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Comment by GreenJelloShot | Hacker News Reader

The average annual out-of-state cost for a bachelor program in Computer Science is $41,992, with an estimated average four year degree total cost of $167,968.

You have to ask yourself what would be more effective: 4 years in college (spend $170k) or spend 4 years learning on your own (free), working on open source projects (free), and/or getting an entry level job (earn 120k or more)?

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I don't know what entry-level job for a dropout is going to pay 120k/year; my first full-time job as a dropout paid 35k/year (in 2011). Granted, this was Orlando, FL, not Silicon Valley, but even still I have a hard time believing that the average entry-level salary is that high.

Also, why the constraint of "out of state" tuition? In-state tuition for CUNY schools is ~$7,000/year. 4 X 7,000 = ~$28,000. Is that a lot of money? Sure, but it's less than my first year's salary as a dropout, even without your inflated numbers.

I agree with just about everything you said but you still have to ask yourself if 28,000 dollars a year is worth it. There's a lot of people coming out of school who just don't really know how to code, you can fumble your way to a CS degree but if you can't put any of that into practice then you wasted a lot of money.

I mean ideally before you entered school you should have had some type of idea about programming. I know many people who started writing code very early but even if that wasn't you you should have at least gave it a shot before you dedicated a major to it right?

Therein lies the problem, if you're intelligent enough to start learning on your own, at what point does the opportunity cost of college outweigh the benefit? If you don't have the initiative or desire to start on your own, then you probably won't make it very far in this field anyway because it requires constant learning and experimenting on your own.

I guess that's why so many companies look for "self-starters"

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