The Anti-College Is on the Rise
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Trade school cannot continue to be a four letter word in american households. HVAC, plumbers, machinists, welders and electricians are all facing massive shortages and offer a skilled, well paying job with benefits. These are all 1-2 year with an apprenticeship and the opportunity to build something you can be proud of.
He pushed heavily for University, but I started getting programming jobs in high school and realized quickly the truth of supply and demand. There will always be demand and need for these types of jobs and they are not low skill at all.
Since then I've heard a lot of people marveling at the need and value of trade jobs.
If I had to quibble at the direction, it would be at the risk that specialization carries. My grandfather was a chiropractor but in later years found a more lucrative career as a copier repairman. This job was highly desired and well paid but for numerous reasons became less so in the 80s and 90s. What happens when you have devoted your career to a specialization and then it disappears or radically transforms?
One of the things that Jewish communities have done for a while is have the men gain both a skill (university degree), and a trade, so that if one fails, they can switch to the other and still provide for their families. For example, after getting laid off in an economic downturn, being able to fix others refrigerators might be the thing that keeps yours from going empty.
The other thing that I wish people would learn is living well within their means, so that if something happens, they don't lose everything that was theirs / the bank's.
I still think people should go through college eventually, even just for resume padding. I spent ~8.5 years in the military and have almost 10 years of experience in my field, but HR at some places won't give me the time of day because I haven't finished my degree yet.
Long term, this will have to be addressed with tons of construction, so it should be a good trade to go into for a young person.
If your fresh new trade school grad is 20 years old, you're betting on there being 40+ years of continuous expansion. A welder can't switch to an electrician the same way a C++ programmer can switch to Rust.
1. The housing shortage doesn't mainly manifest as homelessness, but as housed people crowding into existing places and rural people not being able to afford to move to higher paying jobs in cities. So the number of homeless is relatively small.
2. The empty houses are in depopulated rural places where there is no reason to live.
A number I see thrown around is that California is "missing" 3 million homes right now, and people keep moving in.
This housing shortage could easily have been predicted by demographics - starting in 2003, Millenials started leaving their parents homes and forming households of their own, and starting around 2012 they entered peak house-buying years. The baby boomers are not dying off yet, and the generation that is dying off (the Silent Generation) is small. Thus, not many homes are entering the market for the number of new households being formed.
He went back to college and became a math teacher, which he enjoys.
If any software folks who understand where I'm coming from wanna chime in on that, I'd love to hear about what you did about it... Or maybe I'm just a negative nancy, that's plausible too.
Is a transfer interview not common elsewhere? Anyone know if Amazon or Google requires something like that?
- Three 1hr interviews, coding/system design/behavioral
- Portfolio review
- Talk to senior engineers on the team for a couple hours
- None (I had people on the team vouch for me)
EDIT: This is about Amazon, in retail and AWS.
That said, the trades just don’t pay as much as software does. I’ve thought once or twice about making a career change to that world, but it’s not nearly the kind of money we like to think it is. Sure, there’s a skill shortage, but a cursory look on indeed paints a less glamorous picture
I know an electrician that made 75k a year plus as much overtime as he possibly could want (also to show this isn't just a rare anecdote, the top 25% electricians make a median salary of 71k). If you are a solid tradesman or tradeswoman that knows how to a. show up on time, b. communicate well, c. do the job, congrats, you are already in high demand. That's at least equal if not more than most software devs get paid around where I am. I bet if we counted off hours worked and oncall time, and added hours to hours, the electrician would make more. That's 75k working a proper 8 hours a day and not a minute more.
Hold on. I’m not even sure what percentile this is referring to. It sounds like it has to be at least an 80th percentile salary among all electricians. If that’s the case, then 80% aren’t making $71k, so this sounds a lot worse than you make it out to be.
https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/electrician/salar...
If you note here, there also seems to be cost of living adjustments just like you would find in tech centers as well, so California and New York averages seem higher. A lot of Electrical work is also unionized, so I don't know if that is a factor in any of this, but it seems like some tech workers seem to think unionization is better so there's that. The IBEW (http://www.ibew.org) for example seems to claim their workers on average make 37.69/hr which is right at 75k. The statistic is a bit outdated, but if anything it remained flat, if not slightly increased.
I still have to wonder how much of that is location dependent. $71k in most parts of the Midwest is quite comfortable. In the most expensive urban areas, it’s “livid with 5 roommates and never being able to save much” levels. It would be good if some of these stats were broken down by region, at least, if not MSA.
https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/electrician/salar...
Also, at least according to this union, you can make 10 more dollars an hour being in the union http://www.ibew.org
Last week, I hired a gasfitter to do something that was straightforward, but needs to leave a paper trail. The job he did roughly equates to setting up a static website or similar - basically "turning the crank" for half a day; no fancy skills or tools. His billable rate is about twice what I made at my last local tech job; I was doing fairly fancy DSP firmware, he's got more work available than time to do it. And his rate is substantially lower than another quote I got to do the same job.
I think you're right that this is largely a "grass is greener" situation, but it's also important to look at the externalities of the options. It seems possible to have a successful trades career that rarely involves going over 40 hours/week, but it's hard to do the same in skilled software development. There's also the physical cost; working at a computer all day is super unhealthy.
My dad and grandpa are both plumbers. My grandpa destroyed both his shoulders. He's had one replaced, and needs to have the other one done. My dad is well on his way to destroying his shoulders too.
I think just as many bodies routinely get destroyed in office environments—especially in tech. You know the trope. Sitting all the time under artificial light breathing nasty "inside" air staring at screens in open office environments with a lot of mental stress. Etc.
In each case, blue collar or white, proper care can be taken to avoid these injuries. Especially in blue collar trades.
I paved roads for a summer at 18 and even though I was a very young energetic kid, I was barely getting anything out of my evening workouts or soccer games with friends after 10 hours outside shoveling asphalt.
There are definitely some careers that are more dangerous than others.
My best friend was a HVAC repairman and is a programmer now. He's happier as a programmer. Some people are happier as an HVAC repairman, and more power to them. However it's not the norm for people who have done both.
And if you're working in a factory, conditions have improved far more drastically. Worker safety is serious business given OSHA and legal liability associated with workplace injury.
Happy to hear about your best friend; I doubt it extrapolates, but it doesn't matter much to me--I don't have a dog in the fight.
I know for painters, it's a completely new world with paints that don't dissolve your brain anymore.
The is only something that's not such a big deal yet because the rapid growth of software is very young, and consequently so are most software developers. By contrast the average age of a welder in the US today is 55. [1] It'll be quite interesting to see how this plays out. You have people increasingly living well into their 80s, yet they start to lose their place in the job market after after a couple of decades? Maybe the bias against older workers will simply fade as the industry matures alongside its workers, but if it doesn't then there's going to be quite a spectacle over the next couple of decades.
[1] - https://www.lincolntech.edu/news/industry-news/need-skilled-...
Or maybe I'm just being unrealistically optimistic and life is about to get really difficult for me.
This would also explain why other industries don't suffer from a similar problem. In software development companies collect software developers by the tens of thousands. This results in extremely high labor costs and so reductions on this front can see tremendous savings. As an example Google has about 100,000 employees. That means reducing their average salary by just $10 per year is worth a million dollars of 'free' revenue (yeah, ignoring taxes etc). Really amazing to think about those numbers! By contrast even very large companies in other fields will have relatively small numbers of engineers. For instance petroleum engineering is critical in the fossil fuel industry which is an extremely large industry, yet there are only a total of 33,700 petroleum engineers in the entire country.
[1] - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/petrole...
For example, I work in an office job. Over 50% of us either have serious injuries (like joint replacements) or are pending surgery.
And it could even get easier. I could do 20 hours a week of consulting work and still get by. I don't think I'd want to do that, but I could.
I don't know where you live or what area you work in, but I think the thing you want actually is achievable, maybe with a pay cut, or maybe not even. The fact that you're having to learn to use Rust because it's all the sudden getting used on projects says to me that you're working at some place where people put way too much of themselves into work.
If you hate your job, don't just accept "this is how the industry is". Look around a bit and you might find a corner of it that's more to your liking.
Of course, some of the nicer parts are "by invitation only". Once you've proven yourself to the right people, you might get invited to work on the saner and more fun projects.
I'm assuming this is because you have built up a good contact list? Because as I understand, a lot of time spent in consulting is finding clients.
I'm still kind of a workaholic, but I could do way less and it'd be fine. It's also super nice to have a safety net of more and more remote jobs now. Even if the whole economy melts down, people somewhere in the world will still need software built and maintained remotely.
Remote work is so much closer to feeling like it's not a job than office work, which is a huge deal for me.
And you can move to a lower cost of living area, avoid state income taxes, and still have a competitive salary to your city-dwelling peers.
I honestly don't know why everyone isn't remote.
Obviously making people travel half way around the country to sit in different offices (in the same building) somehow makes sense to management ...
Naturally not every company has such agreements in place, but even then, you are free to search for help on work law.
Same applies to several other countries.
Of course, the extent that people seek for help, depends on how much they can afford for support, or the consequences at the current employer if they eventually win. But all in all, most European law tends to be on employees side.
It's hard to generalize an entire industry.
Don't. As an office worker, you have to worry about carpal tunnel syndrome, your back going and cardiovascular disease from sitting.
Manual labor means repetitive strain injuries and working in an environment that's conducive to hurting one's self.
Those who do manual labor and aren't able to stack capital, become their own boss and hire others will have to worry about all of those things, and the effects of aging on their ability to do their job. Bodies deteriorate with time, and a single injury might prevent them from ever being able to work again when they hit their 40s, 50s or 60s.
> I daydream about taking a pay cut just to be able to go live in like... Cheyenne, WY or something and not be a part of the tech rush
Find an agency or consultancy to work for. There are plenty of them using decades' old tech, maintaining their clients' projects, and "new and shiny" is actively avoided in favor of what's worked for years.
I’d encourage you to get a new job. These days programmers are in extremely high demand, and you sound like you’ve gotten stuck working at a place with a non-ideal culture.
Is that something you could actually do?
I work in the UK, I probably do a 35-40 hour week depending on the week. I work from home two days of that week. I don't spend my weekends learning new stuff unless I have an itch I want to scratch. I don't really have a boss.
I got into server-side programming from the get-go, it moves a lot more slowly in terms of tech than anything web/frontend-ish. I've picked up a lot of crypto/security knowledge along the way. I've managed to leverage that into a contract consultant-developer type of deal. I get paid well*
My only real downsides are that my commute is long because I work in London 3 days per week, but that's really down to me as I refuse to live there. I have no job security at all as a contractor, but to be honest I consider job security in permanent employment to be an illusion much of the time.
(*off the scale according to glassdoor, not sure how true that is, I know that contractors have their own scale. Compared to a silicon-valley salary it's still not that impressive, but then I don't have to put up with what you describe!)
That's not a problem with software, that's a problem with the crazy idea of "unpaid overtime". I'm from Europe, and honestly the first time I heard about it I thought that it must just mean it's legal in US not to pay extra for overtime.
> I so truly just want to clock in, clock out, work about 40hrs/week and have time for my family.
Some people I worked with at HP did just that. Maybe try large, corporate environments?
For the most part, welding as a career sucks big time. It is a dirty, nasty, disgusting business and working as a welder can't possibly pay you enough to really ever get ahead unless you open your own business of some kind and have employees or something like that. It fucking blows compared to an office job writing software.
Even if you can tolerate the horrible working conditions--my dad had to crawl down pipes inside power plants barely big enough to fit into and weld internal seams. He also had to climb into ridiculously high places dragging heavy gear and spend hours up there welding in 100 degree heat of course wearing long-sleeves and heavy clothing. It was a living hell. He did this usually for about $25/hr (1980s, early 1990s).
It gets worse. Oh it get so much fucking worse: The people he had to work with were the most miserable lot on the planet. Drunks, druggies, wife beaters, guys with 20 DUI arrests, biker trash. These were his co-workers and constant companions. If you're the average of the 10 people who spend the most time around, he was doomed! Guys would go out to lunch and drink then come back and operate heavy machinery. OSHA? GTFO! They laughed at safety. No time for that on clock! People got hurt, went on Worker's Comp. I have dozens of stories from back then and I doubt it is any better today. Do you like unions? Because welders have to be in unions more often than not. Unions are just another power structure to lord over people with--the drunks run the unions. It's ugly business. They give the best jobs (foreman) to their buddies. Everyone else is SOL. Only 10 slots at a job in town? Guess you're working out of town this year. And so on.
Find any other job than welding for a living.
This is one of the reasons 'free college' cannot happen. College jobs generally pay more, we cannot artificially remove associated costs or there will be an even bigger gap between degreed students and pupils of skilled trades.
The world needs plumbers, electricians, machinists, etc. We need to pay them well. Kids need to recognize the opportunities presented.
With free college, more students from wider backgrounds could affort it. That would increase supply in college graduates while decreasing supply in workers of skilled trades. Thus, the latter would get to demand higher incomes (while the former would see theirs decreased).
I don't know where I stand on that as it comes to education. Sure, a more educated populous is desirable but college no longer has a monopoly on higher education. The question to me is, do we need more of the type of graduates college is turning out? And if so, will subsidies further exacerbate the college tuition problem when college becomes "free"? It seems like distancing the payer and consumer leads to more unuseful consumption (one can look to healthcare or even college textbooks for examples)
Even today some people are making the argument that college grads can't find good jobs. Wouldn't more grads make the problem worse?
I think some of those college grads should find their way into skilled trades. The trades may lack some of the sizzle, but they definitely result in jobs that serve a purpose.
Exactly. These jobs pay well because for the past couple of decades, people have followed the common advice and overwhelmingly chosen to got to university instead of learning trades. Supply has thus become smaller than demand and wages have risen as a result.
Now that the tides are turning, if people start following the new increasingly common advice to learn trades instead of getting a degree, what will happen? If university enrolment falls by 50% and trades college enrolment increases by the same amount, what kind of job market the new cohort of tradespeople will have upon graduation? If enrolments remain like that for 20 years, what would the job market for trades be in 2040?
I sincerely doubt that blue collar jobs can offer better long-term career prospects, stability, and lifetime earnings than white collar ones. But then again, having gone through Alberta's recession and seeing what it did to blue collar jobs, I might be overly pessimistic.
You’re less likely to end up with a glut of HVAC repairmen or welders versus something like lawyers or (would be) programmers.
At least that's what I've been doing here in Spain for the last 8 years.
The moment I'm asked to work longer hours than I want to I just say no and start looking for another job. It's quite easy to find another one and eventually you find a place where you are not demanded to do such a thing.
A lot of the surplus in college graduates is due to women entering and graduating with four year degrees or more. They simply can't or won't repurpose to those trades. When I was in tech school, we were 80% or higher male, with virtually all the women clustered into hairdressing and machine drafting, with a few outliers in graphic design (printmaking then) and the trades you mentioned. And Machine drafting was where the misfits ended up, the ones who didn't fit into traditional trade work; none of us worked in our field if i remember.
Very few people seem to even think about how the trades can't be an answer for slightly above half of the college-going populace. Even then, honestly trade work is something that will nail you unless you move to management later on.
The whole "have to go to college to get a job" requirement is a very recent development, and that is what the article is speaking against.
Then they need to stop being predatory and expensive. Here in Indy you basically have Lincoln Tech. Let's take a look at one of their programs:
https://www.lincolntech.edu/net-price-calculator
Want to learn "Welding and Metal Fabrication Technology" Estimated net price: $ 31576.00
Are you kidding me? 31k$ to learn how to weld?!?! Looks like average welder income is $16.09 an hour here in Indy... basically a year's gross salary... except you won't start at $16.09, looks like you'll start at $12 an hour or less.
If we do your profession:
"Diesel and Truck Technology" is $56,253 for a 13 month program
"Diesel and Truck Degree" is $63,473 for a 15 month 'degree'!!!
IUPUI, hands down the cheapest accredited university in Indianapolis, doesn't have a 'welding certificate' or anything remotely approximating it. They do have 'certificates' on their minors page but the only thing remotely trade related is some certificates in motorsports
https://acd.iupui.edu/majors/minors-certificates/index.html
I imagine many others cities are in similar positions.
Trades is a good job in your 20s, probably your 30s, but once you start getting to your 40s or above and your body stops performing and healing as it once did then it becomes a problem. How many trade workers never get to enjoy their retirement because their bodies have failed them?
The pay is decent, but in most cases it isn't good enough. If we started clearly putting a price tag on years of peoples lifespans and quality of life, trade jobs are no longer as attractive, and I think that is being reflected in peoples hesitation to join a trade, especially if they are a personal witness to a trade worker with failing health.
As for myself, I started trades myself doing carpentry, I was happy, then I got into an accident, another not uncommon occurrence in trades, after I recovered and tried to start again from a weaker state it became blindingly obvious how hard even just 10 years of real physical labor had done to my body. Yeah it became less noticeable once I got back to full strength, but I realized that it was just me ignoring the very real damage I was doing to my body on a daily basis. Today the only work ill even consider doing for public hire at market rate is high-end cabinetry. I still use my skills in my normal life, but im not going on some strangers roof for a paltry raise over a cashier. Im not going to breath in the chemical fumes and material dusts and pretend it isn't a problem. Im not going to lay brick for even a 20% raise. I plan on being able to actually enjoy my retirement rather than being confined to a lesser physical state full of pains and ailments.
It’s too bad that we have such blinders on as an industry. There’s more to tech work than knowing the big-O notation of a given algorithm off the top of your head.
I've been doing this professionally for 25 years, and definitely my career had a slow start, it took a good nine months out of college to find my first job, which essentially served as an apprenticeship. I've certainly never had a problem with being insufficiently technical, if you can work your way through Gödels incompleteness theorem then you can work your way through PAXOS or an algorithms text book
I'm sure actual native German speakers could probably chime in, but I couldn't help but try to stop the spread of FUD around pronouncing poor ol' Gödel's name. :)
Though, I should not be all that surprised. For my entire life in the U.S. people have pronounced my last name of "Wiese" as either "Wise" or "Why-se," both of which are totally incorrect (my family says "Weese" when anglicized). I much prefer the German pronunciation of my last name, though; too bad it's too much of a pain to explain the discrepancy between how it's spelt and what it sounds like to native English speakers. :P
I took the class just last semester in Spring.
However, abstract theoretical thinking without an adjacent skill (like software development), is probably useless in the market today. This is probably why the OP didn't find financial success.
Suggesting a philosophy career is then a bad idea. Suggesting a CS + Philosophy career might be a decent one though.
That was the god honest trust for about 40 years, so it wasn't naive. The market conditions changed drastically and abruptly, but the same advice was being given.
I hear this all the time from people in their 20s and early 30s, earnestly complaining that they were tricked into believing this, and I think it's somewhat true.
But at the same time, I got my double major in Philosophy (primary was Computer Science), so I know that if you major in Philosophy (or Art, or Sociology, or--this will really get them going--Gender Studies), there will be people crawling out of the woodwork and lining up to tell you your degree is useless and that you should study engineering.
After seeing Yet Another Non-CS Major Software Engineer, I recently joked that we should send a letter to all Freshman and tell them "Just study CS--it's what you're going to end up doing anyway."
My coworker, a software engineer with an art degree, turned to me and said "UT sent me that letter when I started college. I ignored it."
So....we're sending mixed signals to teens. I think you're right that it's starting to turn around and get less mixed. More pro-trade school stuff is appearing on Facebook, for one (though maybe it's that my friend group is shifting).
I attended a grad program for just one semester (since I was able to get the first semester as a free trial - but the rest of the degree would have cost $150K and the program was ranked #1 in the US News scam rankings and yet the school refused to give any statistics on employment of graduates. No problem for the women, who all got the entire $180K paid by corporations. A couple of the guys, though, as I feared, were unemployed for over two years... after $180K debt for a program ranked #1 with an acceptance rate well under 5%! One girl needed a job in less than a week to stay in the US, so her boyfriend hired her as a programmer though she had absolutely no knowledge or experience and so she just started getting paid to study CS. By then, I had about completed a CS program at another school but couldn't get a single job offer.
Several of the guys told me their plan to pay off the $180K was to get Bernie Sanders elected so he'd just forgive it. In fact, that's the most common plan I've heard. Very few people want to pay back student loans unless they quickly get a lucrative job and I dunno if I've found anyone (in person) other than me who felt at least a possible moral obligation to pay if I decided to take out the loan.
Also you are by far not the only one in this situation. I have friends on my facebook that I look back at and see them still working the same job they worked while in college (making roughly 23k/year in Southern California!). They have degrees in sociology, psychology, philosophy, communications etc. Their degree has made them worse off because now they have student loans to repay on a degree which simply cannot support the repayment of such loans. Likewise, the degree did not increase their income at all. It is hard to believe but in reality, they would have been better off not going to college at all.
First, the proposed educational experiences sound like more silly adventures for kids with money (or debt) to burn. You could learn more about life and yourself by working at McDonald's for a year.
Second, it fucking annoys the shit out of me that when articles like this talk about "the liberal arts" they really mean humanities. I have yet to meet someone who espouses the merits of a liberal arts education who realizes that it technically includes math and the natural sciences. How many English majors takes statistics? How many History majors take discrete math or more than the most basic math requirements needed to graduate? Bet it is less than 1%.
I am all for a liberal arts education as long as it has equal helpings of math and the natural sciences along w/ English, philosophy, etc.
Have you really "learned to think" from your humanities education if you have no understanding of calculus, probability, statistics, or physics? If you have never learned how to design and conduct an experiment?
A "good" university education is simple and not sexy. High quality courses taught by passionate teachers. Nothing else. No student unions, no sports teams, no academic or emotional counseling, no beautiful buildings, no study abroad or fucking trips to Alaska. Which basically describes university studies in central Europe and Israel.
Not very sexy so no NYT articles about it.
I actually attended a pricey "liberal arts" college where I majored in computer science. I am currently in the OMSCS program at Georgia Tech and the quality of education I am receiving through it is much better at less than a tenth of the cost. We have better discussions on Slack than I did sitting in seminars w/ a bunch of rich kids 20 years ago. No picturesque campus to stroll through though :)
Why the hell are so many people choosing non-public and out of state schools? Do people really think that double the cost gets you double the returns?
The difference between my life there and my life when I said fuck this place and moved somewhere cool, outdoorsy, and away from all the baggage is night and day.
I grew up in Southern California, and I don't know anyone that stayed there that is "thriving". All have college degrees, still living with parents, not making enough money for me to even consider them "living".
I would say it's a very wise decision to try and move to somewhere with a booming economy as soon as possible.
I think I can tell from context, but, just to be clear, is the 'this' you did "(1) Go to a public school, and (2) Stay in-state", or "choosing non-public and out of state schools"?
More people choosing state schools won't make the mean or median degree cheaper, it will just make state schools more expensive with lower admittance rates.
People do not know how to evaluate the quality of education. The 'real' quality of the education also doesn't matter because it is not actual ability that governs success but ability to play well the game that has arisen from elementary school through new-grad hires.
If you take out the mechanics of the game which are arbitrary you get an economy where there are far more people who are able to be educated and who have been educated for any particular field than there are jobs and success becomes a lottery. (Success is already a lottery hidden behind the game mechanics)
This is expressed in The Case Against Education, which strengthens it's argument by convincing the reader that university is really only useful as a finishing school.
Are there any more extensive writings on the game mechanics of education and successfully joining the workforce?
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/220690/cubed-by-nik...
"Just do x" doesn't help when the game is rigged from the start.
I'm doing everything right:
1. Work during school (on campus & industry) 2. Getting good grades 3. Applying for FAFS 4. In state 5. Engineering progression (IT) 6. Not dorming (except first year because of family situation) 7. No meal plan
I'm levereged over $100k in this degree. Hoping to finish soon. I know my situation is nonstandard but this misinformation is just polluting the dialogue on this topic and it's something that really hurts people like me.
"Just stay in state and go to a public school... also don't be insanely, one-in-a-million unlucky." <- does that feel better to you?
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The conventional wisdom used to be correct. You used to be able to avoid massive debt by staying in state and attending a public college. This is not the case anymore. I know plenty of people who aren't in as bad of a situation as I am and received similarly low financial support from the government and the university I attend.
Focusing the conversation on "what to do" is not helpful. Focusing on "why do you have to" is helpful.
Why do you have to pay ~30k/year, minimum, to live on campus with the most basic meal plan at a state run college?
The out of state tuition for my college (NJIT) was $6,214 [0] in 1998, the year after I was born. This year the out of state tuition is $32,750. This does not count living expenses or textbooks. The college also mandates you have a laptop with some hardware requirements. Using chronicle's "Adjust for Inflation" tool it seems that my college's tuition grew at a rate of >300% above inflation.
I'm not going to make any comments here as to why I think this is, though I do have opinions, but I will state that "just stay in state" ignores this. This is a trend common to most public colleges. If this trend continues for NJIT (of add ~$1k/year to the tuition for in and out of state) in 18 years, when the next gravypod comes around, they'll be even more screwed.
[0] - https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/tuition-and-fees
Yes it is. Full stop. Local community colleges are vastly cheaper than many universities, and the credits match up 1:1. Working full time, getting an AS, transferring to a university to earn a BS is still a very viable path.
Following this path it's not only possible, but expected that one walks away completely debt free with their BS at the end of four years.
Just because you didn't do the right things (or even if you did and still got very unlucky) doesn't mean the rest of us can't have a fruitful conversation about how things will work out for the vast majority of people.
You need to understand this, or you'll forever be trapped making terrible coding analogies on the Internet, not being understood. Literally none of the numbers or situations you cited are relevant to this conversation.
Get it paid off as quickly as you can (sure, you know this). Best wishes.
Every one of the (ex-)overseas(ish) graduates that I know from these countries' universities have had nothing but praise and thanks for the opportunity, have loyalty, promote in their home countries, and live (and earn, and pay tax) there for several years, and if returning home will gladly return / switch between countries.
If any high schoolers reading this thread have not considered this option, take a chance to take a look.
1. In high school I took as many AP courses as I could possibly take and realistically pass. I ended up passing 6 of these exams. These exams cost $80 and get you the equivalent of "one course" worth 3 credits. My US history exam gave me 6 credits for 2 full courses! So in total I got 21 units. In effect, I paid $480 to complete 17.5% of my college education!
2. After graduation, I did not go directly into college. Instead, I skipped one semester and then used CLEP exams to knock out an additional 5 exams. These are exactly the same as AP exams but you basically self-study for the subject. The subjects you study are basically general education subjects like sociology or psychology. I got an additional 15 units from these exams for a total cost of about $500. At this point. I have completed 30% of college education for a cost of $980.
3. I apply to a community college and am subsequently accepted. All of my AP + CLEP exam credits are accepted. I then complete another 24 units at the community for a total cost of about $2,400. I don't fully recall what the cost was but this was on the high end estimate. At this point, I am basically 50% done with my college for a total cost of $3,380.
4. I apply to a state university which I am accepted to and then complete the last 60 units for my BA degree. I don't recall fully what the cost is completely but I would estimate it to be about $3,000 per semester. So estimated total cost for my BA degree was $15,380.
These numbers are just for the tuition and books. I lived at home the entire time, commuting to school. I also was working full time the entire time and paid cash for everything. Never had any student loans. When I graduated it took me about 4 months to find a job paying 52k per year. Major was accounting and I live in Southern California.
Most important thing is to make sure to use the resources that are available to you. AP and CLEP are EXTREMELY value resources to you. It just boggles my mind when I talk to people who complain about their student loans then I ask them if they took AP or CLEP exams. Some of them say they never even heard of these programs....are you kidding me?
>They will take on 15 to 20 hours a week of manual labor in Sitka >all at an affordable price >found the program in order to give young people a taste of the education he received at an older countercultural experiment, Deep Springs College >Deep Springs — a tuition-free, highly selective two-year liberal arts college >Our goal is to make our credits transferable to four-year institutions upon accreditation
So in order to further the spirit of a tuition-free liberal arts college, is charging "students" an as-yet unrevealed fee, working them for four hours a day covering almost every single non-management job at the Sheldon Jackson Campus, with absolutely no set curriculum or accreditation or transferable credits.
This is by the far the most transparent scam I've ever seen make it to HN.
I think university education should be seen as an extension of all earlier education. If you start thinking in terms of "is this financially a good idea", you'll start wondering if people should be leaving school at 14 or something, because they're basically able to work at that age .. right?
Personally, I think the time I had at university was massively useful to my educational development. Even though a lot of what I learnt during that time I consider to be "self-taught", the university environment seemed much more conducive to self learning than the working environment, where you do what your company wants for 8 hours a day then spend the rest of the day trying to defocus.
Just like primary and secondary education, it seems insane to me to just think about tertiary education as some concrete monetary investment. If you give everyone the opportunity to spend a short amount of time (like 3 or 4 years, out of a career period of 45 years) focusing on a particular field of their choosing, surely there must be a massive benefit there to society.
Edit: Also, it should probably be pointed out that a lot of research that happens at universities is used in industry, so if the university system continues to be undermined, you can expect these gains to be lost. We're probably mostly programmers, right? Try pointing to a significant feature of any programming language (old or new) that isn't taken straight from academia.
Yes, this age is something we should wonder and re-wonder often over time. Is all the delayed adolescence of the current state desirable? Do all people need 4 years of high school? Do all degrees need to take 4 years for wildly different fields? Would many people benefit from a "work study" version of high school instead? Etc.
But the alternative path is not necessarily one of less learning. Many people, both gifted and not, detest academics and feel school is a kind of prison or CAFO. This would give them more options. It would give bullied kids more options too, or kids looking to get away from gang activity in their (bad) school.
The problem is this still doesn't solve the wage gap. Businesses look for concrete ways to determine someone's skill, and a Diploma/GED and college education provide them easy standards to set for who can even get to the interview process. Not many CS jobs will take anyone who only lists "self-taught", even if they have some amazing code work linked (this is especially true for recruiters).
This isn't a 1:1 comparison, because being young is a legal problem, but I definitely feel your pain- and the pain of others in that situation- it's a serious downer and quite demoralizing for someone to say no just because you don't have a certificate (in this case, a DL). It's honestly really hard to get someone to take a chance on you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_University
It's actually the largest university in the UK, and has thousands of overseas students.
I mean, public US degrees also cost nothing like a private US degree
That is sometimes, but not always, correlated with educational attainment.
Source eg https://hbr.org/2017/10/what-science-says-about-identifying-...
Just read books and google if you don’t know what to read
And choose a field that does not require a degree to work
This way you save your time and money and probably will end up being more successful
The problem with this is, more and more employers are wanting a 4-year degree for ANY job, even basic office work because 1/3 of the country has at least a 4-year degree.
The problem is that if you are trying to compete in a saturated market, you are already going to lose as there is always someone who is better, faster, and willing to work for less money, leaving the degree to be of no great benefit to you, with respect to getting a job.
We could eliminate that requirement by buying one or two fewer aircraft carriers or stealth bombers. Seems like a fair trade to me.
13 billion is 325,000 degrees at 40k each or 260,000 at 50k each.
21 B-2 stealth bombers from Northrop Grumman in the 1980s and 1990s at a price of more than $2 billion each. 2 billion in 1990 is equal to 9.8 billion dollars today. That's 4-5 million 4-year degrees for what those 21 aircraft cost!!!
Also if you educate 100 people, the majority of them will provide benefit to the economy via any number of ways. The government already throws tons of money at educational institutions, but as research grants for military/defense research, why not educate the populace? For that matter, why not create government educational institutions that cut out all of the fluff and in upon completion of a program you enter into an income share agreement for 5-10 years at 10-5%.
The primary benefit of a large conventional military is to deter such an event from even happening. That said, the air support provided from carriers definitely helped a great deal to curb and reverse the spread of ISIS.
> Also if you educate 100 people, the majority of them will provide benefit to the economy via any number of ways.
If this were true, then it would be economically advantageous for those 100 people to borrow the money themselves (perhaps with the help of a government subsidy). And they do.
I'd believe that, a decade or two ago. The Global Hawk drone has a declassified record of 33.1 hours of flight time at 60,000 feet though for surveillance and doesn't have pilot fatigue as swapping out a pilot is as simple as "hey Greg,your shift is about over, stand up whenever you're ready and I'll take over watching the monitors".
UCAVs (unnamed combat aerial vehicles) are possessed by more than 20 confirmed countries. The United States as 2 publcily known variants, the MQ-1 since 1995 and the MQ-9 since 2001. The MQ-9 costs about 16 million dollars, can carry 750lbs of payload to 50,000 feet and fly for 30 hours or carry considerably more (like Hellifre, JDAM, laser guided bombs etc) for much shorter periods. These can take off from any sufficiently long flat surface, can be transported anywhere in the world in C-17s and honestly it wouldn't surprise me if they've devised a way to launch them out of C-17s.
As ISIS doesn't have fighter jets, there's no need to have fighter jets ready to take off to engage them. Aerial combat as a whole is effectively a thing of yesteryear.
Having a giant floating city in the ocean six-thousand persons simply isn't necessary anymore. Yes, we need certain types of ships for guarding ports and trade routes by aircraft carriers are gross overkill and largely the money-giving beast of lobbyists, politicians and defense contractors.
>If this were true, then it would be economically advantageous for those 100 people to borrow the money themselves
Except for the part where college tuition is outrageous, many many people do not qualify for government subsidized loans and interest rates on private loans can be outrageous and you could easily be servicing the loans for DECADES unless you want to live in a van with 3 other people.
The same could be said about traditional universities, especially now that, as you point out, they're so expensive that the cost is ruinous on a per-capita basis. I see no reason that this would change if the cost was borne by the federal government any more than the cost of the Navy would change.
Somewhere there's a point where it costs more than it produces, dependent on how much time the person will spend being a more-educated person before they die, and I expect also dependent on the precise education being imparted, but I'd be surprised if that line was where the free education cut-off currently is.
Stretching the discussion a little, we could ask the same question about all education. Why is any of it free? But the benefits to the United States (for example) of almost everyone being able to read and write (for example) are incredible. If a large proportion of the US population had dropped out of school before being able to read and write (because of the cost), the US would be extraordinarily less wealthy. Everyone would lose out.
Define done right. General education does have positive externalities and we provide that for everyone up to the end of high school. However, college and beyond is about specializing. There are many majors that have way to many students majoring in them only to end up getting a job out of college that does not use any of the skills they learned in college. I do not see how subsidizing those students would be beneficial.
The only problem is that this practical, pragmatic approach violates some people's morals. Similarly to how the US could have a far cheaper, far more effective corrections system, but that be morally objectionable for too many people.
On a personal note, I'm not convinced that the end of high school is the correct cut-off point for free education (particularly given that the US has become a far more technological society and economy over the last century), but I don't have any evidence for that. It would seem something of a suspicious coincidence.
I don't care which party you favor. Viewing the institution as a whole, do you think that Congress could do this right? I don't.
We should make it real cheap to get educated as a doctor or nurse though (and most other medical stuff). Sure, they have great personal returns on their education now, but that's exactly what we want to erode, by flooding the market.
It's been awhile since I worked in healthcare but I don't think primary care provider pay is high on the list of most impactful cost cutting improvements
It's not so much that they take home an inordinate share of healthcare spending, it's that the market is severely supply constrained.
I think if you add more people to a bad system you tend to make things worse. Better to fix the process rather than throw more (poorly managed) resources at it
Ballooning enrollment leads to more money spent on facilities and administration, which means even less money goes directly toward educating students.
It is a mess.
1970: $2.2b
1980: $3.2b
1990: $4.0b
2000: $4.6b
2010: $3.5b
2015: $3.2b
I think part of the solution if you truly want cheaper education is remove all but core classes from the required curriculum so students aren't laying for bs classes majority of them retain none of. Then allow any student to sit in on any class they have personal interest in and allow generic automatic testing so the student can get a general feel for if they learned well enough (though my opinions on testing are low overall, I know many students still like the benchmark).
Why not remove the fat then? If you cut classes, this won't make institutional parasites disappear, as they'll invent other things to justify their existence. I feel the ballooning overhead surrounding the core mission (here: education and scientific research) needs to be addressed directly.
Free college would just lower acceptance rates at good state schools and allow more people to complete degrees in community colleges. If anything it will make state school degrees even more valuable; roughly the same number of people will graduate from the same school but the cohort will be academically stronger.
IDK what you were imagining exactly with that last bit, but at my old uni you could test out of basically any class by paying $60 and taking essentially the final in the testing center; if you got >70% iirc you got credit for the course and could advance to the next but no a grade.
If anything it will increase value? Don't buy it. What's your reasoning? Look at the value of college today on avg compared to that of 30 years ago and adjust inflation. People pay much more for what they get now than they did then, because of the saturation.
With the last bit - if you major in chemistry you don't have to take art or anything not chemistry. If you're art you take art. It's a sham that you're required to take all those other classes. They do very little for the vast majority, and if you want the knowledge you can take the classes as you'd like.
School shouldn't be job training only. I majored in a stem field and my favorite classes where the ones where I dove into classical literature, believe it or not. Sure, the degree got me my job, but it also exposed me to the liberal arts in a way that would have been impossible if I tried to study it on my own, because it actively challenged me to step into another field for a minute and reach out to unfamiliar sources to build understanding. There's value in being a well rounded, educated citizen, in my book. The academies of ancient Greece weren't training better farmers or builders, they were training better thinkers and therefore better citizens. That's what modern colleges try to do when they make you take liberal arts classes for an engineering degree. And a chemist who's taken time to learn to read, study, and write well is going to be a better professional chemist than someone who's just done grunt work in the lab and slogged through the chem series, because not only has that better scientist also done that, they've polished their intangibles through liberal arts classes.
Seems like, in terms of income/job prospects, you're better off studying to be an electrician or plumber (which is relatively cheap) than getting a BA in liberal arts or the humanities (which is relatively expensive). If this is the case, solution definitely isn't to encourage more people to do the latter.
People who have a bachelors degree are less prepared to work as a software developer. Counter intuitively this lack of preparation is magnified for those with a computer science degree. Most of my computer science coworkers have historically had weaker communications skill, such as describing details with precision objectively or documenting a simplified set of instructions. I am so under whelmed that basic reading and writing are something I would test for in a job interview.
In addition to weak communication skills I have also observed less flexibility or willingness to learn unfamiliar skills from computer science skills undergraduates. It’s as though these students believe they know all they need and the employer should adapt to the set of techniques these employees were taught. I have had heard somebody on HN describe this as lame duck syndrome. I have observed this enough that it biases me in opposition to job candidates with a comp sci education.
My company has three engineers who have done boot camps and two who are self taught coming from other industries including myself.
I tend to dislike higher education as a general rule because it's more a process of fitting in and obeying a teacher, instead of focusing on the subject matter. I don't care that much actually because I know I'm already skilled at programming. I might not be an excellent programmer, but I can do a lot of what's required.
While education is important, I have put a lot of personal time to learn more and more programming skills after the year I failed one, 8 year ago. Yet the job market is constantly focused on "the degree", while everybody knows that self-teaching is more important in programming. I don't get hired and it's always a matter of trusting a new guy who doesn't have professional experience and can only talk about his skills.
Personally I don't have a lot of faith into the market and the market doesn't have faith in me. So yes, I have plenty of reasons to say that people going into higher education are lucky, privileged or just obedient people who are not yet capable of learning new things, or did not have to waste so much resources to learn things they could do at home.
In the end, you will either have large companies with normative, schooled people, or start ups, who will always struggle to start products because they have no resources.
I'd say that higher education can be bad because normalization slow downs innovation, so in the end, degrees become privileges. People who are taught skills but don't use them to improve society and constantly encourage obedience are a brake on society. In an age of inequality, degrees are seen as rent seeking. People get degrees for comfort. Other people won't seek degrees because they don't want to obey to a system they see as lame and evil.
> However, I bet the end result will be that I will work on the same trivial web applications as I am doing right now but with a pay bump and more opportunities during the job hunt.
I started working in the field professionally around 18 or 19, and I'm begging to fear this same thing. If I do decide to go back to school, it'd be in hopes that I can escape subfields that bore me to death, but I feel the reality is that there just really isn't any real job market for the things I'm interested in.
If you have the aptitude college will absolutely help. But for those who do not pushing them into college is just saddling them with debt for little benefit.
My point is just that there are payoffs other than monetary ones. Nothing wrong with monetary, but nothing wrong with the others if that drives you.
What percentage of college subjects don’t have readily available high-quality material across the Internet for free? Libgen is free. SciHub is free. Whole semesters worth of lectures are available for free on YouTube.
It would be stupid to take out loans for a degree that will never break even, when more knowledge is out there for free than ever before in human history.
I trained in a field that might be classed under "areal studies" more generally for a certain stretch of Eurasia. (And not a "useless" humanities subject, but something that does bring desirable job prospects.) The vast majority of literature in that subject is not available online. More recent publications might be created in PDF format, but for the most part students will need to hit the library shelves, even at the undergraduate level.
Sure, I have scanned and uploaded a great deal to Libgen myself, but I appear to be the only volunteer doing so for this entire field. Most volunteers on LibGen or r/Scholar don’t want to undertake any more effort than downloading already-digitized materials from behind paywalls and then uploading them to Libgen, they don’t want to do the hard work of scanning thousands of pages. I suspect there are a lot of academic fields where it would take decades for the handful of Libgen volunteers to adequately upload the standard publications in that field.
I'd guess former bomber pilot but the rest of your comment makes me think otherwise.
More importantly, while I can use thesearch to learn something I know quite a lot about already, I would not know where to start in things I know nothing about. And let's not start about things that I don't know they exist (which my school covered).
The issue is that college imposes a very real and life changing monetary cost on people attending. If you fail to achieve a high paying job after college you will be far behind your peers who never went, and dramatically more limited in your life choices. College debt is the closest we have to indentured servitude in the modern world.
For those who just want to learn, continuing education or course auditing is the better solution. I do wish colleges would expand upon these programs.
You pay 10% of your disposable income (income above 1.5 times the poverty level) for up to 20 years.
Not sure that's really far behind. For a family of 4 making the median household income that's roughly equivalent to a cable bill.
IBR operates very similar to welfare - including the embarrassing intrusion and analysis of your private life by your lenders. It is a last resort option and not something we should be encouraging.
Cancelled debt is only taxable up to the point of solvency meaning that most people who have a substantial amount of debt cancelled won't owe anything.
>IBR operates very similar to welfare - including the embarrassing intrusion and analysis of your private life by your lenders. It is a last resort option and not something we should be encouraging.
I've done it. You provide your tax return. They don't care about anything but income. It's by no means intrusive and shouldn't bhe thought of as a last resort.
Whether or not it helps is another story, I am not claiming a degree is literally useless. I am however a little rubbed the wrong way by claims that you need a degree to ever have a job that pays good, that seems false.
High-level engineers can have more influence within the company and often earn more than directors and VPs, and most developers who want to move up the ladder don't aspire to become a director or VP -- they'd rather be a Distinguished Engineer, Fellow, etc.
Microsoft was generating cash by writing interpretors before they brought a VC on board. They only brought in a VC for advice and not money - so they still count. Although Gates' mother also had a lot of contacts in the Seattle upper crust. I doubt Gates needed Harvard outside of finding Ballmer.
Apple got VC funding though contacts made on the job not at school. Jobs went to a Liberal Arts college for less than a year. The Homebrew Club also had a big impact on early Apple. Several members of the Homebrew Club founded companies and they all kept track of each other.
Similarly with Oracle and Larry Ellison. Ellison spent some time at two Chicago universities but his contacts and training were largely on the job.
It used to be that having Harvard on your resume did not mean much in tech since it was not considered a tech school. The feel of the valley changed when John Sculley took over Apple since he was not at all a tech guy. This is just based on my gut, but I saw more Harvard alums after Sculley then before Sculley.
So I looked up the top schools for tech CEOs. This is the ranking of schools with the most CEOs with first round of funding. There were a few surprises for me. 1. Stanford 2. UC Berkeley 3. U of Pennsylvania 4. Harvard 5. MIT 6. Cornell 7. U of Michigan 8. U of Texas 9. Carnagie Mellon 10. IIT
Stanford and Berkeley were not a surprise since I have worked at a bunch of companies founded by Stanford and Berkeley alumni. IIT and MIT were also not surprises.
One thing that skews the results is that a bunch of schools provide masters programs to already successful professionals - so it is not clear that they actually contributed to the success of the alumni.
I know many folks who have went on to leadership roles in SV without degrees. It does matter who you know, but that matters even with a degree!
Ever since the recession flooded the market with laid off grads.
Like the other comment pointed out, they are doing $60M/year in sales per store and have staff upwards of 50 people per store.
And in many EU countries its effectively a hard NO
No degree here. I took on work at a low salary for the first few years, viewing it as "paid education". Now working for Microsoft
Let's not move the bar of this discussion to "first job"; it's not a useful metric. Better to discuss position attained by some age
I feel like you're pulling the HN staple "anti anecdata" card when my point wasn't "you're wrong because I exist" & was instead "you're wrong because your metric says people who skip post secondary, collect a meagre salary initially, & eventually end up at FAANG by age 30 should've paid thousands of dollars to attend post secondary until their mid twenties to end up there instead."
I know a SWE at Google who is <20 and does not have a degree. So it certainly is possible, and it implies that you don't need 10+ years of experience to break into FAANG without a bachelor's.
Or invest in a prime developable area near a large metropolis.
Or look at the bank account and smile occasionally.
Class privilege comes with baggage. Better to focus on making the world a better place, starting with your own world -- which often keeps one from putting their nose up too high.
His brothers just enjoy what they do, so they still own the business.
Not everyone enjoys college. I'm one that would much rather learn on my own than through a classroom. I enjoy having learned the things I did in college and felt I needed the piece of paper (and am now working on a master's to change fields), but as far as I've seen, there's no such thing as a degree I would enjoy. Just work or books I would enjoy.
Great distinction to point out and I agree.
I didn't yet complete my Under Graduate course, because I failed in 3 subjects.
I'm being paid more than my colleagues who completed the course from same college.
If people want practical experience and physical work the organisers of these institutions should go to Switzerland, learn how the apprenticeship system works and bring it back to America so people can be set on a viable career path.
Part of the purpose of teaching philosophy is you get rigour from actually testing those ideas out in a place where people are going to scrutinise the ideas. That’s why philosophy exists, and history, and a whole load of other humanities subjects.
The bigger issue here is that employers have gravitated far too much towards the college degree as a signal device for a quality employee which effectively shuts out alternate forms of education. Employers need to be willing to hire people who are smart but don't have a college degree. If someone self-studied all the subjects on their own and it is clear they are on the same level as a college grad then they should not be excluded from the hiring process.
It is almost like we need some sort of "SAT" for various subjects. That way if someone is really smart then they can just take this SAT in whatever subject to evaluate their knowledge. We sort of have this already for certificates but it seems like employers don't place much value on them compared to a college degree. There are exceptions but they are mostly outliers IMO.
Corporations effectively outsource intelligence testing to colleges, as they have no other choice to obtain info about their future employees' abilities.
More and more people are becoming like me in this market and not overweighting degrees. I don't care about your formal education and I actively blind resume submissions for it through an assistant. I care about what you've done and what you're passionate about.
On the way to hiring 100 people pretty soon here and growth is solid. Leads to a lot of diversity of thought and background, which is a good thing.
After all, I'm a dropout nobody, too. Someone's gotta look out for us.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/25/silicon-valley-is-3rd...