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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

> I know for a fact that I and dozens of other students would have happily paid hundreds of dollars to use your project

Is this normal in the US, that students have high enough disposable income that they would be able to pay "hundreds of dollars" to use a webapp to swap classes with each other? Or is this school uniquely one for the more well-off kids out there?

Remembering my time when my friends were in university, some while working, just about no one would have hundreds of dollars to spend on something like that.

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Some required courses are only taught in Spring or only in Fall. Some of those "Fall only" courses are prerequisites for other required Spring-only courses.

If you can't get into a required course, it can delay your graduation a full year. That costs way more than a couple hundred dollars.

I ended up needing to stay an extra semester for a single course my final semester, because I planned poorly and discovered too late that I couldn't get it in my would-have-been-penultimate semester.

> If you can't get into a required course, it can delay your graduation a full year. That costs way more than a couple hundred dollars.

Sure, but if you don't have "a couple of hundred dollars", you don't. It's a bit like saying "Why are people poor? Just put $1 million into a savings account, then you'll get enough to survive each month". Great for the ones who can, irrelevant for the ones who can't.

I think most students in America have loans. For me, and everyone I knew, there was a credit balance after the school got paid and that money was put into your bank account.

Don't forget you have to buy books, etc., and they cost "a couple of hundred dollars" too.

When I was an undergraduate I was definitely on a knife's edge, but I also often had cash in the bank because I got a big cash infusion annually. I just had to live off a very strict budget at that time to make sure the money would last.

I wouldn't have wanted to rely on this service when I was a student, especially at that cost, but in a pinch I could see situations where it would make sense.

I myself was never given access to any funds or credit from student loans.

It would have been nice if I did though.

If you're able to scrape together the funds for another semester, you can probably scrape together a couple hundred bucks to avoid paying for that extra semester.

People going to university like to talk about how poor they are, but they're obviously not "can't manage a couple hundred bucks for college" poor. I've known a lot of constantly-bordering-on-homeless people, and they're usually lucky to even manage community college. UW is $13k a year just for tuition.

I haven't been in university in over 20 years, but when I was, I absolutely did not have hundreds of dollars to throw around for things to make my life more convenient. Certainly some of my peers did, but they were not in the majority.

Convenience was not a factor. If you were unable to sign up for some of these courses, you would be barred from advancing in your studies. These were things like prerequisites for applying to your major, not just shuffling around your timeslots for an ideal schedule.

Im unsure if this was much more of an issue at UW specifically (also this was also over a decade ago), but UW accepted maybe ~30% of the applicants to a given major (in STEM). They dont tell you this as a freshman when you declare your intended course of study, but you're competing with your classmates to actually be able to study what you want to major in. This leads to critical classes filling up within seconds, massive waitlists, and delays of semesters possible if you miss courses you need.

My sister-in-law is going back for her masters right now. She did the maximum allowed loans from her FAFSA, so after her tuition and fees were paid, she had enough left over to draw a $300/wk "salary" from the remaining balance. She has to pay her rent and groceries and other bills from that, but she usually has about $100 a month left over for "fun" - if she lived in a cheaper apartment or took out additional loans, she'd have a lot "left over," and this is what a lot of Americans do.

Wait, why would anyone do this, though? It’s like taking a personal loan from the government that is non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. The interest is going to accrue every year you go to uni.

If you use that to go long on the stock market, I get it since the S&P500 beats interest rates right now, though there’s a risk. Using it on personal expenses seems like the lowest EV choice!

Living expenses have to come from somewhere. If you use the time to graduate faster, instead of working to generate weekly income, in some cases you can come out ahead overall. Details vary, but it's not obvious that it's a bad deal.

Essential expenses it certainly makes sense. But it seems some amount of it is treated as disposable income rather than liability.

Based on the breakdown, it sounds like she has $100 leftover per month. That pretty much sounds like "liability" money to me. Barely much to dispose of.

The average student loan debt is $38k. If you borrow $100 extra per month, and defer your first payment till the month you graduate, your extra burden is $5300 or so or about 14%. The average borrower takes 20 years to pay off the debt. They’d pay it off 2 years earlier without this extra expenditure.

Okay, but this isn't a 4 year university loan. It's a masters program after she went back to school.

Someone pursuing a masters is much more likely to have a plan on how to turn that degree into better career progression or other opportunities. Especially a masters student who spent time in industry.

And honestly 5k loans to pay off 2-4 years later is about as good a loan debt as you're going to get. Paying off thst debt is more about having a career plan by that time than penny pinching for as low as loan value as possible.

A lot of students at UW - especially ones in the CS department - come from rich families. A lot of foreign students as well - who again - come from a ton of money.

College is not cheap in the US. Going to any university in the US implies a certain amount of wealth, and barring that (scholarship, e.g.) then you must be someone who is incredibly motivated. In either case, spending a few hundred dollars to guaruntee a spot in a required course to keep your studies on track, to be accepted into your major, and to eventually graduate on time is worth AT LEAST a few hundred dollars. Like the other commenter, i also ended up needing to graduate a semester late due to this nonsense, which cost me thousands in actual money, and much more in lost potential income.

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