I’m doing a distance data science degree at a fraction of the cost and I would imagine I’m getting much more out of it than this September intake will. There’s been a revolution in remote working, will education follow?
Note: I do not know which school you are referring to. It might be Berkeley's $70k+ degree or one of the many lower-tier schools, so YMMV.
I'm a prior software development manager and degrees in general in this kind of field don't carry much weight outside of academic hires and very select companies.
While some companies or hiring managers might frown upon this it doesn't matter if there is an active hiring group that doesn't put any weight on them.
I guess one could argue that the ones who frown upon the degree pay more competitive but I've only found the opposite to be true with my experience.
(I'm ignoring FAANG because they're so unique that they're an exception to everything in the "real world")
Does your comment change re: stigma if OP was in fact talking about said berkeley degree?
I'm personally getting a significant amount of financial aid, so that it will end up costing much less than that for me, but I know people who are paying full price.
EDIT: I'm an undergrad at a 4-year university.
This has a lot to do with “last place aversion” - the people making $150k near SF having to pay full price for their kid (who probably worked their ass off) to barely scrape into Stanford are (rightly or wrongly) going to be totally NIMBY / selfish in terms of voting and policy when it comes to the $65k families from far away whose kids can pay much less than half for Stanford, say.
My two cents: I'd blame San Fransisco, they are the ones with the weird housing market and shouldn't make others subsidize things around their propped up property prices.
But on the flipside, state and federal taxes collected from city dwellers do heavily subsidize much more expensive infrastructure and operations costs in suburban and rural areas.
So rural residents get safe roads, remote snow removal, remote power lines, heavy freight supply shipping, equal prices for US mail shipping, school systems and so on, despite not having their own tax base capable of actually sustaining all the costs.
Basically, middle class and upper middle class urban workers subsidize pretty much everybody else. Any richer and you have access to tax avoidance resources and lobbying, and poorer and you consume much more in government resources than you pay in, especially in rural areas.
It's primarily the discretionary, high-tech, and expensive items that are cheaper in a high-cost-of-living place. Want to buy an iPhone or a Tesla or an expensive camera or something like that? Those are all less expensive relative to your income in high-CoL places. Plus, interest rates from savings accounts and many retirement accounts are the same nationwide, meaning that having more total money is advantageous.
In those cities, your money has to grow fast or the loss of purchasing power is huge.
So I wouldn’t say nationwide interest rates are definitely an advantage for people with bigger starting piles of money in urban areas. It’s complicated.
Way back when I graduated, 3 years in, I was making just as much as people that went to prestigious schools for my same area (computer science) and I paid less for one year of college than they paid for four - and no debt.
If I were graduating today and wanted to work in Big Tech, I would spend six months to a year preparing for white board interviews.
Especially in tech. What college you go to only makes a slight difference and that’s only for your first job. Being able to do algorithms and data structures is the great equalizer for Big Tech.
https://www.collegechoice.net/will-what-college-i-attend-mat...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/do-elite-colleges-lead-to-highe...
For example from the first link:
> “ However, another expert, this one from The Atlantic, says that where you go to school does matter, and he also has a study that backs up his point of view. There are institutions, especially ivy league schools and those with name recognition, that can improve someone's earning and employment potential, especially in the cases of graduate work. According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, both someone's grade point average and their school of choice are determining factors in their earnings.”
which includes embedded links to The Atlantic and NCES research on it.
You also are confusing the question of whether school choice at large is correlated to earnings vs whether specific schools produce graduates who earn more, which is a different statistical question.
Consider from here:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/09/14/how-much-mor...
> “ The median annual earnings for an Ivy League graduate 10 years out amount to well over $70,000 a year. For graduates of all other schools, the median is around $34,000.
But things get really interesting at the top end of the income spectrum. The top 10 percent of Ivy League grads are earning $200,000 or more by the time their 10-year college reunion rolls around. The top earners of other schools, on the other hand, are making just a hair under $70,000.”
It’s not too related but I also disagree hugely with you about algorithm hazing trivia in tech hiring. It’s not correlated with career success and it is used to play politics to do gatekeeping on the candidate pipeline (eg Steve Yegge’s classic on interview anti-loops).
I’ve been a senior architect and engineering manager for a while. I have never noticed any correlation between people who whiz through algorithm interviews and people who are effective at achieving business outcomes and project success once in the role.
You can make $70K graduating from your run of the mill state school as a an enterprise CRUD developer in any major city in the US that’s not on the west coast.
Other studies have shown that there are no difference in salary between people who were accepted in an Ivy League school and didn’t attend as those who did go.
Also, in tech, you can make $200K within two or three years easily - regardless of college you attended.
I’ve been a senior architect and engineering manager for a while. I have never noticed any correlation between people who whiz through algorithm interviews and people who are effective at achieving business outcomes and project success once in the role.
I agree, and actually submitted tweet on HN a while back.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19687593
Whether it is correlated with outcomes or not, is irrelevant to the fact that you can get into big tech by being able to do algorithms and make $200K relatively early on in your career.
I personally didn’t “get into a FAANG” by doing a whiteboard interview. I got in as a “cloud consultant” where I had to have a history of achieving business outcomes.
It seems like you’re deliberately trying not to engage with the point of the article, and instead trying to claim some bizarre specific standard of tech salaries you are making is supposed to be comparable to the data from eg the Boston Globe article (which explicitly refutes the point you’re trying to make).
Anyway, I can’t help you if you have your mind made up and you’re reading confirmation bias articles as tea leaves.
If you are applying for your standard CRUD jobs where you go to school isn’t going to matter. They are in my experience going to ask you techno trivia and may have you doing coding problems slightly above FizzBuzz level of complexity and are going to pay you the same regardless. The interview is the equalizer.
If you are applying for a company that wants “smart people” (tm) like the Big Tech companies and the big tech wannabes, algorithms are going to be the great equalizer.
We are on a tech site with plenty of people who work or have worked for BigTech. Almost all of the people here know how interviews and hiring works at Big Tech. Many know how hiring works at your standard CRUD jobs.
I have experience with both.
Playing with Harvard's "Net Price Calculator" [3] makes clear that non-millionaires, let alone non-billionaires, may be asked to pay full price. A lot depends on the number of children, the number in college, and accumulated wealth (excluding retirement accounts and home equity).
Harvard students who receive federal financial aid pay (or their families pay) around $15,500 per year on average [4], which suggests that the distribution of payments may be bimodal: a lot of families pay $80,000 per year, and a lot pay a lot less.
[1] https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid
[2] https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/how-aid-works
[3] https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/net-price-calculat...
[4] https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?166027-Harvard-Unive...
People with under $1 million in net worth are very unlikely to pay full price at the wealthiest US colleges. Unless they have huge income but no savings. By “millionaire” do you mean people who earn a million dollars of income per year?
To take the Harvard example you linked to, a family with $500,000 in assets (not including equity in their primary home; for many families home equity is a majority of their net worth) and $120,000/year income will get about 2/3 of college costs paid by financial aid.
A family with $1 million in non-primary-home-equity assets and a $150,000/year income will still get 1/4 of college costs from financial aid.
*My knowledge is limited to California in the United States. I know there exists programs in Georgia and other places that do cover full rides but I think they are anomalous and not the rule.
Seriously, I do pay like 4.5K USD after conversion for 7 semesters of CS at weekends - 4 days / month and I cannot imagine that
It would be interesting to analyze what free colleges cost the average taxpayer, and to compare that with what non-free colleges cost in the U.S. Do countries that offer free college education offer the public a way to find out the itemized expenses of publicly funded universities?
In the US the professors appear to often work a lot closer to free than the administrators do anyway.
I don't really see the point of pointing to total costs and saying "look how expensive college is". You need food and shelter anyway.
The numbers vary depending on if you're paying in-state tuition or getting other scholarships, but the numbers above are pretty typical outside of those caveats.
The numbers are crazy, but the degree is worth millions, unless they change their mind and don't practice or something.
The best part is that for many master degrees and some bachelor degrees you can study remotely while living in your own country, only coming to Switzerland once or twice a year.
I don’t know why there are so few American students studying outside the US. (We do have some Canadian and Australian students though).