Hacker News Reader

Comment by gavinray | Hacker News Reader

A lot (most?) people who don't come from affluent backgrounds have to put themselves through school while working fulltime.

You can't pay your house/apartment and other bills without a fulltime job, so if you want to go to college to try to get in a better life position, you've got to do it on top of also working fulltime.

I tried to do this for a while as a teen -- I worked as a landscaper all day, then would ride a bus 1 hour each way to night classes at a community college.

Said FUCK THAT and dropped out after 2 semesters.

I applaud anyone who can actually do this. I'm not sure I could finish college even with zero responsibilities, you have to take so many boring classes you don't care about as pre-requisites.

View on HN

I put myself through college, but had jobs I could study on; Security Guard, and a Mini Storage Manager.

I couldn't imagine even working twenty hours delivering a ton of packages, and getting through school, especially if you need decent grades for grad school.

Amazon knows very few of their workers will take advantage of their college offer.

Great PR though.

In my personal experience I'm pretty sure I earned more money per hour by getting awesome grades + scholarships than I would have on minimum wage. It's a bit of a chicken and egg issue, but if you can make do in the the gap (about a year), then you can ride the scholarships money better than a job

C's get degrees, but the marginal difference between a C and and A wasn't all that much time.

Yeah, if I could go back and tell my 16 year old self not to do drugs and drop out of highschool because college is really, really expensive I would. I probably wouldn't listen though haha.

It's entirely your own doing if you don't get good grades IMO unless you have a legitimate disability. But some people were idiots when they were younger, or had other (questionable) priorities. I've also heard really sad life situations where teens wind up essentially having to take care of their siblings and the household due to dysfunctional parents or other stuff.

Because yeah, if your pubescent, immature brain decides that you have better things to do than schoolwork, you've really screwed the pooch and lost your shot.

Can't well go back to highschool and try over, haha.

(It worked out okay for me, I eventually got a GED and that's it. Never finished highschool or went to college, but programmed for fun as a kid and so managed to worm my way into software eventually. It probably would not have worked out in about a billion other scenarios, RIP)

Opposite is true. The vast majority of students do not work full time. A majority do not work at all:

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_ssa.pdf

Reply on news.ycombinator.com