Hacker News Reader

You didn't go to uni in the USA and the paper is by the St Louis Fed on USA grads.

You took your degree in a country with far lower inequality and better inward education investment, and then jumped over to work in a country that doesn't tax people enough to support USA students.

I'd imagine that is pretty good value.

I went to university in a country with a Gini coefficient of .35, and now live in a country with a Gini coefficient of .39 (See OECD link below)

The funny thing is, my student loan is one of the highest out of my American friend group† (although very normal amongst my NZ peers). Unlike the US, there was a lot less much in the way of financial aid/scholarships available, so sticker price was what people actually paid.

https://data.oecd.org/inequality/income-inequality.htm

† For people with undergraduate degrees

Interesting. I knew NZ was pretty messed up but I didn't realise it was that bad.

The friend bit is anecdata.

Looks like NZ avg debt is $28k NZD [1]

USA is $29 USD [2]

So USA is 50% more expensive, on avg (NZDUSD 1.5). IMHO both are a disgrace, but that's another thing.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loans_in_New_Zealand#S...

2: https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/

$29k is not that much is it? That is about what I ended up with for my degree in Sweden where higher education is free but you borrow for living expenses. I repay it with about $100 per month for 25 years.

Perhaps the biggest difference is the interest rate which is government backed and around maybe 1-2%. According to first result on Google the interest rates on US student loans seems to be around 6-8%.

$29k is a decent chunk of change of you don't have a high paying job. It'll take you many years to pay off because of all your other expenses (housing, transportation, healthcare, food, clothing, etc.).

Yes, but think of it as someone else lent you money to be housed, fed, and clothed for four years while you earned no income. That’s going to cost money anywhere in the world, before a single book is purchased or lecture paid for.

4.5% for US gov't subsidized loans.

Yes, but you get the 6-8% as a tax deduction if you can pay it as long as the loan is from the govt.

Yeah it's not great!

There's fairly decent financial aid available to cover your living costs if you're from a low income family, but that cuts off pretty quickly, and unlike the US, there isn't really a culture of paying for your children's education, so there's a lot of kids (like me) who grew up upper-middle class but didn't get much help through university.

Overall, I'd equate the USD = NZD as realtively equivalent, even though there is a currency difference. The average American is graduating into a job paying $51k USD, whereas NZ grads are often starting at $50-55k NZD.

[1] https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/compensatio...

Sure, I used the FX rate in your case as you are paid USA wages but your debt was NZD.

Oh yeah, it's a great deal for me. What I meant was Americans who studied and then work in America end up paying roughly the same (when you take into account average earnings) as Kiwis who study and then stay in NZ.

You are incorrect about your assessment of US education expenditure. Governments in the US spend a similar percentage of GDP on tertiary education as New Zealand: https://jobmarketmonitor.com/2016/09/23/tertiary-education-c.... Both spend in the 4-5% range of GDP in terms of public money. (We spend a higher percentage of GDP, again just public money, than countries with “free” education like Germany.) Additionally, because US GDP per capita is 65% higher than New Zealand adjusted for cost of living, we spend far more than New Zealand per person in absolute terms.

The good thing too is if you get really sick you can go back home for the free healthcare.

The US really benefits from immigrants that were trained by poorer countries. I too moved here, my chronically ill relative is still at home.

I did something like that. The country was California in the 1980s.

Don't forget the old prop 13 rug pull!

I made it out in the nick of time. Friend of mine made it out before Reagan took away grants for kids that grew up on welfare.

Moving overseas is the top benefit of having a relevant (not just any) degree IMO. I'm grateful that American cities are still the best places in the world to work as a software engineer, but that could always change. I'm hoping a non-STEM degree combined with 6+ years of experience will still let me move around easily.

For knowledge workers who could have begun a similar career without college, the cost of the degree should also include the money they would have made by working 4 additional years at the end of their career (probably one of the highest points?)

The Opportunity Cost would have been incurred while they were in college, not 30+ years after. There are too many variables in play when projecting that far out in the future, but you can make good estimates as to what would have happened in the past as an alternative to the 4 years spent in college.

I didn't get compensated as if I had 4 YoE when I had 0.

> For intelligence workers

You probably mean "knowledge workers" :)

sure fixed

I've done the math on the opportunity cost of how much I would have made if I hadn't gone to university. It was about $120k over 4 years, and raised the opportunity cost to about $160k (I borrowed $60k, but some of that money was for living expenses, that would have been covered by working full time). I was earning about $16/$17 per hour at the time. It increased the jump I needed to make from $.50 per hour to $2 per hour.

Alright. I probably would have taken a similar job to the one I actually took 3 years earlier and followed a similar career path the whole time. That is, I wouldn't add 3 additional years of entry level IC work, I would add 3 additional years of senior IC work or better. Right now I'm working for half of prevailing wages for senior ICs in exchange for living in a civilized country, so half of prevailing wages * 3 years - taxes is around $400,000. If I ever move back to the US or get promoted it will be pretty easy to get to an opportunity cost of seven figures of post-tax money for 3 years of math degree.

> Grad school, in general, seems to be a rip off

Grad school is often much better for immigration scoring than a bachelors. Especially if you can manage to do the graduate degree in the country you want to immigrate to.

I'd say this is spot on, particularly the part about going to college for lifestyle reasons, combined with a field that is low-paying, and a choice of uni that isn't particularly cheap, is a bad combination.

I'm not sure I agree on grad school, perhaps you could elaborate? It's true that it's very much hit or miss. But my experience is that there's plenty of grad schools which offer 1 - 1.5 year Masters' and tuition fees that aren't abnormal. Here too your second point rings true, either you pay a lot of money for a good rep (e.g. if you go into BigLaw, assuming you don't burn out, it gives a high return rate), or you pay little for a no-name university, and then I feel grad school absolutely does come at a premium. Compared to a 3-4 year Bachelor's degree, it's usually a relatively quick program with potentially bigger upside, especially if paid for by your employer.

I think what most students underestimate is just how many of them fail to finish the standard path. Almost half of students don't finish their bachelor's within six years due to delays and changing paths, and a lot of them quit entirely. I think college makes sense if you know what you're looking to study, why, are dedicated to completing it, and able to.

A lot of students go into fields of study as a teenager, literally never having had a 5 minute conversation with a person actually working in the field, having spent no time looking at the income tables, or indeed not actually considering the field at all, but just wanting to become a college student. It's these students who probably drag down the stats quite a lot. I've seen fairly unimpressive people go into a business course, work their ass off, do various internships, and land high-paying jobs. And I've seen smart kids start the same business course, muck around, graduate after 6-7 years and land a mediocre job that doesn't really require any particular degree. At the end of the day the student is still the most important factor here, and by the time they head to college, it's often already 'too late' for institutions to turn an B student into an A student, without the intrinsic motivation. There's lots more room in primary/secondary school for that, that's really where it's at. What college you head to after is less important in my opinion.

Rolling deep into anecdotal avenue, but my thoughts on grad school

• Lucrative fields like medicine & dentistry saddle you with enormous debts (often in the mid six figures) that take multiple years to pay off. The ROI is probably worth it if you work to 65, but you're locked in for easily twenty years, and such high debt levels make taking risks very difficult.

• Lucrative, but more populated fields like law & business also often saddle you with enormous debt, and for these degrees you need a school with a strong brand name to get a look in anywhere (if you do an MBA and you aren't at Harvard/Stanford/Wharton, and a very few others, what's the point?).

• In a lot of fields (liberal arts/social sciences) what's the point of getting a masters? Do you get an earning premium? Is the earning premium worth the opportunity cost? I'd be surprised if the answer is often yes. I have a friend who was a teacher and is now studying to be a families therapist. Lovely person, but absolutely terrible choice. Years of additional study and debt, and no hope of a future earning substantially more money to show for it all.

I agree completely with your points about teenagers not doing enough due diligence before they study.

Agree with most of this comment (couldn't read article due to blocking or something). Can confirm the blacklist on no degree. I had one that had like 10 years experience in and perfect fit. When HR found out that he did not finish his degree it was over with no recourse.

Also Masters (MBA is different) is useless in most fields unless used to get a visa or something. Usually you are foregoing wages with few additional benefits. Might be slightly easier to get first job.

Not sure source of degree matters as long as accredited. Certainly there can be upside like same alma mater but I rarely care but will admit to negative bias to Univ of Phoenix but interview and work history trump everything.

Having said that BS or BE have merit if the student actually takes it seriously. I learned a whole lot that I'm not sure I would have learned through self study alone (a least around that time).

You can look at it as a positive too. Having no degree as a programmer means that overly bureaucratic workplaces are filtered out and your chances of ending up at a workplace that has a minimum of BS are increased.

Only works for programmers though. Everybody else should obviously get degrees.

Grad school is often funded in the U.S. (PhD at least, masters not so much)

Even then, depending on your speciality the economic return from a PhD is iffy since you're losing 5+ years of industry wages and experience.

Few people pursuing PhDs are doing so to maximize earning potential.

Disregarding the mental toll of a PhD (one problem being that too many people want to be paid to think than there are available positions), I totally disagree with the parent poster's claim that graduate school is a rip-off. Just being in an an academic environment, being able to take classes, & studying around really smart people and doing research at the highest academic level is a really great experience & makes the stress worth it.

> Just being in an an academic environment, being able to take classes, & studying around really smart people and doing research at the highest academic level is a really great experience & makes the stress worth it.

I guess your mileage may vary. The best description I've heard about grad school is that it's a self induced neurosis. That was certainly my experience at the time I did it.

The argument you put forward doesn't make sense. It's not a ripoff to make close to minimum wage for a number of years (and possibly take on high levels of student loan debt), all to work in a field where there is an oversupply of labour that depresses wages?

Ok...

My experience is the work in academia is more interesting and intellectually stimulating than my high paying tech jobs. That would be one motivation to go the academia route instead of the tech route.

If you come out the other end of a PhD, then you have the opportunity for best of both worlds: high paying job to work on the problems you find intellectually stimulating.

Also, it is cliche, but doing a PhD does train a person in a way to think that you don't necessarily pick up in a normal job.

Having a PhD is a bar raiser, it automatically disqualifies you from a lot of jobs that don’t have intellectually stimulating problems to work on. This is all fine and dandy if your area overlaps with a hot field, but not if it doesn’t (or is then but isn’t now). Right now, 95% of the CS industry jobs for PhDs are in AI.

The thinking advantage of a PhD is really valuable, its like an extended apprenticeship with your advisor. Also, it gives you time to look at things you find interesting (well, it should, sometimes not).

Yeah fair points. I was sick of studying by the time I graduated - I enjoyed my experience at University, but I wanted to get into the private sector (probably worth mentioning that I studied business at the undergrad level, so I think a lot of that 'postgrad research' in marketing for example is suspect at best).

It's an economic ripoff, his oiubt is that people still want to do it, for reasons other than €€.

I did my Ph.D. to get access to the interesting work that I wanted to do. This work was / is actually less well paid than a standard CS career (in the UK this is IT contracting in the City of London/Finance sector - rapidly £600 a day, often much more). But, if I had done that I think I would probably have had to quit after 10 years, and I would probably have ended up doing something like teaching. This would arguably have been a social good (depending on how good a teacher I might have been) but in terms of pay back I think that the fact that I've managed more than 20 years and am still going is clearly a good bet financially. The seniority that I have in the industry now means that I am able to command good remuneration and the work is as interesting as ever, but more stressful!

Even though the college premiums might be declining, I don’t think your logic is supported by this article at all. The stats in this article show postgraduate degree holders earning 3x what non-graduates earn, and accumulating 5-10x the wealth.

Good point, I was more thinking Med school / Law school / MBA / masters level study.

>4: The cost isn't that bad, when you spread it out over a career. My degree & living costs cost about $60k NZD (~$40k USD). That's $1k USD / year, or $.50 per hour. Considering how my income has multiplied in the few years since I've graduated (SF wages help tremendously here), the actual cost is barely anything, even when you control for the opportunity cost of studying.

You also need to take into account the opportunity cost. You could have been working at the time, earning $XXk/year.

Yep, I was giving up about $30k a year ($120k / 4 years). I was working in a supermarket. $2 more an hour needed over the course of my career to make the juice worth the squeeze. Nothing to write home about.

What are you talking about? Otago is what dreams are made of!

Otaaaaaaaagoooooo! Wouldn’t change it for the world.

Local undergrad is way more sensible. If you want to be elite, kill it locally then do a masters at Oxbridge or whatever.

Haha, especially if you like burning couches! I went to Waikato.

Actually, thanks to Weka, I knew about Waikato University :-)

> • Grad school, in general, seems to be a rip off

In usa they are used as a path to immigration. 90% of grad students are foreigners.

> 90% of grad students are foreigners.

Nowhere near that in total over all fields and even in STEM where the percentage is the highest it is about 80%.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/education/edlife/american...

What you are portraing is your exploitation of your countries education system for your own benefit. The NZ tax payer invested in yours for your future ROI into NZ and you put this ROI in your sack.

The possibility of migrating to richer countries causes greater investment in education.

https://appam.confex.com/appam/2018/webprogram/Paper27374.ht...

> Using a new administrative dataset combining the universe of permanent migrant departures from the Philippines with the universe of institution-level post-secondary enrollment and graduation, we show that enrollment and graduation in nursing programs increased in response to demand from abroad for nurses. The supply of nursing programs increased to accommodate this. The increase in nursing enrollment and graduation during the period was much larger than the increase in nurse migration and contributed to a brain gain

Uh, that's the Philippines.

Their economy runs on remittances, and the population is mostly under 18, so the government wants graduates to emigrate and send money home.

They even have the OFW department to monitor treatment of their emigrant workers, and provide a parallel immigration office.

Possibly the worst citation ever. :)

And I'm not going to feel bad about it either!

It definitely changes the "is it worth it" math though, so it's not as relevant to the original article.