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Comment by eof | Hacker News Reader

Surprised by the lack of support for dropping out.

Is a 4 year education and a degree valuable? Of course.

Is it worth $xx,000 in student debt and 4 year opportunity cost of doing something else? Rarely. Especially for this crowd.

If you are a 19 year old with some programming skills, and you are paying for your own college (via loans or with cash) dropping out is a GREAT idea. Spend the next three years working on your own projects, open source projects, crappy little free lance whatever.. you are going to be in a much better spot than if you spent the next three years going to classes and coming out with 50k in student loan debt.

If college is free, then yeah, you are crazy not to go. But if you are smart and willing to work hard anyway.. education is FREE these days. Save the cost of the house and the years.

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I have to disagree. A college education costs about $26,000 for Florida residents here in Orlando for a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. Compare that to my first year's salary which was roughly double that, and the cost begins to look minimal.

The opportunity cost is relative, since the people you meet in college may very well be the best resources you have for maintaining your drive, innovative spirit, and will to keep on. Just the discipline of finishing something is worth the time and money spent. That said, it depends on _you_ and your situation.

Personally, I wouldn't be who I am today without suffering with my peers through classes like CS1, Discrete Structures, and Computer Architecture. My first piece of real consulting work, the first proposal I ever wrote, was for an ad on our local university's job board.

Disclaimer: The total cost of my education was paid by scholarships, so I do not have first hand knowledge of how this works, just providing my anecdote. $26,000 figure was calculated using my in state invoices from 2003-2007 so they may need adjusting for inflation.

26k + 4 * 25k a year salary you aren't earning (very conservative for someone who is going to spend 4 years trying to make money being a programmer)

And you have a 126k education.

That ~50k you are making a year is roughly the same as my first salaried position; except that I dropped out of college and spent that time jerking off and doing some free lance work.

Certainly there is a lot of value in college; I learned to program (even though I didn't graduate) primarily in college, and my buddies from there are some of my best friends (and potential networking opportunities).

However, at 26, with no degree, minor networking, and (in my opinion) an amateur portfolio I was able to get multiple 45k+ opportunities. At 28 with a better portfolio I can work as much or as little as I choose for $50+ an hour.

In this industry, no one gives a shit about your degree for 99% of cases. Can you hack it and show you can hack it? Then you can get a job.

In Idaho, the 4 year universities are about 3K per semester. Assuming a 4-year degree, that's 24K in tuition. If it's 5 years, that's 30K.

You can live on about 1K per month. So loosely, that's about 20K per year to get a degree here.

it's correct to think about the bigger picture, but you'd be paying rent anyway. I think the right number to look at is tuition + opportunity cost, e.g. 6K + 18K salary or whatever.

Opportunity cost was very little for me and all the other CS people I knew in undergraduate. The alternative for most people was doing tech support and making 24K/year with no growth potential (using local rates). Since the local rate for a BSCS is about 50K, there's no meaningful reason for the bulk of students to drop out. You'd have to have 20% year over year growth in income (not counting the bennies coming in with a salary job) to equal it.

In other words, for a computer science student - if you have a business raking in cash and you need to drop out to keep the money stream, you're losing out. Otherwise, stay in college.

Unfortunately Florida is much, much less expensive than almost anywhere else. A college education from a decent university in Pennsylvania will run you about 15k a year (University of Pittsburgh or Penn State). Throw in living costs and tuition increases, and you're looking at 80-100k easily for 4 years.

> Throw in living costs

I see the point you're trying to make, but I don't see why you'd calculate living costs into the cost of school.

If I'm working I'm likely to have higher living costs as most universities have subsidized housing and meals, not to mention most students live with room mates once they move off campus. I'd guess working people have far fewer room mates and much nicer/expensive accommodations :)

Anecdotally that's how it's been for pretty much everyone I know

Tuition at the University of Alabama is about $9,000/year for in-state students. It was half that when I attended in the early 2000s. It's not a highly ranked CS school but there are plenty of resources available and it's worked out well enough for me so far careerwise. I was working 40 hours a week throughout grad school, so my lifetime student loan total amount maxed out at around 1/3 of your quote.

On the flip side, my high school roommate dropped out of college as a freshman and he is doing just great working for a big-name Valley startup.

See I'm going the other way.

I'm in the process of applying for a Master's Degree in Computer Science. Historically I've been rather reluctant to do this since I can learn on my own, and have. However, I think the structure and the environment provided by school is worth the 25k a total cost. Having money on the barrel head provides a real sense of focus. Having a peer group that wants to really pursue the same topic is valuable and worth a portion of the 25k. Finally, it gets me to focus on a topic. Currently I'm flitting around from technology to technology, fueled by HN. I look at Node.js, then Mongo, then a plethora of JS libraries. I'm tired.

School will focus me on Software Engineering with a focus on Grid/Distributed computing.

I did a masters in CS for almost the same reasons and it was one of the best decisions I've ever made. Met a tonne of amazing people, learnt a stupid amount in one year (which I say with some authority in learning stupid amounts in short spaces of time) and had a really fantastic time. I found that it forced me to do things I wouldn't perhaps on the face of it have chosen, but turned out to be really interesting and influence my work in other areas (like predicate logic, which I initially hated but learned to love).

I completely agree, 4 years of learning leading technologies in IT will put you far ahead of 4 years of learning possibly outdated stuff. Education is FREE!

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