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Comment by leetcrew | Hacker News Reader

> Both will leave a student heavily in debt to the tune of 150-300k

unless you have a very weird financial situation, no US student is going into anything like that much debt to go to either of those two schools. it looks like you got those numbers by just taking the tuition and multiplying it by four. both schools offer substantial aid packages for eligible families. the average yearly tuition contribution for MIT is something like $17k, not far off from in-state tuition at most public universities.

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I left Umass Amherst with ~75k in debt in 2010. At the time the list price was 30k.

If your family exceeds the cutoffs for financial aid, but for various reasons cannot provide for college expenses - you are going to go into a lot of debt. One of my friends from the time managed to take 120k for an english major that left them with a $12/hr job at graduation.

How does that happen? I come from a time where my private university tuition (before grants, financial aid, etc) was around $25k/yr, and I understand things are different today.

I don't know all the ins-and-outs of today's student loan options, but say that 120k is taken at 5% spread across 20(!) years, the monthly payment on that kind of loan is around $800/mo. Did this person not have a clear idea of what recent college grads with English degrees make? I mean, it seems like a serious misjudgment to bury themselves in that much debt without a very clear path out of it.

I'm not suggesting the "learn to code" or "only STEM degrees matter" trope, but if you really want to become a writer, or a teacher, or anything else where an English degree is required, you can get that at a much more affordable price: I know someone from a "poor" family who did exactly that, but went to UMass Dartmouth and now has a successful, average middle-class life as an editor. They did not need to go to six-figure debt because they knew they would have a really hard time paying that off...

There's a big sunk cost falacy at play. English is one of the most common majors at Umass, and the university isn't exactly forthcoming about the job prospects for this major. This person was the first to go to college in their family - but their parents had become modestly successfuly in the trades meaning they made ~100k combined in the Boston area. 100k is enough to push you out of substantial financial aid, but is not enough for your parents to afford a significant portion of your college costs in a high CoL area. A 3 bedroom and 2 kids gets expensive.

If you realize 2 years in that you're down ~60k, and a 5 year program will cost an extra 40k then you aren't going to change majors.

Umass Amherst is only ~25% more expensive than Umass Dartmouth on paper ( or at least was when I was attending ).

For myself, I got a physics degree and flipped into software engineering - I went bust in my first 2 years out of school but I was able to put things together and paid off my debt comfortably. The debt did ensure I stopped pursuing grad school for physics as the math became impossible to justify.

> The debt did ensure I stopped pursuing grad school for physics as the math became impossible to justify.

I appreciate that this comment can be read two different ways.

Plenty of middle class families making low to mid 100k but not contributing to their children's tuition bill because they live in HCOL area. But yes, low income students don't pay.

“Plenty,” sure. But not a majority or anything. The median family income in the US is something like 68kb

What about the median income of people who attended college?

"For 25- to 34-year-olds who worked full time, year round in 2018, higher educational attainment was associated with higher median earnings. This pattern was consistent from 2000 through 2018. For example, in 2018 the median earnings of those with a master’s or higher degree ($65,000) were 19 percent higher than the earnings of those with a bachelor’s degree ($54,700), and the median earnings of those with a bachelor’s degree were 57 percent higher than the earnings of high school completers ($34,900)."[1]

None of those median salaries put you in the 'wealthy' category.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cba.pdf

Close, but still not the data we need. What schools are looking at it family income of the students which means the 25-34 range isn't going to cut it. No need to do further research as I agree with your premise, but I think the number of students who receive minimal aid and family help might be higher than you expect.

Not too big a fan of screwing over children for their parents making too much money personally.

There's no obligation for parents to pay for their kids education, yet the way the system is set up, you'd think there was.

> There's no obligation for parents to pay for their kids education

There's no (as yet generally accepted) obligation for anyone else to pay for young adults higher education. Society has generally chosen to subsidize some costs for young people who seek such subsidy using formulas which assume that parents of means will also do so, but this does not reflect an obligation of parents to do so.

$100k is not enough to totally phase out financial aid from top schools, but sure, there are some families that could afford to pay but refuse to. still, no one is writing $40k+ loans each year for students with no cosigner. if you have rich parents who won't pay and the school considers you a dependent, you're pretty much SOL.

Yeah, the last part sucks. It's not completely impossible, but it is certainly not easy if your parents will not help: https://www.quora.com/My-family-is-upper-middle-class-160-00...

> no one is writing $40k+ loans each year for students with no cosigner.

This is in fact exactly what's happening. It's impossible to bankrupt out of student loans, so in theory it's a no risk loan from the loan providers perspective.

Schools almost never totally phase out financial help, but they do reduce it to negligible portions e.g. $500 work study on a 50k bill. This helps keep their financial aid stats healthy while still getting paid.

This type of affect will only show up when viewing the percentiles of debt students are taking on. Adding a bunch of folks who only take on $1k in debt is a great way to draw down the average.

I don’t think anybody thinks going is expensive, the expensive part is getting in, something fundamentally out of reach by design for 99.9% of the population and 95% of the applicant pool.

Something is really rotten with this country if the only tools to get ahead are a 5% shot at a “better life” (though people seem far too politically correct to provide a counter factual outcome if you don’t get into an elite institution).

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