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Comment by inflagranti | Hacker News Reader

First of, that's a false dichotomy. The choice is not between expensive liberal art colleges and cheap CS universities. The outcome of a guy going to a cheap liberal arts college would still have been much worse than yours!

Yes, there is some individual reliability, but acting like it's peoples fault if they are good at something that doesn't pay well and don't have a hang for CS & math is dishonest IMHO. Not everyone can just study the subject that currently pays well and be good at it if they don't have a basic talent for it. I would definitely be fucked and miserable if I had to do something artsy if that would be what pays...

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There are a few factors involved but most of the burden comes down to the person. What ever happened to personal responsibility and learning some financial sense?

This is the same issue with housing. Just because the bank pre-qualified you for a $500k loan, doesn't mean you should go out and buy a $500k house. You need to look ahead and think about your current financial situation, what you can honestly afford, how much can you put away into savings, will you be able to afford maintenance and repairs?

Author could of had a lesser burden had they went to a local or state university instead of starting off at private.

Properly understanding intricate financial arrangements while also being able to see far into the future just to make sure you will get a well-paying job and never get sick or get laid off, and to make sure there won't be a banks-created global financial crisis, and wrapping your head around the default-interest-fees schedule that can have you owing 5x your loan 20 years later if something unexpected DOES happen - is difficult at best for someone with decades of adult life experience. Now you want 18 year olds to have that understanding and mystical future vision.

Yelling "personal responsibility!" while having been relatively lucky in life (if you're active on HN, you're one of the lucky few among your 8 billion peers) feels like ostrich syndrome to me.

Edit: I'm also a bit sad that you want the author or young people like him to accept that the social situation they're born in to dictates what level of education they can afford and pursue. To me that's akin to saying "well, your parents are poor and on welfare, so you should probably just accept that your high school in your poor neighborhood has decades old text books that need to be shared." It's not entirely analogous I suppose - you'd say something about personal responsibility again - but looking at the photo negative of your statement looks to me like "only rich kids can go to rich college, you have to accept your position in cheap college."

It's also interesting to note that access to even "financial sense" for the poor, doesn't exist.

But history, grammar, chemistry, physics and all those other subjects "are", according to most school curriculae. Arguably, those subjects are really not that necessary for most of the population to function in day-to-day situations, and yet we drill and drill it into students incessantly.

Financial sense, however, is very important for the majority of the population. Even more so for those not-so-fortunate to win the oh-so-often-complained-about "genetic" or "parental lottery".

The inner conspiracy theorist in me would have me convinced that not-teaching such important topics is the only way to keep the economy-engine churning. Efficiency and money-sense in the general populace are not things that will drive "growth" and "GDP". But I could be wrong.

> Properly understanding intricate financial arrangements

I am borrowing 200k. I will need to pay back 200k plus interest, as documented in my paperwork. I am expected to have this all paid in X years.

What is intricate about that? Don't sign something if you don't understand it, ask questions, they're free.

> What ever happened to personal responsibility and learning some financial sense?

Does this not also apply to the banks making the loans? In other words, a bank that is willing to lend me much more than what I can honestly afford is either negligent or rapacious, but not responsible or sensible. The bank is not properly valuing the risk that I represent. If they were, I would have been denied such an oversized loan.

I have mixed feelings on this. If I lend somebody money without any reasonable due diligence on my prospects to be repaid, it is true that the borrower still owes me, but it's the height of entitlement for me to go complain to the government that I need special treatment under the law (bankruptcy...) because I made a poor lending decision.

It's unclear whether this is true or not. Prior to literacy bring widespread, it may have been looked at similarly: "I'm good at tailoring, you can't expect me to learn to read and write like a monk". But as it turns out, most people are actually capable of literacy. It's doesn't mean they become hemingways, but it allows them to do all sorts of jobs they wouldn't otherwise be able to do if we believed that literacy was a matter of personal taste or what you're "good at".

Perhaps the same is true of CS: we don't need everyone to be Hemingway here: plenty of jobs just need programming. I'm not sure what the alternative would be. Even if CS turns out to be above the capabilities of most people, that certainly shouldn't mean that it's a reasonable choice to spend an equivalent amount of money getting a degree that well known ahead of time to not get you a return.

That is a valid point and definitely we can acquire a lot of skills. Still there is natural ability and personal preferences and I would think a society where everyone can learn and do what they feel like they are good and and would enjoy - even with that changing over time - would be a way better society.

Now thats of course far from the current discussion, where people are forced to get into certain debts just to study for a profession they hopefully enjoy and will be ok enough in to earn back the money they invested to learn it in the first place.

> I would definitely be fucked and miserable if I had to do something artsy if that would be what pays...

You'd be surprised at how well an analytical mind can approach the problem of getting good at an artsy field. But if you go in with the assumption that you'd be fucked, well, it might be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Lets further constrain it then to singing or painting, both areas where I was always horrible (and my guess would be a lot of people in tech are). I just don't see myself getting good enough at those to be anywhere competitive with other people and I definitely wouldn't enjoy it.

So if those were the main areas where there's decent money to be made, best I could hope for is get a mediocre position to earn some money to hopefully pay back my student loans while definitely being unhappy doing something I don't enjoy. The alternative would be to go into some field that pays shit, let's say CS in this scenario, where I might be excellent at but even earn less than being a mediocre painter, and hope to still make it there and at least be happy. Now the choice is much tougher IMHO that what was initially suggested.

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