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Comment by jartelt | Hacker News Reader

Totally agree. You can graduate from your state school with <$100k in debt easily. You can get much lower debt levels if you don't stay in the expensive dorms (with expensive meal plans) after your freshman year, if you plan ahead and graduate in 4 years, and if you apply for many local/state scholarships (in my experience the national scholarships are a waste of time).

As an engineering student, you can also get paid internships each summer (can often pay >$10k) or can be a paid research assistant for a professor during the year for ~10 hours week (pays for groceries each week).

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Or you can go in the Air Force, be a "civilian in uniform" (Air Force is really easy), and have Uncle Sam pay for your degree at night while you get free room and board, free meals, free medical and dental. It's an option for those people not opposed to military service. The AF really is an easy row to hoe. Personal experience. Show up with a clean uniform, good attitude, and everything is easy peasy lemon squeezy. My military service paid for my own degree. Nothing says crappy life like emerging from university behind the power curve because you're in massive debt, paying back student loans while struggling to pay rent, medical costs, transportation costs, ad astra... Start your working career not in debt. Just my 0.02.

Editing to say that if you make the military a career, you can literally save almost your entire salary if your personal peccadilloes are minimal. I knew guys that decided 4 years was enough and emerged after 4 years with over 50k in savings while paying nothing and they also got the BA/BSc degree on Uncle Sam's dime. They emerged debt free, degreed, and ready to start the next stage of their lives. Doing 8 years gets you a masters all the while doing nothing but work a job with everything paid for. At that rate, you might as well do 20, marry another member and have a steady retirement at 39 or 40 with money enabling you to pursue a job you really love because you can afford to live where you want. Bonus: Tri-Care military medical costs $500 year on retirement. Cannot touch that out here.

You can get much lower debt levels if you don't stay in the expensive dorms (with expensive meal plans) after your freshman year,

As someone who lived off-campus the entire time and regretted it, I do think that spending at least freshman year in dorms is a really good idea to make friends and get to know the school's culture and environment.

if you plan ahead and graduate in 4 years, and if you apply for many local/state scholarships (in my experience the national scholarships are a waste of time).

My advice to my younger self would also be to take more student loans so I wouldn't have to work. I had to work to pay tuition, but working made keeping up with school impossible. Catch 22.

> My advice to my younger self would also be to take more student loans so I wouldn't have to work. I had to work to pay tuition, but working made keeping up with school impossible. Catch 22.

This is counter to my experience. I was able to work part-time jobs just fine, and having that experience made me a much more competitive candidate upon graduation.

Depends on a lot of factors -- morning vs. night chronotype, how close work is to school, how close school and work are to housing, how many hours work demands, whether your landlord is insane and kicks you all out with 3 days notice right before the semester to rent to a family, etc.

I would still have worked most if not all of my summers, but never more than 5 hours a week during the semesters. My job, which I actually really liked, demanded 20, which also required another 6-10 hours commuting on top of 5-8 hours of commuting to school.

I had also worked in tech for a year before starting school, so I was a bit less worried about having experience to list. And in the end it didn't matter because I started a company and ran that for 5 years instead.

At least for me, the key was to keep it capped at 10 hours a week. With more hours than that I would have struggled to balance coursework, social life, work, and sleep.

You definitely can't pay for everything on 10 hours a week, but it at least pays the bar tab...

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