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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

> Part of the problem is the scale of the higher education system in the US, where hundreds of nonprofit colleges are competing for enrollment and talent, and a large proportion of upper- and middle-class parents are willing to pay top dollar — or even go into debt themselves — to give their kids the best education possible.

This seems like something that's entirely unsurprising. If your STEM-oriented kid could attend <insert top 5 engineering school here> or your more Ivy-oriented kid could attend an Ivy League school and you could help them make that happen, why wouldn't you?

Not in the literal sense of "make the best rational argument against it" but in the metaphorical sense of "yeah, an enormous number of families will make exactly that choice, even if some opt out".

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STEM-kids aren't struggling to pay off their college debts. Liberal art degree holders, however.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/opinion/medical-school-st...

> My personal experiences highlight the magnitude of the problem. Upon graduation from medical school in 2013, I owed approximately $180,000 in student debt — what might seem an outrageously high number that is actually about $10,000 less than the average for today’s medical school graduates. I scrounged and saved during residency, living in a tiny Chinatown apartment, riding my bicycle to work every day, and sneaking expired patient sandwiches for lunch so that I could make my monthly $700 debt payment. Yet upon completing residency, the amount I owed had, to my disbelief, increased to $188,000 — all my efforts had not been enough to cover even the interest accumulating on my loans.

> I am far from alone. A mentor in residency, several years my senior and making over $200,000 per year, once revealed that she had moved back in with her mother just to get a handle on her student loans. Another colleague had a marriage proposal rejected because of his mortgage-size debt.

Do you have data that's not anecdotal?

EDIT: Do you have data that's not anecdotal and shows that residents/doctors are struggling to pay off that debt?

Plenty. https://educationdata.org/average-medical-school-debt

> The average medical school graduate owes $250,995 in total student loan debt.

> The average medical school graduate owes 4 times as much as the average college graduate

> In 1978, the average medical school debt in the U.S. was $13,500. That’s $53,648 when adjusted for inflation.

Medical school debt seems like the least compelling example given how much doctors get paid.

https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/radiologist... The median radiologist is making $459k. The bottom 10% is still making $344k. So you could finish med school, be the lowest-paid radiologist in your class, and pay off your debt in like 2 years if you wanted.

A less lucrative specialty still makes the debt no big deal. If you're making $250k as a family doctor, you're still living comfortably after making your debt payments.

But after residency, you’re looking at a salary of 200K. You’d be able to pay down your debt in a few years of frugal living.

Debt itself isn’t bad if it’s taken on as an investment.

There's consequences to frugal living, particularly in the form of people moving past the ideal window for starting a family.

It's almost as if life is a series of trade-offs.

Trade-offs that the generations before didn't have to make.

You have to make allowances for things like starting a family. Otherwise we're not going to have enough people to create the expected economic value in 20 years. That will come with economic and political consequences that no one likes, and of course, the people who earned a retirement off of such short-sighted policy will be either dead or too frail to face the consequences.

I don’t see any evidence that we’re in danger of running out of people. The world passed 8B and climbing. The US is around 342M and grew almost 25M in the last decade.

If the cost of college or students loans is reducing the population, it’s hard to be too afraid of it.

And I'm sure that we'll be able to let those people immigrate with absolutely no friction. None whatsoever.

Yeah, they say programmers get paid that too, but not where I live

A $180,000 at 7% interest would require monthly payments of ~$1,200 to pay down after 30 years. Even at 3% it'd still be ~$750.

I'm really skeptical of these types of articles because they don't tell the complete story about their finances and how they're spending money. In 2013 the median rent in Chinatown was ~$600, and the average salary for a resident was $55,000. After taxes that's roughly $3k/month.

They were probably in an income based repayment plan where the payments are capped versus income, and it is very common for the balance to grow if your income is low.

The thing that endlessly amuses me is that there are oodles of ways to get a libarts degree without incurring student debt. Heck, you can get a passable STEM degree without incurring student debt. Or at least not paying more for a degree than you'd pay for a decently-specced new car right off the lot.

For reference, I have a degree in history that I paid (ending in 2014) 30k in 2024 dollars for over the course of six years. Even with current price, that same degree at the same institution would be ~60k over the course of four years. Inflationary and gouging - sure, but still rather affordable.

The current system that perpetuates "college for everyone" along with a governmental debt guarantee to the universities leads to incessant price jacking. No, Boston University is emphatically not worth 63 thousand dollars a year. No state school is worth 30-40k/year.

UC Berkeley is sure worth 40K a year. They call it “the people’s Harvard” for a reason.

But the question is - is a 160k debt before you've ever held a job in your life worth it, whereas you have statistically the same outcome with a sub-60k-all-in degree?

Very few people will incur debt anywhere near that for an undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley. 71% of undergraduates graduate with no debt. For those who borrow the average debt at graduation is around $18k.

>71% of undergraduates graduate with no debt.

That's borderline not believable. Somebody should probably take a closer look at where that data comes from. I went through the UC system, filling out the FAFSA every year, and had one parent who _partially_ supported me financially. I had that average amount of debt in two years. This was many years ago, and yes, I did work as well.

>For those who borrow the average debt at graduation is around $18k.

The debt specifically for tuition? What about housing? August to May is 10 months. It's easy to find studios that charge at least 1000/month. Assume rent is 900$. How does that housing cost calculation square with your average debt figure of 18k? If you're not including it, why not?

If the degree they grant you doesn't help you to get a job that can pay back the loan it cost to get the degree, how can it be said to be worth it? Certainly not in a financial sense.

Even a Berkeley degree is medieval basketweaving is worth a lot - you’re likely in the top 1% or higher of your field. This means you will likely end up as a tenure tracked professor.

You’re delusional to claim that state schools “aren’t worth it”. There are cream of the crop state schools.

A value (Top 1% in a field) times availability of jobs in field (just about 0) technically does equal a positive float, but the stark mathematic reality is that you might as well just take the 160k and blow it on lottery tickets for a roughly equal probability of making your money back.

And if it's just for "an degree", the reality is most HR departments in the US could give two shits about you having anything but an degree.

I'd happily spend $30-40K/yr for UC-Berkeley, UT-Austin, or UNC if that's where my kid got in and wanted to go.

A lot of this hinges on "worth".

Are you trying to make some kind of purely financial investment and show in an Excel model how it improves the overall financial outcome?

Or are you trying to equip your offspring to maximize their enjoyment in life? I got a lot of education at university that will never show up in a cell in a spreadsheet and I'm forever grateful for that, even though that it that subset had a negative RoI.

Ah, but you're paying for your children's education and not saddling them with 120k debt right out of the gate, correct?

I will be yes but, in my estimation, the value of those state schools is well above the $30K/yr in GP's post, regardless of who is paying.

Side note: If a student chooses to saddle themself with that level of debt to attend Berkeley, I think that's still a good decision for the vast majority of students who will make that choice.

> there are oodles of ways to get a libarts degree without incurring student debt.

For folks who don't know, would you be willing to elaborate? Is it a real degree (fully accredited, so you can actually use it?).

Even using residency status at a community college for your first two years, and then transfering in to a public state university, still puts the cheapest bachlors degree around here at close to $40k (not including room and board). (And for maybe half of the careers, you can't do this, and it costs even more)

Yes. Night schools, extension schools, community colleges, hell, going abroad is significantly cheaper. University of Tokyo is 4-5000 dollars a year, exchange rate dependent.

E: Also in your post, 40k, not 40k/year. A lot of these (domestic to the US at least) also assume that you're working part or fulltime through it. Having done it, have to say proto-SRE work and full college load is hell, but a doable hell.

Except STEM extends beyond computer science and software engineering degrees.

Many careers requiring hard science degrees have dreadful pay.

Like which ones?

The job market for people with a bachelors in Biology or Chemistry is pretty lousy. Lots of people end up doing repetitive lab work for low pay. Going to graduate school is essentially required to get a "good" job in the field.

Well, where "liberal art degree" often means "high-skilled labor". People struggling to pay off college debt includes:

- teachers and childcare workers

- special education and/or disability workers

- librarians

- social workers, therapists, mental health workers

- cnas, medical billing, and other heathcare admin

- and many more not listed above

People often seem to assume "liberal arts" translates to a fake profession, like "underwater basketweaving" or "economist" or something "silly". And while that's occasionally true, most folks with a Liberal Arts degree are hard-working career-oriented people, who society just pays terribly, arbitrarily, because they can. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education#Modern_...

Many places are facing a teacher shortage too. I think one would assume in a rational economy, since the labor is in short supply, they would pay more for it. However, the pay gap between teachers and the average worker is widening...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2024/03/19/teacher-s...

This is 100% true. I have a chemistry degree that's technically from a liberal arts college and it was super confusing to my immigrant parents how that could happen. Now with the advent of the term "STEM" it's even more confusing because a huge portion of Science degrees are actually in liberal arts programs, not technically "Science" programs.

> I have a chemistry degree that's technically from a liberal arts college and it was super confusing to my immigrant parents how that could happen.

I kind of get it. The english words "liberal" and "arts" used to mean entirely different things for hundreds of years, and have been redefined into something else only recently (past ~30 years) via common usage.

My degree program was in "Liberal Studies", and my parents consistently assumed it meant "studying how to become a Democrat voter", when in actuality, what it meant was "if you can justify it well, we give you permission to merge two-or-more different degree paths into one"

The university eventually had to rename the program to "Integrative Studies", because too many people simply don't know what "Liberal" means in an traditional academic context, and couldn't shake the modern-political framing of the word.

Teachers who are struggling to pay off college debt are mostly those who chose to attend private colleges without scholarships, or chose to work in high-cost areas after graduation. In most states it's possible to get a bachelor's degree plus teaching credential for under $40K total tuition. And starting salaries for teachers are at or above the average for college graduates in most places — especially for special education teachers who are in the highest demand. I totally support higher pay for teachers to attract more qualified candidates to the field, but when teachers struggle to pay off college debts that's usually the result of making some bad decisions or lack of financial discipline.

As for a CNAS or medical biller, those jobs don't even require a bachelor's degree. They can get trained more cheaply in community college.

Low pay in many of those fields you listed is only arbitrary in the sense that much of the funding ultimately comes from governments. Voters are already struggling themselves and seldom vote for tax increases.

It's less about liberal arts, and more about those that graduate or not. It's more about those that fall into the "some collage" category. Most of the costs of a full degree, but none of the benefits.

STEM kids absolutely are struggling to pay off these loans. They have it easier, but college exploitation has gotten so bad that every degree program has some students graduating with lifelong debt.

What you said used to be true, it's no longer true.

Hold up, just so we're aware: STEM covers not only tech but also sciences.

Let me say here I know three chemist undergrads that have been in the industry for 5-8y+: none are happy or over six figures.

I am an ex-biochemist and trust me, PhDs in academia are not making six figures.

There is a divide there between tech and science for sure. Of the maybe 25 or so younger people I worked with in the lab, the ones that did very well moved to tech. The ones that did ok were either from other countries, or their parents paid their way. Very few US people from the lab that stayed in science that had loans, paid off their loan. I can think of one.

Lab work is super underpaid, and you need every degree in order to even get your foot in the door.

>and you could help them make that happen

Is "lifetime of debt" in the realm of "help make that happen" at this point?

At some point it's less an investment and more a very fancy splurge.

The worst part is that this isn't just some crazy expense revserved for Harvard. Tuition for ASU is 30k out of state. You're paying some 200k for your kid to go to a school reputed (or perhaps, used to be reputed) for its party scene? That's where this really starts to be untenable.

I don't disagree college is too expensive, but I don't know why people would go to out of state schools if they are concerned about money. Local schools with lower tuition and where you may have family housing and support makes a huge cost difference.

>I don't know why people would go to out of state schools if they are concerned about money.

really depends on your state and your college aspects. Not all states are created equal in terms of education.

>where you may have family housing

There's also that. It's probably shifting these days, but commuter students had a reaction of "not getting the full college experience."

social interactions aside, there is some point to be made on how college can be a good preperation for self-preservation without the gaze of the increasing helicopter parenting methodology in your midst. Or simply a way to finally disengage with a bad family dynamic.

Sure on all these - but basically I think putting all this on credit for 4 years is a bad start to life.

An aside for that common ASU slander: It's a huge school (55K students on the main campus alone). It can have both a party scene and a good education. I remember it having quality departments in engineering, business, design (and there's a neat interdisciplinary program for those three), and journalism.

It was a low hanging fruit, I agree and apologize. But I just wanted some example that was semi-popular to show that this isn't just an issue for Harvard/MIT goers.

And also a location that likely isn't in-state for many people. Living in Arizona to get a better deal, you may as well just jump straight into your local oven.

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