101–110 of 669 posts
For me, I feel if I had discovered the many mailing lists and irc channels that learned through in high school instead of college I could have saved five years of my time.
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On the other hand, one should wonder why college is so expensive in the US in the first place. Even without any subsidies, non-American tuition is a fraction of the cost of the big universities in the US. Why? Why are book so expensive here? Why is so much money spent on buildings, stadiums and hiring football coaches? The highest paid public employee in 39 states in the US is a college sports coach! [1] Throwing mor…
But all you're really saying with sports coach comment is that, among people in a sector that is not profit-oriented or known for high wages, the highest paid employee is the biggest differentiator of success ("amateur" participants notwithstanding) for a lucrative entertainment business. That's not really surprising on its face.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, one should wonder why college is so expensive in the US in the first place. Even without any subsidies, non-American tuition is a fraction of the cost of the big universities in the US. Why? Why are book so expensive here? Why is so much money spent on buildings, stadiums and hiring football coaches? The highest paid public employee in 39 states in the US is a college sports coach! [1] Throwing mor…
The top paid coach there is Nick Saban; Alabama football made over $100 million in revenue last year. https://www.seccountry.com/alabama/alabama-football-reported...
The big sports programs are profitable, but not all of them.
I guess many state schools do have successful sports programs with big TV deals. For example, 2 of the highest paid NCAA football coaches are in self sufficient programs at state schools in just 1 state: http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2016/08/big_10_schools_l...
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What about... offering college for free like the rest of the modern world? Then you would only have to worry about living costs and those loans are pretty small. I could pay off mine in like 4-5 years if I really wanted to. Plus, then people still could get an education even if their parents didn't save up for you. What about as a society/culture you start telling people that the country should offer education for fr…
Education in America is cheap, the problem is people don't go to their local school, they see college as an experience where they travel halfway across the country and stay in student housing.
[0] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/02/03/when-students...
Instead of shifting their efforts towards solving difficult problems (to add value), companies today prefer to focus on already-solved simple problems and to focus on optimizing existing solutions (to capture value from competitors); what that means is that humans collectively spend more effort merely competing against each other (zero-sum games) instead of collaborating to create new value.
If companies don't invest more money into finding solutions to difficult problems, the skills required to solve those problems will lose value on the marketplace - And by association, the education required to attain those skills will also lose value.
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What about... offering college for free like the rest of the modern world? Then you would only have to worry about living costs and those loans are pretty small. I could pay off mine in like 4-5 years if I really wanted to. Plus, then people still could get an education even if their parents didn't save up for you. What about as a society/culture you start telling people that the country should offer education for fr…
We already provide free college to the best performing students and those students very likely achieve much higher ROI. I benefitted from a four-year tuition, room, and board scholarship from my college, as did my brother and sister from theirs. However, only a fraction of a percent receives academic scholarships and a good portion of scholarships go to star athletes instead. The German system is nearly comparable. O…
I performed pretty badly before my high school (gymnasium) but after that I performed well as I found what I was interested in. But I didn't have like the best scores but I still have a good education in IT and works as a competent programmer today.
Perhaps I wouldn't be as successful if college weren't free in my country. It's just stupid not to offer college for free. A less educated population leads to bad things. Just see who the US president is.
How do you skip college and invest the tuition in the S&P 500? Ah, you can't: Of course, lenders won't give out large loans for an individual to skip college and dump tuition into the stock market, this is just a hypothetical scenario. So this article is unrealistic.
The article isn't actually recommending you do that. It's a hypothetical situation intended as social commentary.
Governments are willing to subsidize loans for education but not investing for at least two entirely rational reasons.
First, an educated populous -- especially college educated, and especially in STEM fields -- is in the public interest. We need doctors, lawyers, engineers, and, yes, even well-rounded marketing/sales teams. Could we get all of those things without subsidizing education? Probably not in the quantities needed by American firms.
Second, consider the sheer mass of each college-aged adult reliably pouring six figures into investment vehicles on their 18th birthday. It would take on a force of its own. In small quantities, this works out well for the non-student. In large quantities, the tail wags the dog. And anyways, where are all these lucrative investments that pay out decade after decade and that require nothing but cash money, quality of labor market be damned? I mean, they exist, but surely not in large enough quantities to sustain an entire society of passive income earners...
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No, education in America is expensive. If tuition was free or cheap, you could work part-time to pay living expenses and take more time to finish your degree as many students in Europe do.
I went to two years of community college for under 2k. My parents invested in a state program when I was younger which promised to pay for 4 years of state schooling. Not sure exactly how much they put in, but had you withdrawn the amount to use it for private schooling it was like 10k, so I'm assuming not much more than that. Because community college was so cheap, I was able to use that other funding to pay for a g…
As a culture, we really need to stop telling 17 year olds to not worry about money, go to college, and figure something out. There is always someone ready with a romantic appeal to a classical education, and it is so frustrating for me. Wasting four years is a huge cost. Years, decades of debt is a huge cost. Going to college with no plan about money? The costs are assured. Plus, the degrees people are actually getti…
What about... offering college for free like the rest of the modern world? Then you would only have to worry about living costs and those loans are pretty small. I could pay off mine in like 4-5 years if I really wanted to. Plus, then people still could get an education even if their parents didn't save up for you. What about as a society/culture you start telling people that the country should offer education for fr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, one should wonder why college is so expensive in the US in the first place. Even without any subsidies, non-American tuition is a fraction of the cost of the big universities in the US. Why? Why are book so expensive here? Why is so much money spent on buildings, stadiums and hiring football coaches? The highest paid public employee in 39 states in the US is a college sports coach! [1] Throwing mor…
The top paid coach there is Nick Saban; Alabama football made over $100 million in revenue last year. https://www.seccountry.com/alabama/alabama-football-reported...