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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I assume the conclusions change considerably when you plug in non-American numbers?

My degrees were about 1/8th the price of many U.S. peers’, which made them more palatable given that my original career was looking at a lifetime ceiling of maybe $90k CAD.

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Sometimes I wish these articles would include "in the US" in the title. "Is College in the US Worth It? A Return on Investment Analysis"

From an ROI perspective, college in the US is not worth it for all but a few degree programs. The university I graduated from in the early 90's (on scholarship) was at the time the most expensive college in the US but now most public schools cost more than that.

Something not accounted for in these studies is financial aid in the form of grants, scholarships, and loans. That will radically change the ROI for individual students.

The paper shows that the ROI for college in the US is positive for many, but not all, majors and schools. It’s literally the entire point of the paper, complete with data, graphs and the rest.

Not as positive as some might think, and there are a significant number of losers, but only “a few degree programs” being positive is not supported by the data.

ROI may be positive for many programs but still only worth it for a few of them.

What difference do you imply between a positive ROI and "worth it" ?

Americans write articles for an American audience and don't ever acknowledge the existence of other countries.

Yes it's just a coincidence that we can hear them talk. Almost nobody outside of China is going to read articles written in Chinese because we don't speak that language.

Of course. In other countries it's affordable and going to college becomes a no-brainer.

I don't think it's a no-brainer. You spend a lot of time in college, and it would be interesting to see how much information/learnings you could ingest on your own time, compared to what they would give you in college.

Many people (but probably not everyone) would be better off not going to college at all, and start learning/working on their own, especially if they have specific interests instead of not knowing what they want to do.

In college you are not 'given' information/learnings, you actually have to do the work and selection to 'get' that yourself. At least, that is how it works here (EU). If you don't pro-actively do this, you simply won't succeed (and from a ROI perspective that would be a bad one).

The big difference between 'in' college and 'outside' or 'on your own' is context; the facilities, culture and exchange of ideas available to you in a college setting are very different from anything else. Especially when to take the sandbox element in to account.

There are also many fields in which receiving “expert” feedback is a substantial part of the learning process.

And on top of that there is the difference between studied subjects and experienced subjects. There is no golden 'do this, get everything' path. Going to college or university doesn't mean there is nothing you need to learn in a work context. Same goes the other way: only learning things at work means you probably get a lot less abstract underpinnings and overarching context (or you might get none at all) which reduces understanding of your surroundings significantly.

The first iterations of school (in the first one or or two decades of life) are mostly "learning how to deal with people", "learning how to learn", "learning within a context" and after all that you get to "learn how to make use of what you have learned" in the real world. The earlier you stop, the fewer tools you'll have for the rest of your life.

There would be two avenues that are somewhat distinctive: academia which blends school-type context into work-type context at some point, and there is vocational training which reduces school-type context earlier and eliminates it before you're even "out of school". Neither are 'bad' or 'good', just different paths.

Depends on how you calculate it.

If had become say a plumber instead of going to university, had lived as cheap as a student with a plumber salary and invested the surplus 100 percent in the stock marked that would be a lot of money now many years later. I prefer not to calculate it.

I agree. I feel like there should be a credentialing system where you can 'test into' knowledge for specific course loads and however the person (at their own pace) arrives at that knowledge is considered secondary to whether they pass the test.

It's sensible to require one or two years of in-person study but requiring the whole 4 years seems like a potential waste of time due to the differences in maturity, social development, and focus among college aged students.

But is it easy to get in? Most English speaking Europeans you can talk to (barring the UK, etc) are in the above average category for their country. A lot of people may only speak their mothertongue or another European language that is not English.

I went to a college in a developing country and I regret it. I didn't lose money, but I wasted a lot of time and didn't really learn much (or rather, I did learn things during college, but not because of it). The lectures were unbearably boring and I didn't socialize much. More than anything, I hate the fact that I was too much of a coward to drop out once I realized how miserable I was doing all the fake and pointless work that was assigned to me. I forgot to say, I studied computer science.

You'd be surprised. Take Spain: College is very cheap, but in 2014, the median student that graduated was 27... and that was with a plain degree. This also didn't mean that most of their college degrees were on any topic that helped their job prospects. If you spend most of your 20s working hard on a course of study that doesn't lead to a career that pays much better than minimum wage, going to college sure isn't a no-brainer. This isn't purely a matter of motivation, but of the quality of their school, their interest in teaching, and setting sensible exams. My US college had plenty of Spanish engineering students which had gotten nowhere in their Spanish college, and were doing very well under the US system. Nothing like seeing engineers now at NASA that were unable to pass a single class in their first year in Madrid.

Salaries can also be quite different across borders. Studying computer science in the US isn't cheap, but the jobs available right when you are done are not paying anywhere near the same as those of the Spanish developer. You see American companies opening software shops in the least developed parts of Europe, and a big part of it is that you might be getting up to 5 developers for the price of one. I emigrated because I knew that the Spanish college route was far more dubious than a pretty average US college, even paying for the whole thing.

So a no-brainer? Hardly. And the life path that makes sense in 2010 might not make all that much sense in 2030. Just like someone that became a mining engineer, specializing in coal, had a very different career if he made his choice in the 1950s, vs doing the same in 2005.

Not really. Many of those countries have lower proportion of college degrees than the US. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...)

If cost isn't an issue, I wonder what prevents more from getting degrees?

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