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On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return

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Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return

#191

Post by smsm42 »

Tenobrus wrote: post #143
smsm42 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've interviewed many people for starting position in software. I've looked at their degree only if there's literally nothing else to look at, and even then it wasn't a major sign. I've seen many people with degrees that are useless, and many people who were very skilled and who I don't even know whether they have a degree and what it is worth. It goes like this: 1. Experience 2. Experience 3. Experience 4. Knowledge…

Sure, this is probably true for people directly looking for jobs on the market. But I'd say most top students are getting internships pre-graduation and getting good return offers, or just using career fairs (that are targeting new grads specifically). From what I've seen that path can get them much higher than average salaries directly out of college, without any experience to speak of (an internship or two and some…

Open source/volunteer projects are great at building resume pre-employment. With additional bonus that you can actually show the potential employer your code and not just talk about it. And if you managed to actually run an OSS project while being a student, instead of merely submitting patches to it, that's even more excellent news.

College name - sure, if it's MIT, maybe. Or a handful of others. Otherwise - meh, in software world nobody really cares. In business or law maybe different, don't know.

Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return

#192

Post by thefourthchime »

TL;DR; Didn't go to college, at first people thought it was a liability, but after working my way up people are blown away.

Here is my experience:

Dad got a masters in Math, couldn't get a job, became a Taxi driver and then took 6mo of community college and got a job writing BASIC in the mid 1980s.

Dad didn't encourage me to go to college, I was a bad student, but taught myself coding and really liked it. Had a C average in high school.

Got a job at the small company my dad worked at, got paid $7 an hour, then $14 an hour the next year.

Decided I needed to go to college to really make it, put my resume out for fun. Got an offer for $65k to work at Microsoft via a recruiter. This was in 1998.

Been working since, learning, making contacts. I make $180k with bonuses now at a Fortune 100 company, I could work into upper management as many have, but I like coding, hate email, hate meetings. I have a Director title.

When people hear that I don't have a college education they are blown away.

Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return

#193

Post by rhino369 »

alkonaut wrote: post #167
rhino369 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What about... offering college for free like the rest of the modern world? Paying for tution with tax money doesn't make it free. If you aren't willing to invest in yourself, why should society do so? Free college tuition is a waste of resources on the upper middle class.

Doesn't that argument extend to mean that the public shouldn't fund any education? I mean what's the difference between the first ~12 years of school vs the last 2-5? Is the difference that the people are adults and no longer children (and so can be said to be responsible for themselves)?

First, there must be a dividing line between when we are no longer going to pay for a persons education. 18 years old is a pretty good dividing line because that when society deems people responsible for themselves.

Second, college is a good cut of because it's highly specialized education.

Third, almost all the benefits are captured by the precipitant of the education.

Finally, most of the country would either be unsuited or uninterested in college education. To a person breaking their back doing roofting, they might as well be buying rich kids trips to Europe instead. Not only does free college only benefit a portion of society, it benefits a portion that doesn't need a subsidy.

Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return

#194

Post by alkonaut »

First of all, instead of going all the way to free higher education in one go, try a better loan system.

Basically since educated youth is a national interest, set up an authority that lends money to students with very reasonable interest rates and repayment.

Interest rate can be set at the inflation level plus a small margin, repayment is set as a fraction of annual income, and the loans should not count against future credit. Remaining debt at 65 is written off and absorbed by the public.

This is how I funded my education (or rather, the rent/food/books as there was no tuition).

Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return

#195

Post by liveoneggs »

vowelless wrote: post #68
staticelf wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Because the market automatically adjusts to the highest possible cost in a situation like college (as opposed to pork bellies, for example).

It's the same reason healthcare is so expensive.

Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return

#196

Post by pmiller2 »

netsharc wrote: post #186
pmiller2 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it rather difficult for a non-EU citizen to become employed in EU member states?

Look up "blue card scheme". If you have a university degree, and you interview somewhere and get the job, and your salary will be over 1.5x average national gross salary (In Germany this calculates to around 39KEUR/year), you will get a residence permit, none of this "is there an EU citizen qualified for the same job" check. As for the salary, I can only say a German computer science graduate being offered a real pro…

>If you have a university degree....

Um, the post I was responding to mentioned getting residency in Europe in order to take advantage of the university system, so....

Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return

#198

Post by digitalzombie »

smt88 wrote: post #77
twic wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This article doesn't explain why we should believe that stockmarket performance, going forward, will be anything like the S&P's performance from 1993 to now. Nor why we should believe that a college degree's wage premium will be anything like its performance from 1993 to now.

As automation replaces low-skill jobs, the wage premium may actually skyrocket for those who are able to get a job.

> As automation replaces low-skill jobs, the wage premium may actually skyrocket for those who are able to get a job.

There was an article recently about automation actually lower the cost.

I had a debate about this with my libertarian friend.

Buddy: "Automation is a great!"

I know he's libertarian I was curious if he would support government program for the job that's being displaced. I'm for automation too.

Me: "So what about the people who are displace?"

Buddy: Well for the job that left over from automation will go up. So if waiters got displace, the rest of the worker who sill wait table will have their wages rises.

I didn't have a response to this because I have no idea if it's true or not. Then on reddit and hacknews there was an article talking about automation will cause wages to go down for the job automation is taken over. As for your comment of either job wages going up or not.

Anyway, it goes on and on until his solution was: family, church, community, and he very very reluctantly states government assistance. Also throughout said talk, he never thought about these people or flesh out a real plan for this.

Your comment reminded me of this conversation.

I'm not entirely sure if you're talking about the people who's getting replace or the other job. Either way unskilled workers still need a skill/trade to even get a job that's not automated.

If we're going to automate away all or most of the low skill job then what happen to these unskilled people?

For the people that are able to land a job, I think it's your speculation, in term of wages will go up.

I think education either college or vocational school or online or whatever is going to help unskilled labor pool. And how are they even going to even do that given that the job pool for unskilled or low skill labors are going away? How do they train for skill while having no money?

Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return

#199

Post by blazespin »

krakensden wrote: post #46

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…

Yeah, we need more people without history degrees. Or philosophy. I mean, seriously, enlightenment is overrated. How are we going to build a better Facebook if everyone is taking art degrees.

Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return

#200

Post by habitue »

I think a lot of people are looking at this as "maybe this article is offering advice" instead, the way I'm looking at it is this is giving us a rough quantification of what we all know intuitively: that college is so expensive it's reaching a natural ceiling.

The way this manifests in reality isn't millions of people all doing a cost/benefit calculus like this and coming to the rational conclusion they can skip college. What happens is that slowly, the meme that "Jim went to college and he doesn't seem better off" seeps into the collective consciousness. More and more people start running into this evidence, and reconsider mortgaging the house (figuratively) to send their kids to college, and the upward pressure on college tuition starts to lessen.

After a while this meme that college is a tradeoff becomes well established, and it becomes common knowledge that you think hard about it before you send your kid to college. The underlying reason is something like "You can make a better return in principle investing in the S&P" but the way it becomes a force in the real world is by a collective bayesian reasoning process we all engage in as a society.

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