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Comment by huac | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of my peers have (for better or worse) a stronger aversion to debt and risk, having matured right after or during the last economic crisis. We've been warned about credit card debt, sleep debt, and now student debt. Fundamentally when you don't have some minimum level of capital you need to take the more certain outcome. Nobody's dropping out to form a startup, but they might take a semester off to work at Facebook or Google.

Even the highest paying tech internships can't cover the cost of attending expensive private colleges. God forbid you 'merely' do banking, which pays $16k for a summer before tax, aka half the cost of a semester at my school. This is without considering the additional cost of wanting to eat and live better than cheap pizza, food truck chicken over rice, or info session sandwiches.

(I cut out a lot of snark above, but college tuition is just too damn high)

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I really think the problem is that people are unwilling to shop around for a cheaper college education. In the Midwest, I bought an affordable engineering education by starting at community colleges before going to a large university. I'm very successful in my career if that's the measure you want to use. If you are adamant about going to a university on the coasts, you'll pay out the nose.

Figures (for 2016) from the midwest university I went to:

14 credit hours:

    $4206/semester  in-state
    $11,159/semester out-of-state

14 credit hours of engineering classes (includes additional per-hour fees...):

    $5381/semester in-state
    $12,335/semester out-of-state

[0] https://www.k-state.edu/admissions/finaid/

Figures (for 2016) from the community college I went to for my first two years:

$1267/term in-state

$2815/term out-of-state

Damn. Sounds like the smartest students would go to community college first. The degree you get after transfer is the same regardless. You just have to make sure those credits transfer -- probably the biggest concern. Otherwise you're just paying a premium and repeating courses. Did yours transfer?

All of my credits transferred. I went to university in the same state as the community college, and the community college specifically had it as a goal that everything should transfer. I'd recommend talking to advisors at both the community college and your planned university to confirm.

One other excellent property my community college (https://www.pcc.edu/) had: because they also catered to high-school-completion students, and students transferring in with gaps or inconsistencies in their knowledge, they had a placement exam for math and English as part of the application process. That exam could place you anywhere from "you need a few years of remedial classes" to "you can go directly to second-year classes".

One program at my old high school let you get community college credits for the classes you took. It was a fantastic idea that let people start their careers early and come out with far less debt.

Similar for the one I went to on the east coast. State school, in-state rates. Around $10k or $11k each year although it was closer to $8-9k when I went.

Either way, between working part time through high school I paid for the first year or so. Worked basic service-type jobs back home during summers (retail, restaurant, etc) to pay for the next year's rent and food budget. Worked very part-time during the year (like maybe 6 or 7 hours a week at the computer lab) for bullshit money to spend on stupid stuff like $4-a-head keg party cover charge on the weekends because I wasn't just confined to school and work.

The rest was taken out in loans and after all was said and done, I probably owed around $25-30k in low-interest loans with an insanely low payment rate for the first year or so out of school.

So yeah, I owed the equivalent of a decent new car and when I was still scraping by as a recent grad I had to make <$80/mo payments before moving up to the "full" minimum payment of <$120/mo. That at least allowed me to keep up with payments while getting settled but incurred no penalties when I started paying much more than minimum once I was stable.

I guess my experience was that I financed the equivalent of a new car while gaining that much more each year in salary after a few years due to having that degree. Was it rough right out of school? Definitely. I had roommates for a good few years after graduation and never got to blow thousands on stuff like Spring Break or shopping trips.

Still, I'm glad I didn't end up like so many people I've met who went to schools that cost 2-5x as much, owned a car, went on trips, and didn't start paying for any of it until after graduation.

Couldn't agree more. I went to school in South Dakota for next to nothing compared to other schools, got involved in my program, did internships every summer I could, and now working a job I love with next-to-no college debt. I've been out of school for a little over 4 years and plan on paying off the rest of my debt by end of year.

There's a stigma against community college in the US for high-achieving students. At least where I went to high school, it was where the kids who did okay/poorly in high school went to get a second chance in hopes of transferring to a university or at least have an associate's degree.

If you were to tell the average high school student who's in the top ~10% of their class to go to CC, you'd get laughed at.

Also, we're spoiled in programming and engineering in that we can go to almost any valid school and still get a job if we can build and ship software. In other careers, college or location choice really does matter!

On a better note, where I went to high school most students (even top ones) went to in-state schools, but that's because Texas has pretty good public colleges (though last time I checked they're getting more expensive).

> There's a stigma against community college in the US for high-achieving students.

> If you were to tell the average high school student who's in the top ~10% of their class to go to CC, you'd get laughed at.

There shouldn't be any such stigma; it's a great path to follow. If it was the last degree you got, sure, a 2-year degree won't get you the results you want. But as the first 2 years of a B.S. or graduate degree, it's a completely sensible path.

I went to community college for 2 years, graduated with an A.S., transfered into a full university as a junior, and then finished a B.S. and Ph.D. there. I can definitely vouch for that path, and never once has it mattered in the least where those first two years took place.

> Also, we're spoiled in programming and engineering in that we can go to almost any valid school and still get a job if we can build and ship software. In other careers, college or location choice really does matter!

True, careers like law or business seem to have a much larger problem with credentials.

Part of the stigma is at least well deserving where I grew up, since if you had anything over a B average at my high school, the state schools would give you a full ride for all four years. Of course most people ended up paying a bunch of money to go to one of the UCs.

Although you also need to factor into that decision the impaction in certain majors at lots of the CalStates. People are taking more than 4 years to graduate because they can't get in to classes they need.

I recognize my bias towards community colleges is impacted by the fact that I grew up in a small, isolated community with a major R&D institution.

My chemistry, math, and physics teachers excelled in their field and taught night classes because they wanted to. This was much better then the university classes taught by people who just wanted to research or who were too caught up in all the theory to figure out how to explain concepts.

Where was this?

This works if a student wants to start out as an entrepreneur. But if they actually want to start their career with a high paying engineering job at a big tech company and they don't have any inside connections, their school had better be a recruiting target for internships and new grad positions. Plenty of affordable public universities are in this category, but Google and Facebook don't show up at the community college career fairs.

Of course there's always a career path for people with a record of making impressive things, but if you're a CS major in the right schools you can get into the big-name tech companies just for having potential.

Honestly no offence meant, but you won't be very good in your connections. You won't know the right people, the alumni or professors or generally all the actually important people that will give you massive leg ups if you want to start a company.

As for learning? Your peers won't challenge you, you'll be exposed to easier lessons, to easier concepts, you won't really get challenged at all. When I was keeping up with this stuff, in the UK the shit unis taught Java, the good ones Lisp or Python. The whole ethos is different. A friend of mine got a 1st (best degree in UK) from the 2nd tier University he went to.

But he couldn't remotely handle complicated code written by our literally genius colleague (I've honestly never met someone so insanely good again in 15 years). He was not anywhere near 1st material in a real top-tier university. He would have been lucky to get a 2:2.

I know someone who did the 2nd tier route and who is genuinely good. He, perhaps like you, is the exception, not the rule.

Genius coders make complicated concepts easier to wrangle, almost by definition. Don't know anything about your friend's skill level, but I did want to challenge that perception.

It seems like the "connections" aspect is spot on, especially if you are considering founding a startup (and also seeking funding).

That said I've certainly met and worked with engineers with degrees from prestigious institutions that were lacking in their skill set, particularly when it came to "real" field work.

And to get into the right colleges you need to go to the right high schools, and to pay for the right high schools, you need the right parents.

It's almost as if the west coast isn't as meritocratic as it likes to think, and is really just a mirror image of Wall Street...

You can meet those people if you move out to the coasts after college. It's a long freakin' way from Kansas to California and if your goal is to have as little tuition and/or debt as possible to begin with, you're pretty much forced to go into whatever state you grew up in the U.S.

I'm from the same state, and I chose the four year traditional route and it worked for me since I had lots of scholarships. If I didn't have as many, I may have started at the Community College instead.

Additionally, your point about 1st tier versus 2nd tier is kind of off when most of the time people go to community college to get their general ed. requirements out of the way and then transfer to the larger Uni for the specialized classes. If you're majoring in C.S. and you want to take Physics I,II, Intro level English, and programming I/II that's going to be nearly the same no matter which Uni you're at.

Complicated code? That doesn't sound like genius to me.

I think a genius coders makes a complex problem into simple code.

More generally, they're not being strategic about college. There's a lot of people who get a degree from a prestigious school because that's what's expected of them.

The strategic way to use college to start a startup would be to independently learn how to slam out CRUD web-apps, go to Stanford for a single semester, meet literally everyone you can in the CS and business departments, then drop out. You could shop around for a cheaper education, but you'd pay a lot of money and spend a lot of time for a less useful product.

Um, maybe I'm stuffy and old-fashioned but I suspect I would run a mile from someone who popped up for a "single semester" to "meet literally everyone they can in the CS and business departments". You would probably wind up with a Rolodex crammed with other busy little networkers and not much else.

Yeah, I agree with you there - meeting people isn't the goal, just a thing you have to do to get what you actually want: building meaningful and mutually beneficial relationships. Starting that process with a bunch of 18 year old Stanford students is probably the best way to become a startup founder, and the easiest and cheapest way to jump-start that process is to go to Stanford for a semester (at least while you don't have the bona-fides that would let you succeed at a start-up anyways).

This is what I wish I did. I didn't work hard enough and chose the 'affordable but still expensive' UC system.

I agree with your synopsis.

Wages are too deflated for good overall economic prospects.

If I can criticize ourselves, it is with this:

I think millennials are too risk-averse, not because the opportunities are out there in waiting, but because the job opportunities are so poor.

There comes a point when you live in some degree of (relative) poverty at which not making a startup is dumber than making one.

There seems to be two cohorts of entrepreneurs. Working class ones forced into it by desperation and upper middle class ones who see it being at worst a good contribution to their CV if they fail, with unlimited upside. The acqu-hire system attests to this as a valid strategy because paper certs have such limited signaling potential now that everybody has them.

Honestly in either case it is a hard road. It is so much easier just to give up. Part of the reason I think people come here is the invigoration of seeing other minds at work.

> upper middle class ones who see [entrepeneurship] being at worst a good contribution to their CV if they fail, with unlimited upside.

Bridgewater told me, and others, that they love students who do things outside of traditional finance internships. 'Go travel the world! Go start a startup! Don't do wealth management!' The attitude feels so much like that New Yorker article about traveling the world with only a backpack, phone, and a trust fund [0]. It's not just a line on your CV - it's a great story to talk about in the interview. But the opportunity cost is very high, unless you're rich enough where that doesn't matter.

[0]: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/why-i-quit-my-jo...

If your college education can get you a $16k summer job, isn't the price of college almost inconsequential compared to the life-long opportunity it's clearly buying you?

My point is more so that students feel like they need to take the corporate route, instead of pursuing a more entrepeneurial path. Especially given that corporate internships help alleviate tuition and other costs, at least compared to low/no wage startup internships (this obviously doesn't apply to internships at Uber, FB, etc.)

And $16k after tax, housing, and food in NYC (Wall Street baby) isn't a ton.

Move out of NYC. $16k is livable in other parts of the USA.

Right, but the original poster is talking about a banking job that you then leverage up to a higher wage on the next rung up.

You're not getting that by working at Dairy Queen in BFE.

A lot of people suggest moving somewhere less expensive. For banking and other industries where jobs very geo-centric, that just isn't realistic. Beyond that, I think the macro trend we are seeing that is in part causing the huge migration to cities is uncertainty with employment.

The reality is it is easier to get a new job (let alone a good job) in a big metro with lots of businesses than it is in the middle of flyover country. For people burned by lack of employment, gainful employment, or secure employment, having a a couple companies within reasonable commuting distance is seen as a real risk since remote work is hardly common yet.

In those cases, the high costs of city living are seen as the cost of upward mobility and more stable employment. Unfortunately, the net result we've been seeing with housing/rent cost increases, etc. is that this leads to a reduction in overall standard of living compared to say, the Baby Boomers.

Bottom line, younger generations have the deck stacked against them in a lot of ways. Often times it is not "which is the better choice" but "which is the less worse choice."

Moving somewhere less expensive might also be moving to the suburbs. Millennials seem to be very turned off to that idea, but it can significantly reduce cost of living while still being in a desirable city.

In other words, "Drive until you qualify." This was certainly big in the 90s and 00s and still happens a great deal today but I think people have become less sanguine about it because:

1) people are more aware of the serious detriment to quality of life a long commute by car produces,

2) in many places, how far you have to drive keeps getting longer (or the roads keep getting slower), and

3) too much decentralization can close off opportunities that are theoretically in the same metropolis by pushing the commute from being arduous to being unacceptable. So the reason you moved to the metropolis (access to a large number of opportunities) evaporates as you move further to one edge.

Before we start making tons of blanket statements about millenials' turnoffs, I think we should consider that there are plenty of rational reasons to not live in the suburbs. Plenty (non-NYC/non-SFBA) metros are equally as expensive in the suburbs due to increased transportation costs.

The suburbs idea is not applicable to SV/SF since most of it is suburbs to begin with. Only a small portion of San Jose is what most people would consider city.

The crux of my point is that one-liner solutions don't universally solve the problem.

Where outside high-cost areas are you going to make $16k doing a summer internship?

If you want to be an entrepreneur, don't bother with the college at all. Just my humble opinion, and I understand many will disagree for various rather good reasons.

I've been wondering about that. In the same time period and with the same money you could start a company, fail, and start another. As a business education that would be far better than anything you'd get in college.

Seems like you'd probably want to take an accounting class or two, though, even if you didn't get a degree.

Feel free to count the number of successes vs the typical rich WASP. (include dropouts in the latter number) You might learn something you do not like.

Right, right. Because the "rich WASP" people out there have so much trouble coming out on top when the go to college. And when they don't. It's almost like they come out ahead either way.

That actually doesn't bother me very much, to be honest.

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