison between countries, rather than across time, certainly the number of supervised teaching hours per week I have seen in US universities has been much higher than even in the highest-rated universities in the UK and Germany.
2. The labour costs are not just in-class teaching time, but also all work that is attached to teaching activity. Much more effort is put into "compliance" issues than before (e.g., dealing with legal challenges to grades, and I think that admissions is a much more expensive process than before).
3. The most sought-after faculty (star professors) do earn much more than before, and for at least some faculties, the pay for star professors is proportionally high.
4. Faculty turnover is higher.
I'm sure concrete figures exist - I'd certainly like to see a solid analysis of labour cost trends in the US and elsewhere.
And this is exactly why information like this never makes it to these types of arguments. It totally refutes the majority of the claims made. I say majority because unfortunately there are a number of very needy people who get denied access to the best institutions due to financial considerations instead of scholastic aptitude.
"Unfortunately there are a number of very needy people who get denied access to the best institutions due to financial considerations instead of scholastic aptitude."
Yes but the article is still completely wrong. They're making a very specific claim that on average students pay X, when in fact that's not true. Of course there are lots of cases where a person isn't able to get student loans or grants because their parents are wealthy but they're also highly abusive or whatever, but that doesn't have anything to do with what the article is claiming.
But they're not making a specific claim. They're making a generalized claim to tell the story. Any one individual student should be able to compare their financial situation to the generalizations in the article.
The final sentence of the article is this:
How on earth do colleges today ramp up costs to $40,000 a year?
And in fact, scholarships, grants and other subsidies would be but one part of the explanation for why costs are high. Just because a student might not pay $40,000 because he gets $10,000 in merit scholarships and need-based gov't and 3rd party grants, doesn't mean the cost of that degree still isn't $40,000.
>But they're not making a specific claim. They're making a generalized claim to tell the story.
"Consider this: You have just paid about three times as much for your degree as did someone graduating 30 years ago. That’s in constant dollars — in other words, after accounting for inflation. [...] According to the College Board, in 1983 a typical private American university managed to provide a bachelor’s-degree-level education to young people just like you for $11,000 a year in tuition and fees. That’s in 2012 dollars."
It's not meant to be taken literally. It's just part of the narrative. It's blatantly obvious that the author can't actually know how much his readers have actually paid for their tuition. In fact the audience for this article is probably not even recent graduates.
Attending a "prestigious," college usually means that you NEED to make it. I use to pressure my own self into a mental state that, "I need to achieve in life... a career, a business, something that shows my valor, my intellect."
A college degree, I believe, will get you further in a career (or at least an interview),...but getting the interview, that's what college is for! I don't believe that BS saying "it's not what you know, it's who you know." What you know, is equally important as to who you know, because if you don't know diddly squat, who you know will laugh you away.
To clear up any presumptions...I'm a college dropout that passed on going to SFSU, because I didn't want to go back to the bay area, but if I could change it...hmmm college degree or criminal record. (easy choice)
I graduated high school last year and decided to forgo a $40,000 college to be an entrepreneur.
I regret nothing.
Unfortunately, my parents are doing the silliest thing imaginable and are forcing me to go to college now. I dread reading articles like this four years from now.
The hack overuse of <X Industrial Complex> makes this article very difficult to take seriously.
The real military industrial complex and the regulatory capture it described was far more serious and dangerous than this ever could be, producing war after war on the backs of the poor to serve tiny oligarchies.
Compared to that, this is just a schoolyard tussle.
It's better to understand this as an extortion dynamic than a single conspiracy.
Mafia is a good analogy. There is no "Mafia" (except for werewolves, if anyone gets the allusion). There are various crime families and connections between them are loose to nonexistent. "Mafia" is a term people make up to describe what are actually a heterogeneous set of people who just happen to compete in such a way that they get the benefits and the externalities fall out on society (just like an upper class).
Conspiracy theories are an attractive proposition because you can "blow up the room where they meet". If only it were that simple. The reality is that the types of people who are in power are naturally extortionist-- it's probably genetic-- and such people are naturally drawn to the power they gain in numbers, but too individually arrogant and selfish to form comic-book "Conspiracies" (cf. "The Empire" in mid-90s console RPGs). In reality, lower-case-c conspiracies exist all over the place, but there's no "one room where they meet".
Ok, now onto the expensiveness of college and (as mentioned) urban real estate, it's an extortion economy. It's a protection racket. Colleges are (at least in theory) able to protect people from falling to the bottom, and that's the service they sell these days. As the U.S. middle class shuts down, demand for the few remaining seats becomes nearly infinite. That's why college tuitions are crossing the $50,000 barrier and rents are skyrocketing in the few locations where it's possible for a young person to start a career. The U.S. middle class is being "obsoleted" and people, in panic, are clinging to the few successful institutions (top universities, star cities) that appear high enough to survive the flood.
You can view this as a generation getting "screwed" but I see it as a mix of good and bad. We also live in a time when participation in technology is becoming available to the masses. This really is the best and worst of times. We could win big and change history, or we could be the worst loser generation the world has seen in hundreds of years. It's still not determined yet.
I look at the upper classes and see insecurity and weakness. Sure, they're parasitic and mostly evil, but they also are afraid of something. I'm not sure what yet. But a lot of their parasitic hyperconsumption is them throwing a huge party before the curtain drops on them.
I still believe in Avenue 1. Avenue 1 is that we level up on technology and education and make a better world and just outperform these assholes. We build better companies and institutions and allow them to decline peacefully. (Avenue 2 is a violent, worldwide revolution against the current global elite that will probably kill ~4 million before it concludes.) We don't have to fight them directly; we just build things that are superior to what they can come up with, and gradually draw power through positive means. Avenue 1 means we, as a generation, build something like what Silicon Valley was before it became VC-istan.
I see a lot of opportunity. Sure, those in our generation who hoped to have the easy route to corporate executive sinecures have lost that opportunity forever; but Avenue 1 is a real possibility.
Why do you think once "we level up on technology and education and outperform these assholes", we will not become assholes ourselves? Tangentially related, but this[1] is one of my favorite articles from Less Wrong. A quote from that article
"The young revolutionary's belief is honest. There will be no betraying catch in his throat, as he explains why the tribe is doomed at the hands of the old and corrupt, unless he is given power to set things right. Not even subconsciously does he think, 'And then, once I obtain power, I will strangely begin to resemble that old corrupt guard, abusing my power to increase my inclusive genetic fitness.'"
This is my main reason for preferring to do it nonviolently (Avenue 1). We need to be building things that give power to the currently powerless and decentralize control, not the other way around. If we take power "for ourselves", we find that what we call "ourselves" is infiltrated by the worst kinds of people, and then they push us out.
I don't have any moral problem with killing the current global elite. For what they've done to this world, they're effectively our property, to do with what we wish. That said, I prefer to offer them full amnesty so long as they decline peacefully. (They'll even remain fairly wealthy; just not dominant anymore.) Even if it's abstractly morally acceptable, there is a major moral cost to violence nonetheless. Once we start it, how do we stop it? Also, violent revolutions tend to draw in the worst people (who are attracted, as noted, by the power). Our side is 99.9% of the world; not everyone in that set is good.
Best is a nonviolent revolution centered on decentralization of power (giving power away to the currently powerless in order to build a healthier and more robust world) because the sorts of people who are attracted to such a movement are the kinds you want. When you start killing people and blowing shit up and "ruling" old-style (see what happened to communism) then you are taking power (perhaps with the stated intention of giving it back some day) and you get a lot of mercenary assholes in your effort who don't really care about the ideals and just want to cause harm.
Obviously Avenue 1 is the best outcome, but what happens if those in control simply change the rules? Even if you can outperform them, you're not going to win if the rules keep getting changed.
By that I mean, even if you could come up with a new wireless technology 100x faster and 100x cheaper, what can you do if the powers-that-be pass legislation making it illegal?
I just hope you're right. I honestly don't think we've seen the US Gov flex their muscles on bittorrent yet (not to suggest there's anything they can do).
Who is this "global elite" you're talking about? Does it include Obama and the Democrats (most young people I know voted for them)?
Does Vladimir Putin also count? Hugo Chavez? Silvio Berlusconi?
Most of today's corrupt and powerful people are in democratic governments, what do you do about them?
I like your analysis, but why throw the 4 million estimate on the number of people killed in your Avenue 2 scenario? To give a number like that for such a speculative scenario seems ridiculous to me.
I figure it will take about 4000 casualties among the global elite (of about 80,000 people) to convince them to retreat. Somewhere around one spill per 20 will convince them that times have changed.
Unfortunately, we're probably looking at a battle kill ratio of 100:1, not because the good guys would be incompetent, but because the bad guys would have lots of guards and hired guns (who would count toward that 100). So that's 400,000 in battle.
The spinoff conflicts and general social mayhem and disruptions of service will add an order of magnitude to that. Most of the dead won't be killed in battle; they'll be people who can't get to hospitals in time because of roadblocks.
All-in, low millions seems likely. We really want to avoid that if possible. However, when you compare that to the number of people who die of health insurance in the US, or the casualty count of the 2003 War of Corporate Enrichment (in Iraq) it's not that extreme. It's still horrible and we still need to do everything we can as a generation to make sure that it doesn't happen, but it's not a x-risk (which our current corporate elite is).
I only support violence if it comes to us, as a second-strike matter-- I would much rather have the global corporate elite back off peacefully and no one get killed-- but U.S. health insurance (i.e. corporate murder-for-profit) is pretty damn close to the red line.
>That's why college tuitions are crossing the $50,000 barrier
Maybe for out-of-state, Ivy league education, or maybe Medical School, but this is outrageously untrue for the average college.
For example, Georgia Tech, an amazing public college in the South, costs $5325[1] per semester for instate students.
Community colleges, in the area, cost thousands less as well (in the $3000 range per semester?).
I can understand that maybe MIT and Stanford are getting pricey, but hopefully people understand that there are literally thousands of other colleges out there.
