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Comment by dokein | Hacker News Reader

When my parents couldn't spare $40, I took a job at a local motel. The author, in contrast, asked them to cosign for $200,040.

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Seems what was missing was a sensible discussion along the lines of "why not go to State U which would cost about half that. Or maybe community college which is much less than even that."

This assumes that they even knew this existed. I can tell you that my parents, nor I knew at the time, however the internet was a bit farther along by the time he went to school.

$50K/year is an elite university. The bulk of your high school peers would be going to State U and would be talking about it. It'd be like buying a Mercedes because you don't know about Fords. I find this hard to believe.

The bulk of my high school peers couldn't afford to go to college, the ones that could were on full ride athletic scholarships. This wasn't recent and it was harder to get in to colleges at the time, and Google wasn't as useful as it is today but thanks for the assumption. Ironically the State University was actually more expensive than where I ended up (and still is pretty expensive). I eventually ended up joining the military and after I was discharged getting a couple of degrees from a school a few towns over that I didn't even knew existed.

Before the internet, school guidance offices and your local library had printed catalogs and cross-referenced directories of colleges. Magazines like US News & World Report would publish their annual college rankings.

This wasn't hard information to come by.

It's hard to believe you didn't know about your home state university. Your athlete friends surely followed the fortunes of their football team. Around here the State U team is constantly in the newspaper and on the nightly local TV news sports roundup. This has been true in every place I've lived in, decades before the internet.

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