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Comment by industriousthou | Hacker News Reader

Non-college grad here (well, AA from a community college, but that doesn't really count). I get the impression that that some kids did really challenging programs or went to prestigious schools and that paid off really well, but a lot of kids bought into the "college = success" mantra. Every authority figure they knew was telling them that this was the only way to be successful and the schools were jacking up tuition to pay for more and more amenities. Indoor kayaking! Rock climbing walls! Extend your adolescence for four years and you'll magically be successful and pay it all off!

This is really a shocking dereliction of duty on the part of teachers and guidance counselors. It was just easy to go along with conventional wisdom and not apply any critical thinking and they ended up really screwing a lot of kids over.

All that said, I wish someone would have shown me the value of a really high-end education and helped me attain one.

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> This is really a shocking dereliction of duty on the part of teachers and guidance counselors.

Playing devil's advocate for a second, what if the teachers and guidance counselors still believe it to be true? They're likely from a previous generation or two, where simply having a college degree opened up most doors.

Then again, what if having a college degree really is still better than not? You don't have to spend $300K on undergrad to get a degree- and I think that is what we should be pounding into kids' heads. That's great that you want to go to a private school for undergrad and two more years to get your masters so you can be a teacher, but paying 5-10% on $300-400K and topping out at $65K/year is a shitty economic deal. Go in-state and work while you study. Search for the grants, so many random grants go relatively unclaimed.

It's like buying a car- when you focus on the prospect of a low monthly payment and not the fact you're paying for 95 years, it's easy to hide how much money you're flushing down the toilet.

EDIT: I took on about $50K in school loans and worked a minimum 20 hours a week through uni. I worked as a motorcycle mechanic, farm hand on a dairy farm, tech support for the college, hardware testing for a lab, and all kinds of contract development work. Sometimes in the same week.

Some days it sucked, most of the time it was tolerable, and it was often pretty fun. I also learned something about my own intestinal fortitude that school never would've taught me.

This makes no sense. Are you telling me high school teachers and counselors are telling students to go to colleges without factoring in costs/financial aid packages/ROI?

They are saying that teachers/counselors are viewing it from their baked-in perspective formed 30 years ago...back when you could graduate with a bachelor's degree, end up in a school job that gave you a life-long pension and healthcare.

I think it is difficult for someone from my parent's generation, who had so many benefits (no offshore competition, defined benefits pensions, lifetime pensions, etc) to understand how tough life is now. You hear about it, but until you struggle with it it is difficult to know.

Some of what you're saying is true, but some doesn't quite work out:

1. Work while you study: why work a part time job for $X and go to school part time, when you could finish school in half the time by going full time and spend the remaining time working for $2X? Work study is generally counterproductive.

2. $65K is still a lot of debt. Lots of my peers have that and $20K/yr jobs.

The truth is, there simply aren't many good options for today's young adults. There are a handful of fields that can pay well with a degree, but then you have the risk that you won't be able to finish. And there are fewer fields where you can work without a degree and get paid well. Even in CS, a field where you usually can get jobs without a degree, I've roughly capped out my pay without a degree at age 29.

I took a full time class load and also worked part time through college. It wasn't that bad,(in fact it was good) and it was fairly commonplace at the school I went to.

Is this not the case anymore?

It depends on the rigor of your institution, of the program you're in, and what constitutes "full time."

At the institution I attended, FT was 12-18 credit hours in a semester. You could take up to 21 with permission from the administration and your professors, and up to 24 with permission + paying additionally for the 3 credits.

The difference between 12 credits and 18 in terms of work load and scheduling hassles is astronomical yet both are full time. Our professions always said 1 hour in class = 3 hours outside of class. Assuming that held true (it rarely did on an individual class level but on a semester level it was pretty close), 12 credits = 48 hours a week and 18 = 72.

If you're only taking 12-15 credits you probably should have a 10-15 hour/week job. If you're taking 18 I wouldn't even do work study on campus for gas money, you just won't have the time unless you want no social life.

Yea to be fair I always took 12-15 hours with only 2 exceptions. But that's what I had to do to make it through and still pay bills/eat/etc.

I pretty much always took 12-15 credits. My school was on semesters and I just went year round whereas most people took summer offer. Summer credits were cheaper and you could cram in a bunch of general ed stuff that didn't need a ton of study.

My engineering classes all preached 4 hours of study for every hour of class- I don't think I averaged two for most classes and graduated above a 3.2 GPA. Except EE courses and physics. I had to buckle down for those.

I went to college in Brazil, here the class load is fixed for most universities (ie: you don't choose what classes you will go, they will hand to you a list of the ones you are signed up for each semester).

Although the classes themselves took half a day (started at 7:30, finished at 13:00) the coursework we had to do was incredibly high, teachers never coordinated, they just assumed that you had all free time of the world.

In one semester I had to quit my job, and slept to little that I got incredibly sick, my apartment reeked sugar, because I was drinking coca-cola and energy drinks so fast that empty bottles were piling up near my computer, I slept on average 4 hours per day, and went from 110kg to 125kg

And mind you, this was to do coursework, NOT any kind of paying work, when I finished university my net worth was incredibly negative, right now it STILL is negative, I am living with my parents right now to dedicate 100% of my income to debt paying, and still don't see any perspective of actually paying it (specially because when I consider the past year or two, the average INTEREST I had to pay, was higher than my average income).

Geez that hardly sounds worth it. I thought folks in the states had it rough with the loans...

The raw loan amount is not high as in US (when you consider USD... for BRL it is comparable if you consider your own income, but even that some people get lower).

But in Brazil you can't ask for bankruptcy, ever... In US Student Loans can't be rid of with bankruptcy, but you CAN make another loan, pay the student loans, and THEN go bankrupt... in Brazil this loophole doesn't exist.

And Brazil has a incredibly high interest rate, credit card interest is 400% year, overdraft and personal credit interest in a bank is 300+% a year, special credit for business with government subsidies are still around 100% per year. (and I never saw anyone that qualified for it).

The effect is that if you are in debt, you are screwed... and if you HAVE money, investing in any business is stupid idea, specially with our high inflation (currently about 11% per year), it makes much more sense to loan to the government (that currently will happily absorb it, and pay interest that is usually at least 14.25% year + inflation), so noone invest in creating business anyway, so you never find jobs, startups are non-existing, creating a startup is bad idea, and so on...

The average Computer Engineering degree from my university was completed (at that time) in 5 years. I graduated in 5 years and worked, so it didn't take me any longer than average, and I switched majors from CS to CpE- costing me two terms.

So I didn't give up any potential salary earnings I didn't already give up by going in the first place.

My point is that college can still be a good option for lots of people, they just need to focus on the cost/ROI. The horrors stories that we hear about are typically from a dumb kid who went to an out of state or private school, got a a 'general' degree and had no job qualifications. Then they were shocked people were t just handing them money.

I've yet to hear a story about a kid that did two years at a community college, finished up their BS in engineering, and then had life crippling problems with their debt.

Not everyone is a computer scientist or computer engineer.

> I get the impression that that some kids did really challenging programs or went to prestigious schools and that paid off really well, but a lot of kids bought into the "college = success" mantra.

Challenging programs have relatively little to do with it. It's almost 100% about the prestigious schools and the networks that come along with them: the old "it's not what you know; it's who you know," deal.

> All that said, I wish someone would have shown me the value of a really high-end education and helped me attain one.

Education is always valuable. It's schooling that's not always worthwhile.

> Challenging programs have relatively little to do with it. It's almost 100% about the prestigious schools and the networks that come along with them: the old "it's not what you know; it's who you know," deal.

I didn't go to a particularly prestigious school. I didn't know anybody at the job I got as a new grad. I individually made more money in my first year out of university than most families did mid-career. I was not unusual among those in my program.

A degree in engineering pays off in part because it's a challenging program.

Many (most?) people can get into whatever the main land grant/public research university that exists in their respective state, even more so after a year of community college. In general, almost all of these schools offer a good quality education, especially if you avoid degree-mill majors (e.g. communications, psych, history, economics, etc...) and choose any critical thinking degree (STEM, Philosophy, maybe English/Lit).

If you aren't going to meet that bar, then it's probably not worth it to go to college because you're probably not going to learn much.

My post was not about getting a good quality education. In fact, my contention is that getting a good education is less relevant than the specific school and major one chooses. For a software developer just out of college, an EECS degree from Berkeley is going to beat a degree in (say) math, physics, or robotics from Podunk State, all else being equal. And, all else is rarely equal, because the Berkeley grad is going to have a way better network than the Podunk State grad.

I went to a prestigious school and studied physics - place was ranked best in the world for the subject at the time.

The degree is worthless. The wretched right-wing connections are even more worthless.

Are you working in physics or a related field? It seems odd that you would associate the political beliefs of what is surely only a portion of your collegiate network with the science degree you got.

an associates degree does count. it shows initiative. it's something completed. don't just toss it out, it's not trivial to employers. And you can learn a ton in community college. I know people who enjoyed it a lot more than 4 year universities and had more available to them. depends on the school and the person of course, always.

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