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Comment by bgilroy26 | Hacker News Reader

I think we will look back on this period of American universities (between say the 1980s and whenever the NFL gets a basic minor league) as a great aberration. College sports were meant to be clubs of enthusiasts from the student body, not a parallel big business.

Maybe as an intermediate step, you could have schools that sponsor the teams and offer scholarships for when the players leave professional sports. That would be nice for the players involved because they would be a bit older and better able to take advantage of their studies.

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> I think we will look back on this period of American universities as a great aberration.

I hope so. Athletics are only the tip of the iceberg.

Tuition at universities like Harvard, Princeton, etc. runs around $45,000 a year. Even at public universities, it tends to be over $10,000 a year. This is tuition, mind you, not counting room and board. These figures are vastly higher than a generation ago, and are continuing to skyrocket. Needless to say, this is inflicting crippling debt on huge numbers of college students.

Meanwhile, universities are hiring fewer and fewer tenure-track professors; increasingly, the teaching is being done by people working under terrible job conditions. See, for example, this as an example:

https://pankisseskafka.com/2017/07/16/rate-my-jil-2018-this-...

I am an insider -- a college professor at an American university. The current system is thoroughly screwed. We need a big reset.

Tuition rates for Harvard and Princeton in particular are deceptive since if you earnestly cannot afford that tuition, they don't ask you to pay it. Those schools are often actually cheaper than public schools for people without much money.

Other expensive private-nonprofit schools may be another matter entirely. But those two are bad examples to use.

> Those schools are often actually cheaper than public schools for people without much money.

While this is true on paper, it's not always the case in practice. I was able to get multiple acceptance offers to Ivy League schools, and poor enough to have the sliding scale of tuition slide all the way to $0. But all of them had an estimated cost of attendance[1] so optimistic about ancillary expenses during the school year that it was infeasible to actually go to any of them. There were other implicit barriers to acceptance as a poor kid as well, but the way the sliding scale was implemented was the biggest.

I chose a state school instead. Despite a higher paper cost higher than the Ivy League schools offering free tuition, the total out of pocket cost for attendance of the state school worked out significantly lower.

[1] Federal loans and many scholarships won't pay out over the university's estimated cost of attendance. By zero'ing out tuition and room and board, that just leaves the "books and personal expenses" line item,

I'm a little surprised by your story. I was in a similar situation myself, except that I chose to go to an Ivy League school, and there were sufficiently many work-study options available to help pay for all my expenses.

For sure! You can see my replies to sibling comments, but those opportunities exist. I just was too naive at the time and without sufficient personal support to be able to understand that. And while some of the acceptance offers made reference to things such as work study, there was a presumption of understanding in many of them on how that stuff works. And I was a first generation college student without anyone to help me fill in that knowledge gap.

There were additional issues like the logistics and upfront costs of a cross-country move, as well as the timing of aid disbursements and expense needs. Which I neither had the savings nor the cashflow to confidently support, nor anyone to lean on temporarily for it. While there were plenty of unknowns for the state school, they were manageable enough for me to be competent in my ability to handle them and close enough to my personal support network if things went south.

Many schools do in fact have the ability to address such needs. I just didn't learn was a possibility until after the fact. For anyone else that happens to be in that situation, I'd strongly encourage doing what you did and taking the Ivy offer. There will be sufficient support to accomodate your circumstances. It'd just be nice if the schools themselves improved their offer letters or follow-up collateral to address the concerns/needs that are likely for those which qualify for a zero'd out tuition or whose application/FAFSA documents indicate are a first generation college student.

If you were accepted into multiple Ivies with full financial aid you were definitely eligible for work study and student loans.

Personally, I would recommend anyone in that situation to opt for the Ivy as it really does open doors later in life.

> ... and student loans

With so many students exiting college with crippling debt, I'm not sure this is still a sustainable way of paying your way. Work study can certainly help, but the pay of even a fairly skilled job will fall far, far short of the cost of tuition, room and board, textbooks, etc.

This thread is about paying for books and clothes when tuition and room and board are covered by grants.

> Personally, I would recommend anyone in that situation to opt for the Ivy as it really does open doors later in life.

For anyone that comes across this post: I fully agree. I was fortunate in the particular intersection of my skills being comparatively rare, and having a professor that took a personal liking to me and acted as a mentor (while opening a few doors on my behalf through his connections). While I've been successful myself, it's been through connections I've made post-school (other than the bootstrapping from that one professor). I can't imagine the possibilities that would have come with seeding that entire process throughout school.

> If you were accepted into multiple Ivies with full financial aid you were definitely eligible for work study and student loans.

You're not wrong, but that was non-obvious at the time. The student loans were a particularly sticking point, as the cost of attendance letter provided by the schools had optimistic line items for personal expenses (which include books and supplies), creating an artificially low limit on the ability to take out loans. And I wasn't familiar enough with the college experience, nor had access to anyone that was, to understand the potential for work study. Better onboarding collateral geared towards first generation college students would have easily clarified things and provided confidence around this, rather than leaving a gaping unknown on how I was going to make ends meet.

Ancillary expenses make college hard to attend, but that's not because the school is ripping you off, it's because life is expensive. The absolute cheapest housing in Cambridge, MA is in the middle of downtown on Harvard's campus.

I don't disagree. But the cost of attendance includes a line item for "personal expenses" (which includes books and all that stuff). For 2019-2020 academic year at Harvard, that line item is $4,193[1]. There's also a line item for "travel expenses", but when using their net price calculator with my circumstances when I went to school, that kept coming back as zero.

By zero'ing out tuition, fees, and room and board, that leaves $4,193 as the cap on demonstrable need, which federal loans and many scholarships will use as a max limit on cumulative aid. This is unrealistically optimistic, and serves to needlessly cap the potential ability to raise funds via merit scholarships or loans, shifting part of the cost burden to ongoing cashflow.

Which, I'll concede, isn't necessarily too hard due to the plethora of work-study and student jobs available. But I only knew that after the fact, and the prospect of getting stuck far away from home without the money to make ends meet and the knowledge that your family is too far away to help you get home and too poor to help financially is terrifying to a kid right out of high school.

I also learned, through the work that I did for the university I went to, that the cost of attendance isn't as black and white as it's made out to be either. Although universities may differ in policies, they can make accommodations in your individual cost of attendance letter if you can justify the deviations. But I only learned of that flexibility after experiencing the system, and it wasn't clear at the outset. So I didn't even realize that was a possibility when evaluating acceptance offers and aid packages.

[1] https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/how-aid-works

College football was bigger than pro football for a very long time, it wasn't until the 60's when pro football became more popular.

It has nearly always been the way it is now, big business.

72,000 capacity stadiums built in 1927 aren't built for school clubs to play in. Stadiums like this were built for schools like Michigan because the sport was big money.

I would not bet against the NFL. Still, the very short life of the XFL suggests to me that Americans want to see their minor league football with college branding.

College football is not a quality product. The kids are young, the vast majority aren’t going to even sniff a pro career, there are hundreds of teams to dilute all the talent and most of the games are blowouts. The entire business model is the personal connection with your school. There’s literally no other reason to watch.

> College football is not a quality product

The multi-billions of dollars spent on it begs to differ. Just because they aren't old (are 22 year olds really too young for athletics?) doesn't mean it is a bad product. Many consider it to be a much more exciting game opposed to the 7-3 games the NFL puts out.

I'd rather watch a 49-21 game than a 14-6 snoozefest.

This is really your personal opinion.

The vast majority of people don't watch football for "quality product". They watch for the fun of balls moving and people hitting and picking a tribe in a competition.

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