My Valuable, Cheap College Degree
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Spent 2 years at Cabrillo College, in Aptos, CA - Tuition Cost: ~$1000
Spent 18 months at UC Berkeley, taking 16-21 credits per semester, including a summer quarter, after a small scholarship ($4000) - Tuition Cost: $10,000
So $11,000
My strategy: Go to community college for 2 years, do well, get the Berkeley Alumni Scholarship ($4000/year), take lots of classes, finish early. I have $0.0 debt. Due to tuition increases not sure you could replicate this, but I bet you could get close.
For those who get snobbish re community college, it really depends where you go! At Cabrillo, a lot of my profs had Phd's from reputable schools and the students were pretty sharp. You get great access to profs in the small classes. Once I got to Berkeley I had no problem walking right up to the profs there, was not intimidated. Plus you get a better perspective of the world in Community College sitting next to the pregnant single mom, the retiree, the recent immigrant and the lawyer turned Plummer in your Philosophy of Mind class! Interesting discussion!
What you don't get is the access to all the university culture (frats/dorms/connections), or at least that's what I've been told.
Also, consider that at a community college you could learn a trade, it'll take more time but if you're likely to spend 5 or 6 years pursuing a 4-year degree why not spend just as much time and far less money also adding a skill and a credential that can pay the bills?
It used to be extremely common in the Seattle area for locals to spend 2 years at Bellevue Community College (now just Bellevue College) and then transfer to the University of Washington. Each year UW it's harder to transfer as the school prefers 4 year students ($). Even worse they prefer out of state students ($$). Even more worse they prefer international students ($$$)!
It is in the schools financial interest to accept non-local students who will pay more for the same education. And it gets worse every year. It's a seriously messed up issue.
Funny enough, I took "C Programming" at Thomas Edison (mentioned in the article) the summer between 7th and 8th grades. I learned at home and took proctored exams. 5 years later, Rutgers honored the 3 credits (though I also had AP credit) for an intro programming class.
A contrarian comment based on the interestingly paradoxical fact that our sub-20K PhD found his path to happiness (if, indeed, that's what heading the American Enterprise Institute represents for him) by recognizing he might best pursue such a goal by becoming a tenured professor at a $45K per BA year institution. I remain unimpressed by today's tutorial
There will be plenty of differences from a University in the West; but for those with a sense for adventure, it might still be worthwhile
The National Institute of Technologies are a group of universities that give direct admissions to foreign nationals [0]. But be careful, only a few highly reputed ones might give a competitive education.
There are other universities like ManipalTech[1], VIT[2] which also give direct admissions to foreign nationals.
[0] https://www.dasanit.org/ [1] http://www.manipal.edu/INTERNATIONALSTUDENTS/UNDERGRADUATE/P... [2]http://www.vit.ac.in/
But for other occupations (doctors?) - I'm not so sure. Probably a Canadian medical school graduate will be able to get a residency position in the US, but a graduate from India?
If you're an American and smart and capable, the way to go is to load up on community college credits in HS, do a year of CC, then transfer to a state school with reasonable tuition for the least year and change.
If you've got some programming skill, it should be even easier. I earned enough during my summers in college programming to pay most of my in-state tuition and cost of living at my state school, and it wasn't even a particularly cheap one.
This bad reputation is likely due to the many extremely negative (and usually very few, if any, positive) experiences that many in the field have had with software development projects that were outsourced to India, and bungled by Indian-trained staff.
Getting such a degree may not be a bad thing to do, if it's the experience that one is interested in. But I'm not convinced that it'd get you a practical degree that'd be respected much, if at all, by employers or other institutions in western nations.
Conversely, even the so called 'prestigious universities' produce graduates who are completely incapable of coding even if their life depended on it. But I've seen graduates from unknown universities with great talent and work ethic. They just didn't study that hard to get through the incredibly competitive exams when in high school.
I understand the reason for the bad reputation; but I think a HUGE opportunity is being wasted. There is a lot of talent out there, and some companies I'm familiar with have quietly recognized that. If you're building a team in India, make sure you're first employee can recognize talent and not just degrees.
Coming back to the original point: if, say, an American were to get a degree from some of the better known institutes, she would probably miss a lot of the exposure that being in a US university gives. Her professors wouldn't be that good. But if she's studying CS, she doesn't need the superb labs that I've seen in the US universities. The best universities use textbooks written by American authors, and have students that are quite proficient in programming.
I'm not sure how it would turn out, but it's not something that you can dismiss that easily.
If you are going to go abroad to get a degree in a technical subject, I wouldn't recommend India or China. Singapore, Hong Kong, Austrailia, New Zealand have strong English speaking programs, Japan and Korea also have strong skills if you are willing to learn another language.
But even with that knowledge of the high risks of a bubble, and even if one tries to forget the many studies proving education is a worthwhile investment (for the increased salary benefits one gets - cf signalling theory) how munch do you think the capacity to learn and create is worth? How valuable is it to you?
Some people do not need any formal education to get that. But many do. And even those who don't "need" a formal education can take great advantage of it - for ex finding some golden insights with a marketable value, formalizing their knowledge, or even better- learning how to create new knowledge (PhD)
There is a growing anti intellectual bias - even here on HN. Whatever, but least leave aside your opinion and consider the facts.
(conflict of interest warning - I made an "investment" in my education, and therefore I could have a biased opinion)
Universities in America are very expensive (even when you compensate for state aid). I remember getting a mailing from Amherst College back when I was applying to schools a decade ago noting that while the sticker price was in the mid-$30,000 range, the college was actually spending tens of thousands more than that price per student. I think it was to tell people, "even if you're paying full price, you're still getting a good deal." What stuck with me was the amount being spent.
Looking at many other countries with respectable third level education systems, they're spending less. According to the OECD, the United States spends $29,201 per student while the European Union spends $12,967. Over four years, that amounts to $64,936. If you consider that in many countries Arts Degrees are 3-year programs, the savings becomes $77,903.
So, even if one thinks education is wonderful, one can question "why is it becoming so expensive? what are American universities doing wrong?"
Similarly, there has been (although it's going away a bit) this idea that "the school matters more than the program" or "it's the Bachelor's degree that you need, not any specific skill." Being against those trains of thought isn't anti-intellectual. If anything, it's pro-intellectual. It's saying that you should learn good things rather than trying to take the easiest course at the place with the best reputation. Still, I think there are people questioning their undergraduate expense if they entered without much of a plan (college was simply "the next thing people of my status do"). Many of my friends have had to spend a year taking additional classes to prepare for a graduate program their undergrad didn't prepare them for - because they didn't know what they wanted to do at the time.
Here on HN, we typically dislike things like power imbalances, high prices, places that seem to have a lock on the market, etc. Universities can exemplify those things. Many people need formal education and universities do have valuable things to offer. However, I think a reasonable person who has been around universities will have seen a lot of money spent on things simply because the money is around; because students will pay it. That's bad.
To make an analogy: when people criticize certain ISPs, they aren't saying that they don't find the internet valuable. When it comes down to it, I think most of us would part with $150+ for our internet connection. However, we don't evaluate price simply in terms of what we get out of it, but also with an eye toward whether the service is being offered at an efficient, fair price. If my ISP forced me to pay $150/mo, I probably would. The internet has high value to me. But, in that case, I would complain. Even if my ISP's margins were low (or even not-for-profit), I would question the efficiency with which they were provisioning my service; I would question whether they were wise with their spending; I would question whether they had a staffing mixture appropriate for their business; I would question whether their leadership knew what they needed to do in order to provide good service at an affordable price. I would question this because I would look at other, similar countries where people were being provisioned internet of substantially similar quality for substantially less money.
I got my degree from a local state school in the mid 90s. And then I went back and pursued another degree in a dual-major for another 3 years before finally deciding I wanted to do something else and leaving school. That was a luxury I had because school was so cheap, my parents paid for most of school and I was able to graduate without any debt. Today that same educational experience at the same school would cost nearly twice as much per year adjusted for inflation. Which is just not supportable without taking on most of it as debt for most people. And if you go to out of state tuition plus rent the costs are enormous, and also unsustainable for even people from reasonably affluent families.
Meanwhile, it's become oh so much easier to take on massive amounts of student loan debt, which has no doubt helped fuel some of this bubble.
No matter how valuable an education is, and I consider mine plenty valuable, when the cost doubles or more the benefit to cost ratio goes down substantially. And that's the core problem of the education bubble today. It used to be that moderately valuable degrees were still good, because they could be gotten cheaply enough, but now every degree is hugely expensive so the less valuable degrees now have a much lower RoI and are much less worthwhile investments.
I.e. with the housing bubble and the stock market bubble, the motivation was to buy those assets solely in anticipation of being able to sell them at higher prices later on, thus being able to profit (and handsomely so).
If you're paying list price for an education, you're doing it wrong.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/02/21/us-education-stanf...
Given their acceptance rates, this is not an option for even a majority of HN readers.
- Military or government service.
- Join a company that will pay you to get the degree (likely only from a company that requires a top degree)
- A field of study that no one ever chooses.
If not feel free to share some of that information.
#2 is more available than you realize.
#3 exemplifies supply-and-demand.
If you're not flexible, you'll pay thru the nose.
Harvard or MIT cannot make you into a powerful machine. The most important thing to achieve a big scientific career is to be born with the genetics and the willpower to work. It seems that going to Harvard or Stanford takes care of the latter part since you are betting your life on a few years of your life and you are taking extraordinary debt to do so. If you're getting it all for free, you probably won't work as hard right? But after a few years, if you go to the master degree or the doctorate, what difference does it make? None.
What ends up being really relevant is that a lot of the big gun companies target schools, and recruit right from the graduating crop in person, sometimes with barely an interview as long as the GPA is reasonable. That has value bordering on that 100k price tag.
[1] http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/10/18/graduates-small-...
Why the focus on private universities? From the same data source, the cost at a public institution is less than half that. (Public institution grad here)
Get a degree somewhere, and concurrently some relevant experience (paid or volunteer), and you will be better suited for the future than someone who has to invest 100% of their university career (or after) struggling to pay for it.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-27/misconceptions-101-...
And this is why your major accomplishments are being a professor at a third-tier school like Syracuse, and being a commissar and hack for a think tank funded by the Olins, ExxonMobil etc. What a surprise such a shlocky job is done by someone who could barely make it through college and got a crap degree.
"I am now the president of a Washington research organization."