Hacker News Reader

Comment by bradenb | Hacker News Reader

I was discussing student loans and value of a college education with friends the other day. We were discussing whether or not I would recommend college to someone today. My conclusion is that TODAY I would still as long as that person has the means to do so without any loans.

But, then we started discussing whether I would push my children to go. My answer is that I hope I don't need to. Even though I have some amount of college savings for my kids, I don't think it will be enough to let them choose their school freely and I would much rather that money go towards starting them out in their career or family or whatever they choose.

My hope is that when it is time for them to start their adult life that there will either be enough cheap or free alternative forms of education or that the stigma of not having a degree will have lessened. Realistically, I don't think the situation will have changed in that time.

My own experience is complicated because I took out loans--which I greatly regret--but also likely have my career to thank for it. I had a full-tuition scholarship to the school of my choice, but opted to go to another school my parents wanted me at; when I eventually transferred back to my original choice I had lost the scholarship. If I had to do it again today I would definitely start with a 2 year local college education and then work hard through the remaining years to finish debt-free.

View on HN

The main reasons to get a degree are:

-. To show you can complete a big, multi year project that’s full of doing stuff you don’t like

-. To get past HR screenings

-. If you ever want a chance to reach Executive level jobs, you need to have a degree, for the perception of nothing else.

This debate has been going on for a long time, despite this being presented as a recent thing, and it always comes down to those things. While the tech-minded here might want to see it from a strictly educational standpoint, these are human/societal reasons that are quite important.

I don't have a degree and I'm 10+ years deep into my career. What has started to stand out for me in recent years is that there are holes in my experience that my college-educated peers don't have to deal with. Granted I never had to deal with student loans so I guess there's a tradeoff. But the problem with these education "holes" is that they hit you right out of left field when you least expect it.

My mom is a music teacher, and she finds that she often will get new students who were previously self-taught with blind spots. Ideally, one of the main perks of school, which is difficult if not impossible to get with auto-didacticism, is that you get continuous feedback from someone who knows what common mistakes look like.

My technical background is largely from reading books and manuals on my own, but I'm under no delusion that I would benefit greatly from some more formal instruction for certain topics, if nothing else because then I would have someone challenge me immediately when I'm wrong.

What do you feel are the gaps in your education? Do you think taking an online course would help with them?

I suggest learning a little about data structures and algorithms, each are typically one semester courses in undergrad. You might supplement it with operating systems and distributed computing, though data structures should be a primary focus.

I've tried and failed going back school enough times to know it doesn't work for me. Certification courses & clinics have proven worthwhile in the past though.

Could you provide some examples?

I can provide some examples for him as a self-educated dev:

* What is big O

* What is value type vs pointer/reference

* How does the internet work

* Binary search trees, tries, graphs - u wut m8 (Thankfully, there's this: https://medium.com/basecs/archive/2017/01)

* Basic cryptography, hashing, etc

* DNS, IPs, HTTP, etc

* TCP, UDP, etc (I still don't know these)

* Stack, heap, queue, malloc (Again, very little exposure to this without learning a low level language.)

* How modern computers work

* Logic gates, clocks, memory, (actual) binary math

* Wifi basics (actual physical data transmission)

* Linux

I can go on and on and on, but these are things you don't pick up at work unless you go out of your way to learn how they work.

Regarding the parent post - I have a very generous training budget. And guess where I will never spend it? At the best University in my state. I got a degree in something other than Comp Sci, and 95% of the classes were useless and way-too-drawn-out. So, you might not be as behind as you think.

A pretty-smart co-worker of mine with a Comp Sci degree said he didn't figure out the point of object oriented programming until he got his first Java job.

This is only related to other comments in this thread, but I do feel that formal education is oversold, and particularly to people who are from poor families with no guidance trying to have a shot at life.

I have a CS degree, but I learned basically all of the above on my own. In some cases I also had a class later that taught it, but for most of the networking stuff it wasn't even taught in school.

If you're self-taught and worried about your CS fundamentals, there's a really simple algorithm to get an education better than any CS student at roughly 1/100th of the price:

1. Look up some famous university like Stanford or MIT.

2. Download the course syllabus for the course you're interested in off their website. (Nowadays you can often get the full course, including all the lectures and handouts.)

3. Buy the textbook. When I was in school you could pull shenanigans like buying the European version of the textbook for 1/4 the price or (if you live in a college town) buying the textbook, reading it, and returning it before courses are finalized, but these loopholes have probably been mostly closed. There's now a thriving used-textbook market online that didn't exist when I went to school, though.

4. Read the textbook. Do some of the exercises. Implement the algorithms.

Incidentally, this is largely what CS students do for homework. Most of them kinda gloss over it because it's required, though, while if you're doing this because you really love the material, you've got a big advantage.

I've interviewed people with degrees that don't know about many of these questions. In fact I make it a point that if someone puts something like "TCP/IP" or "networking" in the laundry-list of skills/knowledge they have, I ask them a basic question about it -- and a depressingly large amount of time people can't even explain the difference between TCP and UDP.

I've also worked with people who can explain what big-O is and yet they'll write completely inefficient nested loops and N+1 SELECT queries, and then wonder why everything is slow in production even though it works great in dev.

Comp Sci can teach you theory and concepts, but as they say: there's no substitute for experience.

Self taught programmer and I'm strong in all these areas. You can read three books and know all of this. It does not require a college education. In fact the TCP/IP stack and Linux I learned back in high school just by reading two books. It wasn't hard. The Data structures and algorithms I picked up a few years later when I was about college age. Again, you can read books about this stuff. It's not that hard.

If anything, a self-study program with a list of books to read and skills to master would save many self taught / self motivated people quite a bit of time, but its absence is by no means a show stopper.

What three books? (Especially interested in data transfer protocols - I got a little bit into it for game development, but never found anything resembling a good source).

I learned a lot of these things from taking Harvard's CS50 online, reading the blog posts I linked (and doing problems), and I would imagine this book (https://bigmachine.io/products/the-imposters-handbook/) would help out - a friend recommended it, but I never got around to it.

https://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softw...

^Covers logic gates and the basics of how a computer is built to an incredible degree, but it's VERY time intensive. Still, I really recommend it.

These days CS50 lectures are online. The TCP/IP and Linux books I can't recall. That was some 20+ years ago. I think the TCP/IP/Protocols book was from Sams and the Linux book(s) were from O'Reilly. Algorithms/Data was The Algorithm Design Manual by Skiena. Cracking the Coding Interview is great too. Crypto was just a bunch of reading online, I haven't found a good book on that I would recommend, same for data transfer protocols. I didn't just read three books, I'm saying, 20/20 hindsight I could have read about 3 books to garner most of the stuff I didn't learn by skipping college.

Maybe some of us self taught developers should get together and curate a clear path for CS knowledge and ancillary helpful things.

"Maybe some of us self taught developers should get together and curate a clear path for CS knowledge and ancillary helpful things."

I wouldn't mind spending some time contributing to something like that. There is an endless amount of material to read and classes to take, but narrowing it down and prioritizing is the hard part.

Please share the 3 books that taught you everything on this list. Not being sarcastic, I would love to have them.

Given the timeline he mentioned, the TCP/IP one may have been "Inside TCP/IP". It was an extremely valuable reference at one time, but it's a bit dated now. I'm just about to finally give away my copy.

You wouldn't happen to have a good suggestion to replace it?

You might try the two-volume "TCP/IP Illustrated" set, although I haven't personally read those. Otherwise, no, as far as I know there was never an edition of "Inside TCP/IP" published after 1997, and no book exactly took its place.

Which is a real shame.

If you just want to get a good sense of UDP, ICMP, TCP/IP, datagram headers, and a handful of older protocols (like FTP), "Inside TCP/IP" is still valuable.

I can second this. Self taught programmer and I am weak in all of the above areas. My math skills (only high school math) are also especially weak which has really bitten me in graphics based jobs (simulation) where I have had to calculate view rotations and similar in 3d. I am lucky enough to have made it to the 6 figure club but I probably could have been here a decade ago with the right education. Also imposter syndrome has been a major limiter at times.

I started college (Comp E) and didn't finish and I, can vouch for the fact that the classes I didn't take would have taught me nearly everything on your list (aside from the last 2).

FWIW, I learned all these things on my own, including object oriented programming. My blind spot was SQL, and thankfully I learned that in school. I preferred lower level coding and I had to be pushed to see that the performance overhead of SQL was not important compared with the productivity benefits.

You can get past HR screening without a degree, experience still often matters more - and in my opinion, a 22-23 year old proving they can do multi year projects is of dubious value - what it is useful for is showing that you know how to learn.

I have no degree, but have a boat load of experience in my chosen field, with a couple of notable exceptions, this alone is enough to get my foot in the door. The notable exceptions are government roles, and government contracts with private companies, they want someone who has a degree in any engineering discipline.

I never had trouble finding tech work without a degree. I did however find the door to more interesting jobs was generally closed without one, and that door opened after I went back to school and finished a BS.

I find the doors which are closed by not having a degree to be ones I probably wouldn't have enjoyed. I have no degree and have had Phd's reporting to me, in Silicon Valley.

Some prefer to be the PhDs.

Sure, but it'll be harder. Most places have a stack of resumes for positions, guess who gets weeded out first?

Am I the only one around here who actually learned things in college? I would certainly not be as good at my job nor as aware of things outside my primary skill had I not gone to college.

You missed the biggest reason:

- Networking with people all assumed to be at or above a bar dictated by the college acceptance committee.

This is point is huge, given how spread out the US is many students may have never had that kind of opportunity. The things you learn from your peers, all naturally aligned in the community are orders of magnitude more than what you learn in class and can't easily be replaced by online resources.

Your points are important but at the same time it's inaccurate to discount the educational component. Good universities instill a sense of intellectual rigor in their students that carries across many fields--reading critically, expressing arguments clearly, and perhaps most of understanding what "good enough" really means when working on solutions to difficult problems.

I’m not trying to discount the educational component, just trying to blunt the inevitable replies about how you can learn the same material on your own. The point I’m making is that there are other benefits outside of the education that you can’t do on your own.

Thinking back to group projects, I can honestly say that most of the college graduates whose educations I am most acquainted with cannot complete moderately sized semester-long projects that they don't like without substantial outside help and constant prodding.

The project I’m talking about is the degree itself, not group projects in any particular class.

I'd add:

-. To easily identify a group of friends/peers with common interests and culture.

Probably not worth the egregiously high tuitions now, but I've talked with several other alums from my college and we agree that easily the greatest benefit from college has been networking-related / social ties.

That's honestly probably the biggest reason for why people are so set on sending their kids to elite institutions- in many cases the pedagogy might not necessarily be better than cheaper alternatives (e.g., state schools), but there's a higher likelihood of rubbing shoulders with other influential characters.

Likewise, I would suggest that it's more valuable for someone coming from a lower income/social status background to go to a good school than for someone who comes from higher - those people either already know influential people, or have the financial resources necessary to do things like attend conferences or just up and move to where those people are.

I'd agree with that. Whenever people cite Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg as college dropout successes, they tend to overlook the substantial cultural and social capital these leaders had already accrued as students at Lakeside, Homestead, and Phillips Exeter.

Every reason you cited can be had by starting in community college. If I were advising a graduating senior today, I'd advise them to consider a gap year and to go the community college route. You can still get a degree from the most prestigious state schools while paying a small fraction of what you'd otherwise pay for your first two years of school.

Since price is becoming an issue, prioritize junior/senior years since those result in the degree and look to economize for freshman/sophomore.

Those human societal reasons need to change.

Why?

I don't disagree, but if you're saying a change needs to be made I think the onus on you is to propose what the change should be and why it would be beneficial overall.

I would personally recommend 4-year college to someone (assuming their family isn't rich) today if that person has a concrete plan for using the degree to enter a lucrative field. Engineering? Yes, go to college. Corporate-track marketing/accounting/finance/whatever? Yes, go to to college. History/English/I don't know what I want to do? No, you're wasting your money. For everyone else, trade schools, community college programs, and similar "alternatives" should be a starting place to get you pointed in the right direction, then you can decide if pursuing an expensive diploma is worth it later.

Is this view counter to the original intent of college to create a class of people who are well-educated in the humanities as well as the sciences? Yes, but today's cost of education is just too out of control and salaries for most jobs too low for that noble idea to be practical.

It's silly to say that a student should only go to college if they can afford to do it with no loans. I think a large part of the "student loan" problem is that we don't talk about income enough. It is completely reasonable for a comp sci major from a good school to graduate with $75k in loans ($900 payments). That will not be a burden for them. Likewise, a $20k student loan ($300 payments) should be manageable for someone who makes $40k a year. The issue is when the person who only real prospects pay $40k a year and they have $75k in loans.

I was admitted to a relatively competitive university's (<10% acceptance rate) computer science program, but it would mean I would have to take on just over 100k of debt. After the first year I chose to transfer to a local community college to earn an associates, and then trasnfer to a state school. I was hired after my associates, got my bachelors paid for and completed it online, and graduated with no debt. I'm extremely happy I made the change, rather than paying 100k for a bachelor. Sure, I could've afforded it, but instead I was able to purchase a car in cash and buy a house pretty much straight out of school. I wouldn't recommend anyone go into debt for a bachelor; in my opinion the money could be better spent elsewhere, and it is unlikely to make a significant difference in position/pay having a name brand degree rather than something from a state school

I take a lot of pride in my liberal arts education and how it shaped my world view. I would never in a thousand years trade it in for a car and a house... And it cost less too.

Ok... lots of state school offer liberal arts programs so not sure what point you're trying to make there. I would hope that it cost a lot less than a house, but I still think going into debt for a bachelors is a bad idea. I'm gaining equity every month rather than paying hundreds of dollars for a degree that provides little to no benefits over what you can get from a state school without taking on debt. Also, my house has appreciated 46.5% since I purchased it which is another financial benefit I would not have had I stayed at the expensive university

I'm sorry I wasn't clear. You are making the world out to be a false dichotomy, either you spend $100k or 0 for a college education. One means you are broke and the other means you can buy a fancy car and a house. My point is that it is a spectrum. My schooling cost me $50k. I got a small, liberal arts environment in a cool city with access to a variety of internships. State schools around me did not offer that combination. A) I enjoyed my schooling and I don't mind paying $500/month in loans for it and B) it didn't cost $100k and C) I find it nuts that you are bragging about the fact you got to buy a car because you didn't have student loans.

Cant live in a degree or drive it to work, how you feel about things and their actual value might need some perspective shifting.

Funny, no one has ever asked me whether or not I own a brand new car or own my own house in a job interview. However, every interview has asked me about my college education.

Maybe you are the one who needs to reevaluate their priorities.

Revisit this thought 20 years from now when you finally finish paying off that loan and still have no place to sleep.

Who are you angry at? My loans will be paid off in less than four years from now (7 total) and possibly as little as two more years (if I can figure out how to not eat out so much...). My college education was a fantastic investment.

I am not angry at all. I watched people around me in the same situation as you, job right out of school with a good payment plan have life happen and suddenly that 4 yr plan turned into 20.

That was with much much lower debt than anyone I see today having.

All I can say is that my repayment plan is speeding up and not slowing down.

Good. I truly wish you the best. Some folks do great. Looking back on my 5 decades more dont.

No one should owe 75k for a bachelors, and having educational loans take up 20% of your post-tax income for a decade is beyond ridiculous.

Minimum student loan payments are fixed while your income should grow. What starts out as 20% of your first paycheck won't be 20% by year five.

"Should" being a huge keyword there. Labor wage growth in general has barely kept up with inflation, on average. The software industry bubbles have kept it largely immune to this and overall still seems to be seeing relatively strong wage growth in certain cities and sectors, but there's no guarantee that will continue.

Not to mention that with the time value of money, 20% of your first paycheck isn't just immediately a lot (which it is), it's also a potentially much larger chunk of long term savings and investments potential.

But the main argument here remains that a lot of the complaints are the overall slow delay in people with student loan debt engaging with other economic concerns (buying homes, starting families, etc), and all you've done is exactly illuminate why it is considered such a crisis, people are rationally waiting for that "year five" when student loan payments are less than 20% (or whatever high water mark) of their income, rather than starting bigger projects earlier than that.

Those wage growth numbers discussed are an average. It would be very strange to have someone not have any significant raises between year 0 of their career and year 10.

On a bell curve there are as many people below the average as there are above it. Given the overall wage growth in software industry it's very easy to assume that has largely propped the average up over the last couple decades of statistics and that there are lots of people in other industries that have suffered wage loss more than wage growth.

You could argue that wages do not follow a bell-curve distribution, but there isn't a distribution out there without people falling at or below the average. "Significant raises" in one's career seems to be the outlier statistic, not the norm.

I agree with everything you just said, but its also an average across age groups. It would not surprise me to see many 40year old workers getting 1% yearly raises for the rest of their career. What would surprise me is if there are a significant number of 25 year olds only making 1% raises until they are 35. Most industries will pay a premium for an individual with ten years of experience over someone with no experience (a recent graduate).

My continued disagreement is with "most industries". I think software, especially in "tech hubs" like Silicon Valley has been extremely privileged in raises and I think that colors a false perception of other industries here.

Historically, it seems to be a nice privileged outlier for white collar positions, at most; blue collar work has rarely paid a premium for any individual, much less for experience, and in general has worked very hard to avoid thinking of labor in terms of individuals.

Anecdotally, I've yet to see this "significant raise" for ten years of experience in my own career, and among peers I've straw-polled neither have they. Some have only gotten that cost of living raise through complicated job hopping. Admittedly, I've prioritized overall standard of living over raw income for most of my career to date. I could be doing better, but I'm doing alright.

It does very much look from my cynical point of view that industries that will pay a premium for individuals with experience are few, and increasingly disappearing/extinct in an overall marketplace that hasn't respected labor in decades. The only guaranteed "industry" in current American economics with significant raises of any sort is the C-Suite fraternity. Software has been very fortunate to keep getting good table scraps, with luck, in tech hubs, before cost of living and work/life balance are adjusted for. Lawyers and Doctors with collective effort have done okay protecting their wage gains. I don't think there are many other industries beyond those that can claim the same, even (and maybe especially) adjusting the averages for age.

Lots of professionals earn 1-2% raises their entire career. I'd say it's the norm, and also the reason that job-hopping is seen as the best way to increase your salary.

the problem is that lots of careers that require degrees don't have 75k ceilings

If you owe $75k for a bachelors that isn't a STEM degree from a top tier school, you're Doing It Wrong™.

agree. when you break-down the math, it's not that big of a big deal.

What's silly is to ever allow an institution to take 10% or more of your earnings. Unless they're doing 10% of the work for you, they're not entitled to any claim to the earnings. All that does is perpetuate the gatekeeper fallacy that somehow you need to "pay your dues (to the institution)"

My plan for my (13-year old) daughter is community college, then a state school for a four year degree, which I should have enough savings for. But, more important than the amount of debt, is which major, which is the great elephant in the room. There is a huge investment in degree programs that don't increase your salary, and this fact is routinely buried by doing the analysis on all majors combined. For some majors, taking out loans to get a degree is still a good deal, and for others it clearly is not. It's like asking if a mortgage is a good idea in order to buy a house, without reference to where the house is and what shape it's in.

The possibility to go to University in some European city for almost $0 in tuition is almost never discussed. Stay there 4-5 years, get the equivalent of a Bachelor+MSc and then come home in the US debt-free.

Would you suggest your kids to think of that possibility? If not why? Language barriers? Far from Home?

The main problem is that if you are thinking of getting a job in the U.S., many employers don't have the experience in rating non-U.S. degrees, so will view them with suspicion at best. My wife had this experience when she tried to get jobs based on her Eastern-European degree (from a very reputable University there).

That being said, we definitely are keeping that in mind for our kids (though we are financially planning for school here).

Also something to consider if you might go for a Master's or above in the US. I worked in admissions in a graduate-level only film school and there were definitely issues with someone's BA being "good enough" for the school. I didn't directly validate anything but I assume there was a master list somewhere for those whose jobs it was to qualify the degrees.

A couple of questions:

Is tuition really free for non-residents? How do they avoid getting flooded with students?

How do you pay for living expenses? I don't believe they'll be able to work (at least, as a non-EU citizen) and living expenses aren't cheap.

I honestly had never considered this. Siblings to this comment make good points both ways, but regardless I think it could be a very interesting opportunity for my children to not only obtain an education at a low cost, but to also--and just as important, IMO--get another view of the world.

It would probably be cheaper to just have the kid stay at home and pay the (relatively) nominal tuition for the local state university.

A college degree is used as a way to filter out applicants, the same as a high school diploma is sometimes used. It can be used to show some level of maturity and intelligence. It's not a golden standard, but for the amount of applicants per job, something needs to be a standard.

Some higher paying jobs are asking for master's degrees. Also, my brother can directly attribute his income increase to obtaining an MBA.

Is it worth it? An extra US$10k per year for X years of work? Better job stability? These are the decisions that need to be made, and not every career needs a degree.

> It can be used to show some level of maturity and intelligence.

In what measurable way? I'd argue that more intelligent person finds a way to learn something without it costing them.

There are always exceptions to every rule, but what is your current process for hiring people? How to you take a list of 100-200 applicants and trim it down into a manageable list?

I'm retired now, but in my previous career most jobs required minimum years of relevant experience, with a degree able to substitute for some or all of those years, depending.

I would suggest, that of you can obtain a college education with less than 30-40k in loans (ideally no more than 20k), its probably a fair value still. What the degree is in, is also a compounding factor - but almost any degree with some commercial or governmental value will make paying back 20k pretty easy.

The issue is, its very hard to get a four year degree for that cost.

The median for all borrowers was $17,000 in 2017; the median for bachelors was $25,000. (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/24/5-facts-abou...)

"Relatively few with student loan debt have six-figure balances. Only 7% of current borrowers have at least $100,000 in outstanding debt, which corresponds to 1% of the adult population. Balances of $100,000 or more are most common among postgraduate degree holders. Of those with a postgraduate degree and outstanding debt, 23% reported owing $100,000 or more."

How many of them are failed students, or people going for a two year degree?

how is it hard? pretty much every state university costs $10-12k a year, so you're looking at $48k total if you somehow manage not to apply/qualify for any grants whatsoever. it's even cheaper if you go to community college for the first two years.

> as long as that person has the means to do so without any loans

Which is true for very, very few of the people actually going to college. Which means your advice is essentially "no" for the vast majority of people who would ask.

Yes, that's a good point. I should probably be more flexible. I agree with many other that a very small student loan burden to close the gap between scholarships, grants, work, and going to affordable state schools is also totally reasonable in my mind.

That's rough that your parents pushed you to go to a different college w/out that free tuition incentive. Budget was a huge factor for me in choosing a college and heavily influenced me to stay in-state and public, where tuition wasn't high and there were plenty of scholarships. If I were to do it again the only thing deterring me from going 2-year first was the group of colleagues I met in my first week of college, in which we're still friends to this day. I imagine it would have been harder to find friends coming in as a Junior.

I shouldn't give my parents too hard of a time. I had a half-tuition scholarship to the other school. It was also a religious, private school and so there's that aspect as well. They would not have disowned me or been too upset had I made the choice to go to my first choice, but as a kid it's hard to not want to do everything you can to please your family. Ultimately, it was still painful to matriculate.

> the stigma of not having a degree will have lessened.

This is already the case in my eyes, where having a degree is a net negative unless in conversation I hear it's actually being used and is returning above median income.

Statistically, that just isn't possible for all holders, meaning any time I hear someone has a degree, it's a coin flip whether or not that means anything at all.

On a separate note, as far as the article is concern I think we're already beyond there. Anecdotally, all of the degree holders within my wife's circle don't have a plan to pay them off. Which means student loans are the new mortgage, and if and when they plan on obtaining a mortgage, they won't pay that off either.

I have people very close to me that have no plans to pay off their mortgages, which means the loaners are just consuming payments indefinitely.

The latest scare to me was learning that community colleges are catching up to universities in terms of the absurdity in cost. I was absolutely floored when I learned what it cost to just obtain a two-year degree.

There's more to university than 1:1 degree to salary analysis. Though there's definitely a failing to effectively double-down on this understanding early on in a student's career.

For example, one aspect of university is that it's a four-year gauntlet that not everyone can finish.

Another aspect is that there's more to life than work. I have a philosophy degree but also taught myself to program. I don't regret my degree, though easy to say when I have lucrative skills. But I have a problem people calling it worthless just because there is no obvious degree-to-job pipeline for philosophy.

The key is that I knew that going in. Well, everyone does know these things going in to some level, but the end can seem so far away that it's hard to really internalize the consequences when you're still putting around university.

The problem is coming out of uni with $60k debt which creates the, then, natural analysis of "so how did university equip you to deal with this burden?" And I think that's what leads us to scenarios where we're lopping off the heads of degrees that don't warrant the debt.

There is a big difference between "don't feel forced to get that luxury product, it's ok to go without if you can't afford it" and "the product is literally worthless".

Nobody is saying the second thing.

In all honestly, I went to a school of minor prestige (not ivy, but similar echelon in my field) and I have had a lot of opportunities come my way based on that. Not through alumni networking or word of mouth, just name checking the school and program has opened quite a few doors for me in my career.

That being said, I don’t think the college experience itself made me uniquely better or more prepared than my peers... and in reality a lot of my peers who’ve skipped college all-together were perhaps MORE prepared for “real work” than me. All tallied up, I agree that I’d like a future where college isn’t a requirement like it seemed to be for me.

> Statistically, that just isn't possible for all holders, meaning any time I hear someone has a degree, it's a coin flip

Those are nowhere near equivalent conditions.

> Anecdotally, all of the degree holders within my wife's circle don't have a plan to pay them off.

Even at high-default colleges and universities, the default and delinquency rates are below 10%.

At "good" colleges and universities the rates typically hover in the 1%-3% range.

I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there are strongly connected clusters of people who are delinquent on their student loans (e.g., majors with poor job prospects or certain types of social groups that value partying over studying).

But the fact remains: your wife's social group is extraordinarily unrepresentative.

> I have people very close to me that have no plans to pay off their mortgages, which means the loaners are just consuming payments indefinitely.

I know a lot of people who purchased houses they never intended to pay off because they knew they were only staying in the region for 5-10 years. They all saved money compared to renting and were able to sell their houses for purchase price or higher.

The bank charged lower rent than the landlords. That's all.

This strategy makes less sense if the bank is insisting on a higher down-payment or if you plan on staying in the same city for 15+ years, of course.

But the "rent vs. mortgage" decision is always extremely personal. Without knowing your friend's situation and 5-10 year career plans, it's impossible to know if he's being irresponsible or savvy.

> The latest scare to me was learning that community colleges are catching up to universities in terms of the absurdity in cost.

Citation sorely needed. I can't find a single CC system that comes even close to costing as much as the stat's university system, even at tiny branch campuses.

Also, in many states CC is free for students who do "well" in high school (and "well" here is a pretty low bar, in many states you don't even need a 3.0 gpa in non-honors courses for a full ride at CCs...).

The state university I go to costs a full 700% more than the CC I work at ($600/credit hour vs $81/credit hour in-state). That is a big gap to bridge.

Who doesn't plan to pay off their mortgage? What does that even mean? It's a 10-30 year debt, not a car lease. You don't really have the option of not paying it off unless you want to get foreclosed on and have a really hard time finding a place to rent.

I believe the GP meant that these people do not intend to stay in the same home beyond the life of the mortgage. So yes, they pay off the original loan when they sell, but they immediately turn around and take out another.

I don't agree with the GP on much of anything they said there, but that's my take on it. Maybe they meant interest only loans? I don't know why anyone would take out an interest only loan for a primary residence they intend to live in for some time, but I'm guessing here.

Do you understand how mortgages work? You can't just not pay it off. There are minimum payments and if you don't meet them you will likely get your house foreclosed on. If you keep paying for the whole 30 year term you will by default pay it off. So what exactly are you talking about?

This new account has already posted more than one uncivil comment to HN. That usually signals trollage, so I've banned it until we get some indication that you've read the guidelines and want to use HN as intended. If you have and do, you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

People like to trade up houses or refinance these days. It’s not at all unusual to reach retirement with a mortgage still in play.

It doesn't work that way anymore, so I'm not sure what world you live in; there are banks that provide indefinite mortgages which leave you literally paying nothing but interest and never principal.

There are certainly mortgages which only require the payment of the interest, rather than the principal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interest-only_loan

But even with interest-only mortgages you don't pay indefinitely - either a) you switch to paying down the principal after a specific number of years or b) the loan-balance becomes due.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com