</scandinavian>
EDIT: I didn't mean to be all smug about it. The cost of going to university is different in different countries, and if it's too expensive where you're at, maybe going as an exchange student is a viable alternative? That's the only big regret I have, never having done that.
Cost of degree > Worth of degree.
$200,000 for a degree which only nets a $35,000/yr job is starting to seem like a bad deal.
Cost of (Humanities) degree >> Worth of said degree
Sad, but true. Perhaps humanities subjects are ripe for an online-learning revolution.
Debt that will follow you through bankruptcy is not one of them. I know of people who took exactly that attitude about college and it destroyed their lives.
If you are not paying for college, or not paying much, it is true that it can be a fun 4 years and does not need to be considered a financial decisions. But when you are collecting more debt than an average mortgage you should really consider if the house you are buying is worth it.
Before we get all smug about our educational systems largely free of exorbitant fees, arbitrary admissions, and racists nonsense like affirmative action (well, largely), we should take a look at the results Americans are getting. It's not all corruption and waste.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_and_university_ranking... and it doesn't really matter which you choose
I smell some ill-reasoned statistics.
Sure ya did. Here's how I read it:
Poster: "Take a look at the universities rankings[1] -- how many schools in the top ten aren't British or American?"
You: "the US is a much larger country, and therefore has many more universities"
For such a position to hold water, the US would have to be larger in population than the entire rest of the world.
It makes me wonder why we count campuses as separate in the rankings.
If you have a monolithic system as many universities in Europe do, you'd be penalized for it.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Ranking_of_World_Univ...
That's what it looks like from outside the USA. For US students, the SAT barely matters at all. Top criteria at elite schools are 1. race (don't be Asian-American), 2. sports (especially elite sports like crew), 3. contacts, recommenders, networking, 4. high grades from a well-known high school, 5. extracurricular activities, 6. objective tests.
Try that gauntlet and you'll be pining for tests of SAT words.
However, I'd mostly like to address the fallacy of attributing the high international rankings of American universities to the high undergraduate tuition. At Caltech, I've heard many undergrads say that all undergrad tution is about 5% of Caltech's budget, with a lot of the rest coming from various research grants. At schools with less of a research focus and more undergrads, undergrad tuition might make 30% of the budget. I can't find the blog post at the moment, but there was a discussion a few years ago about what would happen if MIT gave a full scholarship to all attending undergrads, and the conclusion was that it would hurt (but not cripple) MIT financially, but appeared possible.
To the extent that they also teach students more and better, this is actually damaging socially because it sucks secondary educational capital into a few locations. Lower end schools could do more and better if they housed many more bright and ambitious students. But if they're all going to a handful of schools, they're not improving the social networks at Random State.
And its an interesting thought to distribute top students. Assuming a fixed quantity of "bright and ambitious" students, wouldn't sending more of them to lower end schools weaken the social networks formed at elite schools and destroy something unique about American education system?
Seeing as how many people waste time and money at university, I think it is good that they either waste their own or their parents' money.
Probably a better system would be where the top 20% of universities are national and free (with competitive entry) and the rest is private.
There is no free lunch in the world, you indeed pay for university.
The statement you make is so ironic because you are displaying an incredible amount of ignorance in basic math and taxes, thereby discrediting the scandinavian university system you are here defending!!
I'm sitting here cracking up and can't stop laughing at your comment.
So as I see it. It's more efficient use of your time to start working by yourself then seek to learn exactly what you need to get the job done.
Others say what matters about college is not education. But networking and proving you can get things done. But you can also get those more efficiently somewhere else. Hackatons and linking to your code on github are much more efficient at these.
Overall, the main anti-college argument is simply that there are more cost and time efficient means to get the same that college gets you. If after considering that you still want to go to college. Then be happy and do it, you'll still get there, it will only cost you more time and money.
I feel like the programming field should accommodate better, more time efficient education. We're a different breed of workers, as we are constantly required to learn, and the best learning happens while doing actual work.
All of my peer group have fulfilling careers and none of us had any debt after about two or three years. And all of us work positions with people who did pay a lot for school and who are still paying off their debt. In other words going to hum drum community college and state school put us in precisely the same employment positions as people who paid 4 to 5 times as much.
Using today's dollars here's what my education would cost today (minus books because I have no way of knowing what the cost of used books for all of the courses would be plus most courses honestly don't use the books and aren't needed).
Community college: 2 years, A.S. degree (okay, 2 A.S. degrees, but that's not the point). 60 credits. ~$140 per credit in my area. Total: $8400.
That's the first two years of the undergrad down.
Transfer to local state college that possesses an agreement with the local community college to transfer the A.S. and place the student as a junior.
Current tuition around $9k per year. So $18k to finish up the undergrad.
Total undergrad tuition from the local state school $26,500.
Add $18k for the grad program. $44,500.
Now subtract Pell grants (only available for the undegrad): $5500 per year or $22000 for the undergrad. (it was I believe $6500 when I went so there's that).
Final tuition $22500 in 2012 dollars.
Which isn't too bad, only $7500 more than what I paid in 2001.
Of course there's books and such, but like I said usually you can get them used, don't need them at all, and can return them after the semester and get some of the money back. I'm also not counting housing, food, other misc expenses, which is a significant expense for many students. One school I looked at charges ~$20k for housing and meal plan.
By comparison, MIT is $20,885 per term. In other words, even before Pell grants, my entire program, from High School to Graduate Degree costs around what one year costs there.
Tufts university, another well regarded school, run $41,998 per year.
Sidenote: it's interesting how hard it is to find tuition and rates at expensive schools. I picked MIT and Tufts because they were relatively forthcoming about it (even if the information was buried someplace). Other schools play fun games by showing per credit rates, and leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out how many credits their major requires, then do the math to figure out their tuition. Or they show per credit rates after financial aid for a family of the median income or other such nonsense. My favorite is where they'll list their tuition, and then not make it clear if it's per semester or per year. Stanford's tuition rates are almost absurdly cryptic (when the tuition rates page is even up) -- for the record it's $40,050 per year, add in other expenses and it's $52,341 per year or around $200k for an undergraduate degree, 10 times my program which gets you a graduate degree.
It's also very telling when most non-state schools I look at feature "financial aid" on the front page of their site. They know their tuition is too high.
Second sidenote: Tufts recommends $800 per year for textbooks if anybody wants to figure that in.
The price you pay for any income range between there and full price depends upon this incredibly convoluted form, the FAFSA, that basically involves listing every asset and income source available to you, and then the college quoting a price back to you, which will be some combination of parental contribution, work/study, and loans, with the remainder made up by grants from the college.
Sticker price at Amherst when I went was just over $40K/year, including room & board. My parents actually paid about $12K/year, I think, with another couple thousand in loans for me.
More importantly, when private universities do post their tuition, they don't post them as "max tuition pending review of financial status", but increasingly they are as no reasonable person will pay something closing in on a quarter million dollars for an undergraduate degree (I'm thinking tuition, books, supplies, food, housing, the whole shebang) that some schools these days are commanding. And I think it's because the universities spend quite a bit of effort trying to figure out how to shift the tuition to a deferment rather than a waiver or reduction. So we get a "tuition" link right next to the "financial aid" link and a wink and nod from the school because surely everybody knows those rates are negotiable.
I think I return to my main point which is that a decent undergrad education in the U.S. doesn't really have to cost $100k-$250k no matter the school one attends. However, the ridiculous rates private schools post doesn't help things. Their actual average tuition rate is likely much much lower - and the full price is a "penalty rate" for coming from money.
What's troubling is how a relatively simple breakdown like I provided earlier up this thread or yours seems to be a great mystery.
For two generations, we've been fed the line that a "college education leads to success" while at the same time we've entered a world where the rate of innovation - not just in tech - is moving much faster than the curricula can adapt.
As a result, you end up with professors who have been out of their industry and have skills that are (likely) eroding. At the same time, they're teaching concepts that are being replaced and expanded upon. It's a dangerous combination.
At the same time, throw in the degrees that have sole purpose of training a professor to teach the same classes. At some point, the supply of these people will outpace the demand and whole departments are going to suffer.
Then throw in people who probably would have (or should have?) chosen a different path but ended up going to college to have "success." Either they succeed on their own (yea!), the have grade inflation or gimme classes devaluing the degree, or they fail.
If they fail, we end up with some who might have been GREAT at Job X but where pressured into going for Job Y and suffered failure.. so they're unlikely to reach either.
The "value" of an education is primarily two things at this point: - learning how to learn -> if this doesn't happen until college, ponder what's going on the previous 12 years.. - the relationships & associations with like-minded individuals... if you can find them.
I think the decision should be based more on the experiences the person is looking for, instead of money. Especially in Canada, where getting a student loan isn't really a daunting task.
Some of it is just cultural--I received a heavy dose of the anti-college mindset 30 years ago (from relatives while growing up in the southern US) when it was still pretty cheap.
Going to school in most countries is a no-brainer.
if you're saying education isn't worth the time or money, I disagree, but if you're saying the US higher education system is so broken it's not even worth considering, I agree.