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1971genocide

University is a scam.

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.

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It is always sad when I read this sort of screed. I can assure you that Universities are not a 'scam' in the general sense (and yes there are actual scams by some of them but it doesn't sound like Bristol is such a university).

There are three things a University/College education provides you -

1) Is a rapid exposure to many of the typical problems, techniques, and understanding of a particular major subject. Generally this is about 3x the rate you could get exposed to that in a work for hire situation. So for each year of college you end up exposed to the variety of problems it would have taken 3 years of on the job experience to get to.

2) The people who go to college constitute the majority of leaders in the community. It takes a while to realize this but as a young adult there are "the leaders" and "the followers", and the young adult is generally in the follower group. But over time folks move into the leader group and, by and large, those are the people you went to school with. So you are more naturally considered a part of that group.

3) A personal sense of what you can do, for many folks they reach a point where the requirements on them exceed their natural ability to "wing it"[1], and depending on how "smart" they were in high school this can come as a rude awakening. But once past it, people are much more mature about their skills and how to work at things. My experience has been that people who haven't gone to college rarely allow themselves to be pushed pass this wall as the other side is quite reasonably scary. Without the immovable force of 'you must do this or you will not graduate' the temptation to run away can be more powerful. Without that fundamental understanding of your abilities, and how to get more done than you think you can, often limits how successful you can be.

[1] Take things as they come and complete them without preparation.

I beg to differ.

What is the expected salary of a MIT engineer ? Last time I checked it was 72,000 dollars per year.

What is the typical tuition in MIT ? I do not remember the exact number but it would take a while before students are able to pay back the amount. For 4 years of study its more than 4 years to pay back - that is how I look at it. Its bad enough for home students and astronomical for international ones.

Yes, there are some students who make it really big. But that is essentially a lottery and we should ignore them.

The most useful skills I learnt were all self taught - as paul graham pointed out - if you put a bunch of motivated people in a closed chamber they will figure out get things.

University life consisted of learning how to game the exams and not really learn anything of sustainable value.

I knew that from high school and also what Paul wrote about education in general. But I didn't fully accept that our education system is so fundamentally broken.

Lets put what you are saying in monetary prespective.

3x - while just working.

so if you study for 3 years you get 9 years of experience ?

But then you need to spend more than 3 years paying back the debt and you also were not able to earn anything during that time.

And also there is no iterative improvement. you do not know how good you are until you have crossed the 3 years period. You might be terrible at your job and there is no way of knowing.

The upfront cost and risk is too high for the expected outcome.

Some people I know who are studying medicine spend until their 30 to finish. How is this sustainable ?

I realize I can't convince you, its part of what makes it sad for me.

   > The upfront cost and risk is too high for the 
   > expected outcome.

I understand this is your thesis but you don't have the data to actually argue it. And those who have done the research have come to a different conclusion than you have, so its a good place to start to understand what they considered relevant versus what you consider relevant. There has been a lot of work done on this so its easy to find papers and articles to read.

I completely understand what you mean - As Neil Degrass Tyson said - you cannot put a price on ignorance.

But the argument I am making is the same argument that people make about healthcare cost. For example its hard to put a price on life but at the same time we need to be realistic.

Also I think there is a stronger argument for fairness.

If you consider me - with parents who were willing to pay for everything - vs students who are much more apt candidate but are unable to find the funding or get the loan.

Do you think society should run like that ? I would hope the best candidate gets placement in all the top schools regardless of their socio-economical background.

But all I noticed while in university are super rich kids.

No one is arguing that average expected value over a lifetime for better higher education is positive when subtracted from the investment. But is that what it comes down to ?

Do we want young people to waste their life's surplus produce paying back their debt ?

Even besides those things - it seems there is increased financialization of education. Should we allow students to gamble with 6+ years of their best years.

Obama famously finished paying back his student debt when he was in his 30s.

Its not so much of question of net positives and net negatives in terms of pure monetary outcome.

Its a question of what we want education to be - a public good or a private purchase like a car.

Vacuuming out surplus produce from young people also means less new young business / startup / etc.

Ben Bernarke is trying to understand why inflation is not rising - its simple, our generation has lost any faith in buying their own homes, cars or having more than 2 kids.

Ok, there are some interesting statements here that I would like to challenge. First there is this one:

   > If you consider me - with parents who were willing to
   > pay for everything - vs students who are much more apt
   > candidate but are unable to find the funding or get
   > the loan.

This implies there are students "much more apt candidate" who are unable to get funded. But really there are two things here, one is getting into a college and the other is paying for it. In the US there are a lot of colleges, and in my personal experience I got into MIT but there was no financial aid available, and I also got into USC and they offered me a full scholarship. So I went to USC rather than MIT (my first choice). Four years of "in state" tuition, (tuition at a state school where you already live) is generally less than $30,000 which is the cost of a nice car. Graduate school it gets even better since you can often trade tuition for teaching the undergrads or a lab or two.

Combining that knowledge with the experience of working with people from a wide variety of collegiate backgrounds and you will find that good people are good people, regardless of the status of the school they attended. What is more, smaller colleges tend to recruit people with similar values so when you find someone from a college who fits well with your company, chances are other people from that college will as well.

   > Do you think society should run like that ?

And yes, it works as expected. Your statements seem to indicate that if you didn't go to a "good" school you can't get a "good" job, but in the STEM field that really isn't the case. And after you've worked for 3 years folks have a record of what you've done to start referring too and the pedigree of your school becomes less and less important as a discriminator. And if you go to graduate school (which can be cost neutral) you may find you "upgrade" your school pedigree.

So this seems to be your key pain point --

   > Do we want young people to waste their life's 
   > surplus produce paying back their debt ?

And it's a fallacy. We don't want students to feel like they have to go to a "top" school to succeed, because they don't. As a student you have a choice of schools from the very expensive to the very modestly priced. That is a healthy market. And there will always be people who will try to make a status symbol out of where they live or where they went to school Etc. But as you get older you will see that those "values" are entirely artificial. Five years from now you will look back and say, "Gee, I really could have gone to any school and arrived at this same point in my career."

The cost of an undergraduate engineering degree in the US spans the range of $12,000 - $300,000. Everyone who graduates gets to be an engineer, depending on the size and influence of their school they may know people already in their chosen field. But I cannot find any examples of someone who was "held back" from their potential by graduating at a less well known school.

I'm really sorry you got so little value out of the money your parents spent on your education. And I know how "real" your personal experience is relative to your world outlook. However, there are other experiences out there which are very very different than yours and they are very common. You will meet these people in the places you work, and the communities you visit. I'm hoping you will find it isn't as bad as you might think.

I think part of your disagreement is that the original poster is from the UK and you're talking about US education. The systems are similar, but subtly different enough to cause talking past one another.

In the UK you don't pick universities based on price. The government imposes price controls on higher education and (as far as I know) ~all universities charge the maximum amount. Whenever the caps rise, they all raise their prices to the new caps simultaneously. So in effect universities do not compete on price, only on reputation. Students therefore all attempt to get into the "best" universities as determined by basically unchanging perceptions of reputation that exist on a global rather than per-subject level, and the admissions system ends up allocating people based on grades.

So your point about there being a healthy market isn't really on point. For the OP, there simply is no market.

As an additional point, in recent times there has been absolutely massive rises in the price caps and therefore prices. When I went to university it cost me about 10,000 GBP in total. The year I graduated the professors all went on a kind of pseudo-strike where they refused to mark exams (but they still did research and they still got paid their full salary). The strike was because the government had tripled the price caps in order to try and boost capacity, and the staff decided they wanted to keep capacity the same and all get a pay rise instead. Their strike was successful, the (unbelievably weak) administration caved and the entire tripling of their income was immediately passed straight through to higher pay.

The OP claims he paid around 60,000 (about $100k). This sounds plausible to me if it includes costs of living as well. This is a lot of money by anyone's standards, especially compared to the recent past when it was a lot cheaper.

So I sympathise with 1971genocide. I too went through the UK universities system, studying computer science, and had exactly the same frustrations. I went to a university that is considered to be in the tier just below Oxbridge, many of the students there were from very rich families. The universities reputation is good. Yet the staff were incompetent to a degree that was truly mind blowing. Very few of the people who graduated actually became software engineers full time (many went into e.g. generic consulting roles, consultancies, finance), partly because so many people graduated entirely unable to write even basic programs. Many who studied soft subjects there ended up in dead end jobs earning too little to even begin paying back their student loans.

Looking back, I probably should have skipped university. It made me miserable too, and I got a job offer (from Google) before graduating there based on open source work I'd done. If I had gone straight into a job from 18 I'd have probably been much happier and healthier in those years.

Fair enough, I could understand it is a local problem. This web site (http://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/student-finance/...) talks about the costs and points out that many UK schools have 3 year programs rather than the 4 (or 5) year programs in the US. Sort of minimal variation with the limits imposed by the government.

It helps me understand why UK residents come to the US for their college study as well.

The nature of education is that it's always been an investment. Many jobs require a certain amount of preparation and training, and a college degree helps to make the case of preparation for a variety of jobs - and leads to specific training in accounting, business, law, medicine, and academic research.

One reason American student loan debt is so hard to shake is that students used to take out massive loans for college, declare bankruptcy, then go off to higher earning lives.

> What is the expected salary of a MIT engineer ? Last time I checked it was 72,000 dollars per year.

I don't believe that as the average starting salary, let alone mid-career salary. Your average MIT engineering graduate has the skills to be very successful in the job market, and most often that's exactly what happens. They have a huge leg up over people that didn't go to MIT. The average mid-career salary of someone who got an MIT engineering degree is way, way higher than someone who didn't.

I tend to agree, the Alumni group posts starting salaries here: http://web.mit.edu/facts/alum.html but I can't find their 5 year and 10 year numbers. I expect that the median for 10 years would be north of $200,000.

Yeah, per that site, the average starting salary for all MIT undergraduates is $75K/year. That's really damn good. Filter it down to just the software engineers and it'll be a good deal higher. And there's so much upside left too.

The vast majority of fields are simply not lucrative enough for the median salary to be anywhere near $200,000/yr. A chemical engineer is typically unable to create anywhere near as much value as a software developer at a leading company and is compensated accordingly.

> 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.

That is exactly my point !

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.

I think you need to tone down the bitterness. I'm a bit surprised that you're attaching your real name, actually. People tend to stay away from someone who seems angry. Getting a handle about a war crime is a bit aggressive, too. I presume it's something about the war of independence. Also, don't let on that your net worth matters a lot to you. People tend to be suspicious of that particular (completely understandable) motivation.

When I finished university, I had some similar thoughts. There is literally nothing in any course that's not public knowledge. Practicals are a question of getting people to sign off rather than actually understanding anything. Lecturers often have crappy presentation skills.

But you need to take a larger view of what you got up to. Even though every damn thing can be read in a book, not everyone has done so. Even though you can no longer remember the equations and experiments, you now possess an intuition in your field that will make retrieving the specifics much easier than for some novice. Critically, you've shown that you're able to learn on your own. Stuff you learn at university is a whole lot less structured and generally from a much larger syllabus than in secondary school.

On the upside, I think your CV looks pretty good. Decent skills in something that sounds practical, probably someone who could learn to program anything.

My net worth is not important - but it means soon I wont have money to buy food or pay rent. I could have paid my rent and food for 20+ years on each year of my tuition.

I eat canned tuna for 3 years - and went homeless for a few months while being in uni ( my landlord suddenly decided to sell his house and I had exams )

I am sorry as coming off as bitter - I have been on the job-hunt for a while and literally no replies :(

I think I could have done much more productive things in the 3 years - write a blog, do some data analysis on public data and not have been so stressed out constantly.

I am usually really optimistic when it comes to programming but whenever I read about universities and their high cost, etc - I get reminded of all the pain I had to endure and can feel the hopelessness of every other student who are in much more terrible situation.

1) I don't think you'll get too many bites after talking about hitting people.

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.

Its a thought - I am sure many other students who were taking actual loans would have much more terrible thoughts.

Yes, I realize it was a mistake. When I was 18 I was fed the same garbage about going to university as everyone else and took it without much reasoning - It was my fault, I was an idiot.

There are many other people who are in much more worse situation then I am, A lot of my friends are in much more stressful situation then me.

Yes its disrespectful to my parents and that is why I quit. I felt terribly guilty since it was after all not my hard earned money but my parent's. They also brought into the whole university scam as a road to middle class life.

I have never felt more relieved. Now I can go do some real studying in a much more relaxed fashion.

Don't listen to that guy.

2) Can't speak for OP but for a lot of parents (mine included) having a college-educated son is a status symbol (like a nice car or house).

If it'll make them happy to piss their money away towards my tuition, why should I refuse?

Sometimes I go through spells like this too. I graduated from a local state university that I purposely chose because their curriculum was entirely in C/C++. I thought learning the language that was behind Java would make me more marketable, boy was I wrong. I didn't really even land a true programming job after I graduated, just a hybrid of linux admin and software dev tasks on an IT operations team. BUT, because I knew C, and Linux, and had a love for Perl and its community, and had the algorithm/ problem solving mind that Uni taught me, I was able to whip up many solutions to our company's problems. It still did not look that great on a resume, but it was something. And the main point is, I enjoyed it (one reason I went for CS major in the first place).

And more recently, I just quit that first job, and I now work from home doing web development and back end work for a couple of small shops.

If you are having trouble getting work, you are probably just aiming too high. You are probably going to have to do 3-5 years grunt work.

I know C really well, but I can't land any jobs in C because the people I am up against are twice my age with twice my experience. And even though I might be cheaper, employers aren't looking for just cheap, they want someone that will get stuff done (quickly).

Think about if you were a home owner and you wanted a new porch or roof built on your house. What freelancer would you hire?

Some kid just out of tech school that says "I think I can do this kind of work" or "I would like to do this kind of work" or "I've kind of done this stuff before"?

Or the old man that says "I've done this a million times, here's how its done, here's the plan, and this is the cost".

I empathize with your post. Myself I went to a top 10 engineering school, went into debt to do so, graduated with Summa Cum Laude with a 4.0 GPA, and learned nothing at all, and spent 4 years fairly frustrated while taking advantage of every opportunity. I did learn a lot about bureaucracy and "the system". About engineering nothing since I had been designing and inventing new things no one else had ever done since I was a small child.

College is not a bad idea at all. But for the exceptionally skilled it is a waste of time to do a technical degree. Better to go it alone in the school of hard knocks, or major in something that you don't already know completely, perhaps world history or linguistics or mathematics or molecular biology.

For the typical kid who learned to program at age 8, a college major in CS is indeed a huge waste of time and money.

So what should you do? Pay off your onerous debt as soon as you can, and then you will be free. With your freedom, pursue your own interests no matter what they may be.

Thanks for that !

Really makes me feel much better knowing the best of us feels the same way. I am someone who learns by doing and it would have been better to just enter the job market.

Many have disagreed and furiously downvoted you(your text is quite aggressive), but you've raised a valid point.

Young adults waste their time and money often by blindly having faith in flawed system. They could've been more productive, in an individual and societal level, by having more pragmatic experiences.

Beyond programmers, a century ago, you could get started in finance by getting apprenticeships and moving your way up the ladder. You'd have real work experience and have a position only Ivy-MBAs currently do. In your lifetime, you'd been more productive and probably wealthier.

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