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Comment by ianbutler | Hacker News Reader

As an NYU CS grad, can confirm it is egregious. If I had to do it over I would have gone to a different university, the education at NYU was not unlike other much less expensive universities in fact I had a lot of doubts about quality save some select professors. The only reason I'm fine with my loans is because I'm a very well comped SWE.

I don't personally have a lot of sympathy for people who do a liberal arts degree at NYU though. At least I knew I'd be able to pay this all back with some high degree of certainty.

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I live practically within one of their main campuses here in NYC.

I'm a self-taught developer who's thought about maybe attending a school part-time, and they have an awesome makerspace here, so I figured why not try one of their non-matriculated programs?

Even as a senior developer making a higher end salary for New York City, I found it unaffordable.

It absolutely blew my mind because new grads wouldn't make this kind of money for years out of school.

If someone nearing the later parts of the degree's "ideal career" can't afford it, how is someone supposed to afford it with interest?!

> I don't personally have a lot of sympathy for people who do a liberal arts degree at NYU though. At least I knew I'd be able to pay this all back with some high degree of certainty.

Liberal arts teaches people to deal with the problems that cannot be solved with algorithms or engineering, nor yield to the precise objective methods of science - which is the vast majority of them in the world, including the most critical ones, and even in IT. In fact, algorithms, engineering, and science are all ultimately subordinate to the other issues - ultimately, they are products of human nature. Those are some of the same issues about which many tech leaders like to advertize brazen ignorance, never a sign of good judgment!

And not coincidentally, looking around our society, those are our biggest problems by far - we aren't suffering from a lack of algorithms (and other tech), we have far more than ever. Perhaps if more people at Facebook studied the humanities, they wouldn't make such obvious errors with their truly brilliant technologies - errors bizarrely elementary to people who understand these things. Technology is power, and power is orthogonal to good decisions and good outcomes. I suspect that the fact that the knowledge in humanities and social sciences conflicts with power - again, a bizarrely elementary situation - is why so many powerful people try to ridicule and destroy the reputation of liberal arts. I'm afraid that in IT they have too willing an audience - a population widely ignorant of and often uncomfortable with non-technical issues - and that we and the public have disarmed ourselves of all our protection againt the corruption of power and tyranny (many even celebrate corrupt personal power) - dropping our far superior weapons simply because the powerful pointed them and laughed.

I watched William Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar the other day. The issues of today were addressed brilliantly, and on a level no data could describe or express - one function of art going back to ancient Greece and probably through human history, to hold up a mirror. If more SV engineers would watch it and learn from that and the rest of the humanities, the world would be in much better hands. Heck, just studying Shakespeare would be a start.

...

P.S. In employment, most well-paying jobs are outside IT and completely non-technical (if you can't think of any, you are a bit lost in the IT bubble). And more importantly, life is not all about work; there are more important things - wars aren't fought over job skills. Families aren't workplaces. Freedom in Hong Kong and peace in Ukraine aren't dependant on algorithms. Wages and markets, even, are dependant on politics.

You're arguing against claims I didn't make. Liberal Arts is perfectly valuable, but burying yourself financially to get a degree in one of the subjects, which is what will happen to most people who complete one of those degrees from NYU, isn't a smart move and that's where my lack of sympathy lies.

No offense but you're arguing against some thought you have of me in your head not any of my actual stances on liberal arts. My only point is that if you're going to go to an expensive college then the trade off better be worth it otherwise there are far cheaper alternatives (reading is free mostly!) to get that value.

> Liberal Arts is perfectly valuable, but burying yourself financially to get a degree in one of the subjects, which is what will happen to most people who complete one of those degrees from NYU, isn't a smart move and that's where my lack of sympathy lies.

I'm saying that it is a smart move (if you are serious about learning). It benefits the students and society on an essential level.

> there are far cheaper alternatives (reading is free mostly!) to get that value.

It's not the same value: Learning from the world's leading experts, with all the resources you need (reading, just one tool, is certainly not free - try downloading some papers or buying a library of scholarly books), among smart, motivated, hard-working people, is invaluable. Do you want to learn software development from Google Fellows at Google, or from the local front end shop dev? What you get at top universities are Google Fellows in their fields. Do you want to study painting with world-class painters or the person at the mall? Someone I know is in undergrad at one of the top 10 schools in the world, and in every class my friend studies with someone who literally wrote the book in their field, whom personally guides their learning, lectures on it, and whom my friend personally and regularly meets with as a matter of course. My friend is serious about learning these things - can you imagine something more valuable?

Okay, people can enjoy being in debt then. I'm not going to agree with you, I think your take especially for an undergraduate degree is ridiculous and poorly weighted.

You should check with your friend how much debt they're in. I'd imagine it's 0 and if that's the case they made a good call.

You'll benefit no one with your education while scraping by under the thumb of a corp because you can't afford to stop working as a debt slave. That's the reality most people face which is something you seem to ignore.

Every response like this praising Liberal Arts seems to ignore two things:

1. Leaders (executives and management) at top companies almost always come from these top universities you rave about, and many with degrees in Liberal Arts. Yet they still always put profit > the ideals you just spent three paragraphs praising.

2. ALL students in the US receive a Liberal Arts education via general education requirements. On the contrary, only a select few take anything over remedial math/science.

This also puts “leading experts” on a far higher pedestal than deserved. Take Robert Reich, a famous History professor at Berkeley. Despite raving about affordable housing and equality in courses, on Twitter, etc., he actively votes against such legislation [0]. Did his liberal arts education at Dartmouth, Oxford, and Yale fail him?

0: https://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/robert-reich-tries-to-st...

> 1. Leaders (executives and management) at top companies almost always come from these top universities you rave about, and many with degrees in Liberal Arts. Yet they still always put profit > the ideals you just spent three paragraphs praising.

I don't think I mentioned any ideals. Also, your disagreement with their decisions doesn't make them wrong or, more to the point, unaided by their educations.

> Take Robert Reich, a famous History professor ...

You personally disagree with someone who is a leader in liberal arts (and on the level of one among thousands), therefore all liberal arts education for everyone is invalidated? Your support is an (anonymous?) post in a forum on Economics Job Market Rumors? If you are accurate, one leader (of thousands) in liberal arts is flawed, so their entire education is a waste and all of liberal arts is without value? (What about you and me - are we flawed? Is everything we've learned therefore a waste? What about every other commenter and OP author on HN?)

Disagreement is part of liberal arts - it's essential, defining, for liberal arts to contain multiple contrary opinions simultaneously. Human flaws are part of liberal arts - it's impossible for it to work otherwise, as with any human endeavor. But claims without factual and rational basis are excluded. Also, Reich is an economist and professor of public policy.

> Liberal arts teaches people to deal with the problems that cannot be solved with algorithms or engineering, nor yield to the precise objective methods of science

Do you have recommendations for self-study to gain a broader appreciation for the types of problems they can solve and the approaches taken to solve them?

> most well-paying jobs are outside IT and completely non-technical (if you can't think of any, you are a bit lost in the IT bubble)

The ones I can think of typically require graduate / professional degrees or some sort of on the job training program. I don’t know what the employment prospects are for fresh liberal arts grads. I’ve seen some survey data that puts liberal arts grads at below the university average. There are problems with the survey data, but it’s the only information I’ve seen for early career salaries.

The other set of data I’ve seen says mid-career liberal arts graduates out earn everyone else. The issue I take with that data is the liberal arts grads in that data set are more educated in that they go on to earn JD, MBA, MPP, and other professional degrees. The second issue I have with it is the people are older and from a time when undergrad business degrees weren’t common. I have seen some arguments made that business degrees took up a lot of liberal arts students when they became more common at the undergrad level.

In the interest of gaining a more comprehensive understanding, it would be great to know what jobs I’m blind to.

Thanks!

You should have sympathy because those individuals were lied to in terms of employment opportunities post degree.

What was the lie?

Every college I've researched claims that their graduates, on average, make $XXX,XXX/year. That number is usually enough to pay back their tuition. Unfortunately, what they don't tell you, is that is very bimodal.

Well at least by going to college you can finally understand how they misrepresented the data in order to get you onboard. It may not soften the financial burden, but hey at least you know you learned something!

That's the one plus but, unfortunately, our CS program didn't have a stats requirement so many of the students didn't even learn about this in college :)

I'm thankful that we had probability and statistics as mandatory. Which to me looks like on the more useful side of anything math related for CS. Modelling and interpreting data would be useful for many jobs.

Sure, but you can't seriously fault the college for not declaring "Our $LiberalArtsMajor majors are usually unemployed."

Graduating high school, it's incredibly clear that studying finance or engineering will give you a higher income than studying most liberal arts majors. That's so universally known in our culture — and I say this as someone from a terrible neighborhood where nobody went to college — that it's almost absurd.

Nobody signs up for a liberal arts major, stays through it throughout college (even seeing their low to zero internship pay compared to high pay for other majors their peers are in), and then when they get out, says "wow, I'm shocked!".

> Sure, but you can't seriously fault the college for not declaring "Our $LiberalArtsMajor majors are usually unemployed."

Why not? We expect homeopathic medications to include "Not an FDA approved treatment for X" on the label.

We don't expect books to include "Not guaranteed to make you smarter" on the label.

Though we technically expect securities to include "Not guaranteed to make you rich," it's in small text nobody ever reads. I doubt a high school student would be reading it and rethinking their major...

If you're American, you already know that liberal arts majors don't go to college thinking "people are going to pay me so much money for this degree in gender studies."

Some people think it's part of their 'Freedom' to defraud 17 year olds

If you are researching colleges. Maybe we should already expect the students to do some basic research outside it. Or in general on college level education. Finding lot of discussion about loans and employability has been entirely possible for years now. There is no excuse not to do this research for one of the most important decisions in their life.

Throughout highschool I was told by many adults that the internet wasn't an "accurate source for information" and "don't believe what you read online" etc. I obviously ignored them. I was also told multiple times by my guidance counselor in highschool that Software Engineers needed to be very good at math and that I would never succeed in that field and I should choose something more realistic. I also ignored her. I'm now a SWE at a FAANG company. I've helped scale multiple start ups (multiple of which are successful and one of which was just acquired).

Society is set up in such a way that people are trained to:

1. Respect authority figures

2. Follow what your parents tell you to do

3. Your education is the most important thing in your life (between 10 and 30 yo)

All of these things lead to situations where people are more than willing to take out massive loans because everyone in their life tells them "it will be ok!" and "don't think about the money right now, it's about the experience" which is one of the most disgusting ideas that I think is perpetuated. Basically when your parents, your teachers, your politicians, your peers, etc are doing something it's hard to think "that's a bad idea".

17 year olds are known to not always act in their long-term rational self-interest.

Hmm, maybe then even crazier idea would be to set minimum age for college education. Let's say 25. Simply do not allow anyone to make the decision before that age.

Looking at rankings, NYU has a perfectly fine CS program, but you're right that there are better ranked, cheaper options, and if money isn't a concern, Columbia (6 miles uptown) is better ranked. That's a weird market position.

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