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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

IMHO, reality paints a sightly more optimistic picture...the average debt per graduate is $30,000--about the price of a new car, but as measured by wages, a degree gains value (this is because since 2009 wages for grads have seen much stronger growth than wages for non-grads) http://greyenlightenment.com/is-college-a-big-waste-of-time-...

I read stories on Reddit about grads who have debt but are also making decent 5-6 figures and paying the student loan debt, but also also investing the stock market and buying a home, so it's not like they are in poverty or living paycheck to paycheck. The student loan debt can be manageable in many instances, especially if you major in a high-ROI subject.

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It would be helpful (though very difficult) if we could isolate the branding/signaling value of certain colleges from the education/training value of colleges, to ascertain the nature of the return on investment value that is being derived from colleges or varying statures, locations, etc.

"What we are buying" through 4 years of college seems to be getting less and less clear to me, and the administrators are very much involved in keeping things as difficult to measure as possible.

The Department of Education has stats on the average salary after graduation at many institutions (realize this is only a weak proxy for the signals you want, but is at least correlated). You can play with, and download, their data here:

https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/

Just looked up the school I dropped out of. I made >2x in my first year of dropping out than what it says is average salary for new graduates. Suckers.

Consider that perhaps you do not represent the average student at that school.

I went to an engineering focused private university, borrowed my way through the whole thing (housing, food, everything), parents didn't pay a dime.

Stupid? Yes.

But that's reality for a lot of people. I'm shocked those averages are that low.

How much was the tuition per year? Did it take long to get a job when you finished your studies?

Tuition + room and board was about $40K for 4 years.

The school has a good internship/co-op program, so I was fortunate to step into a junior engineering role right after graduation. I'm a C+/B- student. Graduated with a 2.98 GPA.

The median student debt is a lot more interesting, it's much lower than $30,000. The median of all outstanding student debt is around $14,000 today (for households that have any student debt). The median debt for individuals that went to public universities is closer to $10,000.

The average is massively skewed by the top few percentage of all borrowers that have taken on almost unfathomable loans.

What's interesting here is the average or median debt of just-graduated students though; counting those who already repaid almost all their debts isn't meaningful.

FUD

You're comparing two different cohorts - newly graduated students, and everyone who has any student debt. Obviously the second group is going to have lower median and average, so comparing the two is pointless.

Because I think HN likes data I plotted some for ease. We can see that by linear fit the cost grows 2.5 times that of the number of students. The 2015 cost of school is 3.5 times that in 1990. The 2015 number of students is 1.47 that of 1990 students.

Graph: https://i.imgur.com/Udj3leD.png

Sources from: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/dt15_330.10.a...

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/dt15_105.20.a...

Note* 2015 students were estimated and slope is from linear fit.

median ignores half the population. 90th or 95th percentile is interesting

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