Comment by gringoDan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gringoDan | Hacker News Reader

I left college for a semester, then re-enrolled and graduated. It's incredibly easy to do.

If I were a current Harvard student, I'd drop out for the next year. Take some community college courses, work, travel (in a COVID-responsible way...maybe road trips only).

This is a unique opportunity to get off of the well-trodden path and far preferable to sitting in front of a computer in your parents' house for a year.

There is a huge safety net once you've gotten into an Ivy or other top school. Best case scenario, you start a business and no longer need Harvard, a la Zuckerberg or Gates. Worst case scenario, you graduate broke at 23 (with some great stories), rather than broke at 22 (without the stories).

The value of a college degree is:

1) Signaling/exclusivity (the diploma)

2) The connections you make

3) The subject matter that you learn

4) The social environment – all of the benefits of adulthood with none of the responsibilities

Distance learning only hits #3 on that list. Harvard can get away with charging full tuition for its classes because...it's Harvard. So it also hits #1. But the majority of schools are in for a rude awakening when they realize that students were paying for the social environment and aren't willing to, in the words of Good Will Hunting, "Waste $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library."

Bingo, this is what every college student should be doing right now. Most colleges have a well established process for deferring your education for a year or more due to various exigencies that can arise during those years.

I would also argue, that this is what most parents should be doing for their younger kids too. We all know that remote learning sucks for young kids. You basically have to sacrifice one parent to just sit at home and help the kids through their online coursework. At that point, you're better off putting them in daycare for a year, working, and then re-enrolling them for the next year. Will they be behind a year? Sure, but they'll also have a big advantage over their peers who got a half-assed education from the past year and were forced into the next grade.

I would do this except I would lose my $12,000 a semester in scholarship from my university. Most scholarships do seem to require continuous enrollment.

Also, students with deferred loans would need to begin paying those back.

I think it really depends on the specifics of your situation, which no one online will be able to help you with... At the very least, you could probably drop to a part-time student, which would maintain your scholarships and student loan status, while avoiding the full financial commitment.

Right. To be clear I wasn't seeking advice as I've already decided what I'm going to do. I was merely pointing out that it's more complicated than pausing enrollment and resuming when things get back to normal.

When I was a student (over a decade ago now) part time status only deferred my financial obligations if I was in my last semester and about to graduate.

You might very well be right, but it isn't obvious to me that putting off some key foundational learning while your brain is still forming is as reasonable as putting off a year of college. (Though I also have some vague memory of studies showing people who were older for their grade got more benefit than the younger students? This is a very vague memory, though.)

In fact, students admitted to Harvard this year will not need to drop out to pursue the plan you lay out. Harvard is giving new admits the option to defer admission until the following year. This decision was made, I believe, with recognition that the value of Harvard is in large part the social environment and connections you experience in person.

Harvard is a bad example because there are always way more kids that want to go to Harvard than are willing to defer.

They can tap the wait list for everyone else.

gap years, if done responsibly as you say (not in front of the tv), can be extremely life enriching. i'd highly suggest spending some time abroad. getting out of your "only lived at home, now in college" bubble can expose you to other things when you're still young and impressionable while being open to new things.

Unless you urgently need to start a business right now, I don’t see how this has a higher expected value compared to doing the same after you graduate.

It doesn't have higher expected value and I wouldn't necessarily advise going down this path in normal times. But calculating the expected value only takes into account the diploma and learning subject matter, none of the other benefits.

The decision right now is between a) paying full price for a watered-down college experience (graduating earlier) and b) gaining some life experience and potentially getting "the full" college experience in a year or two for the same price (albeit with the drawback of a later graduation date).

I'm not the original commenter, but I'd bet their logic is that the value of being at Harvard for 2020-2021 is less than that of Harvard for 2021-2022.

The expected value of a startup (heavily dependent on what type of startup...) is the same either this year or next, but the opportunity cost is less.

Original commenter, I endorse this reply :)

Ah good catch, I didn’t realize we were talking about this taking off school for this specific year

It does if the in person version of your classes are more engaging than the online versions you would be stuck with otherwise.

Hopefully you're being metaphorical with the use of the term expected value, or are you really suggesting that a young person plans their education based on what's more profitable? Not that money isn't something to consider, but the "value" you get out of your education and other formative experiences isn't measured in dollars.

Expected value encompasses all the things you value, not just money.

Deferrals require you to re-apply, which means you might not get in again.

That depends on the school. Many do not require you to re-apply.

> I'd drop out for the next year. Take some community college courses

Harvard students have better things to do other than taking community college courses... it is absolutely a waste of time to take classes that are a joke.

What classes would be a joke?

All courses offered at community colleges

Seeing as they still count for course credit, I don't think Harvard considers them to be jokes. I will take the highly paid accreditors at Harvard's opinion over yours, sorry mate.

You have no clue what you’re talking about. Research more before claiming that they count for course credit

I've taken classes at community colleges and I have a degree from an Ivy League school. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the community college classes, and I learned a great deal from them. I don't know where you got the chip on your shoulder, but I hope no one reads your words and gets the mistaken impression that community college is somehow lesser.

I guess you're just woefully uninformed then. There are community college classes that could help with that.

Sorry, I've got better things to do.

What a sad, arrogant little individual you are.

I went to Harvard, and I've taken classes at community college. You're either vastly overestimating Harvard or vastly underestimating community college.

During highschool, you mean.

I took classes at community college both during high school and after I graduated from college. You can learn a lot of practical skills at community college that higher education looks down on. I learned to weld at Harvard through the physics lab and didn't realize how much I sucked at it until relearning it from a community college instructor. The person who taught me at community college was far more qualified.

Coincidentally, I first learned TIG welding at Williams via the physics machine shop. One of the memorable pieces of advice from my earnest instructor (the Buildings and Grounds guy who did the necessary welding) was something like "Only weld galvanized at the end of the day because you'll feel like shit afterwards. It helps if you go home and drink lots of milk."

The wisdom of his health advice aside, he was a decent welder taught me useful techniques. But when I later took a community college TIG course from a former nuclear welder, I was astonished by the precision the instructor demonstrated. I got a lot better, not exactly because of the quality of instruction, but just from having seen what excellence looked like.

I took networking courses at a community college. The professor was fantastic, a former IBM employee who'd been doing network stuff at AT&T for 20 years. He wasn't a professor, but this guy knew his stuff. It was the perfect way to get some "hands-on" experience with routing and switching.

Community colleges don't do everything well, but when it comes to building hard skills, it's hard to think of a better bang for your buck. (Particularly if you live in NY like me, it's free!)

I went to Princeton, and after graduating I spent 2 years in community college studying accounting (night school).

The coursework was rigorous and excellent.

Yes - there's unfortunately some notion that as you move lower down the "prestige ladder", the easier / less rigorous the academic content becomes.

I've studied at both good and "poor" schools, and my experience has been that both have their strengths and weaknesses. I've taken classes that were extremely rigorous and in-depth at the low-prestige (or rather, no-prestige) school, pretty much identical to the same classes offered at the big-name school. Only difference was that the first school had a 50% failure rate, whereas the latter school had much better pass-rate, along with grade distribution that was shifted more towards the A.

This is probably due to the caliber of students, the work was the same.

Were these computer science classes? My experience is that the difference between top and “poor” schools is much wider in CS (likely because the academic job market in the humanities and sciences is so tough that you get highly qualified teachers even at “poor” schools).

Electrical Engineering

But with that said, there's a ton of variance within school themselves. Courses can be different from year to year, depending on who's in charge.

One thing I noticed was that the lifers - that is, the older professors, usually had very predictable classes. They'd use the same lecture notes, hand-ins, etc. year after year, often running on decades. They knew their audience, so to speak, and had extremely structured classes. These classes tended to be quite comfortable to take...no surprises, to put it that way.

Then you had the freshly minted professors, that would have a class here and there, usually new classes every other semester. These guys tended to be much more rigorous, and assuming on the level of competence (of their audience) - at least in grad school.

It's not a waste of time to get done with some general classes that you don't care about at all yet need to graduate. In fact you will be saving money. Do I need the harvard version of Calc I when they teach the same exact rehashed AP calculus stuff at the community college and the credit counts the same as taking Calc I Harvard?

Saving money? You know Harvard doesn’t charge by the number of credits you take, right?

Also, community college credits are generally not counted towards graduation. Why do you think they do that?

Most universities accept transfer credits from other colleges, even community colleges.

While in I high school, I always held the impression that college would be full of immensely enriching educational experiences. Courses, primarily those by world renown universities, would be so transformative that they would compensate for the substandard education system of the United States. However, after living with students at various universities and eventually attending an Ivy League University, I found that many of the courses were quite comparable to any simple online course I found on the topic, no matter if it was being taught by another top 50 university, top 100, or random high school teacher. Many Ivy League students worked incredibly hard to attend their respective universities, however, like any other school, there are many that exist far from that stereotypical characterization. Likewise, I know many brilliant people who attended lesser known universities of far less prestige. Harvard students are probably better than average students but definitely not special enough to think they have nothing more to learn, no one is. I would highly encourage everyone to keep an open mind and look for what others can teach you.

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