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Comment by tayo42 | Hacker News Reader

If you go to cheap local public schools there's nothing to regret. Most Americans k-12 go to public schools then suddenly at college public options aren't good anymore?

Though dorms are probably the only time in your adult life all your friends are walking distance away and free to hang out.

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The campus life for 18-22 year olds can be an amazing experience. It can be super stimulating socially, intellectually, culturally. Or it can be a 4-year drinking binge. Depends on the school, the person and the peer group the person can find.

There is a huge variation in quality of local colleges, and in opportunity that arises from them. As every reader here knows, Americans are super class-conscious and pretty competitive, so a good local school will seem like "settling". And, they're not free by any means.

I would argue a cheap public school can be a huge mistake. At least where I'm from, the higher ranked public schools cost the most, and going to a cheap school means you missed 4 years of wages, you still paid some amount of money, and you have a degree which isn't useful. Even in engineering I've seen plenty of managers who won't give "good" jobs out to "worse" schools, and small state schools have unknown reputations and will be the first to get passed up in a questionable job market.

Getting a bad degree from a cheap/bad public school seems like a bad life decision. There is so much more to gain by not getting tattoos and looking presentable instead of getting a degree from a school people don't respect

Eh, I got a cheap degree from a public school (URI), albeit in Mathematics and not Comp Sci and it hasn't stopped me getting good tech jobs over the last decade or so. I'm currently working at a FAANG. Maybe I'm just extra hard-working, smart, or lucky? Or maybe your pedigree isn't as big a deal as it once was? Hard to say from my N=1 data point.

I guess the point I was trying to get at is the flagship public research university in your state doesn't count, URI isn't even cheap compared to other flagship public universities. I went to the flagship public school in my state, I don't consider it cheap. I'm thinking more like lake superior college in MI, or UW-Stout in Wisconsin. They're cheaper than the flagship public school, but because of their lack of name recognition and assumptions employers make (like did this person go to superior because it was cheap, or because that's the only place they got in?), I've seen people struggle to get good jobs after attending, particularly during rough economies.

As a test, look in your IT department. I wouldn't be surprised if it's full of people from community colleges and lower ranked "cheap" colleges with engineering degrees. I like the idea of just going to the cheapest school but ranking unfortunately matters to a lot of employers, and ranking is usually correlated with cost.

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