Comment by thatfrenchguy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thatfrenchguy | Hacker News Reader

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> I think the idea that someone can get straight C's in highschool and get $50k a year to study art in college is not a good use of my tax dollars.

What if that person ends up being successful in that field ? Should we only have the kids of the rich do arts ? That seems to be what's going on in the US and you see the devastating cultural result.

> Additionally, I think students should have SOME Skin in the Game

You have skin in the game, because you need to feed yourself. The government paid for my studies, that doesn't mean I wasn't thinking "how will I have a roof over my head" afterwards.

> Stanford's dorms can cost $2.5k per month for a swanky broom closet. I'm not sure it makes sense to pay for that

Trust me, if they're focused on reducing costs, they won't cost 2.5k a month. French public (individual) dorms cost like 120e a month.

> Trust me, if they're focused on reducing costs, they won't cost 2.5k a month.

They don't cost 2.5k a month, and they aren't swanky broom closets. The average is ~1k, cheaper if you live with more people; this is below Palo Alto rent, mind you.

I believe the Stanford dorm experience is way better than that of most American institutions. For starters, every undergrad is basically guaranteed housing for the entirety of their college education, so no one is unwillingly ejected from university housing and forced to rent elsewhere (which is more expensive, as I already pointed out).

Not sure why gp decided to throw some random defamation at Stanford (might have been exaggerating to make a point, but it's not at all clear from the writing).

Disclosure: Stanford alum.

I’ve stayed in Stanford dorms, and they were pretty swanky (but then, so was pretty much every other dorm in the US I’ve seen)

The variance is huge among all the different dorms so there are relatively swanky ones and ones that are not so (most are in the latter category, depending what you perceive as swanky of course). But my rebuttal was more on the "broom closet" part.

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