Gaps in Alumni Earnings Stand Out in Release of College Data
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
For those visual people like myself, this is the most telling: http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Projects/BPEA/Fall-2015_emb...
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…
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generally_accepted_accounting_...
So, I think the only cost you should account for is the cost of having to pay in the case of default.
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.
This is actually one of the problems.
If you could dismiss college debt via bankruptcy, then lenders would start pushing back against both the colleges and the students.
The degree mills would still exist, but they'd magically price themselves much cheaper.
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%.
Found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9695568 .
Are they worthless, scammy degrees? Who knows, maybe. Are some people told lies and believing in it? Maybe the case, too.
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."
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.
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 :)
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.
How are these not degree mills?
I knew exactly what I was getting into at my university.
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.
No, not really.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accreditation_mill
> I thought the process was they acquire already accredited institutions and rebrand them.
I guess it's possible, but I've never heard of that happening.
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.
https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ADV&fstype=ii&ei=Tt31...
https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AAPOL&fstype=ii&ei=...
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.
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.
Is there any source for this? It's always something I've wondered about but haven't seen anything concrete indicating one way or another.
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.
Start here: http://www.ditext.com/pippin/aims2000.html
[0] This belief is responsible for most gen-ed requirements and core curricula.
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.
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.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_318.20.a...
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.
UChicago's 2000 Aims of Education address says it better than I can: http://aims.uchicago.edu/node/77
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.
Here in Australia we'd sub in "uni" for "college", but it just sounds weird to "complete a degree" without "going to [tertiary education]".
It was possible then, and it's possible now; it is definitely a lot more work than with the degree, though.
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.
The data for MIT is very similar (even same median starting salary of $105,000 for EECS): https://gecd.mit.edu/sites/default/files/about/files/2014-gs...
So if you can just graduate in the top half of your class in at a good CS school you start with a 6 figure salary.
EDIT: Since you mentioned internships, CMU also publish internship stats: http://www.cmu.edu/career/salaries-and-destinations/2014-sur...
> 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.
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.
It fits a narrative that NYT has been pushing for years.
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.
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.
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.
Many talented students can't afford or avoid debt in elite universities.
At the same time, less competitive students may get accepted because of donations/connections/preparatory schools.
That means their family is rich and/or has powerful connections. Thus they will be more likely to succeed after graduation.
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).
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.
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.
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.
They released the data under an open source license and have the source of the website on github! It's built w/ Jekyll!
https://github.com/18F/college-choice
If you asked me a year ago how likely I thought this was, I would have guessed something like 1%.
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.
0 - http://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/reno/san...?
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.
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.
see: http://www.ed.gov/blog/2015/09/colleges-where-students-earn-... and http://www.ed.gov/blog/2015/09/schools-with-low-costs-and-hi...
Do people who make websites nowadays hate people and want to see the world(wide web) burn?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course correlation is not causation...
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.)
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).
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.
The net result I expect to be the same as every other Marxist and/or Libertarian analysis: no useful outcomes.
It's climbing the front page right now.
To whatever the "middle class" can afford.
Edit: Realized I was probably straw-manning you with those questions. Sorry about that. Basically, could you elaborate on your position?
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.
2) If you hated it so much, why in the world would you allow your parents to bankroll it? That seems so disrespectful to me.
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.
If it'll make them happy to piss their money away towards my tuition, why should I refuse?
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 ?
> The upfront cost and risk is too high for the
> expected outcome.
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.
> 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.
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 ?
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 ?
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.
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.
It helps me understand why UK residents come to the US for their college study as well.
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 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.
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.
Its a terrible deal for students - and society.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.