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Comment by codva | Hacker News Reader

I really have little sympathy for somebody that attends an out of state or private school and racks up $100K in college debt getting a sociology degree. My son just finished up his freshman year as a history major. However, he is going to the perfectly good public school located 15 minutes from home, and living at home. It's costing me $5000 a semester in tuition, which isn't chump change, but isn't going to bankrupt me either. If he had to take on some debt to get his degree it would be manageable. We could have made it cheaper still by having him spend the first two years in community college. College costs are out of control in the US, but that doesn't mean we have to blindly pay them.

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If your child goes for 4 years at 2 semesters a year, you will be spending $40k on tuition. Your child is almost certain to move out before then, so there will be an increase in that for rent. There is also food cost.

A LOT of families can't drop that kind of money for one child, let alone several if they have more than 1 kid. The availability of loans means that most students will take on debt to get that degree to some extent. When you are paying what seems to be a huge sum of money, a lot of people get taken in by the false premises and marketing that expensive or ivy league schools provide and get caught up in trying to get that school.

Overall this situation is totally unsustainable and harms more people that it helps. Blaming folks for not having what you have or doing what you did is ridiculous, your life isn't a template for everyone elses needs.

I agree with you, but you're neglecting to realize how little some people understand about the college process.

My dad and I we're definitely in the upper quartile in the college application process, yet even I got stuck with 100k of debt from a private university. Why didn't I go to a public college instead? Who knows! All I can say is that I would have done it differently back then (graduated 2007).

Now imagine you're NOT that informed of the college process, your school's guidance counselor doesn't know anything or care, and your parents don't really know anything about it other than the US News top colleges report. You're more than likely going to enroll in an overpriced university more-so out of ignorance than anything else.

You don't need any help, its math that any high school student should be capable of. Its the same as any time you borrow money to buy something like a car or house, except with this one your ability to ever discharge the debt is quite limited!

When I was starting college none of my friends really knew what they wanted to do. Many switched degrees. Some more than once. While I had only a rough idea at the time, in general terms it matched what I ended up doing.

I don't know what the answer is here, but it starts with high school students getting a good deal of real life experience. Football, tennis, cheer leading, and prom are not real life experiences.

This has nothing to do with what major or direction high school students want to pick. I'm talking about the decision of where to go to school, and specifically highlighting the fact that uninformed kids/parents (at least in my case) picked the more expensive, private university because all signs pointed to that being the correct choice.

The answer here is to push lower cost, public colleges to kids who don't know what they want to do (or to even to those that do) instead of accruing 40k/year of debt trying to figure it out. The idea of going to a public school was out of the question when I was applying, when it very much should have been a key option.

A lot of this is simply that life is risky, and completely unforeseen circumstances can drastically change life outcomes.

I went to an expensive private college. My parents racked up over $100K in debt between my sister and I. Neither of us had any idea what we wanted to do when we went. Our parents were just like "Go to the best college you get into, and we will figure out the money."

The debt was paid off in full 4 years after graduation.

And the real reason it worked out were a variety of circumstances that could totally not have been foreseen when we matriculated. I flunked out of physics twice, and in my scramble to pick a new major and graduate, picked...computer science. And used a lot of the time I spent avoiding my physics homework to learn a bunch of cool programming languages, make contacts with real programmers on the Internet, and pick up internships. So when I barely-graduated, I already had a job lined up at a financial software startup that I'd interned with twice. If I had not flunked out of the physics major, I would likely be just barely finishing my Physics Ph.D now, having lived on $20K/year for the past 7 years, and would be coming into an uncertain job market with few marketable skills, no work experience, and a lot of debt.

My sister happened to go to school in Houston, at a school where her geology department had close ties to local oil majors, and so ended up with a bunch of oil industry internships before graduation. She had two of the majors bidding against each other for her after graduation, and got a lucrative job that way.

The interesting thing is that we both went into college knowing very little other than "Go to the best college you get into", and came out of it with that being the right choice but for reasons completely different than what we thought they'd be. A degree helps, but skills and contacts help more. Maybe the right move for entering students these days is to go to the best college you get into, but think carefully about what you want to do afterwards and put yourself in situations where you can rack up advantages for getting there afterwards.

You have little sympathy? So for someone who doesn't live near a university, doesn't have daddy pay his tuition for him and provide free housing and food, it's just tough luck? Like another commenter said, that's $40k in tuition, probably another $40k for housing, food and other expenses during that period of time. Your attitude is not productive, and sounds to me like the typical "fuck you, I've got mine" attitude.

Noooo, not what the GP is suggesting at all. The GP is saying that local public schools generally pay subsidies to instate students, so that's not a very expensive proposition. He's saying that it shouldn't be $40k + $40k, but rather $10k + $0k (live at home with parents). Racking up an unnecessary $70k/annum debt is something of a self-infliceted wound if that more expensive option isn't going to pay itself off through increased earnings later in life.

Exactly, and thank you. There are a lot of options between borrow 100% of a 4-year degree at the most expensive option available, and don't go to college at all. I think most people that want to go to college can find an option that works without burdening them with life-crushing debt. It might not be 4-years of the typical undergrad experience at State U though. You might spend a couple of years at community college. You might take 8 years to finish because you are working your way through school. There is nothing wrong with any of those options.

The key phrase is getting a sociology degree. While racking up $100K in debt for a Petroleum Engineering degree [1] arguably isn't necessary, it's much more defensible.

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/atwork/2013/04/29/and-the-highest-paid-...

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