Ask HN: Why are self-taught developers deprived of “free for education” tools? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why are self-taught developers deprived of “free for education” tools?

38 pointsfrozencell77 comments

Github Copilot is free for students, but what about "self-taught" people for which school is too far or too expansive?

Why? Because you can verify that someone is a student, if you try hard enough. And they're trying to get people hooked on their product, and then pay for it.

OTOH, college is expensive for students, why don't self-taught people have to pay tuition fees as well? I think it's obvious that the being self-taught (technically: self-teaching?) and being a student isn't the same thing.

College is expensive only in USA.

And most tech companies offering services like this happen to be in the USA.

It's not cheap in the UK.

It’s pretty cheap. Not as cheap as it once was but £9k a year for 3 years with no difficulty in getting the loan and only having to pay it back based on income level after you graduate is a pretty good deal - particularly compared with the US.

The interest rate is RPI+4% which is such an obvious joke that they had to take 5% off the rate recently because it hit 12%, but it's still 7% interest!

Those grads are never going to pay their loans off, so that's a 9% tax on their salary every month forever.

The only ones who can get out are those with family who can lend/gift the money to pay the loans off.

> that's a 9% tax on their salary every month forever

Well, 9% of your salary above £28k, and wiped 30 years after your first payment.

In any case, it means no-one is too poor to study at tertiary level (recognising that there will always be circumstances that mean someone cant') while still making everything can be funded.

It's not perfect, but no system is.

9k per year is in line with in state tuition at a lot of schools in the US too.

Is it? All of the state schools near me (east coast) are like $25k/yr in state.

Edit: that’s what they were 10 years ago when I was a student. I’d guess it’s more expensive now.

Widely varies. I picked a random university in Scotland - the fees were just under 2000 Pounds per year if you're Scottish. The no-name University in my city in the US charges $10K.

Scottish universities are cheaper than the rest of the UK. Tuition fees for the lowest ranking uni in England (London Metropolitan University) is £9,250 per year (~$11,000).

It’s free in Scotland (if you’re from Scotland).

Somebody always pays.

In this case, it's the Scottish people—both those who have and those who haven't had their own schooling subsidized.

This is why it would be good if the employers who benefit most from these education systems contributed more towards society. Every time a FAAMG company hires a Scottish graduate to work in London or California, the Scottish taxpayer has effectively given big tech a little subsidy.

If more Scottish grads help develop the Scottish economy then it could pay for itself, at least partially.

I'm always confused when people make this type of comment. As an American, I usually see it in discussions of health care, but also on other types of government services. Perhaps you can help.

Do you think the people reading it don't know this? Are you trying to make some sort of implied argument?

> why don't self-taught people have to pay tuition fees as well?

People are currently arguing that we should.

Huh? You mean state/govt funded college? Or student loan debt forgiveness?

Student loan debt forgiveness.

Are you this dramatic about every form of government bailout that doesn’t directly benefit you?

Edited subsidy to bailout.

Only ones that go to extremely privileged people.

By "extremely privileged", are you referring to people whose parents didn't pay for their education and so they had to take out loans?

People who came from backgrounds where the idea of spending a house worth of money on a piece of paper that employers aren't even interested in isn't batshit insane.

Sue the school if they lied to you about the prospects of the degree. If they didn't and you went into this deal clear eyed, why am I paying for your years of partying?

"Extremely" privileged, maybe not.

But I was too poor to even think of going to University in the UK, and that's not even half as bad as it is in the US; it's not just the student loans; it is also student living (rent, food, supplies), putting earnings on hold for half-a-decade and the possibility that you may not even have anything to show for it in the end (if you can't hack it or if the degree turns out to be not in-demand) it's not like you're guaranteed work.

It's a gamble, and a hard one to make if you're from a lower-class blue-collar or non-working household.

I'm sure I'll get a deluge of very privileged people here telling me that it would be effectively free to have an education in the UK due to certain debt forgiveness models and earning thresholds, I'm aware of those, but people would be hugely missing the point.

Student loan debt forgiveness is a stupid idea.

All it will do is encourage more borrowing in the hope that there will be another future round of forgiveness. And lenders will have every incentive to offer those loans in the hope that the government pays for it. This money will enable colleges to raise tuitions more, and we get the same problem we've had, just grown more.

Instead allow student loans to be disengaged in bankruptcy. Just like other debts, and just like student loans could before George "W" Bush changed the laws. Now students aren't incentivized to hope for another forgiveness round, lenders aren't either, and we aren't pouring fuel on rising tuition. Plus we'd offer ongoing assistance to those who got in the worst binds. (Unpleasant assistance to be sure. But not a one time bandaid, and very precisely targeted at those who need it most.)

In the UK, tuition was free for all UK students from 1962 - 1998. That period also saw steady economic growth. I'd cite that as evidence the relationship between tuition fees and the broader economy is complex.

Post WWII, the United States has seen massive economic growth. Tuition was not free. It’s tough to connect the two.

I agree with you there. My disagreement is with the OP's very confident predictions of what would happen, when those predictions have not come true anywhere else free tuition fees have been (or are) in place.

Student loan debt forgiveness is nothing like free tuition, and has very different economic effects.

Countries that offer free tuition tend to pay universities directly and cap payments. That provides a strong incentive for universities to control costs. Similarly students who take advantage of the prospect of free tuition do not themselves go into debt.

By contrast student loan forgiveness involves forgiving loans to students who have already gone into debt. This makes their private loans easier to pay for them. The prospect of this makes people more willing to go into debt. Nothing about this program gives universities an incentive to control costs.

Rather than compare this to free tuition, it is better to compare this to other programs that make it easier for students to borrow to pay high tuition. The USA has had a lot of these programs, and the result is one of the factors driving tuition to rise faster than inflation for a half-century now.

I'm just predicting that the result of this program will be the same result that we've seen for the last half-century.

I agree forgiving student loan debt then just continuing on with the current system wouldn’t be great. There could be an argument that it would still represent an economic boost that would benefit many. But especially at this particular moment, I don’t find that argument outweighs the negatives.

(I'm not the GP but I think there's a fair reason why someone would feel differently about loan forgiveness than other subsidies)

Normally a subsidy is established in advance to incentivize some behaviour, like... manufacturing solar panels or something.

A retroactive payment to only specific indebted solar panel manufacturers is called a bailout and does not have that effect, unless it was widely anticipated. It distorts the competitive landscape because it gives them a leg up over competing manufacturers who held back on investments that they would have made if they'd known the debt would be forgiven, and over new companies who are about to take loans to invest in their own factories, who now have to compete against fully-amortized equipment.

So in other words, it's not really a proper subsidy unless it's also available to new students going forward. But due to the weirdness of the education market, that would probably require some form of tuition price controls too.

I'd imagine most people who are in favour of student debt forgiveness are also in favour of free tuition going forwards as well. It would be odd indeed to suggest your debt should be forgiven, but not that of someone who graduates next year.

One complex bit of debt forgiveness is what happens with those who have sacrificed much to already pay off much of their debt. Should they get some kind of repayment?

Agreed on both points, but I haven't seen those policies put forward. I don't have a horse in this race but it will be interesting to see what happens.

Why should the banks forgive instead of forcing the colleges to pay for it? -- the colleges being the ones who fraudulently baited these students into moral hazard, offering something they couldn't warranty.

We need to stop treating colleges and college administrators as only the purest churches and priests.

It would be a major net positive if half of all universities went bankrupt, as was already predicted by HBS professor to be in 10-15 years.

I find this one hard to get on board with…

I took out students loans and struggled financially with very little help from my parents. I graduated with about $25k in debt.

Ten years later, I’m finally about to pay it off completely. I’ve been very fortunate to get jobs with salaries that allowed me to do this.

I realize not everyone is fortunate in this way. But, at least in America, college is a financial decision. The argument about whether or not it should be is meaningless here. People knew going in what the cost would be, and how much in loans they’d need to take out.

Someone taking out $100k for an art degree made a decision that likely wasn’t very wise. Why should someone that made more responsible decisions and made sure they’d be able to pay their debts now foot the bill for those that didn’t? This isn’t like other welfare — food stamps, for example. This is someone taking out a loan for something and not being able to pay it back.

It might not directly benefit me because I worked to make sure my student loan could be settled. It’s a really tough sell to anyone that has done that. Had I felt confident we would be forgiving student debt, I would have simply reconfigured my pay off so that it was over the longest possible term with the lowest possible monthly payment and just wait.

If our government decides to forgive student loan debt, I’d fully expect a check in the mail for what I paid. That only seems fair.

I think it's a snarky way of saying "if college debts are cancelled, self-taught people would thus be paying the tuition fees of those who went to college".

In a sense, student loan forgiveness is making the financially responsible (self-taught, self-made, more valuable degree, worked through college) pay for the financially irresponsible.

Those who work through college are more likely to have worse outcomes, and they're still likely to have a high debt. Those who went to college and have no debt are more likely to come from wealthy families. And if we say "only those who can afford it should go to college", then you are discouraging pretty much the best opportunity for social mobility.

College isn't an opportunity for social mobility anymore. The cost of tuition shoots up as the curriculum relaxes. It's an investment trap for people who can't do the math and listen too closely to what their midwit school teachers believe about the world.

And yet, you can usually go to community college and then a reasonably well regarded state school without taking on crazy debt. It is when you go out of state and live in campus housing that costs balloon.

Community college can be a great investment in some cases, definitely. Especially for people who struggle with setting goals and self-discipline. If you have self-discipline and know what you want to be able to do, there can be a lot of unnecessary time waste in the classroom.

I would be curious to break down and audit time against 4 buckets of things you will learn. Things you "need to know", "ought to know", "don't need" and "don't actually understand". I wonder how long it takes to fill each bucket and how much faster the latter two grow.

Experience is the best teacher of all and additional schooling is the biggest barrier to useful experience.

but those 'financially irresponsible' people include those who work in professions that don't pay well but the rest of us rely on, like those that care for kids or people with disabilities.

They also include people who have any other unexpected event in their life that affects their employability or income.

If you want to go into charity work, don't expect to be paid like a brain surgeon. If you can't afford the education required to go into charity work, start a GoFundMe or choose something more attainable. Stop spending other's money because of vague handwavey "we need it and it doesn't pay well"

You're picking two extremes that make your argument sound very simple. But what do you think about teachers? Should we:

a) Forgive their student debt

b) Discourage non-wealthy people from becoming teachers

c) Force schools to pay them more

d) Pay them more via GoFundMe

e) Have less educated teachers

f) Rely on teachers less and let their value be established by the free market

Being forced to pay a school that your children don't attend is rent seeking. Strip schools of all rent seeking funding, make tax money follow the child and let the parents on vote what education style works with their children's attendance.

If you've got the answers to these difficult problems, what's stopping you from enacting them?

The problems I'm paid to solve pay a lot more. More than triple the maximum salary of government officials.

Anyone can give an untested hypothesis and claim it will solve the problem. Executing a plan competently and being held accountable for the result is a much bigger challenge.

I had a friend who bypassed free-for-education restrictions by using an email like "johndoe@pretend.edu.mydomain.com". Turns out a lot of the code that looks for .edu emails doesn't correctly do end-of-line matching on the string.

A lot of sites are catching up and verifying with institutions or are asking for proof of enrollment.

> I think it's obvious that the being self-taught (technically: self-teaching?) and being a student isn't the same thing.

Sure, but why shouldn't it be treated the same for the purpose of free dev tools.

> being self-taught (...) and being a student isn't the same thing.

Are they not? If you're teaching yourself, you're by definition studying the subject matter, hence you're a student.

You're not a formal student but a student nonetheless.

> why don't self-taught people have to pay tuition fees as well?

That should be fairly obvious. Tuition fees are meant to (at least partially) pay for teachers (time, expertise), teaching infrastructure and ancillary structures to a formal education. Since you're self-teaching, you're providing all of those yourself. You could pay, but you'd pay yourself and that would be silly.

Note that I'm not arguing about the general point of the OP but rather about these specific points.

I think because there's no way to differentiate someone who's a learner vs someone who already has lots of experience. They'd basically be giving it away for free to everyone.

Another option would be to license it "free for non-commercial use", although then you have the problem of people using it for commercial use without upgrading.

You don't need any of those "free for education" tools to learn to be a developer. You can bootstrap yourself using the FOSS ecosystem until someone will pay you to be a developer, then you can afford all the paid devtools your heart desires.

Or your employer will buy tools for you.

Because "free for students" is a marketing ploy to get them using the product in the hope that they will pay for it when they start earning.

Doesn't this apply just as much to self-taught devs?

It is more straight forward for them to identify regular students (through their student ids or institutions).

There are free tiers of software and services everywhere. Businesses make the calculation that sponsoring university students’ use of their product will create loyal paying customers down the road, and students are both easy to identify via email domain and probably more likely than the general population to make purchasing decisions on software and services.

yes, as in my own comment: this is a business, not a charity

if businesses give you something for free, they still expect to profit, but at later point

the logic here is to give you the product while you’re studying so when you finished they can start bill you or your future employer

this is not to help students, but to help companies find leads who will help fill their own pockets

When does the state of “self-taught” developer end? After some set amount of time? After you earn a set amount of money? How do you verify that? How do you make sure the “self-taught” developer isn’t using the tools for a well-paying job and not for learning? For students, this is limited by the access to their .edu e-mail address, which is often cut after graduation.

GitHub Copilot is a purely optional tool you can live without with (and that I personally don’t find worthy of the $10/month price tag). Many other things are free (VS Code, IntelliJ IDEA Community), and you can be quite productive with that. And speaking of JetBrains tools, you can get a free license if you’re an open-source developer.

I mean I graduated almost 8 years ago and still have my .edu email address, been using it for Spotify and random stuff here and there. I know people that apply online for college just to get their email addres and then cancel the application. it's a pretty fucked up system

Do you still have access to your college classes?

> When does the state of “self-taught” developer end?

Maybe after a certain age?

Essentially, there's a very broad attempt to brand an actually regressive business bet as progressive. Microsoft (and Github) would love to appear generous, but they aren't.

Most Americans don't go to college and the vast majority don't get 4-year degrees. Those who do are the wealthier, more privileged 3/5 to 4/5 of the country. Some are scraping by on financial aid or scholarships, but as a whole, they'll have more money than other people throughout their careers.

As a result, it's a good marketing investment to give free access to those students capable of putting up 10K+ USD/year in tuition. In the future, a large number of them will be target customers or possibly subsidized via their employers.

Taking bets on self-taught people without those financial resources (present or future) is a great, prosocial thing to do, but it's not necessarily profitable.

because CS students are more likely to pursue software engineering as a career

free for education really is a marketing tool to get the students to use and depend on the product so that when they land a job they can convince their Product Manager to pay for it

this is business, not a charity

> free for education really is a marketing tool to get the students to use and depend the product so they when they land a job they can convince their Product Manager to pay for it

lol (i was extremely guilty to this)

i was guilty of refusing to offer the service for free to a student

at the time it didn’t make sense to me why i should offer something for free when it costs me money to operate

the student in question switched to a competitor, got a job at FAANG and now their bosses pay big bucks for his usage

lessons learned: offer free (subsidized) accounts to students so when they make it you could bill them or their employers

Developers don’t need access to paid tooling. At least in the past 15 years or so. You used to need Visual Studio and/or Borland, but these days open source tools are as good as or better.

Just because you don't need something it doesn't mean you can't improve your workflow with a paid for tool. IntelliJ is well worth the money I spend on it for me.

You don't need Copilot (or other free-to-education stuff) and there is enough that is available (eg VSCode) for you to establish yourself.

They.... aren't. Awhile back, I wanted to check out Tableau, which offers free licensing to students. I signed up at my local CC (in US) to get a student .edu email, but didn't register for courses. IIRC, registration was required to get a student ID card, but not the email address.

I learned on only open source tooling and I feel learning to collaborate with the open source community benefited me greatly.

Ignore everyone saying you need special corporate controlled tools to succeed. The best tools are the ones no one can take away from you.

Why not just enroll in a college to get an email and then don't take any courses?

Yeah, I think it would be far better if companies made things free for young people in general rather then just students.

Because college students have to pay tution so they cannot afford those tools.

A good strategy is to just find a friend with a .edu email and bother them

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