US Household Debt Surpasses 2008 High

I was definitely told to go to the best school no matter what and to not consider the cost. But I graduated in 2008 in a perma-middle-class suburb that probably wished those things were true. I'm sure it's very different for others.

I don't think that's true, at least in STEM degrees. I learned a tremendous amount in university. I took classes to a 100 or 200 level in a bunch of subjects, which vastly increased my ability to reason about what I know and what I don't. My computer science degree required me to study topics like statistics, computational and applied mathematics (CAAM), and electrical/computer engineering (ELEC), and many more, alongside my CS curriculum.

CAAM courses taught me about numerical stability, and how careful one must be to design an algorithm correctly if you care about the accuracy of your results. Statistics was tough and taught me how much I don't know about that field, while giving me the tools to understand probability and statistical distributions. These are extremely relevant in business, where we use statistics to model and predict customer behavior, or to fight abuse.

One of the most memorable courses of my university education was ELEC 220, which teaches you how CPUs work from the transistor level up. That and related courses culminated with having you design your own general-purpose computer, from scratch, in a simulator, using nothing but basic logic gates and buses. This included designing the RAM, the instruction set, the ALU, and a number of other components from first principles. I learned that, when you understand those first principles, it's actually not that hard!

Another course, COMP 421: Operating Systems and Concurrent Programming, required me to build my own implementation of Unix processes and multithreading, my own virtual memory system, implementation of locks and mutexes, a malloc-style allocator based on `brk` (a system call that I built previously for my implementation of processes, implemented on top of my virtual memory system), and so on. I built my own simple OS kernel. I think we made a file system too. These are very difficult to build correctly and the experience of putting that effort in, and getting it right, taught me about the limits of my ability, and what I can achieve if I apply myself.

These projects were incredibly challenging, and I learned a tremendous amount during these courses and more. I gained the confidence that, if I needed to, I can design and build most of a modern computer and OS from first principles. This in turn provides a strong foundation for understanding and reasoning about actual, real systems. It gave me the ability to understand how things work at all layers, from transistors to the CPU, to the OS, to an interpreted programming language, to an algorithm running in the language; to dive deep into any layer, and design solutions for any problem. I think this kind of comfort and competence is difficult for non-CS graduates to achieve.

It also gives me an understanding of just how much I don't know in fields like mathematics, statistics, and numerical stability, so that I have a healthy respect for them and know when to investigate and apply rigorous solutions in these spaces to business challenges. A passing familiarity makes it possible for me to research and apply known solutions quickly.

I studied other fields like psychology and human factors, which have been relevant to understanding people (like users of software), and modeling various failures in systems, e.g. operator error.

After graduating college, I also learned a tremendous amount about software engineering in industry. The amount that I learned in industry easily equals or exceeds what I learned in college. However, the topics that you can effectively learn in college are difficult to effectively learn in other ways.

I think I'd only be a shell of the engineer I am today if I hadn't had this education to build on. While I think you can get a job in the industry without this kind of education, if you want to be top in your field some day, then a rigorous theoretical/applied education is a real advantage.

Sure but we're talking about rights, not operations.

In the case of the University of California system, it's almost 1:1 substitution, declines in per-student funding being matched by increases in tuition. Partly due to actual cuts to the UC budget since 2000, and partly due to funding not keeping up with increases in student numbers. The state government mandates these increases in student numbers, but in recent years has not been willing to fund accordingly.

The mandate is that the UC system is required to offer spots for the top 12.5% of the current year's in-state graduating high school seniors, so this mandate obviously expands if university-age population increases. Which to be fair is sensible: it makes sense for the state university system's size to be roughly proportional to the size of the state's university-aged population. But then you should fund it proportionally too.

Here are some numbers I put together a few years ago (not updated since 2012): http://www.kmjn.org/misc/uc_funding.txt

Which is not to say overpaid administrators aren't also sucking out more money than they should be. The UC Office of the President (UCOP) is currently being deservedly raked over the coals by the state auditor, and I would not shed a tear if UCOP's budget specifically were cut. But in terms of big-picture trends, the state's per-student funding declining from $30k/student in the '70s and '80s to less than half of that in 2012 is a pretty good first-order explanation.

> Because it doesn't necessarily have to cost that much.

Makes no sense to me. Any person who thinks something is more expensive than it can be; can start his own college and win over the market while making a lot of money.

How can a person claim to know the value of other people's labor ?