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Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I’m a tenure-track community college instructor in computer science in Silicon Valley.

Assuming your son is in the United States since you mentioned “state university,” an option for reducing costs is attending a community college to get the lower-division courses in CS, math, physics, and liberal arts finished at a considerably lower cost. This also allows your son to buy some time and assess the state of the market two years from now. Two years of community college tuition is much lower than two years of university tuition, and depending on the state it might even be tuition-free.

If your son is still in high school, I also highly recommend he take Advanced Placement tests and score sufficiently well on them so that way he will get college credit for those courses. This could potentially save time in college, thus reducing costs.

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+1 this. This was the route I took. I'm old now, so my experience is maybe less relevant. But the price difference seems even more extreme now.

I also think it's worth a real discussion about what your son hopes to gain out of a college education. If the value for him is more vocational, then this strategy above seems almost like a no-brainer. If he's hoping to get that kind of intangible university life experience, community college probably isn't going to deliver.

OP's son programs confidently in 6 languages and develops toy compilers and custom hardware on his own. If he is "dreading the intro classes" already, imagine what two years at a typical community college will do to his momentum and enthusiasm, all to save a bit of money.

It's saving 60k almost and a degree is half bs Gen eds anyway. Why pay so much to take intro to econ, Calc and English classes at an expensive to school?

I would CLEP / test out as much as possible then.

I thought of another possibility: if he enrolled at a university that will allow him to skip or test out of the introductory CS courses, then this will also save time, though he’d still likely need to take non-CS intro courses such as calculus, physics, and a variety of liberal arts/humanities courses.

There’s also the possibility of applying to universities where even the intro level CS courses are quite rigorous and where there’s an expectation, tacitly or explicitly, that CS students have prior experience. Berkeley’s CS 70, for example, is ostensibly an introductory course on discrete math and is required in the EECS program, but it’s much more rigorous than the standard introductory discrete math course taught at most other universities.

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