I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams | Hacker News Reader

I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams

slate.com

231 pointsjseliger446 comments

And here we have once again why the government shouldn't be subsidizing student loans and shouldn't exclude them from bankruptcy. We need to quit incentivizing sub-prime loans. Unlike the housing crash where the houses retained most of their value and could be sold later, you can't sell your degree to pay back the money.

If you're getting a necessary degree, it's very uncommon to default on your loan because you'll be in demand and getting a decent wage. Banks understand this fact and will do the math to give a loan anyway.

Some of my kids seem like they enjoy academics, but others do not. I'll be pushing the latter toward trade school. Average IBEW (electrical union) pay is about $20/hr for an apprentice and $33 for a journeyman. $40,000 to $66,000 with ZERO DEBT right out the gate is nothing to ignore (and that pay can easily double -- especially in your younger years -- if you're willing to travel and put in those extra hours). It sure beats minimum wage at a crappy service job.

Additionally student loans should be something you can refinance. When I took out loans in the early 90s, interest rates on subsidized Stafford loans were about 8%. As interest rates dropped during the course of my education, I was locked into that interest rate and the only way to get a lower rate on those high interest early loans was to consolidate loans. Loan consolidation doesn’t get you a market rate new interest rate instead you get the average of the 2 interest rates.

My student loans have auto re-financed to lower interest rates with no action on my part. But I got them in the 00's, maybe the rules changed.

Military is also a good option to college, especially if your specialty is a skilled trade. My brother did this straight out of high school. Spent a few years overseas and then eventually changed his specialty to biomedical equipment repair. When he left the service he made 60k/year and after 5 years he is at 125k/year. Also when you are in the service, you are getting paid and if you are overseas, all your bills are paid too.

He never had any student loans ever or school expenses. When he was young he just saved most of his money....most of which has doubled or tripled in value due to how good the stock market has been.

Yeah, but you're gambling that you will survive and that you will survive intact. A life full of PTSD or without legs or arms or eyes isn't worth a million a year, let alone $60 to $125k. Then there's the very real possibility of dying. Not to mention the high risk of suicide afterwards.

Given those risks, I can't see how the military is a good option.

Extremely low probability of any of those happening.

Besides, military service changes you. It gives you perspective you will never get anywhere else.

Maybe the percentage is low but it's still plenty high to be a deterrent and much, much higher than at any educational institution and most jobs.

You bring up another excellent reason to avoid military service. I'm sure there are plenty more.

Extremely high probability compared to any other developed nation. The US fights foreign wars with alarming regularity, We are currently fighting several.

That’s because other developed nations barely have militaries. Of those who actually do and deploy and do the things we do the numbers are probably about the same - very low.

I have 3 nephews who served in the military.

2 have PTSD, one severe. The one with severe PTSD also got to spend 6 months in a hospital after being shot out of the air in a conflict that we are theoretically not involved in.

Given their other options, military service might have been a good thing. But the odds of PTSD or injury are much, much higher than I would like.

I served in the military for twenty three years.

My sample size is thousands of times yours.

The odds are very low.

> The odds are very low.

The odds are very high for post-9/11 veterans (and higher the more of their period of service is post-9/11 within that group), who are more likely to have been deployed and seen combat than veterans of earlier eras (both because of optempo and organizational changes that have increased the teeth to tail ratio of uniformed services as support functions have been moved to contracted support.)

There are ample actual studies of this, we don't need to rely on the “sample size” of competing anecdotal reports.

No, they’re not.

I retired last year.

I deployed to Afghanistan multiple times.

I’m literally someone who experienced the life you’re trying to tell me about. Your studies are mostly bullshit written to drive an agenda.

> Your studies are mostly bullshit written to drive an agenda.

It could be that that's true of of a variety of scientific studies from diverse sources with no reason to have common agenda, or it could be that that's just true of your unsubstantiated pseudonymous anecdotal ranting in an internet discussion board.

Cite the studies and I'll be glad to explain to you why they don't say what you believe they do, or why their methodology is laughably incorrect.

Again, btdt. I don't need a think tank to write a paper to tell me how the military works.

This discussion interested me enough to do some casual Googling. The US military's statistics from 2011 say that only 15% of service members are actually involved in combat roles; slightly over 1 in 7. See figure 2 and figure 4 here: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Improving-the-DoD's-To.... And, of course, not every service member who is in a combat role gets PTSD or injuries.

If you have current tooth-to-tail estimates, they'd be interesting to see.

It's hard to find any simple, clear, current figures, but this has a historical study for deployed units through Iraq 2005 (which clearly isn't exactly what we want), and it shows (in the counts that don't include contractors for Iraq 2005, so the ones that are actually addressing uniformed personnel and using the same standards as earlier figures) the highest tooth to tail ratio since WWII, as part of a late (relative to the whole period of study) reversal of what had for most of the post-WWII period been a trend of decreasing the tooth-to-tail ratio.

https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/combat-studies-ins...

You do not have to be in a combat role to see combat, get PTSD, or get injured.

My nephews serve as examples. Their non-combat roles were heavy construction, setting up communication networks, and airplane mechanic. However all three actually saw combat. 2 wound up with PTSD. And one wound up seriously injured when the plane that was delivering him to a secret mission got shot down en route.

In fact according to some estimates, the prevalence of PTSD among veterans of the Iraq war exceeds the fraction who were supposedly in combat roles.

Anybody can "some estimate" anything. My guess is that they're using figures from the massive amount of fraudulent PTSD claims submitted to the VA.

PTSD is the easiest diagnosis to get through the VA, and thus it is rife with fraud. As a result, it is quite difficult to get anything approaching accurate or useful numbers for it.

Not everyone will develop PTSD. Of the ones that do, not all who develop it recognize it immediately. Of those, even fewer will seek treatment. Combat is not the only way to develop it. Some might only develop it after ruminating on events later on, or failing to adjust to civilian life. What's certain is that not treating PTSD can cause much bigger and more dangerous problems. And unless you're a doctor, I wouldn't throw 'fraud' around so easily.

It sounds like you're one of the ideal ones for your line of work, though; brains that are less susceptible to stress damage are rare. It's why not everyone is fit to become a police officer or give talks in front of big crowds. Others have an adrenaline sensitivity or a panic groove etched so deeply in their brains that they'll forget their names if you talk to them when they don't expect it.

I'm also assuming you entered the military voluntarily. There's a predisposition for certain brains to take on and thrive in certain careers. As a DWB friend of mine put it about the career mercs he treated, "They aren't psychopaths, just real mean sons of bitches."

You don't have to like people who aren't built as tough as you, but that doesn't mean they're faking.

I’m well acquainted with how ptsd works.

The vast majority of the people in the military are never exposed to anything at all. They do a job and they get paid for it. They’re no more likely to develop ptsd than the local grocer, plumber or electrician. Many of them are exactly a grocer, plumber, or electrician with a military ID card. They’re not “Mercs” any more than the local grocer...

Everyone on active duty today entered voluntarily as well.

I'm still waiting to see the studies that the odds are "very high" that us veterans have PTSD. Not holding my breath here, but you've made the claim based on your anecdotes and a claim that "ample actual studies exist", so I'd like to see it.

joining the military != fighting in a combat role

There's lots of regular work, maintenance, staffing some random base overseas etc

Mortality rates in the military are actually lower than in the civilian world: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22694586

> Crude mortality rates are lower among U.S. military members than their civilian counterparts; service members must be healthy when they enter service and deaths from illnesses are relatively infrequent.

Suicide rates for veterans is on the high end, but comparable to other highly physical professions. Adjusted for age and gender, the suicide rate among veterans is 50% higher than for the population as a whole: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/26/suicide-rate.... That's on the high end, but not "high" in absolute terms: https://www.registerednursing.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11.... (Scroll down to the chart showing suicide rates by profession for men versus women.) At 40-45 per 100,000, male veterans are about as likely to commit suicide as those in the arts and entertainment and installation/maintenance fields, and less likely than those in construction/resource extraction.

It's not mortality you should worry about, but life altering injury.

My stepdad, my next door neighbor, and 3 of my friends all have some kind of long term chronic injury caused by military service.

In fact I only know 1 guy well who's ex military who doesn't have at least a moderately severe problem related to his service.

Military service is either a noble sacrifice, or it's a good job. It can't be both simultaneously.

The worrying thing about those rates for veterans is that the spike is in younger people, which is not the normal pattern.

There may be a "cohort" effect. See this tweet for an example of this happening in the UK: https://twitter.com/ProfLAppleby/status/1161940914308300801?...

If this is happening it's potentially really worrying, because risk usually increases with age. So we'd see an increase in rates of death as this high risk group ages into a higher risk group.

A very small percentage of people in the military ever see combat, and of those an even smaller percentage get hurt. Most jobs in the military are industrial type jobs, so all of those normal dangers do come along. Now, if someone really does want to see combat I'm sure they can maneuver in such a way to make it happen.

The GI bill paying for college is a big benefit of service, but staying in as an officer can also be a great living.

I get the overall sentiment because I am born well-enough-off and I agree that you are basically signing away your health or even life (after all, no regular mechanic will have to fix a car in a shootout).

OTOH, lots of people don't have my fortunate background and loving but poor parents can only do so much. Housing and food being taken care of and a paycheck on top is a very good incentive if the other choice is to be a "burden" on your family for another few years...

Not gambling health or life is only possible in a very privileged setting. Those not in it might actually be making a very wise choice.

Wouldn't building a society where people don't have to make such critical choices out of desperation be the best way to tackle this problem?

Yes, but until this is accomplished, military service is a viable options for a lot of people.

I can second this. Most branches let you select a job (MOS/whatever the other branches call it) that have real work uses, and you can also change your job if you'd like (with some caveats of course). I certainly didn't enjoy many moments of my military career, but I value the things I learned and the opportunities it opened up for me.

Its certainly not for everyone, but with National Guard/Reserve options it's a pretty sweet deal that the vast majority of people could certainly handle.

The danger is the military can legally lie to you with promises of what you'll be doing when you enter, and in times of personnel shortfalls that might be true.

But they can also make you cannon fodder or a deck swabber.

And ask the reservists about military promises from Iraq. Oh you're in the National Guard? Yeah we're deploying you to a foreign country for years on end.

And once you're in the military, you can be summoned for duty if they need you.

I struggled with college and don't know if I'll be returning... I made it over a third of the way to a CS degree but had to take a break from school.

I got a job while in college as a programmer - and work full time making around the 50k range. I feel that I self taught myself the necessary technical skills for my job, and that the biggest places for self improvement aren't acedimic but business/relationship related.

I have less then 5k in school debt left, and I already have the job I wanted, my only fear is when I eventually look for a new job, how well they'll consider me without a degree. I strongly feel my technical skills are at least up to par, meanwhile in school I watched classmates copy answers off YouTube...

1) look into transferring your credit while it's still good (it can expire) to some place with a fairly cheap online CS program. Most degree programs, including most CS degree programs, are the "do the work, get the degree sort", not the (good) kind that'll run you ragged trying to do 20 hours of math and algo homework a week or whatever, so you can knock them out about the same speed as normal as long as you use the Summer sessions (you'll still have tons of weeks a year without any classes). No one who isn't already (more or less) filtering out non-top-tier school graduates cares where you got your degree or how rigorous the program was, unless the interviewer happened to go there—they aren't getting many candidates from top-tier schools, even at pay much higher than $50k, so they can't be that picky. Just sit down and force yourself to do whatever school work you have for the day before doing anything else, after work. Most days it likely won't really be that much. Every now and then you'll have a 3-hour night of school stuff.

2) make sure the program you're transferring to accepts a bunch of CLEP tests for credit and then pass those for anything you haven't already taken that qualifies—a book, a couple weekends of hard study, and a (relatively) cheap test beats paying for a class and taking all that time. These will mostly be 100-level courses, including and especially "gen ed" classes. Maybe you don't have any of those left, but if you do, CLEP right the hell out of them.

If you can get it cheap enough IMO it's definitely worth some money and some effort not to have questions about why you didn't go to or finish college, in interviews. If nothing else the confidence not having that stuff come up gives you frees you to ask for higher salaries. One 20k bump (not a crazy number for a jump with one job move, if you're at 50k, even if you're in like a 3rd- or 4th-rate city for tech) that otherwise would have taken a couple years longer to achieve, and that degree's a hell of a long way toward paying for itself. You could probably have one in under 3 years, maybe around 2, without taking on too much stress.

[EDIT] oh and ask your employer to chip in for tuition. Can't hurt to ask.

I wouldn't worry too much about the degree in CS if you're already in the industry. Unless you want to do something very specific, your work experience will trump your academic experience in nearly every case. I don't have a degree and have been able to move companies a number of times, as have my other engineer friends without any sort of degree.

Unless you want to do some serious crypto research or something like that, more schooling probably isn't required. You'd be better served getting a CISSP or something.

I was going to school for physics and do plan to go back because I want to be in that field doing research eventually. If you want to do something similar, then school might be worthwhile.

If you have enough work experience you can get onto a distance education Master’s from a UK university without a Bachelor’s.

For example

https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/courses/msc-softwar...

Oxford M.Sc. Software Engineering

A typical applicant will have at least two years' experience in a professional environment, and an undergraduate degree in a related subject. However, more extensive experience may compensate for a lack of formal qualifications, and a strong, immediately-relevant qualification may compensate for a lack of professional experience.

There are others but that’s the best I know of for Software Engineering without a Bachelor’s.

This.

Pushing college the way we do helps to stigmatize the trades. Why don’t we push the trades? We give the impression they are “lesser”.

I have a feeling that trades are paying well because a generation of pushing people away from trades has created a shortage. Now that people are rediscovering this career path and just do trades is becoming (and in some circles has become) the new de facto advice, the generation who all go to trades will have the same issues as the generation who all went to college: stagnating wages, insufficient opportunities, increasing difficulty of getting your foot in the door, etc.

Trades aren't easier to get in and better paid because of their inherent characteristics. The supply and demand in the market has made them so. The new generation of advice is going to change the supply side. I am not sure if the advice is going to be valid for the rest of a young person's career should they choose this path. We have already done this once before with just go to college.

The people who work in the trades are pushing their children away from the trades. (An example is the recent HN post on Chinese restaurants closing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21871240) The hours can be long, the manual labor is hard, and the conditions are often harsh.

I may live in a bubble in this scenario growing up with parents and their friends that did painting/contracting/electrical/plumbing/flooring/etc. but I don't ever hear them as stigmatized. I think a lot of people have a real solid view of these jobs; Physically demanding with low top end rewards.

Few people go into those jobs or unions and make 200k a year. People def make a livable wage, but it's very demanding work physically. I have a friends that do flooring and roofing and they absolutely pay the bills but they are hurting and only just approaching 30. They have months where they have tons of work, and months where they have no work at all.

So while these jobs beat entry level roles and service jobs paying 15 an hour if you're luck, they don't hold the same value as being a lawyer or a doctor or like many of us here, an engineer. My back hurts because I have bad posture and sit all day, not because I was lifting hundreds of pounds of shit all day. And my salary is higher than my buddy that is high up in his union stopping OSHA violations.

Support trades, they are valuable and important. But I don't think we should praise them as the best path to securing your future. They are jobs just like any other with their own risks and rewards.

Most of us are not actual engineers (registered, and with a seal). We are software developers.

Which makes my point even more. It's even easier to get these jobs when you don't need years and years of school. And the salaries and perks will outpace what you get by getting into trades.

Not trying to devalue trades, they are great ways to get into a skilled job, but we can't pretend that they are silver bullets to achieving a happy, successful life.

I will contend that this is not the core problem, but an auxiliary one forced by the states themselves. The primary source of funding for universities is the state, which makes sense because universities rely on local infrastructure and respond to local needs. Depending on the size of the university, they can essentially be a small city within a city. At the same time, the amount of money invested in universities has dropped dramatically:

https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/a-lost-de...

In order to stay solvent as institutions, the universities raise tuition, which is then enabled by student loans. My point isn't that student loans are blameless. They certainly are. In addition, there's a lot of blame that can be levied at the universities themselves for wasteful spending, but this itself is complicated due to donations being contingent on particular projects or buildings and competition between the universities to attract students who often choose a school based on how awesome the quad is. However, at its core, if a state like Arizona reduces its per student spending by over 50%, how is university supposed to stay solvent without dramatically raising tuition?

None of this helps the family in the article. I think they did the right thing. I wish more people would hold the states accountable rather than first blaming students loans.

State institutions are only part of the picture and not the worst part. This might explain why they've raised their tuitions but it doesn't explain why private institutions have done so even more aggressively. It's definitely the easy, guaranteed money from student loans.

Yes and no. Higher public tuition costs allow private entities to raise their tuition as well. While it depends on the college, I contend that most private colleges are not competing on cost. Schools like Harvard and Duke use price as a way to convey prestige, so they need to remain higher priced than their public counterparts. Schools like University of Phoenix compete on convenience, but if everyone else is charging higher tuition, then they can justify even higher tuition costs as well since everyone else is doing it and this new price is the de facto standard.

Now, I agree that the Feds need to cut back on loans in order to put pressure on the states to reduce their tuition costs. Essentially, the student loan system allows the states to receive free federal money by using students as the vessel of that transaction. I find that morally wrong. At the same time, there are a huge number of students who need some kind of loan to pay for college. I believe it to also be morally wrong to create a system where only those of means can enjoy public education. If the states adequately funded their universities, the universities held their tuition costs down, and either the state or the feds provided loans, then this wouldn't be an issue. However, this requires all of these institutions to agree on the principles of access to education and this isn't happening.

I don't know how to fix this. If the Feds eliminated their loan and grant programs, I personally believe that tuition costs would go down or stabilize because a large-section of the population would not be able to afford the current prices, so the universities would be forced to reduce tuition. This would benefit middle class families who have saved for education. I also believe this would prevent low income families from attending college and I'm not fine with this prospect.

I think this trade school obsession is foolish. Everyone cargo-cults it as "pragmatic" without actually analyzing what the jobs entail and what you can actually expect to make.

Statistically, you still earn way more with a degree than without.

You EARN that pay in the trades, and being an electrician is dangerous. The work is hard on your body. A lot of electricians end up on disability.

I wasn't very academic growing up. But then I grew up, and now I am a pretty successful computer programmer making a lot more than that, for way better perks and less dangerous, damaging work.

You can make that kind of money as a manager at Walmart and you do not run the risk of getting your arm fried off or falling off a telephone pole.

And where does a few years as an electrician leave you if you don't end up liking the career? "Sorry son, the internet told me trades were a good idea. Maybe go back to school now that you are an adult with a family?" Part of the reason you go to school as a young person is that you do not have a family to feed or a house to pay off.

> Part of the reason you go to school as a young person is that you do not have a family to feed or a house to pay off.

If you go to art school as a young person, you won't have the problem of paying off a house because you won't have a job that qualifies you for a mortgage.

My wife went to art school and is (somewhat embarrassing to me) supporting our family with her job at Amazon while I (a CS PhD) am looking for work. We even qualify for a mortgage with her income.

(Lesson: UX designers are as important as programmers)

That’s surprising to me. Why is it so hard to find a job with your CS PhD? Are you trying to get a specific research-oriented job?

There aren’t a lot of PL positions open right now, and I didn’t network as much as I should before. Along with the standard problems in applying for jobs (high stakes leetcode, ghosting after multiple successful rounds of interviewing, etc...), that I can’t just apply to a lot of positions means that it takes a bit longer than I would like.

I also have the luxury of waiting for a better opportunity rather than just taking the first one that matches.

A B.A., even in fine art, still opens up a ton of okay-paying jobs. Jobs like paralegals, retail managers, and HR often require a bachelors degree but don’t care what that degree was in.

But you can get a generic degree in English or business admin at a community college and have a fine career as a paralegal. Don’t see why you need to go to an expensive art school.

Bachelors and associates degrees aren’t equivalent. Whenever I’ve seen a job posting asking for a degree, they explicitly ask for a 4 year degree.

Agreed, I would never recommend someone go to art school unless they are absurdly talented ( and at that point: The school would probably give you a scholarship. )

Factoring in tuition costs, plumbers earn almost the same lifetime income as doctors: https://www.high-profile.com/plumber-vs-doctor-who-brings-in...

And it's generally not a life threatening career.

That's complete bullshit. I've known plenty of plumbers, I've never met one who had almost $1 million saved up by 33--which is the example they are using.

Sure some small percentage of plumbers might make $90k after 5 years and manage to seriously save. But that's not anywhere close to normal.

Also even with the cherry picked example of a union plumber who is unbelievably disciplined with respect to saving. And a doctor who does an optional fellowship.

The doctor still comes out WAY ahead over their lifetime.

I'd guess this might have some confusion of average and median one way or the other.

Example: In 2010 the median lawyer made 78k a year while the average made 120k. Note the 50% difference.

Plumber != Plumbing business owner.

That’s the distinction most people gloss over.

So, I assume you pushed your kids to skip medical school and enroll in plumbing classes instead right? How did it go? Are they in the one percent now?

Is this correlation or causation though?

Are young people who get through a degree course then super focused on getting as much money as they can because they have all this debt?

As opposed to people who don't have mountains of student debt, and can then afford to take lower-paying, better-for-their-life jobs?

Huge debt is really stressful, and hard on mental health. I don't know the comparative suicide rates of electricians and art grads, but I'd suspect art school is effectively worse for your health than a trade.

People generally have two or even three careers now. Migrating from electrician to manager is about as easy as migrating from software developer to manager.

>As opposed to people who don't have mountains of student debt, and can then afford to take lower-paying, better-for-their-life jobs

With income based repayment, you pay 10% of your disposable income (income over 1.5x the poverty rate) , so this isn't really much of an issue.

To maintain your debt, yes. But to clear it, and finally be free of it, you need to earn a lot of money. That is bound to focus the mind somewhat.

Or wait 20 years until it's cancelled. People regularly take out 30 year home loans much larger than the average student loan debt without debilitating psychiatric problems.

This isn't comparable in the least, since there's no equity built up over the course of paying off student debt.

Most people are never going to be able to access the equity unless they retire and downsize.

And people end up in situations where they can't make payments and have to walk away and take the credit hit all the time.

Worrying about the theoretical amount you owe instead of the actual amount you have to pay is just dumb.

There is also another aspect to the correlation-causation argument. The kids in college are presumably the smart ones in the cohort. We expect them to have much better outcomes than the rest based on intelligence even without getting a degree.

Does intelligence correlate to either education or wealth? I didn't think it did...

Intelligence strongly correlated with education (~0.5), and adult intelligence is mostly determined by genetics.

https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/39/5/1362/802787

The correlation between intelligence and income also substantial, but seemingly not quite as strong. The correlation between intelligence and wealth is weaker still.

https://www.bcaresearch.com/images/Peter_PPT_presentation%20... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

interesting, thanks for the info. I've met some complete idiots with PhD's, some utter morons with huge incomes, and some geniuses who didn't complete high school. But I guess that's not the normal perception.

It correlates strongly with education, reasonably well with income, and only little with wealth.

Conscientiousness is a huge factor too, but almost all of a person's attributes that would increase their earning potential also increase their chances of getting into college.

> Statistically, you still earn way more with a degree than without.

I would need to see better information on this. I would think a lot of people without a degree don't do much of anything at all and bring the average way down. It would be better to see what the average is for people who complete a trade school program vs the average of people earning a degree.

earning is a misleading figure anyway, a lot of these high paying jobs for graduates are in big cities where the cost of living offsets the higher income

The other issue is the health toll many of the trade jobs have. See what 40 years of running cable on your hands and knees as an electrician will do to you vs a cushy desk job.

Yep, exactly.

I went down this "trades are great!" rabbit hole a while ago because I had a cousin who had a friend telling him: "You can be making 6 figures in 5 years as an electrician!" I was surprised when I found out his buddy didn't have a bridge to sell him as well.

Your career is not just about money earned. It is about the lifestyle. It is about your physical health over a long period of time. It is about your chance for advancement. It is about what you are going to be doing day-to-day.

yeah because the average dev guy can run marathons, right?

Working as a dev doesn't inherently prevent one from being healthy and active enough to be able to run a marathon, just gotta spend some time being active in your spare time. But killed knees and back due to a job in trades certainly will prevent you from running a marathon, no matter what you do with your free time.

Sitting in a chair all day is horrible for people though. (To say nothing of what it does for your attitude and personality).

You can easily mitigate that by making adjustments to your workplace (adjustable sitting/standing desk), as well as by avoiding spending a lot of time in a chair and being active outside of work. With trades, you cannot really do anything outside of work to successfully mitigate the damage done to your body, unfortunately.

A lot of what I've seen is that people in the trades will encourage their kids to go for the desk jobs because the trades are hard on your body and dangerous to boot.

It always seemed like the cargo culting around trade school doesn't come from it as a career option but rather because it comes from a bias against traditional colleges. In reality what we should be doing is making both the trades and college free so that students have their choice of career and education rather than trying to pigeonhole them down one path because education has transformed from a societal good to one purely for work.

> Statistically, you still earn way more with a degree than without.

This is becoming less and less true for lots of cohorts. I suspect it will stop correlating for everyone soon.

From a few days ago: "Is College Still Worth It? The New Calculus of Falling Returns" by Center for Household Financial Stability, St Louis Fed

https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/files/pdfs/hfs/is-college...

> The college wealth premium is at a historic low; among other races and ethnicities, it is statistically indistinguishable from zero

> Our results suggest that college & post-grad education may be failing some recent graduates as a financial investment."

I went to a 4-year college, but earned almost all of my money from self-taught programming and design skills.

It's hard to justify the ROI on college.

At $25k/year for a low-tier college, you'll spend $100k (if you don't need loans). If you take that $100k and put it in the market (avg. 7% annual returns) with 0 contributions for 45 years, you could spend every penny you make and retire at 63 with $2.1M.

At more expensive colleges ($50k/yr+) the math seems less and less in your favor.

Low tier college should be about $10k a year and that's assumimg you don't do 2 years a community college.

You shouldn't live on campus if you're price sensitive. And you cant include room and board in your calculations because you'd need that anyway.

7% annual returns are also misleading because it ignores inflation. Edit--I've since learned that 7% average already adjusts for inflation.

7% is adjusted for inflation. It's about 10% without: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what-average...

> 7% annual returns are also misleading because it ignores inflation.

"One of the major problems for an investor hoping to regularly recreate that 10% average return is inflation. Adjusted for inflation, the historical average annual return is only around 7%."

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what-average...

It doesn't have to be conflated to low tier, state schools are around there as well and cheaper with aid or scholarship. CSU schools are typically pretty cheap considering the areas they are in.

> self-taught programming and design skills.

This is essentially my story too, but IMHE, it hasn't been a realistic option for the people I have known who "don't like academics," and consequently struggled or opted out of the system.

(Fwiw, I couldn't stand academics. However, through dint of self study, it didn't prevent me from graduating.)

There's many viable routes that don't have to be academic. I hate the idea of universities being pushed down everyone's throat. They're higher education institutions and should be for people actually interested in academics and possibly/likely research.

Half of the 'degrees' we have now are not academic, and half of these universities shouldn't even exist. I think all routes are fine. Everyone has different interests and learns differently. Trade school should be a prestigious route in its own right and they should be built up as such, rather than trying to chuck everyone into university regardless of whether it's the correct path for them. There shouldn't be a 'university' culture.

From my high school I can think of less than 10% of people that were honestly interested in/good at academics (of any type, science or arts/humanities) that should've carried on to university. In reality, it was pushed down and over 60% went. Most of them just spent their time partying.

And on the same note, schools should be better. It's sad that some people don't get to find their love in academics until college. It isn't necessarily always late blooming imo, it's that public pre-college education often sucks.

That may be the case, but I'd still wager that, for the majority, self-study isn't a viable route - particularly in technology.

(And, IMHO, the many alternatives to academia aren't nearly the rosey picture you purport, particularly for people who hope to be sure of employment in a decade or two. It's clear that, while many will still be here, many won't.)

Self-study isn't what I mean. Nor am I referring to present alternatives to academia. I'm saying the higher education system is broken and this is something governments need to fix (and stop pushing people into university specifically, and accrediting so many that are worthless) and society needs to change in.

There should absolutely be institutions for education or trade-work post high school. These should not necessarily be universities and should still be aimed at all kinds of individuals, but talented individuals that are not good at and have no interest in academics.

Currently those institutions are often not widely respected. Colleges have become the norm post-18. That shouldn't be the case.

45 years from now, $2.1M adjusted for inflation (3%) is $533K. A lot of these compound interest calculators don't show you the values adjusted for inflation. It sounds great when you get 21x your investment. 5x doesn't sound as great, but it's more realistic.

The 7% figure they gave is already adjusted for inflation.

Only if you think you're getting 7% returns after inflation, which statistically is highly unlikely.

$2.1M is literally $100k compounded at 7% over 45 years.

The S&P typically returns 10% YoY. 7% per year is the historical average adjusted for inflation: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what-average...

You can't perfectly time your retirement to match the S&P 500 average. That's the reason your portfolio shifts to bonds as you get older. It's the reason everyone quotes 7 & 8% as reasonable long-term returns for your retirement portfolio.

Right, but if for each of the past 100 years you tracked people who put money in the stock market and held it for 45 years and averaged each of their returns you'd get a 7% YoY return after adjusting for inflation.

Some would end up lower but some would end up higher.

Nothing is guaranteed, but neither is a job.

What if you don't plan to start your life at 63?

I'm not planning for retirement. 63 is a long way off. There's a lot of life between now and then, indeed the majority of my life is between now and then.

These kinds of "responsible financial actions" are a bit silly imho. Invest in yourself now, and spend your time well now. College pays for itself, if you spent $100k on a decent degree I guarantee you'll earn that amount ten times over in any decent career. Aside from that, it's an experience, and that's worth some money in itself.

The difficulty is in landing in a decent career out of college. People have this fantasy that all you have to do is get X degree and go apply at X Y and Z corporation to land a job getting paid 6 figures for the rest of your life. And that's probably true if your X is from an Ivy League school or a massive state school with hyper-competitive admission to the program. And what you're paying for at that point is access to the elite so that you can hopefully ride their coattails into a good job.

If you end up going to a 2nd or 3rd tier school it's basically a wash whether you end up anywhere good. And it's even worse if you don't get X degree, but instead have a degree that doesn't make it through the word filters. And you can't fuck anything up or make any mistakes in your entire academic career. You have to network aggressively. Many of my cohort ended up working as electricians, and one of them manages the line at a brewery. College was pretty useless for nearly all of us, and our lives probably would have been improved by not getting the degree, because at least that way we wouldn't be under the tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

We were mostly mediocre. But we were smart and we knew how to figure things out. That doesn't really matter to most employers, who just want you to know a specific field right out of the gate so they don't have to bother training you.

I lucked out, by the way. I managed to find a job in 2009 clerking in a warehouse at a technology sales company, and it was only because I knew someone who worked there as a service technician. His moving up created openings that I would be able to use to move into increasingly technical roles. And after 4 years there I was making about $44,000/yr., doubling my starting salary as a clerk. The real benefit for me was networking with my current boss. Because if I hadn't met him then I'd probably still be working long hours for little pay.

So I would strongly urge anyone who isn't in the top 10% to strongly reconsider taking your advice. $100,000 is a huge amount of money and would have been a crippling amount of debt for me. As it was, the $20,000 I graduated with after working two and sometimes three jobs was hard to cope with until I lucked out.

I think my comment took it as a given that if you're spending $100k you'll use every single real opportunity you can get in college and make the most out of your $100k.

There's plenty of people that 'made it' from a local not-so-competitive state school. America remains the land of opportunity. But, unless you go to an Ivy or your parents are rich, you shouldn't expect it to come to you.

You can do things in America that you simply cannot in Europe. You mentioned a few way of doing college right in your own response. Wouldn't the correct response be to use your time in college wisely and not slack or "just make it through" but to make the most of it, rather than to skip college altogether just because it's going to be harder than having your life handed to you on a platter if you went to an Ivy?

----

2nd point I'd make is if you're in Europe student debt doesn't matter.

Tuition is almost always free/cheap, government pays for tuition and living for your time as a student, and gives very favourable terms to repay (e.g. in the UK you don't pay anything if you earn under £25k/yr, then you pay 7% of amount earned above that, debt is wiped clean after 30 yrs if any remains). It doesn't show up on your credit record or affect mortgages etc.

I'd describe America more as a country that rewards the ambitious (with perhaps some drops of luck) and the rich. If you're neither then the system is made to entrap you. Europe is easily better for general life, but it isn't great for ambitious people.

Not planning for retirement in that you’re not even putting funds into a 401k or other retirement account? I get it if you’re strapped for cash but it sounds like you have the funds to save.

This isn’t clever, it’s irresponsible especially given that just putting a little money away now literally pays dividends later.

I don't mean not putting in a 401k. The comment I was replying to was implying throwing $100k into a savings account is a good idea because you'll have a couple million when you're 63.

I do not advocate throwing $100k into savings for retirement at 18.

There's a difference between reasonable financial responsibility (401k, match pension contributions w/ employer, etc) and spending all your young years worrying about being prepared for retirement.

Enjoy the life you have. Be financially responsible, but don't over-do it, is what I'm trying to say.

Go to college. Get an engineering or other high paying job. Save and invest. You'll have a couple of million by early 40's, maybe late 30's if you're lucky.

Engineering is one of the few fields where this is true. For the vast majority of college degrees this is not true.

Ah great, I agree, there is a balance to strike

I really don't understand what you're talking about. The OP is saying that you wouldn't need to care about retirement at all if you invest instead of going to college, and if you can teach yourself a valuable skill like programming, you could likely get most of the benefits of going to college.

The question is, will a degree give you a better return than putting the money in the market? Maybe a degree would get you a better job, but you get a later start.

Students just aren't taught to figure this sort of stuff out before going to college and getting into debt. College just isn't the right fit for many people and it often just puts them behind.

Where do they get that 100K to invest from? Most people won't have rich parents to give them the 100K to invest. This means you have to get a job and save up. With college, you have student loans.

For most people, if you go to college, you can get to 2M a lot faster than you can by investing 100K and waiting around for 40+ years.

> I went to a 4-year college, but earned almost all of my money from self-taught programming and design skills.

College has other benefits like signalling and networking though.

Eh, unless you're going to Stanford, Duke, or an Ivy League (or maybe USC or $REGIONALLY_RENOWNED_SCHOOL), the networking is definitely not worth the price tag.

What you've written is largely hogwash.

Most fields are not so competitive that you need a degree from an A-list school simply to get your foot into the door.

But you will need to get your foot into the door. Several or perhaps many doors throughout your career. Your network, even if it is not a blue-chip list of Ivy League studs and studettes, can help greatly. Particularly with your first position.

I went to a rather unprestiguous school thousands of miles away from Silicon Valley and the network I established before graduation has directly and indirectly resulted in a lot of work for me over the years.

Anecdotal, sure, but I've heard enough similar stories to be sure that this is a commonplace experience. Not that I need to prove anything. The burden of proof rests with anybody who makes a statement like yours.

Even if the networking one does at $SOME_UNIMPRESSIVE_SCHOOL results in only a few thousand dollars per year over what one would have earned sans networking, over the course of one's working life that can easily equal the cost of a college education.

I went to a public university and the price tag was rather reasonable compared to the typical 200k+ of a private school.

They touted the network but I didn't get any meaningful business connections out of it.

1 year of working in Silicon Valley got me dozens of quality connections that turned into meaningful long-term projects.

Personally, I think learning a trade should be an option in high school. A trade is better than a high school diploma both in pay and practical usefulness, whereas "college prep" is almost always useless. If you learn a trade and dislike it, you should have as much time as possible to pivot to something else.

I think high schoolers should have two choices:

- Associates Degree track at a local university - apprenticeship at a local trade organization

The AA/AS by itself isn't particularly useful (a little better than a diploma though), but it gives you an introduction into college life. A trade by itself isn't particularly useful (need years of practice to master it), but it's a practical introduction to what's available without a college degree. Our current approach of teaching to standardized tests seems like the worse option since it's neither practical (college doesn't really work like the tests) nor in demand (your employer doesn't care about your standardized test scores).

Our whole education system is out of whack, and just making it free isn't going to fix it. We need more paths to success, and we currently only have one that's pushed by our education system: STEM degrees.

Sounds a bit like what we have in Norway where you have (roughly) three choices for your 11 to 13 free years in school (1 - 10 is mandatory and while you can choose Montessori and a couple of other options they all share the same subjects):

- Vocational: 2 or 3 years followed by 2+ years as an apprentice in a real company, often with a master craftsman where the apprentices pay increases from approx 30% of full pay and up towards full pay during the time you stay. In return for the limited pay they have to take time to teach you and they cannot easily let you go before your apprenticeship has ended.

- Study preparations: three years of languages (typically the two Norwegian ones, English and German but some people will choose French or Spanish or something instead of or in addition to German.) Students who aim for engineering or medicine studies will typically add math, physics and another sciency subject: chemistry and biology were popular back when I went to school.

- leave school and get a job (or more and more likely it seems: fall behind)

As for why I say roughly, there's been a very nice option where you could get certified as a craftsman and get enough subjects to enter engineering in four years.

Also there are some options for transitioning from vocational to other studies. Going the other way is pretty hard and probably involves getting a job as uncertified worker in the field, then work for 5 years, takes some courses and pass the certification test.

Note: I'm not saying this is unique. It would surprise me if something like this isn't common in many other countries.

> Personally, I think learning a trade should be an option in high school.

Lots of Americans do learn a trade in high school. Just to copy the "Programs" menu from the Tech Center at the high school where my wife teaches (suburb in VT): Automotive Technology, Building Technology, Cosmetology, Computer Systems Technology, Computer Animation & Web Design, Dental Assisting, Design and Creative Media, Childhood Education & Human Services, Engineering & Architectural Design, Natural Resources, Professional Foods, Health Informatics. I understand that many of these programs, if not all, are supposed to be a career for the students, and that many of them are thought of as hard.

There are lots of trade oriented magnate schools in LA and many of them could carry you right into LATTC then after that making six figures and full benefits boring heavy rail under the earth. The trade shortage is being tackled, in major cities at least.

The trades also tend to be unionized with good workers' comp and disability pensions, though.

It's good that they pay for it but I still wouldn't want to be subjected to an opioid prescription for the rest of my life.

> You can make that kind of money as a manager at Walmart and you do not run the risk of getting your arm fried off or falling off a telephone pole.

Yes, but we need many more trades people than managers at Wal-Mart.

Not really. We need more trade people than managers at Wal-Mart specifically, but there’s plenty of equivalent positions at other companies.

Both of my parents were union tradespeople, one of them IBEW, working on telephone poles.

I agree that the "trades" meme is merely a "grass is greener" perspective. The low capped pay and lack of personal autonomy (if not strong discouragement of it by the union perks) can make one miserable, especially when you're pushed into it at such an early age based on others' perceived assessment of your abilities.

Also, I was a terrible math and science student in high school, and found my groove in college, only to graduate with a BS in CS in the top 1% of the class of almost 1k. Just a late bloomer I guess.

> I agree that the "trades" meme is merely a "grass is greener" perspective

Nah, it's a meme being pushed with organized campaigns that take lots of money: it's an attempt to manipulate the labor pool to bring wages down in certain fields by increasing competition for jobs and increasing return to capital.

Of course, so is the similarly heavily promoted “train everyone to code” push.

Hmm. Any source on that or a piece of journalism ?

I worked in that particular trade for quite a while, so I'm not speaking from ignorance. You move away from bucket truck work and the serious injury rates plummet (and bucket truck work -- especially line work -- pays way above average). Work for the union where safety is actually enforced and that rate plummets again.

While freak accidents happen, most are due to foolish people doing foolish things. For example, you mention getting your arm fried, but "working it hot" is almost always going to break safety regulations. I got hit with 480v once, but only because someone flagrantly broke safety regulations and cut my lockout off of a breaker.

If you think injuries don't happen at walmart, try working as a stocker for a few weeks. Only a fraction of a fraction of walmart employees are ever managers and it seems they are very often put there due to nepotism rather than merit. At least if you broke your back as an electrician, you make enough to save for retirement and the IBEW has great disability benefits.

Your last statement disregards three important facts of life. First, if everyone could get that computer job, it would pay next to nothing. Most people simply don't have what it takes. Second, as long as you like having electricity, there will be a demand for electricians. Somebody must do that job and the pay is very good. Thirdly, liking a job is not a pre-requisite. I very seriously doubt most people in the service sector like their jobs. If you're going to dislike your job anyway, you might as well go for the one with higher compensation. If you do decide to switch careers later, you'd be a lot better off with all that extra money.

> Work for the union where safety is actually enforced and that rate plummets again.

Not that easy given how weak unions are now in much of the US .

Taking your comment to its logical conclusion, then, no one should become an electrician. Too dangerous. Low (relative to a degree) pay.

Well, who then is going to fulfill this necessary role?

The licensed electricians I know make far more than degree holders, outside of comp engineers/doctors/MBA from select schools. For the vast majority of non selective schools and non rigorous degrees, an electrician should easily outearn them.

Electrician pay will also continue to rise quite a bit over the next decade. I already pay far more every year than the year before, if I can even book a decent electrician.

Perhaps people who really want to be electricians because they like the trade itself?

And how do people decide they like the trade itself? Fine line there. How are people to know about the trades if all they hear is "go to college"?

If fewer people decide to be electricians, then pay must go up to attract them, changing the calculus. If we force every high school student into trade school, on the other hand, there will be a glut of electricians and pay will go down.

Then what do we have? A lot of very angry people who feel betrayed by our insistence on trade school. And they'd be right to feel betrayed! We should be encouraging people to pursue fields that suit their interests, talents, and ambitions. If there are financial barriers then we need to tear them down.

The economy exists for the people, not people for the economy.

I think you overestimate the number of people attending college who "aren't college material" and underestimate the number who excel at trades. I've seen data indicating a majority portion of student loan defaults are by people who did NOT finish college, thus the worst-case scenario: they're responsible for the debt, and haven't the degree or the job to pay it back. Truly a sad place to be. You might consider the average readership of this forum isn't even your typical college-educated tech worker, but likely a more curious and intellectual type. Who is going to repair his electrical, communications, automotive, mass transit, etc infrastructure. Plumbing in non-glamorous. If you do it after hours I bet his billed rate is higher than yours. And he doesn't pay 7% on $125k of debt. His house is paid for already. My stepson has ADD and other initials to factor in. He makes $75-80k operating heavy equip. His tech school cost $25k. He owns a home. He is still close with his HS friends. 1 in 10 owns a home.

I think it's not just black and white.

Is college universally useful? No, it may leave you without knowledge on how to earn decent money, while crippling you with a heavy debt.

Is college completely useless? No, it's quite useful for some, and even indispensable for certain professions (e.g. medical doctors).

I'd say that college is useful for those who actively extract knowledge and experience from it, and that knowledge can help pay the tuition. This is definitely not 100% of students. Going to college just to hang out with kids and obtain a diploma for decoration, expecting to be passively taught, or studying stuff no business wants to pay for, is silly, of course.

Trade school is a good, viable path, but you do make a good point.

Ask an old electrician what they want their kid to be, and (excluding the scenario of a family business) it's usually "not an electrician"

I come from a family of tradies, I was one myself for a few years, then went to uni. You can't expect to do this after about 40, maybe 50, and expect to have a lot of health problems - bad back, foo-foo valves burst etc. Whereas with the professions you can expect to work as long as you want.

Then of course there are the tradies I knew of when I was young who are dead from it, not many but a couple, I don't know anyone who is dead from computer programming.

There is perhaps one trade that seems to be OK in my experience - plumbing, its not particularly hard work and there's always demand, but you know, digging up sh*t all your life is the trade off. You don't see many old plumbers though - they're probably out in their yachts. Worked with nurses in health for a while - the number of nurses with bad backs is incredible.

Go to uni

Older developer here with a same age friend that’s an electrician for the city. He often makes a lot more than me with overtime. He wasn’t unemployed for a year either due to interview games and ageism bullshit.

> Statistically, you still earn way more with a degree than without.

Hate to be so negative, but it looks like it's all the game of prestige in the hierarchy as it always was: https://www.academia.edu/41235398/Personal_Income_and_Hierar...

>Statistically, you still earn way more with a degree than without.

You don't actually. Among non-hispanic white individuals the college premium is at a historic low, for all other groups it's indistinguishable from zero.[1]

And as for realism or pragmatism. I am German and in Germany the majority of people still learn trades and do not go to university. They start earning a paycheck at 17 or 18, they contribute to their social security from the same point, they have good chances of taking over a business given the demographic transition, and they do not have to participate in the competitive hamster wheel that is the American college system or the overrun white-collar service sector including dozens of applications.

And while I can't speak to the crafts and trade sector in the US, in Germany being an electrician is not particularly dangerous, there are strict safety regulations in place and you don't overwork yourself, companies painfully pay attention to it. This isn't the 1920s with people balancing around on steel beams.

When I see the constant anxiety in the US of the millenial generation, the debt driven barely sustainable lifestyles and the constant competition I can only say I am thankful to have grown up in a country where there is a path for normal people to take on jobs that guarantee secure income, without largely useless academic training for a population that is frankly largely unsuited for it.

[1]https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/12/is...

> Statistically, you still earn way more with a degree than without.

Applying population statistics to individuals is a fool’s errand.

Not everyone is cut out to be a software engineer.

> Statistically, you still earn way more with a degree than without.

This isn't quite true. What's true is people with degrees earn way more than people without them. But people /w degrees don't equal people without degrees.

Why it worked for you: "computer programmer"

There was a decent chance to get that success without college.

Meanwhile, what of the others who go to college? Most are not computer programmers. Lots of people get a BA in psychology, criminal justice, early childhood education, music, sociology, Spanish, drama, anthropology, journalism, or art history. These people seldom find success.

Not every position is physically demanding or dangerous. Its quite easy to move into different fields and positions that are not physically demanding and just require a little bit of critical thinking or smart work. This idea that every trade job is dangerous or will leave you disabled is insane.

If you don't like being an electrician, you could move over into HVAC and make twice as much since you have an electrician's license. I feel your view is rather narrow.

With trades you have the ability of taking a 2 week intensive program and getting hired for $20/hr right out of school. Its a way better deal than some liberal arts education that gets you deep into debt and qualifies you to be a barista.

The issue with bankruptcy is not "excluding" students from bankruptcy. It's applying bankruptcy law fairly to every debtor.

>Some of my kids seem like they enjoy academics, but others do not. I'll be pushing the latter toward trade school. Average IBEW (electrical union) pay is about $20/hr for an apprentice and $33 for a journeyman. $40,000 to $66,000 with ZERO DEBT right out the gate is nothing to ignore (and that pay can easily double -- especially in your younger years -- if you're willing to travel and put in those extra hours). It sure beats minimum wage at a crappy service job.

so, uh, I guess I'm the modern equivalent of those trades. I mean, I don't have a union, but I fix computers and make a whole lot of money doing it, without any education. It is a lot like a trade, 'cause essentially I'm infrastructure for industry. I mean, instead of maintaining electricity at a factory, I'm maintaining servers in a build farm, but it's still infrastructure.

On the individual level you have a point. I mean, as a sysadmin, I do make like 30% less than a SWE, but I still make a whole lot of money, and I started when I was 17.

On a societal level, though? when you don't have a degree, the amount you make is dramatically dependent on how productive the people around you are.

Because I live in silicon valley and manage infrastructure for (mostly highly educated) engineers who are incredibly productive, I make a lot of money. A huge amount for someone who isn't educated or born rich.

If I was in a rural area, I'd be fighting for a job at geeksquad. I mean, I'd handily win that fight, but if I'm maintaining infrastructure for people who aren't very productive, I'm going to make... not very much money.

My point here is that if the US continues this trend of not educating it's children and excluding foreign educated people? Jobs like mine, for uneducated maintainers of infrastructure follow the jobs for the more productive people. If those people start working from china? They're probably gonna go find locals to do my job.

What I'm saying is that it is very much in my interest to do what needs to be done (mostly, I think, pay taxes) to see to it that kids go to college, even if I don't have any children of my own.

College doesn't make someone smart. College doesn't make someone choose to be productive. The decisions that lead to being smart and productive start early in childhood. Unfortunately, dollars spent on early education don't seem to have much of a correlation with success later in life.

More than that, many degrees (especially in the liberal arts) are, economically speaking, luxury goods. They may teach things that benefit society on some level, but the cost of procuring them isn't offset by low wages and scarcity of the relevant jobs.

In a way, they form a bit of a poverty / class mobility trap for those who aren't well off enough to afford them on their own but are attracted by the idea of a purpose-driven life (social work, librarian, historian, identity studies come to mind).

The biggest correlation on success later in life is how wealthy your parents are. Chances are you would be living in a safer neighborhood with better role models and exposed to more opportunities for further success, while being relatively insulated from opportunities for self-destruction.

College functions to get you out of your class bubble and expose other opportunities that you wouldn't otherwise have living at home. You play college right like many do, you advance up that economic ladder, and in the process set up your future kids for trivially easy success.

So, I think about this a lot. I know a lot of really good sysadmins with no education; like of the people I consider really good sysadmins, close to half might not have degrees, and this is one of the reasons I equate my job to the trades. (I mean, along with the fact that our job is to create and maintain infrastructure so that other people can work) I know a fair number of software engineers with no formal education, though the proportion is a lot less than half. I know very few good electrical engineers who lack formal education. I don't know any good chemical engineers who don't have a formal education.

My own experience (I've tried at school several times. I'm currently enrolled in the computer information systems "competency based" degree at nau.edu, but I've tried a bunch of others) is that school is actually way more difficult than industry. You can't just be brilliant twice a month, as is my experience of industry; you have to show up and perform at 90% every day which seems impossibly brutal to me. I mean, this is probably a quirk of my own personality; I'm actually really good at coming in and dealing with disasters every now and again, but my consistency is... really pretty bad.

I mean, I personally think that a love of and respect for learning is fundamentally more important than education; but I also think that education isn't nothing. There are a lot of people who do a lot better with some formal education, and there are a whole lot of jobs, that as far as I can tell, are almost impossible to do well without a good formal education. I personally don't think I'd let a self-taught doctor hack on me if I had any other choice at all.

My personal opinion is that if there are any young people with the capacity to be good at those things that require an education who are prevented from doing those things because of money, our society has made a huge mistake, one that will cost us much money in the long term, just 'cause having those people perform at peak value is hugely valuable to society. Further, I think that the unwillingness, as a society, to pay for the education of young people evinces a lack of valuation of learning that might be an even bigger problem.

It's a tangent, but I'd love to hear more about your decision to pursue the degree at nau.edu.

well, the equation on the "competency based" degrees for me is essentially that they are super way less prestigious than traditional degrees, but they are the only way, as far as I can tell, to get an education without a "you are on time all the time or you fail" condition, as I have a very hard time being on time (and am largely not budget constrained, so the "pay for time" part of most competency based degrees is not as big a deal for me as it would be if I was very slowly earning a degree while working a less remunerative job.) -

'failure' in academia seems, to me, to be way harsher than failure in industry; Nobody brings up even pretty big failures of mine that occured even a few years back in industry, but my high school academic record, more than two decades back, still haunts my admissions efforts, so as far as I can tell, community college is the most prestigious route open to me, and I need to execute almost perfectly to graduate to the next level. I probably won't execute perfectly, especially as my work is a higher priority than school for me, (and my work record isn't perfect either) so I think this is the most realistic route to some sort of undergrad degree, even though I generally work a lot better in person than remote.

There are a lot of 'competency based' programs, and while I think something like that is the best chance I have of getting a degree without permanently marring my record in ways that makes doing academic things harder in the future, I have no idea if I picked the best competency based option. I do personally think that on the low end, you are way better off with a government school than with a private school; that was a big part of my decision. But, for instance, a friend was telling me about western governors university, and... that might have been better? they have an actual CS degree, which would definitely get me further.

Interesting. So are you learning anything from the degree or are just you doing it to get the credential?

It involves a lot of essays... I'm learning a lot about constrained writing, something I'm pretty terrible at as-is. I mean, most of the actual information systems stuff is old hat, but there's a lot to be said for improving my writing to a particular format, and maybe it's best to do that on a subject you already know about? (Interestingly, feedback from my boss has been that I need to improve my constrained writing, that my design documents and things of that nature need to be better, more numerous, and more on topic and to the prescribed format)

It's really interesting 'cause the feedback at the online classes feels... a lot harsher than any I have ever gotten at work; I wonder how much of that is just what is expected in school vs. work? or if it's a class thing, like the school isn't prestigious, whereas most jobs i've had, well, it's usually obvious that I have a lot of other choices... or maybe that I'm really bad at this, and at work, well, there's enough I'm really good at that people treat me somewhat diffidently even in the areas where I'm really bad? I don't know, but it's an interesting experience in a lot of ways.

I mean, it's not bad really, just... really different from how I'm used to people giving me feedback.

But... yeah, I mean, to me it feels like you are paying for essay feedback. Like, they also provide PDFs, videos and reading materials, but I can get all those things on my own; it's the essay feedback, I think, that is the individualized thing.

But you asked about motive, and that's different from how I responded. I do need to get better at constrained writing, and to learn even really basic level management type writing, and while this is certainly a goal, a degree is also something I want; I... would like to do some graduate-level work, and that seems difficult without an undergrad.

Also, a degree is an important plan B... I mean, as long as I'm employed where I am, and as long as the industry doesn't change, a degree in and of itself won't help me all that much, though basic management writing might. but if industry changes, there are a lot of cases where having a degree means you are legally middle class. Right now, the pay cut I'd take working anywhere else in the world would mean I should probably just travel on vacation, but if that ever changes? a degree is almost essential to do my job for a non-US company.

No worries about being off-topic. I’m more than happy to listen to your unconstrained writing. I always enjoy your comments and find you have a unique and valuable perspective.

Anyway, what sort of graduate work would you like to do and why?

And I’m surprised your academic performance in high school is still a hinderance. Do you also have not great test scores?

If you could get into someplace reasonably prestigious, would you go back to school full-time? Or is being able to go to school while still working important for you?

>Anyway, what sort of graduate work would you like to do and why?

I actually don't have a project in mind at the moment. I have in the past wanted to do a lot more with pushing forward open source diagnostics tools, (and with proving the ESD problems in the way most people handle physical servers) - but I don't know that is what I want to do now; it's been a while since I've been serious about the physical layer, and it's really really unstylish right now; it would be better done once the outsourcing pendulum swings back to insourcing.

I am interested in graduate level work in part because my impression is that my work style would be a better fit; my impression is that if you do something recognized as really pretty great every now and then, they forgive you failures in the meanwhile. Like industry. (I also think I'd be more comfortable going to school with graduate-school age people than with undergrad-aged people. I'm pushing 40 at this point.)

>And I’m surprised your academic performance in high school is still a hinderance. Do you also have not great test scores?

Only okay. I'm held back by pretty terrible math test scores. almost average GRE quantitative reasoning (95th percentile verbal, which is good, but not good enough to make up for an average quantitative) I did pretty okay on the MAT, too, but I don't remember the score, and anyhow, if I want to do something with language or the arts, I really badly need an undergrad. I can mostly read okay and can talk about themes of the classics as well as an arts major, (though, uh, I probably cant speak of the criticism of those works the way they can) - but everything else in the arts I'm pretty terrible at.

(I do have plans to take the LSAT this coming year, with little study. I actively studied for the FE exam last year, but found I have another year of math before I can even try. The LSAT looks doable; I mean, I would be surprised if I do well on it, but I'd give myself better than even odds of doing better than average on it.)

I think bringing up my knowledge of basic maths up through, you know, at least GRE math levels is a moderately high priority, but I haven't quite figured out how.

>If you could get into someplace reasonably prestigious, would you go back to school full-time? Or is being able to go to school while still working important for you?

If I seriously thought that I had a 90+ percent chance of graduating... and I do think that the admissions committees are pretty good at judging that sort of thing, yeah, I would be willing to spend four years on it.

This, though, I think is the crux of it. They won't admit me 'cause I don't have a 90+% chance of graduating. Yes, it seems horribly unfair that they hold my bad behavior of 20 years ago against me, but the fact of the matter is that I still don't have that level of discipline.

I suppose that's another reason I want to go; I see this lack of discipline as a big weakness, and... well, where do I go to learn it? I mean, the good colleges could be said to not teach that sort of thing 'cause they filter out people who don't have it on the front end, so I guess I'm in the right place? but maybe not availing myself to the right bits of it? I mean, there's a very large chance that this will simply be something like handwriting, something that I will be terrible at for the rest of my life, and that I simply work around by not doing the things that require discipline, but... like even with handwriting, I spent a few years at calligraphy as an adult before I gave up on it.

You co-authored a reasonably successful book teaching people how to use a complicated piece of software. You may not have any formal schooling past high school but you’re wildly unrepresentative of the “uneducated”.

I think That was actually an example of the benefits one can gain by being around people who are smarter and better educated than you are. That book would not have been intelligible without my smarter and better educated co author.

I mean, I do think I am rather a lot smarter than average, but everything is relative, and I believe I have accomplished so much more because I seek out situations where I am surrounded by people I think are better than I am on those scales.

>If you're getting a necessary degree, it's very uncommon to default on your loan because you'll be in demand and getting a decent wage. Banks understand this fact and will do the math to give a loan anyway.

Why doesn't it make economic sense to declare bankruptcy in any situation, even if you're a CS major from Stanford, at 22 when you have nothing if you've got a loan in the six figures and IF you're allowed to do so, which is what you're implying (loans that aren't guaranteed)?

Peter Schiff has a great video on YouTube about how these “well intentioned” subsidies have done the opposite and have inflated the price of college in the last few decades. It should be cheaper now due to economies of scale, computers, etc. Not when the government is involved.

I think at least part of the solution is to involve your children in your finances. I think if they are able to understand your families monthly/yearly budget, they will be much less likely to take on a ton of debt, as they will more likely understand the consequences of their decisions.

The financial literacy in this country(USA) is absolutely terrible and I think this is one of the most important things a parent can teach there children, because they will not learn this in school. Part of the problem is that most parents themselves are not financially literate and do not have savings or budgets. Life is so much easier if you have a good understanding of money. People like to say "Money doesn't matter", security matters and freedom matters, good luck getting either of those things without money.

At this point it is very obvious the government or universities are not looking out for us in this regard, so this will be one thing my children understand.

Agreed. Showing a teenager how much they will make with the career their interested in and then figuring out how much they might afford in student loans is pretty easy to roughly estimate. It’s what should be taught in schools and banks should have limits as well.

But banks and universities don’t wait those things, because it’d jeopardize the easy money.

There's a big catch with this though, your teenager/college student can't budget & spend like a mid career professional. $10k is far dearer to them than you. (They also have far fewer expenses)

I don't know what the answer is, perhaps you start with basic financial literacy & later mock up what their life might look like with X debt and Y income.

Perhaps one way to help college-bound teenagers make these sorts of decisions is not by asking, "What careers most interest you?" but "What lifestyle do you want to live as an adult?" and then work backward from there.

Teens who envision themselves living in a two-bedroom Manhattan apartment and dining out frequently could then be counseled to pursue jobs that earn enough to support that lifestyle.

And teens who would be OK living in a modest ranch home in a small midwestern town, driving a 10-year-old car, and making most of their meals at home could be counseled to pursue jobs that earn enough to support that lifestyle.

In other words, instead of saying, "Identify the jobs you would be interested in doing, then choose the one with the best earnings potential or work/life balance," parents should be saying, "Identify the lifestyle you would like to lead, then choose the job that is capable of supporting that lifestyle."

This is a good approach for some.

I am - and have always been - disinclined to do work I don't really enjoy. Some people - I have a good friend like this! - don't have that bit flipped in them, and for those people, your approach would be fantastic.

but without a doubt, the material economic reality needs to be discussed early on in high school.

>I am - and have always been - disinclined to do work I don't really enjoy.

Sounds like you live a life of privilege then. Guess what, 99.9% of humans over the course of history have done work they didn't really enjoy.

It's a good approach for everyone. When people can't afford rent suddenly "work you don't enjoy" isn't such a big deal anymore.

Interesting angle to think about. A lot of high schoolers are applying to majors basically blind of what the job at the other end is like. Everyone wants to be a doctor or a lawyer until the slow realization of the realities of these career paths hit, and in a panic they change to business or econ, wrangle excel macros in a cubicle until 65, and wonder where it all went wrong.

Which is different from the lawyers who know exactly where it went wrong.

Another way to phrase this (which was put to me by my own parents): "What type of day do you want to typically have?"

(ie., indoors vs. outdoors, meeting lots of people vs. solitary environment, strict routine vs unpredictable, etc)

Serious question: how does a parent deal with their high school kids wanting to pursue college in a field with a low probability of high lifetime earnings (art, theatre etc.) ?

Especially when they are middle class without generational wealth to insulate themselves

Ask them to double major?

Or pick up a trade instead of a second degree. I think it might be easier to structure time for your artistic passions with a trade day job than a white-collar day job but I might be biased by on-call duty.

Actually, this is excellent advice. Many of the people I know who went through art programs and hung out in the art scene later applied their aesthetics to things like the construction trade (fashioning complex plaster jobs, painting) or started some kind of small time manufacturing.

Good suggestion. Being from India where double majors aren't a thing, it didn't strike me.

Thanks.

I've suggested to my kids that they study two separate areas. I think it makes you stand out in a very good way if, for example, you have a dual computer science / art history degree.

I'm lucky though because my kids are dual US-Canada citizens. They can go to university in Canada and it's very inexpensive.

I asked a mechanical engineer in hiring if a double major on a resume made any difference to him. He said that if the major was not related to engineering, he really didn't care about it. They're paying you to be an engineer, nothing more. I studied Russian and in aerospace engineering in the US, employers absolutely did not care about it. I now resent the time/money spent on that coursework, and wish I had taken stats or CS, maybe dabbling in Russian on my own time.

having more than one degree won't help someone get a job, but it will help that person succeed in their career

When you hybridise like that it’s up to you to highlight the benefits. As you point out it’s much easier to do that with closely related fields. You need to have an idea of what the one field brings to the other. If you don’t know and can’t articulate that how is the hiring manager supposed to?

Drop the "follow your dreams" rhetoric and have a serious discussion with them about the costs of life and lifestyles.

If they want to live in a 6000 sq ft house in Malibu, then they shouldn't get a degree in 5th Century Aerobics.

> If they want to live in a 6000 sq ft house in Malibu, then they shouldn't get a degree in 5th Century Aerobics.

I mean if that's what they want, you might as well tell them to be born into another family because you'll never enough for that as a wage worker regardless of the degree.

Doctors and lawyers could afford a house in Malibu and they are wage workers.

The white collar professionals who can afford these types of areas are usually much more like entrepreneurs than individual practitioners of their craft.

And they have a relevant education.

Not all doctors. Not all lawyers. Only the cream of the crop in those respective fields, and only after 20+ years in the field.

Of course, that assumes a normal mortgage, with no “payments go to interest only” or other malarkey.

But to be able to play at the top of the field you'll have to have attended something like Penn Law or Yale Medicine. SUNY Downstate won't cut it.

It's somewhat backwards in medicine. Many top grads stay in academics where the prestige is high but the pay is low. With the exception of elective plastics and dermatology, the highest earning physicians tend to be from middle of the road schools and work in rural areas after graduation (commonly from surgical sub-specialties).

It will, it’s just substantially harder. The ranks of partners at top law firms are much less prestigious than those of top law faculty. Academia cares more about prestige than basically any other sector of the economy. Even in medicine you have many, many tries at associating yourself with a high prestige institution throughout your career. If you studied at a toilet tier Caribbean medical school but ten years later you’re working at the Mayo Clinic no one will care about where you got your degree.

If by afford you mean "take out a loan that will not be paid off until the property is underwater from global warming", sure.

There is no job that's kept pace with the growth of the economy, let alone the growth of the stock market.

At this point the smartest economic decision anyone can make is to invent cryosleep, build a modest nuclear reactor in their basement and wait for the year 3000 where compound interest would have made them the richest person in the world.

Oh, come on. Visigothercize is the hottest thing right now: "burn! and loot! and turn! and burn!".

Seriously, this is good advice. A lot of young-uns have amazingly naive ideas about both how much money they will make but also how much money they get to keep. Like they will hear about making $70K and imagine that somehow that means that they could pay off, say, a $350K debt "in the order of 5 years" (obviously not thinking exactly 5). As opposed to the reality which is that they will be challenged to even service the interest on a $350K debt at that income level after their other expenses.

> Visigothercize is the hottest thing right now: "burn! and loot! and turn! and burn!".

I live in Santa Monica (just a little south of Malibu) and given the number of exercise/barre/yoga/soul cycle/equinox/pilates/crossfit places near me, I have to say: Visigothercize sounds like pure genius and I have no doubt it would IPO within a year or two.

"With ancient and time-tested techniques, we help you get in touch with your inner aggression and fear, channeling them into transformational life experiences."

Or even a modest 2000 sq ft house in the midwest for that matter

> Drop the "follow your dreams" rhetoric

The most important part of "follow your dreams" is to not let your imagination run away. You can get very close to what you want in life if you take a realistic perspective and understand basic finance.

Take as many gap years being an artist as you want. The degree won't help much in pure arts anyway

maybe the 529 will grow in that time anyway

The average rate of return in 529s is about 3%.

This happens to parents that don’t discuss the importance of having money in life. Also happens when kids get little to no financial education.

The kids grow up thinking pursuing your passions and dreams is more important than accumulating money. And it feels so good and right until you find yourself broke and poor and your passion is gone, and you think life just sucks.

It takes no effort to throw down a spreadsheet. List their yearly earnings for the rest of their life. Throw in expenses like mortgages, vacations, food, then add in kids and family, medical emergencies, show them just how poor they will be if they go down the path of their shitty career. Many kids may be left wide eyed when they accept these numbers are true. There’s no extra money hidden away, no big windfall waiting to come out and propel them up the class ladder. This is it, this is their life. Good luck.

Your first paragraph is absolutist, judgemental, and, frankly, very naive.

Our household has very open finances. We have dinner table talks about dollar cost averaging, compounded growth, and investing in broad mutual funds.

Kids have a bank account with debit card at 14, and a personal Vanguard account at 18, as well as a Roth IRA in which we match their taxable earnings.

And the kids know that making money is hard: they tutor, they create their own Kickstarter campaigns, they work as a cashier for extras.

They know how to make a budget and what things cost.

But no amount of your discussion or financial education is going change the mind of a very determined, strong headed youngster who “doesn’t want to live in the bubble of Silicon Valley anyway” and wants to pursue a non-technical creative course of live.

Well then I just hope that youngster is also prepared to find some creative ways to make money.

I hope so too.

Just don’t assume that avoiding the parental flaws that you think you’ve identified to be the root is a silver bullet.

Alot of your points, show an upper middle class lifestyle. Your kids probably live in a bubble with other similar kids.

You need to expose them to people who have made bad decisions. Seeing how people live can be very illustrative.

Just have them work the numbers out. Specifically create monthly budget after they graduate. Salary expectations, rent/mortgage, student debt, taxes, transportation, food, etc.

Does art school make a person a better artist? I would argue not really -- especially in a day in age where so much advanced art instruction is available for free. When a company or person wants to commission you, do they look at your degree or your portfolio?

The only real benefit of art college is more contacts to sell on your personality. $300,000 for that $75,000/yr college is a huge marketing budget for someone not proven to be a success. That money would be much better spent establishing an art studio and working on a portfolio. At least if they aren't very successful, some of the loss can be recovered.

The same idea goes for most art degrees in one form or another.

> Does art school make a person a better artist?

It certainly isn't automatic but a motivated student can get a lot out of the experience.

My girlfriend and I have had this discussion a lot, because she went to a top tier art school. I think you might be underrating three factors in your reasoning:

One is the value of very direct feedback and guidance from seasoned, respected professionals. The class sizes in top art programs are very small, and most classes have a frequent, intense “critique” portion where the professor and students tear apart each others’ work. It’s like 3 years of intense code review from other talented programmers, led by a staff engineer. It’s hard to put a sticker price on this, because you largely get out what you put in, but it’s immense and I’d argue unique to a top tier art school.

The second is that you’re living in a high pressure environment of professors and peers who always seem to be pushing you to be better in some dimension. It’s not conducive for everyone, but if you have a strong competitive drive, it can make you very productive.

Finally, the fundamentals in design and art are insanely important. My girlfriend took 4 semesters of typography, because the ROI there is legitimately defensible. Most people skip this stuff when they’re self teaching, and it shows to people who know better.

You’re right that portfolios are of paramount importance, but good companies will make you defend your portfolio pieces, and ask you what you’d do differently with different constraints or resources. An art school training will humble you to the idea that there is another way, and arm you with ideas for alternative solutions. It’s subtle, but it comes out in interviews and on the job. I’d argue it’s similar to software engineering in that way.

I sometimes wonder about rpg's notion of a MFA in programming. I think it'd be very valuable - there's a lot of crossover between art and programming, I think.

I think survivorship bias and the need to justify the education necessarily clouds judgement.

If there's one thing the internet has taught me, it's that finding legitimate critique about anything is easy and cheap -- just put it out there and ask. There are lots of online art communities that can do this job very well.

High-pressure environments may benefit some people, but people with that kind of drive are likely to push themselves anyway. Plus, an actual commissioned project is way more pressure than any professor could add (at least to me)

Since the principles of art and design don't really change, they can be provided cheaply and easily just as you can find free (and very good) resources on basically every fundamental of programming.

$300,000 paid over a staggering 20 years at 7% interest is $560,000 by the time you're done and you're on the hook for over $2300 every single month or around $28,000 in student loan payments every single year.

(note: these numbers are from salary.com which gives the highest income of all sites I looked at)

The average artist salary seems to be $45,000 to $55,000 per year. 90th percentile salary is only around $72,000. If you're an average artist, more than 50% of your GROSS salary goes toward your student loan and even if you are top-tier, you still wind up paying 39% of your gross toward your loans. Even as an art manager, at 88k at the 50th percentile and 125k at the 90th percentile (not something you're likely to be doing with zero experience), you're going to be in a very tough situation until your mid-40s and that's assuming you don't want to have a family.

In contrast, a low-level HVAC tech makes about as much out the gate without all the debt. A high-level tech makes 62k on average (76 at 90th percentile) while that manager position 72k on average (92k at 90th percentile). An apprenticeship is generally free, but even if you wanted to go to your local community college, you'd be 10-15k out the door at the upper-end. That would be less than $120/mo over 20 years and less than $300/mo over 5 years.

Even a 25th percentile artist will make as much without a degree at 47k per year will be making about as much as a 90th percentile 72k per year paying out 28k every year. Investing the extra 4k every year you save over paying for that degree with a mild 5% ROI gives almost 80k saved for retirement by your mid 40s when your student-loan person is just breaking even. If you've managed to learn the rest of those fundamentals sometime over that last 20 years, you're going to beat that college education by a much larger margin.

https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/artist-sala...

https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/art-manager...

https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/hvac-instal...

https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/hvac-mechan...

https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/hvac-superv...

What online art communities do you think give critique as well as professional art schools?

“Survivorship” bias plays a role, but I think it’s unjust to chalk it up to just that.

The statistics you’ve given are a convincing argument against “arts” in general, but “arts” is a huge range. If you’re graduating a top 5 arts school, you’re generally already in the top percentile, at which point the sample sizes are small and the variance is huge.

The average ROI is very damning, but your choice of school plays a bit role in determining how “average” you are. I’m not arguing in favor of the average art school, I’m defending the ROI of the schools given as examples in the article (Pratt).

That aside, responding to your specific points:

Like a sibling comment implied, it’s not easy to find quality criticism on demand. I stand by this. It’s hard to tell until you’ve been in such an environment, but it really is an order of magnitude’s difference from what you can get online from strangers.

Further, I sort of miscommunicated the value of the environment. It’s more that you’re seeing how other talented people come up with solutions that diverge from your own in fascinating ways. It’s high pressure because everybody is so good, that it demands you to learn and better yourself, not because of deadlines, etc. That was my bad. :P

Finally, while the fundamentals are relatively constant, it’s hard to find them presented in a way that demands 4 semesters of self driven study. I stand by that point.

But yeah, in conclusion I totally agree with the statistics that the average art degree isn’t worth it. The average art position doesn’t require a top 5 degree. The positions that do are remunerative to the extent that they are worth it, in our experience. Finally, not everyone pays the sticker price; in fact, few people (mostly the very wealthy) do.

So yeah, I graduated from a top-tier art school which had very high tuition but I also had considerable grants and scholarships so I was able to pay off my student loans in a few years after graduating working a blue-collar job.

I experienced four years of group critiques, and really value that as an activity. Unfortunately very few people understand or can appreciate how directly that maps to software development.

My two cents, guidance counselors just need to shut the fuck up when it comes to talking with high-school students. There is so little knowledge about what different careers actually entail that I think it is impossible for high-school students to make informed decisions about what they want to focus on.

While I think getting a BFA was the right choice for me I also think that the school environment could have been much more beneficial and productive than it was (mostly due to students in other majors being disruptive due to their drinking and partying during the week.)

I really wish we had something comparable to group critiques in my computer science/engineering program. I wholeheartedly agree that it’s an underrated form of education: it allows everyone to benefit from everyone else’s talents and experiences, whereas the traditional lecture format is limited to the talent and the experience of the instructor.

I was really jealous of that aspect of my girlfriend’s education. Some companies and incubators (recurse center?) are really good at creating this kind of learning, but I don’t know of many traditional universities experimenting with this approach at either the BS or MS level; which IMO a shame.

Also, the skill of receiving and responding constructively to criticism is incredibly underrated, and is something that the good art schools seem to be unusually good at.

The way my girlfriend tells it, it was a tortuous time (for many of the reasons you describe), but it was also very formative and it accelerated her growth dramatically.

I think some of the more recent 'design thinking' schools are coming close. A key element in critiques is that everyone has pretty much the same role (they are creating something and getting feedback on it) so no one is trying to game the system for personal career advancement.

It could be adapted to CS/E classes where students were creating something new and most Art professors could probably help run them. There is a definite discipline and culture to running good group critiques.

Art creates meaning within contexts. It's certainly possible to learn to reason about context working on your own, but formal schooling forces you to do so and ensures it happens.

From my own experience hiring designers, those with formal schooling in art tend to make better creative leaders, like managers or creative directors.

We are in this now. First year in college, still undecided what to do, but interested in something design/art/writing.

Our suggestions to choose something that might be profitable was a huge stress factor that pushed her towards depression and we decided to back off.

She had always surprised us in a good way, and she has proven to be very good a connecting with people, organizing, making things work.

I think she’ll be fine eventually.

We are not generationally wealthy, but tech has made us rich enough afford the college tuition without too much pain.

Not everyone can or wants to be an engineer.

Design offers an easy path to a profitable career. A specialization in UX design would easily earn your child a lucrative position in any tech company.

Even writing - something I pursued - offers a path to a stable career if you move towards copywriting and content. A few years in an agency as a copywriter and all sorts of options open up, some highly lucrative ones (creative director/strategist).

I’m pretty sympathetic to the perspective that the solution is not dealing with it. “I want to go to art school” is at the same level as “I want a pony” or “I’m gonna marry a rich girl”; it’s not originally intended as a serious life plan, and you’ll only start to see it as one if the people around you encourage it.

I don't see anything wrong with going to school for an education rather than training. Frankly, I wish there were more kids working on a liberal and fine arts education. It's one of the reasons I'm a big fan of the free-college-for-all plans being pushed by some politicians.

I don't see anything wrong with it either. I think it's a great thing that American doctors and engineers still get a liberal arts education, and it'd be wonderful if nobody in the US ever felt like finances were stopping them from getting the education they want.

But that's different than having a plan for your life. Most kids can't afford to wait until after college to start planning.

It’s certainly not something I want limited tax dollars to pay for, given that we still have childhood poverty and homelessness to work on.

Our economy generates enough wealth to take care of those people too.

Let's convince taxpayers to raise taxes to pay for those things first, then worry about subsidizing four years of binge drinking and sex for middle class kids.

Student debt is a main driver of poverty and homelessness. Solving the student-debt crisis will reduce the poverty and homelessness and reduce the burden placed on programs meant to deal with those issues. It may be cheaper in the short term to just pay into those services, but why should people suffer before getting relief, when suffering could be prevented altogether?

Also, your impression about what college students actually do is completely unrepresentative of the experiences of those who are grateful for the opportunity to have an education, i.e. the people who would most benefit from having the costs of their education subsidized, i.e. those who go in with few opportunities and come out with many more. The only people who party are those who could already afford to live their lives normally after they graduate, or the people getting degrees in high-return fields (i.e. business and engineering).

> Student debt is a main driver of poverty and homelessness.

Source? Especially for the homelessness part.

this sounds like a really bad way to spend my tax dollars. by all means, use them to educate the next generation of teachers, social workers, and scientists, but don't make me foot the bill for some kid to study art history for four years and still need government assistance at the end.

You are already footing the bill for the art history student to go through over 12 years of education, what's 4 more?

honestly not quite sure how to respond to this. the obvious response to "what's 4 more?" is that it's a lot more money than zero more, and each of those last four years is going to be considerably more expensive than a year of grade school.

I don't mind having my tax dollars go towards helping young people establish stable careers so they can become self-sufficient. I also don't mind paying to educate them so the can go out and help the needier members of society. I just don't think stuff like art history is a good investment of public money. I have a lot of friends who got art history degrees, which is why I use this example. they had a great time in school, but they would be hard pressed to point to any tangible benefits from the degree. most of them ended up having to pursue certifications for unrelated fields.

As I mentioned in a prior post (and which, as you correctly noted, did not adequately recognize the context of the thread), the cost for educating social scientists and humanists is minimal (though certainly not negligible, especially if we aspire to providing a good education rather than a bottom-of-the-barrel and grossly underfunded degree, which is currently the norm). However, I'm wondering what you consider to be tangible benefits? And to who?

The benefits of a degree in social sciences or humanities are ways of thinking that can be applied in various fields of practice. Students in these programs literally learn how to think and argue effectively, especially about social issues and social systems. This goes way beyond the first year sociology class that computer science students are 'forced' to take as an elective. Techies without social science or humanities backgrounds are notoriously bad at thinking about social systems, and end up developing extremely problematic socially-embedded tools and technologies. If we consider many of the problematic tech of the past decade (intrusive surveillance tech, under-moderated social media, crispr genetic modification, etc), they were all designed without such considerations in mind, and have had detrimental effects on society. It's sad that we continue to not 'get it', that thinking properly about human experiences and systems, as informed by specialists who deal with this specifically, is crucial.

This is not only true about tech fields. When social science and humanities graduates enter post-grad programs that actually recognize the value of such prior education (i.e. medical schools that accept students with bachelor or arts, which is surprisingly rare) these students actually tend to perform better. Public policy designed by social scientists and humanists also works more effectively, but instead we have huge lobbies funded by the tech industry and management firms pushing for de-regulation or regulation designed by those technocrats themselves (i.e. sidewalk labs in toronto).

> don't make me foot the bill for some kid to study art history for four years

This is completely false. In fact, the complete opposite is true. Art history students subsidize the cost of education for STEM students.

At least in Canada, your tuition is the same whether you study a STEM field or art history. But STEM has greater costs association with teaching, i.e. lab equipment, lab technicians' salaries, shop spaces, computer labs, etc. Much of social sciences and humanities teaching is based on a JSTOR subscriptions and a computer projector in the basement of a crumbling concrete building built half a century ago in the far corner of campus. 90% of the money that Social Science and Humanities students pay goes to fund the STEM programs.

you're not wrong, but read the context of the thread. I am replying to a proposal for free college as a taxpayer.

Why should we pay for college for an area that won’t return a positive ROI just so they can be a “better citizen of the world”?

That seems like a good reason to me, as long as the debt load isn't severe. Plus, in my experience, education enriches the everyday profoundly.

The debt load will be severe. The US doesn't have a balanced budget, has a growing deficit at all levels (federal, state, municipal), and politicians are promising "free college", when we have bigger issues (child poverty, homelessness, healthcare, DEBT)?

How are you going to measure ROI?

Back 2011 the Freakonomics guys said this:

> According to the College Board, a year of tuition at a public college for an in-state student costs an average of $7,605, while a year at a private college costs an average of $27,293. Meaning that (assuming you graduate in four years) a college diploma from a public school costs about $30,000, and about $109,000 from a private school. That’s a lot of coin, but consider this: the difference in yearly income for a person with a college degree and a person with just a high school diploma is $19,550, according to the 2010 Census. So keeping things simple, on average, a public school college degree pays for itself in less than two years, and a private school diploma in less than six. Which is probably why, according to the Pew study, the vast majority of college graduates (86%) say that college was a good investment for them.

Now things are more expensive, but even if the payoff is 2x or 3x longer now, it's still an overall good investment.

Plus, who knows what the benefits would be if the US were producing millions of great global citizens each year. If those global citizens helped educate and raise the world's poorest people out of poverty, those countries would likely stabilize somewhat and maybe that would ease conflict and spending on war.

And even if all the things I just said were wrong, sometimes ROI isn't a great way to value things. For example, journalism, especially at a local level, is hard to fund yet the value isn't zero. Lots of people who don't pay for news still benefit from having eyes on the powerful.

In that case, what’s wrong with the people who benefit from the education paying themselves? In a capitalist society, Journalism degrees should cost less than a STEM degree.

Definitely. As long as we can get some guarantees that a good fraction of people who study for free contribute back to society without being treated like slaves.

All carrot with zero stick is not good just like all stick and zero carrot is not good.

I don't either. Most of the life-long value I got from college was not in the concentrations I was required to choose from. The real value was in the broad exposure to many disciplines, endeavors and POVs. Especially important in that were the hundreds of talented people I got to talk with ... a valuable extracurricular available at many schools.

Many people find satisfaction in work unrelated to what they thought they wanted when they were 18-20. Maybe they discovered other options they weren't aware of. Maybe their prospective specialities disappeared over time, maybe their values changed as they matured. A whole person is about more than income or ability to match some arbitrary standard.

In short noone should assume they know what an 18-20 yo is going to wind up doing (even if all goes well in their life). Nor do they (let alone their unfocussed 'advisors') know what occupations will stick around. A huge investment and a 4-year degree seems unwise and un-called for at this point. Never mind what 'tradition' says. Unless you're looking to be an academic, two years at first seems more reasonable. Less debt, less pressure. Get started, go try yourself in the crucible.

Five years later, that vagueness has been clarified by life experiences. At that point, the wisdom of a big investment might make more sense. 25 can be a lot more focussed than 20.

Can't speak to marrying the rich girl, but the 'I want a pony' can be dealt within some situations. Start by finding them a local ranch they can work on and learn horse care lessons from. Work with them on how they will pay for it and what they will have to sacrifice to make the lesson fees (being realistic in the extent they are expected to pay for it compared to something like piano lessons). Generally two or three weeks of cleaning horse poo from hooves will be enough to squash any pony dreams while teaching them a lesson on dipping their toe in the water and trying something out before jumping in.

If they happen to really like it, you can increase their involvement proportional to how much they are willing to sacrifice to support it. This won't work for everyone, but it shows working towards a goal and maybe they get to the point where they are willing to sacrifice other enjoyments in life to be able to stable a pony at a local ranch.

Regardless if they bail or stick with it, valuable life lessons are to be learned. I did this with my niece for a year and she discovered that she really loved horses even to the point of enjoying cleaning them, but also was too afraid of them (after seeing another girl get injured by a spooked horse).

Just say no.

Kids of that age are usually wise enough to understand probability, the relative importance of money, and where their family’s relative position is in the financial sense.

With a solid grip on those parameters, I’d say that most well-adjusted teenagers are reasonably equipped to make that decision on their own. If you feel like they’re still making the “wrong” decision, I’d personally apply anecdotes and statistics to add emphasis to the parameters you feel they’re undervaluing.

Reflecting on my own situation, having recently come through the higher education system miraculously in-tact, the biggest issues I’ve observed are:

(1) most teenagers don’t know the financial situation of their parents (very few did when I was in High School, anyway). Their parents could be bona fide millionaires, but they make choices ignorant of that fact. Or, their parents could be penniless, and they don’t apply to schools that give needs-based full rides, because they think they can’t afford it.

(2) most teenagers do not have an appreciation for how quality of life varies substantially with seemingly small variations (say, 60k vs 90k living in NYC) in salary. This makes the “worst case” of having a minimum wage job seem not too bad.

(3) most teenagers don’t understand the “life impact” and psychological burden of having a mortgage-sized loan at 22: how much of a new grad paycheck is “left” after taxes, rent, loans; how the size of the loan correlates to the amount you take out of your paycheck; how much the loan costs over it’s lifetime; and how much this all impacts your decision to buy a house, start a business, marry, etc. This obviously impacts you terribly when your college adventure is unsuccessful, but it is a burden you’ll bear regardless of your success.

I feel similar to the author of this article, that it’s the responsibility of the parent to not sugar coat those issues with aphorisms like “just follow your dreams” or “the issue of money always solves itself”. It might feel embarrassing to tell your children your situation in life, but it’s a big life decision and it ought to be an informed one.

In my country people try to convince them but mostly they end up saying "well, if that's what they really want... they can always change degrees or do another one later". Several of my friends did that and ended up fine.

Of course, from the replies, I notice that in America the price of degrees makes the perspective very different because the decision may not be easily reversible...

how about putting together a realistic budget for after they graduate? go tour some apartments and ask them to pick one they could see themselves living in. build a budget around the rent for that place, estimated utilities, going out with friends, etc. also add the monthly loan payment for the art school they want to go to. then compare that against typical monthly take-home pay for someone in their desired field and start cutting things until they can break even. $30-40k annual income can sound like a lot to a high school student until you start breaking it down month by month and force them to confront how expensive things are and the lifestyle sacrifices they will have to make.

Just say you won’t pay for it.

Show them the numbers, what it costs, what it pays, and say you aren’t rich enough to study a hobby. You need to study something you can support yourself with.

They can always go off on their own and do it. At that point, they are adults and you’re done your best.

> Just say you won’t pay for it.

And?

There are plenty of banks and government agencies more than willing to let a 17 year old sign up for a crushing student loan.

> Show them the numbers, what it costs, what it pays

Most 17 year olds are incapable of making a good decision even with this information.

And, given how many parents let their kids ruin the beginning of life with mountains of student loan, apparently, many parents are also clearly incapable of making a good decision with that information.

> Serious question: how does a parent deal with their high school kids wanting to pursue college in a field with a low probability of high lifetime earnings (art, theatre etc.) ?

Have them meet people in the profession, talk to them about the expense of college, and more generally help them strategize about what they'll need to do to maintain a middle class lifestyle as an artist. A middle-aged artist will be happy to share experiences and talk about money.

The other thing is to help them think about backup plans. There are plenty of jobs in art or theatre, business and technical, that don't necessary involve performing or creating art. In my experience with a theatre program in a large university, they're quite realistic about helping their students prepare for employment.

Theatre Professor here. Do not let your kids go to school for acting. Oh, he or she is perfect looking and incredibly talented? Great, they don't need a degree in acting. Go to school in New York, Chicago, or LA, and audition between classes in a real degree. Now if they want to study design and tech, go nuts. The amount of work out there is incredible, there is just so much content being consumed.

I kind of regret doing CS instead of music. Maybe if I had done something more art focused the competition wouldn't have been so bad and I'd probably still have a girlfriend, which is more important to me personally than money.

Music is way more competitive than CS. You have to be a truly elite musician to make a good living in music, but you can be an average programmer and still make a good living in CS.

Are you talking about education or work? Because I feel the point he’s trying to make is that the educational aspect of acting is negligible. You can just do it.

The competition in the arts is incredible. But with your CS degree you could still do music on the side? Whatever you do, you have to live outside of work and put work into your relationships.

LOL

I'm not an expert, and every kid is different, but when I talked with my oldest (now in her first year of college) these were the things that seemed to help her pick a direction in life:

1) The Ideal Job Venn Diagram by David Hamil (https://breakingnorms.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/ideal-job-...) It's a Venn diagram of "things you're good" at, "things you like doing", and "things that pay well". The main purpose of this is to kick off the question of whether your true passion should really be a hobby instead of a job. Also, if you don't have a "Dream Job" in mind, then start by eliminating jobs that you would hate or be terrible at. Sometimes it's just easier to pick a job that doesn't suck.

2) College is an investment in your future, so you need to understand the full costs (tuition and lost income), as well as the potential returns. What professions are you interested in and what are the average starting salaries for them? At that salary how long would it take to pay off the full cost of going to college?

Another key thing I learned is to start having the conversations well before they are stressed out about picking a college and possible career. At that point it's too emotionally charged to have a rational conversation.

Tell them that they don't have to follow their dreams 100% of the time.

If you don't plan to have a big career besides art, learn something that you can bear with and that has enough demand so you don't have to work 50h a week to pay the rent.

I know many people who simply have a vocation and an avocation. They work 3-4 days a week in an office job to pay the bills and do different stuff with the rest of the week.

Actors, musicians, tattoo artists, DJs, event organizers, illustrators, fashion designers, instagram influencers, photographers and what not.

Sure, it's cooler to do 100% of what you love, but these things really only bring fun if you can really do what you love and not have to bend yourself to apply your loved skill to some dumb projects just to make money.

I know many photographers who have to do one marriage after another, just to pay the bills and they hate it. Illustrators who have to draw corporate crap all the time etc. This sucks the soul out of your passion.

You crush their college dreams, which is what the whole article is about.

Show them the website of the American Visionary Art Museum. It’s a museum for art made by people who never went to art school. It’s filled with stories of people who had rich lives as artists alongside other careers.

You don’t need art school to be an artist. http://www.avam.org/

The museum might be cool but that website is badly designed enough to testify against this idea of being a self-taught artist.

The museum is actually run by a mime (who did have formal training)!

incidentally, a folk artist is simply an artist that does not have a formal art education

I told them flat out: if they went that way (non-STEM) they would have to do it w/o my support.

Though, in reality I would have continued to support them if they switched majors after giving STEM a chance for 2-years.

I would suggest them getting two degrees. One would need to be in something they can tolerate doing for a living that has a good chance of earning enough money (though the actual definition of enough differs between people) and the other in what they love to do.

This does mean sacrificing a lot of the fun during college, but in exchange you get both an education in what you love and a career that can support what you love even if what you love isn't financially viable.

It is impossible to predict how your child's life is going to turn out. I know a bunch of people who are making great livings with degrees in supposedly "low earning potential" fields like art, English, etc. Some are web developers, some are medical professionals, some are social media experts, some are entrepreneurs, etc. Who knows what the future of the economy will hold.

IMO it is better for parents to stick to logistics and standards, like "this is how much we can spend on college" and "this is how hard I expect you to work."

In that case it's critical to go to an excellent school where networking is easy. If the probability of a job is low, go where that job is. NYC schools or USC/UCLA, I don't think the job opportunities are as plentiful in Chicago as you get competition from talent from both coasts and everyone with a pipe dream in the mid west. Otherwise it will be that shit underpaid job that you can't crawl out of, because you aren't going to get that 1 of maybe only 2 cushy theater company jobs in Houston, or a job as an illustrator in the entire mid west.

You tell them to pursue it at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc, not at Pratt or Columbia, which are known money pits.

You can do anything with a liberal arts major from Harvard.

Tell the parent that their child is as unlikely to become Lee Iacocca as they are to become Robert Redford.

One of the great things about those fields is that they don't really require a degree. So one option is let them do it, just without the huge upfront sunk cost.

If it's art, they could live at home, work as a barista, take art classes, and paint as much as they want.

If it's acting they could move to L.A. or new york, wait tables and take lessons while auditioning.

After a few years they'll find a little traction and decide to pursue it a few more or they'll figure accounting isn't so bad. Better to figure that out at 21 than 28.

My son went to college for Physics. I stressed to him that getting a high paying career in Physics with all the competition out there will be like landing a major role in a movie, he'll need to be the best of the best, and still be ready for rejection, possibly putting him into a situation where he'll take any job to stay afloat.

It took him 4 months in college before discovering an Engineering field he was more interested in than Physics. It wasn't my fear-speak that did it, he just discovered how interesting it was on his own and now wants to pursue it.

My sigh of relief could be heard throughout the galaxy.

We are also at a state school and paying all of his college expenses out of pocket except for books and a small stipend of financial aid. So, being in a career that would yield a high paying job after he left school was very important to us.

I did the same with my boys -- now both software engineers (duh). When raising children, are you going to omit how Physics affects your life? No, you'll tell about hot stoves and heavy objects on the other side of levers. You tell them about chemistry and biology: frying pan fires, food going bad, drink fluids when you're sick. We tell them about history and sociology: this group of people came to this country when they were being murdered in their own country; that group came because they were granted land by a government. We omit money and how it works. Many also omit romantic sex, even if their kids take sex ed. And, of course, we omit anything that we don't want to face ourselves, but that's probably another topic.

> that group came because they were granted land by a government. We omit money and how it works

You also omit the part where the people already living there got genocided I guess.

Yes. I would categorize genocide by relatives as something that most people would not want to face -- it's "probably another topic" It's a mistake to omit that too.

Fair :-)

> While other parents cheerfully promise that “if you get in, we’ll figure out the money part,”

That is literally the worst mindset to go in to this about.

I profoundly want to see college be free for all, and debt zeroed out. Failing that rather utopian vision, the smart bet is to get a degree that you can pay off in under 10 years without a miracle.

I plan to save up enough to help my kid out, which might well involve "we'll send you internationally: those colleges are just as good, you'll get more independent, and you will be about debt free when you get out".

Public student loans have income based repayment. Assuming you go to a state school and don't live on campus, the debt isn't a big deal.

And if you get into very top tier private school, the networking alone is definitely worth it.

> Public student loans have income based repayment. Assuming you go to a state school and don't live on campus, the debt isn't a big deal.

only for very specific programs, doing very specific work. I looked into it. it's not a general program - at least, when I was dealing with my 10s of thousands of dollars..

Nope. Income based repayment is available for all federal student loans.

There's a limit of $30k for dependent students and $60k fo independent students. For direct federal undergrad loans in general, not for income based repayment.

>I profoundly want to see college be free for all, and debt zeroed out.

If you don't mind, can I ask some questions to expand upon this?

First, does this count living expenses? Many students can save greatly living at home, but this requires going to a college near your home, for there to even been a college near your home, and decent enough relationship with the parents/guardian. If we don't cover room/board/etc. it greatly limits freedom of picking without people still having to take on some level of debt, but makes the overall cost cheaper. If we do cover room/board/etc. then what sorts of limits are on it?

Second, you say free for all, but does all mean the people who take more than 4 years to finish a 4 year degree? What sort of upper limits? What about people who have a degree but want to go back (perhaps there degree is in a field that is currently shrinking)? Would there be an expected level of academic achievement that must be met to continue?

Many people I've spoken to in the past will quickly point out that many nations already solve these problems, but I also find what the person envisions and how it works in other countries do have some level of disagreement (especially with regards to merit qualifications and the actual experience itself), though I haven't been able to verify if this is really the case or not.

These are my observations/opinions based on both graduate and undergrad school in the US.

(1) In this utopian world, college owned dorms would be part and parcel of the free college. This allows control of the costs rather than allowing landlords to profit off of the university. The US has massive issues with expensive housing, even around rural universities.

(2) I'd set the limit at, say, 6 years. 5 years isn't uncommon, 6 is rare, and 7 is .... extremely rare, and questionable for a full-time student... Generally speaking. I'd expect a 2.5 GPA or better.

I have no real interest in an unending "free ride". But I do want an educated citizenry without enormous debt burdens. I will shoulder the tax burden that I, a high-earning citizen, will have to pay out, in order to get an educated citizenry with an interest in taking risks. I think a lot of the lack of new businesses etc in the last 20 years can be directly traced to that. And on a more nuanced scale, I think the lack of a wide college education has reduced the discourse in the country (prior cheap college in the US was largely contingent on the Cold War and the GI bill; it's very complicated, but I do think it helped us collectively in the 50s-70s).

Anyway. I'm not per se drawing off of any other country's specific educational systems. I'm not personally fond of the West European systems I've looked at, although they do solve these issues to some level. The US has enormous resources and enormous capability.

>I think the lack of a wide college education has reduced the discourse in the country (prior cheap college in the US was largely contingent on the Cold War and the GI bill; it's very complicated, but I do think it helped us collectively in the 50s-70s).

I feel in this case, waiting for college is too late and the improvements should be done at the grade school level. Only a fraction of the population goes to college and as such even if the education from college was perfected, it would only apply to that fraction of the population. While controlling costs may help increase that fraction some, it would not help with those who find college not in their future due to academic limitation instead of financial ones.

Overall, my own personal problem with this proposal comes from my own experience at college, where I saw numerous people who took 5+ years doing so because they prioritized fun over education. Taking minimum course loads, partying instead of studying, etc. I think much stricter requirements on academic achievement would be needed for me to be willing to support such a plan.

What do you think of a shorter term solution of allowing student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy?

> I feel in this case, waiting for college is too late and the improvements should be done at the grade school level. Only a fraction of the population goes to college and as such even if the education from college was perfected, it would only apply to that fraction of the population.

25% or so of the population or so attends at least one semester of college. If I recollect the statistics right. Which is.... pretty dang good.

You're not wrong in that k-12 education needs to improve. That said, people have been moaning about k-12 education for the last 200 years in the US, and, well, I'm not personally particularly keen about hunting with that dog. In part because k-12 is considered a guaranteed education, so you ipso facto have to consider policies with address the entirety of the bell curve of the population, and the stakeholders are peculiarly passionate (their kids!). College has the profound advantage in that there's some flavor of choice in it, so you can wind up executing on certain rule changes without the enormous knife fight involved in k-12 politics.

I'm not disagreeing. But I think if we spec out the political fight between "federally mandate a substantial change in learning social sciences, history, civics, & philosophy across the US by Congress" (the required subjects for a competent civic education) and "free college for all", my money is that free college for all, with a free pony too, will happen decades before the other.

> I saw numerous people who took 5+ years doing so because they prioritized fun over education. Taking minimum course loads, partying instead of studying, etc.

I didn't see that, much. There was some. Very very small proportion in my experience. I went to state schools in Idaho, mostly around the engineering departments. Business departments or frats maaaaay have had different student populations.

I recognize your concern though. That is why I think > 6 years should be a fairly hard cutoff for government supported college. 5 years was pretty common for people who switched majors or had a rough semester. 6 years was rare.

> What do you think of a shorter term solution of allowing student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy?

I'm in favor of that!

When I was applying to colleges (in the 90's), my parents told me that:

(a) If I applied and was accepted at the local state University, they would pay the full costs for me to attend there. (at the time, ~$10K/yr)

(b) If I was additionally accepted to any other school and decided to go there, they would still pay _me_ the costs of attending the state school, and I would be responsible for for making up any difference in tuition (financial aid, scholarships, loans, side jobs, whatever) to the alternate school.

They did offer a ton of guidance and encouragement towards applying for scholarships, finding jobs, etc. and in the end I did manage to get through a private school in a different state.

It worked out for me - I would probably offer a similar deal to my own children.

it's not a bad deal! The cost I expect for my kid at a state school for a 4 year school is ~~~~150K, given typical cost increases.

I'm not averse to giving him enough debt to attend to his finances with care - say, 20-30K in today's dollars. But I'm not saddling him with debt to last into his 30s. I lived that. It killed a great deal of opportunity for me.

I expect I will probably buy 90% or so of the Washington state GET program (somewhat complicated), and let him sort out the other 10%.

There is no free. Free means Janet's dad who didn't go to college get to pay additional so Bill's son goes for free. When resources are free, they become either worthless or completely over-utilized. If you make college free, that means colleges will still charge for classes, still charge for books, still charge for dorm rooms, etc. They'll send their bills to the government, to pay with increased tax dollars. They'll increase their rates to the gov't also. Professors and administrators aren't working for free. Groundskeepers either. TA's won't either because now they don't have tuition. Professors workloads just increased because normally they have TA's to teach and grade for them. So more professors are hired. Notice anything interesting? College costs which keep increasing as long as easy student loans are available, (and are responsible for the higher costs) just went up more. Now taxes are increasing and additional gov't administration for programs are implemented. Looks like a major redistribution of wealth, from taxpayers to educational institutions. :-/ This is my surprised face.

You should realize that primary and secondary school are already provided "free" to anyone, and the reasons that works are just as valid for college.

There's nothing magically impossible about using taxpayer money to provide 16 years of education instead of 12.

It benefits us as a country to have an electorate who can read and write and have a basic understanding of civics and history. It doesn't necessarily appear to benefit us the same way to have a bunch of folks spend 4 years getting English degrees to make mom and dad happy.

There are a lot of benefits to college, but a lot of those benefits go away when college stops becoming a choice and starts becoming mandated state education.

How about if a bunch of folks spend 4 years getting English degrees because sophisticated communication is a critical skill when your entire economy is based on information?

It's really striking to me how the arguments against college for all today mirror the arguments against secondary school for all 120 years ago.

Hopefully the parallel continues and our great grandkids can take their advanced education for granted the way we take secondary school for granted today.

We don't live in a world where "sophisticated communication" alone gets you hired unfortunately. Primary/secondary education is meant to build reasonably well rounded individuals who meet the basic skills to function well in society. Paying significant amounts of money to do that for an additional four years with no return on investment, whether it's the individual or the taxpayers at large, is silly.

> How about if a bunch of folks spend 4 years getting English degrees because sophisticated communication is a critical skill when your entire economy is based on information?

This is an argument for teaching Communications or Rhetoric. It fails completely as an argument for English, which is mostly an exercise in poorly imitating literary analysis in some style from the 50’s or later. Even if we did want better communicators a year of focused effort on communications/rhetoric would be enough rather than spending four.

> Hopefully the parallel continues and our great grandkids can take their advanced education for granted the way we take secondary school for granted today.

If tertiary education is expanded massively it will only be by the same mechanism as secondary education was, dramatic lowering of standards.

You don't have to speculate, this is reality in Europe.

An important part of these systems are the limits on the number of students admitted to most programs.

For example in Hungary there are centralized final exams at the end of secondary school (age 18-19) and you get a score at the end. You can apply to several universities at the same time, in a preferential order. Then, each year, an algorithm goes down the list of all students ordered by their score and allocates them to their topmost choice where there's still room.

(Also there's no "soft" and subjective bullshit, like essays about your motivation and proofs of "well-roundedness".)

This way the state can focus the subsidy to educational fields that will benefit the economy more, while still subsidizing a certain number of places everywhere.

(Of course if you don't have enough points, there are further, paid places as well.)

Why the criticism of an English degree? It's an important, critical and incredibly useful subject. Especially in our increasingly connected and writing-centric world. You get an advanced workforce by making it advanced in all aspects, not just the ones that you arbitrarily value.

There's nothing wrong with an English degree if you intend to use it and have a career path with it in mind. Unfortunately I have no shortage of friends who went with college because they were expected to, got an English degree because it was easy, and now work dead end jobs they dislike.

While I'm picking on English degrees because it's easy pickings, it's not unique. Take any degree, throw enough people at it and you'll end up with a lot of degree holders not having career paths open to them.

"the reasons that works" is debatable. Now kids in the us frequently start in pre-pre-Kindergarten. And yet we can't teach cursive writing/reading because its too hard. Baltimore City spends more per capita than any other region in the state of MD, yet nobody reads at grade level. There are many factors in play. Throwing money at free college because the 1st 12 nee 14 were free doesn't mean it works. Wanna go to college? Take a test, show you've not frittered away your 1st 12yrs. My employer paid for my MS degree courses and books. If I didn't present a =>3.0 GPA, they didn't reimburse. That provided motivation. But... there was a study in recent years showing some for-profit private colleges that relied heavily on gov't paid students had "watered down" their requirements to achieve the grades necessary to continue on a tax-payer funded basis. So there's that to deal with. Evidently Higher Ed is willing to compromise it scruples when money is involved.

That's different though. High school educations are entirely uniform across the board.

> Looks like a major redistribution of wealth, from taxpayers to educational institutions. :-/ This is my surprised face.

This is my beef with free college. It's a huge amount of public money going to benefit people who don't need it, all for an extremely tenuous promise of upward mobility. Kids growing up in real urban poverty aren't going to college, tuition-free or not. The hurdles keeping them from upward mobility are happening at a much earlier point than the tuition payment deadline.

And the lower middle class kids who might go if college were tuition free--are they really being helped? AOC graduated with a BA cum laude from Boston University and went back to bar-tending afterward. Absolutely no criticism of that--it's honest work. But what does that story--which is common--say about the value of a BA from a college outside the top tier? I studied for the LSAT in Atlanta. I was working as an engineer at the time--all my Georgia Tech classmates had gotten good jobs in Atlanta within six months of graduation. But the folks in my LSAT class, who mostly graduated from places like Georgia State with a BA, were doing things like bar-tending, or administrative roles they could easily have done without a college degree. One of my friends works at a brewery--he says that all but one of the guys bottling/packing the beer have college degrees. Is college really adding value for these people? Or would making it free just transfer wealth from taxpayers to college professors and administrators, while graduates end up doing the same jobs they'd be qualified to do without a degree?

There's some mainstream literature (with data) that corroborates this point of view: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-10-30/free-c...

This might come as a shock, but AOC is a member of Congress now.

(It's silly to judge the value of a college education by the jobs that people get the first few years after college.)

Well, that covers 435 Boston University grads. What about the rest of them?

Couldn't the same be said about any level of education? The law of averages means that yes, on average not everyone is going to see massive success.

That doesn't meant we should deprive them the right to get an education.

What does the law of averages have to say about 435 out of 2 million? My point is that Rayiner was more right than the parent comment: AOC's election doesn't refute the point that a huge number of humanities degree recipients are durably underemployed.

And my point is I'm not sure why that matters. A huge number of highschool graduates are unemployed, therefore does that mean we should start charging for basic education? Just start defunding it further because it has no value?

This linking of career to college education is exactly the problem I'm talking about. People should be free to study what they want, because educated citizens have more value than what they can contribute to the corporate bottom line. European countries understand this and it's time we follow suit. And some of the best software engineers I've known came from education such as the humanities or teaching.

Resources are finite. People should be free to study what they want, but we shouldn't be allocating resources to subsidize all postsecondary study for its own sake. This is why a lot of people think community college should be free: it's largely pin-compatible with the first several years of university education, but has none of the social status and leisure components that have turned college – yes, including state universities – into a Veblen good.

A "huge number"? Rayiner offered a few anecdotes about a few people a few years out of college... he brought up AOC; I merely tried to highlight how silly it was to draw any kind of conclusion from (that) one person.

I know the uselessness of humanities degrees is an article of faith among developers, but the data do not support it.

> It’s also interesting that although it’s a popular target of those who insist that a college education should connect to a good job, majors in “Liberal Arts and Sciences, General Studies, and Humanities” left a scant 18,824 underemployed grads after five years. “English Language and Literature/Letters” had just 16,422 similarly underemployed. And the major with the fewest underemployed graduates, according to the report, was “Foreign Languages, Literature, and Linguistics.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereknewton/2018/05/31/its-not-...

AAAS found that humanities degree holders earn less on average than those holding engineering or computer science degrees but have nearly equal levels of employment and job satisfaction:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/02/07/study-finds-h...

Georgetown found that STEM jobs pay more, but that across all degrees, BA holders have almost twice the median earnings of those with only a high school degree. Some associates degrees beat some BA majors.

https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/5rules/?mod=article_i...

I haven't found any data I'd think of as "huge numbers"--especially if one looks at longer career durations.

"Underemployment" is measured in terms of people getting jobs that "require a college degree." But that does not directly measure whether college is adding value: https://www.hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/Documents/di...

> For example, in 2015, 67% of production supervisor job postings asked for a college degree, while only 16% of employed production supervisors had one.

When companies start requiring college degrees simply because it's an easy way to filter out the bottom of the barrel in a world where we've pushed everyone to get a college degree, the degree isn't adding value. It's just overcoming a self-created hurdle.

> In the present study, I use ASEC data and skill ratings derived from O*NET to test the relative education hypothesis, investigating whether college degree-holders increasingly find themselves in lower-skilled jobs as more of their peers attend college. The findings support the hypothesis that as educational attainment rises in the population, individuals with college degrees are increasingly shuffled into lower skilled jobs.

I think the fact that liberal arts majors have such a hard time getting a job out of college is an indication that college isn't actually adding value. If they stumble around and eventually get a career, it may well be that it's the experience they gain in the meantime that is really adding the value (even if the college degree is checking a box).

You have to be careful not to conflate degree inflation, which is about over-zealous filtering in an organization's hiring process, with college education and the personal benefits it confers upon the individual who receives it.

Put another way, the recipient of a bachelor's degree gets two benefits: 1) a pass through certain HR filters, and 2) the improvement of their personal knowledge and abilities.

The distinction matters because we can fix degree inflation where it happens: in HR. That's why HBS is writing about it. We don't need to deny the obvious benefits of post-secondary education to people, just to fix a problem with over-zealous HR filters. (Those aren't unique to college BTW--think of silly requirements like "10 years experience with React.")

> I think the fact that liberal arts majors have such a hard time getting a job out of college is an indication that college isn't actually adding value.

This would make sense if liberal arts majors had an unusually hard time getting a job out of college, but they don't. Here are some majors and their probability of underemployment in first job and 5 years out.

    Engineering               29% 18%
    Communication/Journalism  39% 24%
    Mathematics/Statistics    39% 26%
    Foreign Languages         43% 27%
    Physical Sciences         40% 27%
    English/Literature        45% 29%
    Visual/Performing Arts    45% 31%
    Biological/Biomedical     51% 35%

From study linked in article in my earlier comment:

https://www.burning-glass.com/wp-content/uploads/permanent_d...

I mean, you're essentially arguing that people like me (people that grew up in deep poverty) wouldn't benefit from a college degree, but here I am. A software engineer because I was able to afford college through benefits and grants that made it near-free. I didn't go to a top tier college. I went to the local community college and used that to go to the local University to get a degree in CS.

Well, here I am. Are you saying I don't exist? Without my degree which opened quite a few doors, I'd be still back home in poverty.

I don't think that's what he's arguing. I think he believes there are some people who

- grew up in deep poverty

- graduated highschool with the grades/SATs to get into a STEM program

- didn't get enough grants/loans to go to college

- would have gone to college had it been free

- and would have graduated with a worthwhile degree had they gone

but they're outnumbered by their peers who wouldn't benefit from free college, but would still have to pay extra taxes, or receive less in benefits to fund a bunch of upper/middle class kids art pursuing history degrees.

Counterpoint: I want to see college eliminated. The idea doesn't make as much sense in the modern world and codifies the idea that companies shouldn't have to train their own employees (and raises an artificial barrier to entry!).

Subsidizing collegiate institutions might cement practices that should perhaps change as time goes on. Does it truly make sense for every kid to go to school for four years? Perhaps three years would do just as well? How and when will we change the funding to each institution to accommodate that? Will the institutions be able to transition well to a three-year model? The free market is able to make such changes as fast as need be. The regulated market would push back against changes that may be necessary.

I'm not saying college isn't necessary or that it isn't too expensive. I too am alarmed at the number of bankrupted kids and the hordes of immigrants stealing jobs that we should rightfully be able to fill best. However, I am saying that rushing to the solution of free college may introduce unforeseen problems in the future.

>Failing that rather utopian vision

When I went to university in the UK in 1983 university was free, both undergraduate and graduate, there was a means tested grant for living expenses and student debt wasn't really a thing. So it's possible. On the downside there was only so much money from tax hence only about 15% of the people got to do undergrad degrees and postgrad was maybe 10% of that.

the downside there was only so much money from tax hence only about 15% of the people got to do undergrad degrees and postgrad was maybe 10% of that.

I’m not sure this is true; were there any cases of kids who got 3 A’s at A-level (back when that meant something) being turned away because the colleges were full? It was actually the case that if you got the grades, there would be a place for you. Nowadays it’s different of course, but that is because of lowering standards both in the exams and in the entry requirements.

Yes if you got good grades you got to go. That was the main criteria for the limited number of places.

Whether that's a good system or not is debatable.

There’s some weird things about this article.

1) Their daughter likely would’ve qualified for quite a bit of financial aid, which potentially could have brought a fancy art college to within reason for her. That she never even applied to her dream schools means she will never know if they would’ve been competitively priced.

2) Collectively, student debt is $1.6T, but that doesn’t tell you much about the per graduate burden. Here’s some data: https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/. Average debt load is $30K or $7.5K per year of study (just living on that amount of money seems like a good deal). That’s is quite a bit of money, but not insurmountable. Median payment is $222/month. Also pretty feasible for most graduates, especially when inflation and wage gains are factored in.

Median payment seems like a misleading statistic because there are many repayment plans: the default is 10 years for student loans; but income-based repayment could extend that. Affordable monthly payments across the board is good for all graduates, but it doesn't necessarily imply it's $222/month for 10 years for all debtors.

You'll never owe more than 10% of income over 1.5x the federal poverty rate though assuming you don't get private loans (90% of loan disbursements are public).

My biggest issue with it was that you are in the "too well-off to get aid but not well-off enough to pay cash" gap, then you should be expanding the number of schools you are applying too, not reducing. In-state and out-of-state public schools, and a wide mix of small to large private schools in both the "reach" and "safety" categories to see what kind of financial offers you get. With the caveat that if it turns out you hate the school that offered you money and end up transferring out, you lose all those other offers and you will be pretty much limited to public schools.

If cash is king you need to start busting your ass freshman year of high school. Four years of pushing it and you can net an easy scholarship that will take out a chunk of the cost, or even get a full ride and be able to go anywhere you'd like.

"full ride" <> "able to go anywhere you'd like"

Unless the one school that offers you a "full ride" is the one that you wanted to go to.

But they're not the median family, sending their median daughter to a median university. They're the Warnick's, considering sending Ella Warnick to Pratt, so the median debt, and median payment isn't relevant.

We know how much the school is,75,000 a year. We know how much they can afford. $15,000 a year. So we know that Ella will probably be in ~ $240,000 worth of debt.

One of the best things my parents ever did for me (and themselves) was tell me, despite getting accepted, that I was not going to a fancy 40k+/yr school for undergrad.

I was angsty about it at the time, but I got over it pretty quick and now looking back appreciate how much stress and debt they saved me from.

I went to a magnet high school so there was a lot of pressure to go to a "prestigious" school, and "settling" for a public university was uncool. But of course ultimately something like 10% of my graduating class went to the local public university. I had a phenomenal time there.

I keep in touch with many folks from high school, and while some of them that went on to expensive private schools have been very successful (usually rather wealthy already), I'd say that on balance the kids who went to affordable-but-respected programs are doing better 10-15 years after graduation than the kids who went to expensive elite schools on debt.

The debt burden of those expensive schools can be truly devastating, financially and emotionally. I am seeing the long-term effects of it on my peers still after 15 years. And the costs have gotten even higher now. As a parent, one should think very very carefully about whether it is truly worth it.

Same here. Got into MIT for engineering and went to a (still good) in-state school for engineering. My parents made it clear that they had saved enough to pay for the in-state tuition (+ an academic scholarship) but that I'd have to go into debt for MIT.

Some of my peers were kind of shitty about it. "So-and-so doesn't like to try so I get their decision." There was definitely a cult of Ivy League there.

I'm very happy with the decision. The in-state school was plenty challenging and I learned a bunch. Work in software now and got a job at a FAANG out of school (thanks to a referral from a college friend), so outcome-wise I can't imagine that sticker price being worth it. Not to mention that culturally I now know that MIT isn't exactly my vibe lol so I probably would've been unhappy.

My sister and I basically copied what our parents did. I got a degree in engineering like my dad (but pivoted to data science), and my sister got a degree in elementary education like my mom. She works much harder than me but earns significantly less and frequently comments about how massive of a mistake it was to go into teaching.

I'm not really sure what the lesson is here other than that the world isn't fair. From my perspective, my sister is generating much more value for the world than I am, and yet all of her efforts result in very little reward.

I'm mixed on what to tell my future children. I want them to do what they love (or what they feel is important), but that may result in a very difficult future financially. I suppose I'll just try to make the trade-offs in career choices as clear as possible and hope they make decisions they won't regret later.

People are not compensated to their value, they are compensated to their rarity. A lot of people can (in theory) teach elementary aged kids, a lot fewer folks can architect skyscrapers or perform brain surgery.

> She works much harder than me but earns significantly less and frequently comments about how massive of a mistake it was to go into teaching.

Still time to get out. There are data science and other boot camps.

What I don't understand is: why don't they go to a university in Europe? I just checked for my alma mater: tuition fee is ~500 euro for 1 year. You pay about 4k in rent per year (this is probably too high an estimate). The level of education is high, and the programs are available in English.

Because most European universities are crap compared to American ones. Crude, but the truth.

Strong words. What do you learn in American university that you don't learn in, say, a German one? I know I could have done without two years of basic education in the form of GenEds.

You have to understand the American mentality.

I’ve talked with parents who told me how unfortunate that their kid can’t go to a good school. The school has a score of 9.2/10 versus the school they wanted which scores 9.5/10.

We can all thank Greatschools and their Gates foundation grants for making everyone think you can assign a number to the quality of a school (which most people in the rest of the world would think is nonsense), and to perpetuate redlining by making sure your kids go to school only with other wasian people.

The policy push toward simple reduced-to-a-number school report cards significantly predates Greatschools, which just jumped on the bandwagon.

Do you have any evidence to back up this rather broad claim?

Ever heard of a little kernel known as Linux?

> Because most European universities are crap compared to American ones.

That's probably true if you compare the average European university to the handful of elite American one's, but it's even more true when you compare the average American University to those same elites (even if you exclude all the unaccredited and for-profit schools, which really drag the American quality standards down.)

Not everyone wants to go live in another continent at 18, an expensive flight away, with no family or friends, different culture and perhaps different language? Plenty of reasons.

This is why many doctors in the US get their basic medical schooling outside of the US. (Often in the Caribbean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medical_schools_in_the... )

That generally is not why US born doctors go to medical school outside of the US.

> That generally is not why US born doctors go to medical school outside of the US.

Everyone I know who did it did so for two reasons, and this is one of them. Getting into medical school means tonnes of debt - similar to art school, perhaps. And if you don't do well enough at your residency, or at your medical school prior to that, you are completely screwed in a way those who went to art school are.

Going to the Caribbean (or any other country) for medical school has its risks, though. You are treated differently when applying for residency programs, and need a much much higher score on the USMLE than someone trained in the US to match. But if you don't, you're not stuck with crippling debt.

Oh, and the other reason? Quicker to graduate. Most countries allow you to enter medical school right after high school.

Caribbean schools are even more expensive than US med schools. A contact of mine is graduating from Ross University with $550k of debt.

Students go there because their bar for incoming students is lower, and not at all because they're cheaper.

It's the same with veterinarians as well.

Not the Caribbean, but I know someone who did this in Mexico.

Let's not sugar coat this. The #1 reason people go Caribbean is that they can't get into a US MD school.

Caribbean schools are often more expensive than US ones, and only like 20% of their grads actually end up becoming US doctors. When it comes time to apply for residencies, carribbean students get put at the bottom of the pile, if the programs even bother to look at their application at all.

A neighbor's kid is at St. Andrew's in Scotland. But I don't know of many who have chosen that route.

Tuition for EU residents is usually not the same as tuition for American students. It's still cheaper than school in the US, but not by nearly as much

University in Germany is just as cheap for foreigners as it is for Germans. It's only a few hundred Euros per semester, and comes with benefits like cheap public transportation and subsidized meals.

Here's the tuition fee table for KULeuven. https://www.kuleuven.be/inschrijvingen/registration/fees

This university is located in Belgium (where people speak Dutch, English and French), and ranks quite well.

https://nieuws.kuleuven.be/en/content/2019/ku-leuven-rises-t...

Travel time from NY is about 7h. Sure, you might be in for a culture shock, but someone coming from Alabama will have a shock going to MIT or Caltech too.

They don't market nearly as effectively. They don't appear on rankings for top colleges. They don't send leaflets and no one you know goes there.

The only European Uni I knew was oxford, and I had no idea that I could save money on a similar education in Europe. In the first place I just assumed I would need to know a foreign language for any non-UK European school.

They don't market nearly as effectively

Heh, yes. A long time ago there was this guide aimed at foreign students coming to study in the US. They had a warning: if the school pitches itself at foreigners it does not have sufficient domestic students. The prospective customer should ponder long and hard about the motive of the place.

(The motive may not always be nefarious. Back then, the Classics departments of Oxford and Cambridge did pitch themselves at German school leavers because in England Latin instruction was plainly worthless. In Germany it was actually at an adequate level.)

Why they would market it? Education is subsided by government. Hope is that student will stay after finishing Uni. Mostly it targets students from poorer countries, for example Polish universities are attracting people from former soviet union.

Some ignorant american would just drink, cost money and move away at end.

> Why they would market it?

They wouldn't, but American universities do and it works. Thus the answer to GPs conundrum of why don't more students consider school in Europe.

> They don't market nearly as effectively

It's not in the interest of any European government or university to get flooded by American (or any other foreign, non-EU) students. The only reason some German states haven't introduced a fee for non-EU residents yet is probably that their number is not that high yet. But some other German states have already set up such extra fees. Some other countries place fees on English-language programmes, while those in the local language remain free.

List of probable truths when studying in Europe as an American at 18:

- You've never left home for more than a month.

- There will be few (if any) Americans in a European bachelor's program.

- There is a 6 to 9 hours timezone difference with home.

- You don't have an easy time getting information compared to with American universities.

- The country will not speak English (UK aside). I know they speak english in French and German unis but your landlord probably won't, nor your health insurer.

That's a massive list of stress-inducing elements you have to take into account. For a master/PhD the situation is totally different but it's still not that easy (source: did an international master programme).

> I know they speak english in French and German unis

Lol in France, except in some top programs, they usually won't usefully speak English. Your landlord may be better at it.

Ireland is also a solution, with several excellent universities.

Only Trinity and University College Dublin are in or near the global top 200. Two is not several.

Is that tuition for foreign students too? Some countries offer international students a subsidized rate (Germany comes to mind) but others do not.

I loved this part:

To give my daughter a hard no on something she really, really wants—and that I in theory want for her!—makes me feel like a monster. While other parents cheerfully promise that “if you get in, we’ll figure out the money part,” I’m over here sounding a Greek chorus of caution and lament. Sometimes I long to just say yes. Saying yes feels good. Yes makes people happy.

On the other hand, saying no is part of my job as a parent. Hasn’t it been my role all along to steer my kid toward smarter but seemingly less desirable choices? Carrots instead of Kit Kats, an early bedtime instead of an all-night YouTube binge? Children naturally hate those kinds of limits. They may temporarily hate us. But they’re too young and myopic to see how this one decision could make their lives harder for a long, long time. We can.

You saved your daughter from a life of debt slavery. Now she can have a life, children and maybe even become a painter.

I think it can be a disservice to apply to so few schools on the presumption that you won't get aid or scholarships. I applied to only 3 schools and still slightly regret not applying to more, since I thought 2 of schools were going to toss my application into the trash but didn't.

Lots of schools offer a lot of scholarships that the parents and the kids may not be aware of. I was very surprised by my offers, and I'm sure there are a lot of other kids out there who made 'pragmatic' choices like me who undershot because they thought they were being realistic.

I still ended up going to my safety school that I was always planning on going and it was wonderful and cheap. But I still wonder what could have happened if I had tried a little bit harder or looked around a little bit more seriously.

EDIT: In case no one read it, the teenager only applied to 2 schools after a lot of pressure from the parent to be pragmatic.

Some of the more expensive colleges rely on the psychological impact of "oh wow, they're offering a five figure discount!" to overcome resistance. I went to a school that's was $36k/year (now $60k); they had a $10k "merit" scholarship for a SAT/ACT score threshold that anyone eligible to attend would've qualified for.

I wound up transferring to the local community college (for a tenth of the cost) for a year, and had quite a few of the same professors who'd adjunct there for a bit of side income.

These parents are heroes.

> A couple months ago, my 17-year-old daughter’s guidance counselor called her into his office to ask pretty much the only question that adults ask high school seniors: “What colleges are you applying to?” When Ella tossed off a handful of universities, he said, “Have you thought about going to art school?”

This is goddamn malpractice.

> Like most parents, who save on average $18,000 for their kids’ education, we’d failed to sock away anything close to the $75,000 annual sticker price it would take for Ella to go to, say, Pratt in New York City.

A friend of ours matriculated at a similar school, but dropped out and went into physical therapy instead. She and her husband managed to buy a house in their late 20s, have kids, etc.[1]

Your job as a parent is to socialize your children. And that means telling them how the world works. The society that they see around them exists because people with valuable skills work hard to produce things. That doesn’t just mean doctors or engineers—the world needs accountants and roofers and HVAC technicians. The common thread is that these are skills that people and companies need every day to make the world around us keep humming. People are compensated based on the value and rarity of their skills. And money is necessary for security and supporting yourself. Kids need to learn these lessons from the earliest age. You abdicate that duty if you don’t teach them that, and instead allow a bunch of government workers fill your kids’ heads with nonsense.

College, for most people, is a joke. Take a bunch of classes that don’t teach you anything useful, and then get a job that doesn’t require you to use anything you learned. It’s an elaborate shell game we have to play because we’ve bought into the nonsense peddled by teachers and guidance counselors. As parents, it’s your job to be smart and help your kids navigate this game. (We’re going through this with my wife’s younger brother right now.) Manage your courses to keep up your GPA, take prerequisites at community college for a fraction of the price, etc. The Kafkaesque administration of most colleges makes this hard enough. But teachers and administrators will fight you the whole way. They’ll talk about making sure kids get the “college experience” and telling kids to “pursue their bliss.” Its your job as a parent to do everything you can to fight back.

[1] I don’t want to come across to much like judging people’s lifestyle. I know some people who are happy with the bohemian art world lifestyle. That makes them happy. But when you see people complain about student debt and the plight of millennials, that’s what keeps coming up: they can’t afford to buy a house or have kids.

[2] That doesn’t mean I think doctors or aerospace engineers don’t need to go to college. But in 1960, less than 40% of the population graduated from high school and less than 10% had a bachelors degree. It’s incredible what a sophisticated economy we had with so little formal education.

There is a place for encouraging students to go to art school... the catch is that they need to have obvious signs of world class talent.

You can be completely average talent wise, get a job at an ad agency and 5-7 years later be a creative director making bank.

Art school can actually be a great investment if you want to do creative work for hire.

This is a weird ponzi-scheme like comment.

If you are a creative director, you have people working under you.

How do you all get to be creative directors?

Because not many people go to art school and pursue that route.

You'd be surprised how many high-level creative positions are available, especially in games. It's kinda political to get a position of course. But being an artist is pretty sustainable if you're willing to put out work for a studio of that sort.

An art education is very different from a design education, though they are very often separate tracks at the same institution.

IME, the people that wanted to go to art school, weren't interested in what is taught design school, and vice versa.

The world we live in is capable of providing a living wage to artists (and writers, and sculptors, etc.). It’s not common, and its not always the most comfortable living, but it exists.

Pixar, Riot Games, Marvel, and XKCD would not exist without full time artists (even those with above-average-but-not-world-class talent).

XKCD is created by a guy who is ... not exactly an "artist". Well, he's an artist because he draws, but he is foremost an engineer, and he went to school for a STEM education. He had a tech job at NASA in his past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randall_Munroe

You’re not wrong. I could have mentioned “Penny Arcade” or “Frogpants Studios” just as easily, I just figured that xkcd is better known here.

> There is a place for encouraging students to go to art school... the catch is that they need to have obvious signs of world class talent.

Maybe, but you have to be careful with this kind of thinking. I know a couple of really gifted guys with degrees from Berklee College of Music who still have student loans to pay off. The truth is, world class musicians working good jobs still take considerable time to pay off loans that big. It's not a high-paying profession.

There's a category of artist, the superstars, who don't have these sorts of problems but its population is vanishingly small.

On the other hand, the guys I'm talking about don't really question the value of their excellent education. It's not all about money for some people, which is good. It's just wise to know what you're getting into.

"World class talent" is hard to define in art. Was Jackson Pollock's work as an art student clearly "world class"? What about color field paintings? Anna Karenina was dismissed on its release as trifling. Art, perhaps by definition, is subjective.

An objective criteria might be to pursue art if you don't have to pay tuition. I knew someone who decided as a teenager that he wouldn't pursue music unless he didn't have to pay for it. This worked out mostly - his undergrad and graduate programs were full ride scholarships, he really was extraordinary. Except when he was auditioning for orchestras at the end, he spent almost a year unemployed and flying back and forth across the country on his own dime. He had to buy a separate seat for his instrument because he couldn't trust it being checked as baggage. He was incredibly good, but he told me that 80% of the people who auditioned were just as good, and past a certain level of ability, it was basically random who got picked. So this guy was perhaps "world class," but even at the end it was a dicey period where he was not sure he could be employed.

Does it take world class talent to convince someone to pay $120K for a banana taped to a wall?

https://www.cnn.com/style/article/david-datuna-banana-art-ba...

> $75,000 annual sticker price

Dear lord, that's insane. UT Austin estimates $26,000/year (in state), including room and board.

And $26k is still insane, at least compared to when I went to school in the 90s. It’s tough these days.

According to a random inflation calculator off the front page of a search (no doubt a sterling source of information) that's about $14,500 equivalent dollars.

How does that compare to what you paid?

I paid $2700/year for tuition, $295/month for rent on a basement apartment (this is Seattle, so even in the 90s rents were kind of high on something nicer), and skimped on food way too much.

Like I said, it was easier in those days. Dad paid my tuition, I paid everything else with a minimum wage job (and later internships, upgrading my apartment to a nicer university provided $425/month).

Doing the math, it was way less than $10k.

Yep, my Bachelor's in CS and Math from at SUNY school was $2750/semester plus room and board. I worked summers, worked on campus, got a job on campus that provided a room, and took out just a couple of loans. I don't actually know how much my degrees cost me, but it was less than $50K and my family and I struggled to pay for it. My first job out of school in '95 was a whopping $35K/yr and some benes.

I'm looking at the SUNY website and it looks like tuition, fees, room and board is about $27K a year now. It's about double what it cost me, roughly $108K for four years.

College, for most people, is a joke

College is great for the right people but we should be emphasizing vocational education and apprenticeships for many more people. Someone who doesn't want to do the reading or do abstract symbol manipulation is a poor fit for universities: https://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boos.... I know because I've taught many students who don't want to be in school and aren't getting much out of it.

The problem with vocational training that /r/personalfinance and similar forums trumpet is that it often points directly to manual labor which leads to severe physical decline and often injury. I hope industries such as plumbing, welding, HVAC, construction, etc. have improved and now teach best practices for safe lifting, mandatory physical therapy, and enforce them - but I don't think they do.

Effectively what we're telling people is: you can make decent money with these jobs but you'll have to endure pain which all those kids goofing off in college will never have to go through. Making one class of people go through pain, and the other not, seems like dual-class citizenship. De-stigmatizing blue collar jobs is important but we have to try to make them more equal to white-collar jobs first.

Jobs that involve typing and computer use for extended periods of time will often lead to pain and health problems. It's not a quality unique to blue collar jobs.

a bit disingenuous. while all jobs have the possibility of physical injury, some are much more likely than others.

I agree, but white collar jobs often afford the opportunity to bugger off for 20 minutes and get a coffee, stretch, etc., where as a line job with time cards may lack that. There are often more resources spent on i.e. chairs, standing desks, even in-office physical therapy, as well (IMO).

But can you make much money doing many of these trades? Pulling up glassdoor for several jobs typically parroted as "high paid" show you maxing out at $40k-$50k at the very most without niche specializations. And that's with a decade+ of experience. The pay for the entry level / apprenticeship work is insulting and you could make that at a call center. At least in my area that's what I've seen.

Electricians have a median pay of $55,000 which is a good bit higher than the average pay of $38,000. And I don't think anyone is recommending kids become electricians instead of petroleum engineers but maybe instead of history majors/baristas.

Call center is also entry level, so I don't know why an entry level electrician should get paid much more than what someone at a call center makers.

I see this argument, about physical demands, a lot, and I don't understand how it's coherent. Somebody is going to do these jobs. Is the argument that it's not fair for kids who could go to college to be that person?

> Is the argument that it's not fair for kids who could go to college to be that person?

Spot on. When I make that argument its from the perspective of me at 18 with the options to do either. I think you're making an important counter point that many don't have the option to begin with, due to money, citizenship, parental/child care, relationships, illness, education level, etc. - although scholarships heavily target most of those demographics.

Your kids are your kids. While you as a single person may not do much to improve working conditions across society, you can improve your kids' future by steering them towards less physically demanding jobs.

Especially people who do physical work themselves try to make sure their kids won't have to. E.g. my grandparents, who were simple village folks working in the fields, made sure to support their kids in getting educated. (Despite all its nastyness, one of the few good things about socialist Hungary was that this kind of upward mobility was possible and encouraged).

The idea that people shouldn't do demanding physical work, and that everyone should to the best of their ability make sure their own kids don't, doesn't seem to me like a good way to structure a society.

My uncle was an electrician (he's retired now), and so is one of his sons, and they both seem pretty happy with their lives. Happier than a lot of tech workers I know.

Most individual people don't try to structure society, they try to improve their and their families' lives.

I don't fault anyone for not sacrificing themselves for the greater good of society at large.

And yes, for sure, there can be shitty, stressful and low-paid office jobs and fulfilling, well-paid physical work. If someone finds an example of the latter, I see no reason why they wouldn't recommend it to their kids.

My parents destroyed their body doing professional fishing as their career.

They were very happy that I decided to get a desk job because they didn't want me to be in perpetual pain and disabled like they are.

So then your argument is that nobody should fish professionally, right?

I recall you have two children -- do you teach them as such?

I ask for a particular reason: I think you're easily one of the smartest guys in this forum, and your children are likely to be similarly smart.

So, there are two games out there for us to play -- 1) as you say, the HVAC technicians and roofers who actually make a pretty comfortable salary and 2) the uber smarts, the googlers and the founders. Even a liberal arts degree from a big name A-tier school is worth it for them, for the connections they'll make and the prestige they'll be set with for all of their life. So 2 is actually a pretty good bet. And it's why I encourage my nieces (who seem very smart) to do the whole college acceptance dance (learn to play piano, do some sports, and everything else to secure a ticket to Harvard) and the rest is easy. Don't you do the same with your kids?

My kids are small, so jury's out on how smart they will end up being. The approach we've taken with them so far is to ground them in sober reality. (I feel like a lot of forces, both in school and media, try to insulate kids from how the economy works. It's like getting packaged meat in the store and not knowing how animals are raised and slaughtered and processed.) We're fortunate to be able to afford many luxuries (private schools, maids). But we try to help the kids understand that there is a link between these luxuries and the fact that mommy and daddy work on the weekends. Life presents lots of learning opportunities, such as the $700 heating-oil bill we got the other day. We live near the Naval Academy, so the older one also understands that the young people she sees in uniform are learning important skills and will one day risk their lives to defend the comfortable world around her that she shouldn't take for granted. Being from Bangladesh also offers the opportunity to teach what the world is like for all the people who aren't so fortunate to live in America.

I don't agree with folks who say everyone should just go to trade school. There are lots of good, high-demand jobs that require a college degree. That is also part of the reality that kids need to understand. My kids will start SAT prep in middle school and depending on demonstrated potential, we might encourage trying for a top-tier college. We don't intend to pay for school, because we think debt creates motivation. If either of them demonstrate an interest in law or medicine, I suspect we'll encourage them to go to a state school for undergrad like my wife and I did, because people care more about the terminal degree. Either way, we think it's important to take a gap year to mature after high school. (My wife did; I wish I had done the same.) At the end of the day, a lot depends on the kids. At the same time, my wife and I are not ashamed to be Asian parents. There is a lot you can do to guide, mold, guilt, manipulate, wheedle, and prod your children into making good decisions, and we intend to do it.

You're not going to pay for undergrad? We decided not to pay for grad school, but I feel strongly obligated to cover undergrad (I'm thrilled that my daughter chose Illinois over Oberlin).

Congrats on the daughter!

I mean it obviously depends on what happens a decade from now. I’m imagining some mix of taking some amount in loans with us covering living expenses. My wife worked through Iowa, and I feel like I would’ve done better had my parents made me spend my summer earnings from programming on tuition. But my older kid is so self motivated it may not matter.

Tremendously insightful comment.

Generally is say the post-secondary education institution in the U.S. is riding on the laurels of decades past. College use to have a higher bar to entry - standards were higher and the commitment was stronger, and kids of college age were on average more mature. Now that the experience has been wholly commercialized, children who have no business in higher learning are encouraged by the secondary effects of an at one time well meaning propaganda campaign to take on debts they are unlikely to benefit from even in majors which are clearly useless to both individuals and society at large.

> Your job as a parent is to socialize your children. And that means telling them how the world works.

God I wish there had been someone to do this for me, and for all kinds of things, not just finances and career planning. (My parents tried some, but they didn't know much of this themselves.) Now that I'm "old", I'm just starting to get the hang of some of this stuff.

That said, in my youth I suppose I would have been too "smart" to accept advice like this most of the time.

(Want some free education about the business world? Read every Dilbert strip--free online--and think about what they're alluding to.)

> One friend recently told me that her son has his heart set on a pricey out-of-state engineering program, despite the fact that a fantastic engineering program exists at the public university in our town. “It’s a reach school, but if he gets in he’ll probably go there—and I guess deal with a lot of student loan debt afterward,” she said with a laugh.

I don't understand this from the article. I went to a pricey out-of-state engineering school, took out significant loans, got a good engineering job, and paid them off in less than 5 years. Taking out loans to obtain a fancy degree in a low paying profession isn't the same as taking out loans to obtain fancy degrees in a high paying profession, but the article gives them similar treatment.

I sometimes wonder if the main difference between the US and EU economies is that in the EU, the state(s) have largely identified demand inelastic goods and services and regulated their supply: health, tertiary education, housing (more or less). Where these are not regulated, two things happen: prices shoot up and finance providers move in to finance access, creating debt traps. I’m trying not to think about Brexit too much, but one of my indicators for, “this was a bad/good idea” is the extent to which the health, education, housing sectors are further deregulated.

The author briefly transitions from arts schools to engineering schools which- in my opinion- are a totally different beast. If you graduate with 30k-50k in debt and a six figure salary then it's not too bad

But..you can get a six figure salary with an in-state public school too.

Sometimes. The fancy consulting firms place a huge premium on those elite private schools and pay huge salaries. University prestige matters for jobs and salary, even if it doesn't matter for how much you learn.

Yeah but the truly elite private schools are pretty good at aid, I think it's the "borderline" elites where one would end up with substantially more debt than staying in state (on average anyway). I don't have any data but I would guess the fancy consulting firm recruitment potential drops off at a similar rate as the aid amounts do.

Agreed but the host of smaller concerns that dominate high school college choice advice (eg pick a place you feel you fit in, yadda yadda) make a lot more sense if your debt is a tiny fraction of your future income.

FWIW I went to CMU (non-CS) for some squishy reason, like it "felt right". I realized I needed a better degree for taking on 30k debt partway through freshman year and transferred to CS.

The education was rock solid. If anything it was too good - I spent so much time learning and working that I did very little else.

Debt has not really been a concern post graduation, compared to cost of buying a house where I want to live it's barely worth mentioning.

> I spent so much time learning and working that I did very little else

Funny, I did the same thing (+ applying for internships/jobs/research) and had zero debt and 4 internships under my belt. And yet...I only got into 2 state schools (my safeties) and went to the easier one. I guess I'm not as good because I couldn't get into a CMU-tier school?

> I guess I'm not as good because I couldn't get into a CMU-tier school?

That's not my suggestion, any I'm sorry if you took my post that way.

I'm not sure what your suggestion is then?

I don't see why people would choose to go to the effort if they didn't see that way.

"Culturally upper-class person with middle-bracket income treats college exactly the same way as everybody else in their income bracket, writes article about how different they are"

Private colleges increasingly practice perfect price discrimination making it an incredibly high income tax on the middle class.

A small few give breaks for academically better students, or don't attempt to fully maximize their price (e.g. Harvard could easily charge $100k/year), but for the great majority, the price you pay is basically "as much as you can".

Because of subsidized student loans and jobs that require "credentialization", there's guaranteed supply and guaranteed demand for these rather expensive slots, and no incentive to deliver quality education at a lower price.

Until there's either a dramatic decline in wealthy college students, a drop in government loan support, a decline in the proportion of jobs that absolutely require a BA, or some sort of innovation in virtual college, I don't see this changing.

Telling a kid that you aren't willing to

This article needlessly and incorrectly shits on art school. There are many, many good careers that come out of going to art school, or better yet getting a design degree at an art school. So, maybe have a talk with your kid about _applied_ arts, not just blindly writing off a BFA.

No college teaches creative problem solving and critical thinking better than art school. Not every art school costs $75k, either (which is a price almost no one pays anyway thanks to financial aid).

I went to art school. I work in software engineering now and make good money. Art school made me fearless and pragmatic in a way I wouldn’t have gotten with a state engineering program. It was worth every cent.

As someone who made this choice (not going away to an expensive school), I still regret it. I went to a local school and lived at home, almost everyone I knew moved away. I never developed the same social circle as my friends who went away did. There were so many experiences I missed out on and opportunities that were closed to me because I wasn’t where the action was. I don’t have any memorable college stories to tell or any connections with reach outside of the local community. It stifled my growth professionally and socially, and I would not recommend it.

Sometimes fancy art school is worth it, though. My sister decided to go to CalArts and stomach the high tuition costs. She dropped out two years later after receiving a job offer from Sony Pictures, and Netflix ended up headhunting her a few months later. Now she's debt-free and making a comfortable living, all from the connections and internships she got from CalArts. Sometimes, a name brand school is worth it compared to a cheap school "with a great art program".

I feel that this is a disingenuous approach to the situation that the parents have put their children in.

They put a very positive spin on having spent the money that should have gone to their child’s college tuition.

Braces are a cliche, and cost an absolute max of 10k, a drop in the bucket compared to 300k worth of tuition. These people did not budget for children at all and probably (like everyone else) spent the money on stuff they don’t actually need.

You encourage your child to do well in school and excel at something, but suddenly when the bill comes due it is their responsibility to pay for whatever you’ve encouraged them in, for the rest of their adult lives.

I’m trying to say there’s a big financial literacy issue coming from the parents, not the children (although maybe also the children), and the culture around it is to blame everyone but the parents and saddle the child with indentured servant levels of debt... to pay for stuff the parents wanted at the time. (The 529 is basically free money! How did you not use it?)

These parents do make enough money for them to have saved for this, they just didn’t.

If they didn’t make enough, financial aid probably would have been there. (You can apply somewhere, get in and see what type of financial aid package they give you, then reject because the cost is too high). Schools with better endowments tend to have better aid packages.

To me, this is someone justifying 20 years of their own bad financial decisions.

Everyone is obsessed with the cost of college being “worth it” or send their kids into the life of backbreaking work trade school entails.

For many degrees, there could simply be some sort of national board exam (or a series of them), administered by a testing center (like Prometric). Students can study on their own then pay to present the exams. Since the best lectures and material can be obtained cheaply or for free (Khan, Coursera, etc), "college" debt would be massively reduced. I don't speak for degrees that truly require lab work, like STEM.

Some eye openers there for me. They saved 40k for their kid and on average parents save 18k for their kids?! We saved exactly $0.00 for my oldest. My middle kid is a freshman. $0.00. And my youngest is 9, also $0.00.

The number one thing you must save for is your own retirement. I just this last year started funding that adequately due to life circumstances. We are just recently able to help out with education costs and do plan to open 529 plans this year.

The (very massive) downside to not having saved for the kid's education is that for us to help now, we are spending like nearly $30k a year to cover our oldest's classes. She is working part time and saving, and we are asking her to pay us back 50%. The other option is loans. We would have to cosign for them anyway, so no reason to use her poor credit. But having recently paid off all our debts sans a small mortgage, I'm not excited to take out any more debts.

I had told all my kids since they were young that they were going to pay for their own college. It is hard to follow through with that when the loans they could get are terrible and I still have to cosign for them. Glad I finally have the income to help.

Your approach is right - you need to save for your own retirement as the highest priority.

I personally think that as the are cohort that finished school with the dot com crash then followed up crushed under the weight of the housing crash, start to send kids to college, there will be a general reckoning.

While my wife and I are doing well financially and professionally at the moment, these events have made us distrustful of the current economic model of low taxes and high wealth, which I am practically certain leads to these hours of economic malaise. We had our first at a relatively young age, and the realities of our wealth and savings are not as good as the author of this piece... We only have one salary, which is a particularly huge benefit.

Regardless, one can only hope we decide that a well educated populace is such an improvement to general welfare that we don't continually stuck the costs of raising children on the parents alone. I know that there are tax benefits, but those are a joke.

Uh, school is more than education, specially in art, and more about connections.

For 40k I would consider three years abroad. I think this would cover cost in a good university in Europe. This would give invaluable experience living abroad, give top class education and probably be within budget.

What I never understand about articles like this written from the perspective of Americans is that they don't seem to consider that there are other countries than the US? Why limit yourself to the US when education is much cheaper in other countries. And, it's not like a Art degree from a European country is going to be worse than from a US school, it'll probably open more doors not to mention that learning the language will be useful...

People all over the world think internationally when selecting universities yet people in the US somehow limit themselves only to their own country.

Schools are a place for education but also a signalling tool for recruiting.

I imagine it's difficult to get recruited back in your home country with a degree from a foreign institution unless it's a pretty named school. The simple and harsh reality being that they may have no idea or the bandwidth to figure out how to interpret the grades you received or the education you had. (Of course, CS or hard sciences are likely an exception to this with portfolios or research results being pretty universal...)

And then there's the issue of visa issues should you attempt to work abroad post graduation in that country.

I would tend to say that an experience abroad in fields like Arts is also extremely valuable and there are internationally recognized schools abroad. For example, the beaux arts in France or The Berlin University of the Arts.

So, while I agree with you that schools are a signaling tool for recruiting, this is not necessarily the case for non top schools in the US and given that a art education is extremely cheap in Europe, the money saved can also open doors later.

Visa issues are not that much of a problem as one might think as long as the student gets a master degree (most countries give a one year visa immediately after the obtention of a master that can then easily be renewed if the visa holder is employed). In general, master degrees make getting visa much easier. I'd also argue that returning to the US after a couple years of employments will give the graduate more opportunities because at that point they will have an edge by having had an international experience.

I know HN is really sensitive about this, but this sounds like a very culturally white thing. Many other cultures have a mentality of "get an employable major, period" and we are now seeing how superior that mentality really is, considering the impending generational student debt crisis.

If you have rich parents who can support you for life and set you up with an inheritance, knock yourself out with the Art major (like the daughter in the article). If you don't, then pursue your passions and expect a difficult life... or just choose a more employable major or career path.

My oldest child is currently a senior in college. The school is full of kids who think nothing of racking up student debt, and all of them seem to have nice phones, cars and clothes.

It's madness. They'll be paying for that 4-year vacation for the rest of their lives.

And I will be mad as a wet hen if some politician forgives student debts. It's not right that everybody else has to pay for this frivolity. (It's also not right for those kids who don't go on to college-- they miss the free vacation and they are disadvantaged in the workplace.)

What we've done with our kids is tell them from an early age that we will help them with the first year of college and after that they are on their own. So far we have 2 in college and that has been how it worked out. They knew up front that we would not help them after the first year, and neither has come to us asking for help because we were upfront with them long before they started going to college. Bottom line, set expectations early.

>So we finance it, or our kids do, 45 million of us owing a collective $1.6 trillion in student debt that not even Bernie Sanders could make disappear.

Considering $1.6 trillion dollars is about what we spend annually to maintain our global military empire (when you include all the legacy costs including paying for veterans healthcare), it really wouldn't be very difficult to make it disappear at all. Of course, its a matter of priorities.

Can't wait for the followup article written by Ella in 15 years: "Today I told my parents they were going to have to get used to living in a cardboard box because they didn't save for retirement. They asked me to help pay for a nice assisted-living facility, but I explained to them how important it was not to make financial decisions that could complicate your life for a long time based on emotions."

I had a friend who went to Academy of Art. He was from very humble beginnings. He now runs a 100 million dollar fine art studio in SF. He made all the connections and learned the business of high end art while in art school.

The article reads like the “crabs in a barrel” only applied to family circumstances. Despite obvious talent, the father doesn’t want his child to succeed and has systematically destroyed her dreams. It’s very sad.

The truth might be more nuanced though. Some colleges have better ROI than others. I assume there is a lack of good data on most colleges, because people who see the actual ROI on any given college wouldn't go to bad schools and schools had more pressure to lower their rates (or invest in their programs).

> Some colleges have better ROI than others.

As is always pointed out when someone mentions ROI: No one should look at ROI when it comes to colleges. You can end up with more wealth going to a lower ROI school. What matters is how much more you earn than your costs (difference, not ratio).

Spending $10K total for a very cheap undergrad and earning $30K/year means an ROI of 3. Spending $100K total for undergrad and earning $120K/year is a lower ROI, but you'll be a lot wealthier.

Additionally, you have to be careful how the rankings source the salary number. Obviously distribution of majors at different schools is a big factor, but on top of that many rankings look at earnings within 5 years of graduation. If your program tends to produce doctors, lawyers, etc. (in particular when they choose to further specialize) the salary 5 years after graduation is obviously not very good, but lifetime earning likely is. My guess is if you take a random Ivy and a random state school, the Ivy is going to have a notably higher percentage that pursues a graduate degree, which means those 5 year numbers probably underrate the Ivy.

Yeah, at some point you have to consider the ROI. "Art school" is not going to pay for itself. I'm not sure it's even useful for anyone truly talented, and it's definitely not useful for someone who doesn't have talent. So I'm not entirely sure what the point of it is.

I'm not sure about this. I've taken out some loans to finance my education, but overall I would say both experience and financial ROI have been totally worth it.

If I went to any other program, I doubt that it would have been that way (given, the thing I went to school for is weirdly specialized).

Your school may be an exception. There are exceptions for most people, but the acceptance rates are low. For example, a well adjusted middle class child would be a foolish in most circumstances not to take out debt to attend Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Stanford (and a select few other universities where you can maximize the chances of vastly increasing the status of your social network with four years of camaraderie). However, after you dip below a certain level of status, the benefits are much less clear.

A middle class child may never have the opportunity to get exposure to one or two notches up save for education. But this only exists in a select few places.

(After going to a fancy private school...)

IMO, Fancy private schools are like fancy luxury cars. Expensive, and get you from point A to point B just as fast as the ultra-reliable mass market cars.

The only difference is that you pay more, and you might be slightly more comfortable... And the fancy cars tend to break down more often.

In my case, my parents really pushed me towards a fancy private school. (I wanted to go to the cheaper state school.) When applying, I noticed that the state school was accredited in Computer Science, but the private school was not. While in school, I realized that my professors were clueless. A few years later, I learned that the state school had one of the best computer science departments in the world, but no one heard of my fancy private school.

I realized that my parents were clueless about how education works, but because they didn't get to go to college right out of high school, they equated cost with quality.

Some times it's nice to pay extra money to sit in traffic in a fancy luxury car; but it's only worth it if you aren't going into extensive debt for that car.

Lived in many EU countries. Never seen a problem close to this one in that countries regarding education.

This is a thoroughly American debacle brought on by Bill Clinton and abetted by every US President since then. Their simplistic idea was to make education "affordable" for all, and in their infinite wisdom, they fucked up higher education beyond all recognition. They invited Wall Street bankers to come in and wreak financial havoc. The schools were all in on the scheme, so if they eventually all go under, remember, they have it coming.

50 years ago parents didnt always pay for a college education. A student could pretty much earn his/her way through working quarter-time during school year and full time in the summer. Thats what I did (at MIT). These days college costs are proportionally much higher.

"Don't Go to Art School": https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/dont-go-to-art-school-138c5efd45e...

A degree from an expensive private school or out of state school is a luxury item, and parents need to treat them like the Jaguar or Porsche with a comparable value. If your child got their license and asked for a Range Rover, would you plunk down $100,000? Then why on earth would you do it for an undergraduate degree to an expensive school.

If anything, the money should be saved for graduate school, where the big payoff happens. If they can get through undergrad at the instate school (or maybe an out-of-state public school) with the grades and pedigree for grad school, then maybe Duke Law School, or University of Chicago Medical School (or a masters from Stanford in engineering) is a worthwhile financial investment, but never for undergrad.

An undergraduate degree from an elite school helps with networking and gives the student a "brand" that will help with getting all subsequent jobs. Same phenomenon for business school- the curriculum isn't much better but the connections and brand are much better.

That misses the point. Jaguars are better (and more fun) than a Ford Focus. The question is whether the branded school is worth the delta, and the answer is that in most undergrad programs, it isn't. Let's take an example: Steve wants to go to school for Computer Science. He'd really like to go to Duke, but he also gets in at UC Irvine in California. If he's really good, he'll get good grades at UCI, and he can go to Duke for a Masters (maybe on a free ride). If he's only an average student, then he had no business going to Duke because he wouldn't really be able to leverage the high powered degree anyways (a C+ average from Duke isn't opening a ton of doors). Let's change the hypo and make the major French Literature. Now, we know Steve will never be able to repay Duke tuition with that degree, no matter how many influential people he meets or how good his grades are.

The upshot: it's not that Duke isn't better than UCI - it clearly is. The point is, is it a good investment. And it rarely is...unless you have the extra money and can do it without the debt and without limiting your future options. That's what makes it a luxury item.

I disagree. Luxury cars depreciate in value just like any other car. The right school is an investment in future income by way of the people you get connected to as well as what you learn and build a career off of. It's what you make of it, though. It's not an easy road no matter what. Is it worth it? Maybe. Or you could fly to Vegas and put it all on black at roulette, I guess.

Just. Make. College. Free.

Troll.

Free = infinite demand. I don't think that will ever work anymore than throwing open the floodgates at the border and letting in all the world's surplus population who want to come and get free benes from us and wipe their asses on our flag.

When something is given away for free, people value it less. So making college "tuition free" e.g. saddled to the taxpayer, is not going to produce quality graduates or get us any kind of ROI for us lowly, un-represented, long-suffering American taxpayers. So I suppose if we make it "free" that could be final nail in the coffin.

With the limitless debt situation we have in the US right now, the Fed could just print off another $2-3 Trillion and paper over the whole damn thing. All of us will be poorer, of course. You like getting paid in Monopoly money, right? Zimbabwe dollars all right with you?

So... why not Europe? Germany, Switzerland, France...?

Guidance Counsellors are the problem here.

I have two children and one is coming up on college age. I'm not advocating for "Ivy League" for her. There would have to be a really strong argument for that because the prices have skyrocketed in the past 20 years. Nobody is "working all summer to pay for college" unless it's at some corporate internship that actually pays decent.

My kids need to be practical people, understand money and especially debt, and be able to make strong investments choices--and also take the risks I couldn't take. College debt is not a risk, it's a surefire way of being poor and having fewer options. You have to have a plan you can articulate whenever you are taking on debt.

The only reason I can see stretching to some rarefied school is because you want to connect socially with people who are more well off than you are in hopes of "marrying up." I think that what I just said did pretty much worked out for me--after all the hard work I put in, a fundamental irony of my life is that my happiness didn't come from schooling, it came from marrying the right woman whom I would not have met had I not sought out a PhD. You can't overlook the indirect benefits.

It's not a simple binary choice between going to college on a loan or not going because the parents can't afford it or don't want a loan. I worked my way through college over 5 years with only a small loan. One can spend the first two years at a community college for very low tuition then transfer to a university. Large state universities have lower tuition than small private universities. There are other means of financial aid besides loans, like grants and scholarships.

But, not everyone needs to go to a university. Society needs to encourage more vocational education for the trades, and encourage apprenticeships.

I wish the headline was: "I Helped My Teenager Grow Up. You Should, Too."

Student debt sucks. But the myth that these institutions are somehow kidnapping high school students and forcing them to take on massive loans is a myth that needs to be crushed.

The market has been flood with cheap easy to get money. Families are lining up to bite off more than they should or could. This (i.e., demand) drives up cost. The cycle continues.

This myth you've created is a strawman. No one is suggesting colleges physically hold students ransom. The argument is that society is increasingly forcing people to get degrees to keep up with the job climate and it is effectively the same as forcing people into debt.

I'm not questioning the need for a degree or the value. What I'm questing is students (and parents) who insist on attending higher edus that amount to over-priced out-of-state country clubs. No one is going to die if sushi isn't served for lunch/dinner. "Eat great food" and "Best gym ever" will never be on anyone's CV.

Furthermore, in many cases, it's possible to do your first two years "on a budget" and then transfer into a "big name" big budget school with a more valuable degree. No one cares where you did English 101.

There are choices. There are alternatives. However, entitlement and keeping up with the Jones keeps superceding common sense and basic fiscal responsibility. No one is being forced into excessive debt. They are lining up and volunteering. Over and over and over again.

For the record, the bit about country clue unis is also mentioned in the book The Coddling of the American Mind.

https://www.thecoddling.com/

> But the myth that these institutions are somehow kidnapping high school students and forcing them to take on massive loans is a myth that needs to be crushed.

Well, yes. Same with the push for credit card advertising being banned on campuses. Same with the ban on tobacco advertising. And so on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com