Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

So the poor are attending more community colleges than 4 year universities.

But considering the costs, is this even possible or desirable to reverse?

The article says we should make it cheaper, but that's a pretty big demand.

>In the 20th century, rich and poor students were equally likely to get humanities degrees. Today, a majority of humanities students are poor.

That's curious as my local community colleges don't have much in the way of big humanities programs. Do others?

> For example, engineering schools often have separate applications, and they require higher test scores and grade point averages. Some “STEM” programs also expect students to arrive having completed prerequisite coursework — the kind more readily available to wealthy students in well-resourced high schools.

I remember this being the case even when I went to school. STEM type programs (we didn't call them that then) had this track that if you weren't already planning to be in you were discouraged from applying / were told you'd probably fail. There was no real way to be a late bloomer and work your way in.

VOC Rehab only supports community colleges, unless you get a scholarship to pay for everything. I went to UM Rolla in 1986-1987 with a student loan, but ran out of money to live on. So I returned home and attended a community college while living with my parents. I started working in the Computer Lab while earning an IT degree and got a couple jobs, but I was too busy working to earn a Bachelor's degree. My Associates was good enough until the 1999 Dotcom bust, where they raised the degree to a bachelors to do my job. I returned for a Bachelor's at the University of Phoenix in 2005. But I became disabled due to a mental illness in 2003 and could not work a job.

I paid off my student loans, but college was expensive. I applied for 100+ scholarships and won none of them. I came from a middle-class family where my father was a phone installer for AT&T/SWB and barely made enough to make ends meet with three children and a wife. I learned BASIC on a Commodore 64 I shared with my two brothers, and got into BBSing with a VICMODEM 300 Baud MODEM.

Now there are Hacker Bootcamps to learn how to code without a STEM degree.

> I came from a middle-class family where my father was a phone installer for AT&T/SWB and barely made enough to make ends meet with three children and a wife

I don't want to be disrespectful here, but this seems like a contradiction in terms. Can you explain how you'd define "middle-class"?

I believe my situation was similar to GP's: family on the lower end of middle class, and enough younger siblings to make it a stretch.

I was accepted to a reasonably prestigious university, but ran out of money after the first semester, so I wound up coming home and finishing my degree at a state school.

It's also important to note that the student loan system back then was very different: different guarantors, and non-infinite money.

Yes, that was the case, lower-middle-class, and three children with a wife on my father's salary.

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