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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

#211

Post by virmundi »

adpoe wrote: post #205

Opinion: Just like the stock market, college is also an investment. There is risk involved. One of the main problems is that this is NOT communicated well. (If it all.) Too many people take on huge long-shot risks that are unlikely to pay off. Yes, if you get an English degree and become a professional writer selling books and screenplays at $1MM a pop -- that's an awesome and incredible gig. But not many people can…

You can't discharge college loans if taken from a federal program. Unlike other ventures where you can pay pennies on the dollar when you bet and lose, such loans are pursued by the full force of the United States.

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

#212

Post by yequalsx »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #114
yequalsx wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that include cost of building the stadium? The gyms? I don't think it does.

The stadium has been there since 1929, so presumably. Upkeep is not $50 million.

At Alabama. What about the other 100 or so FBS schools? Does Alabama make a profit without mandatory athletic fees? What about other schools? Alabama is an outlier and even its numbers are not as good as they make them out to be.

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

#213

Post by joepvd »

staticelf wrote: post #106
mncolinlee wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There could be tons of reasons on why you would score badly in your younger years. That shouldn't mean that you should be excluded from a chance to college IMO. 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…

> Just see who the US president is.

Think it is time to update Godwin's Law.

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

#214

Post by henrikschroder »

rhino369 wrote: post #113
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…

>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.

> If you aren't willing to invest in yourself, why should society do so?

Because society has an interest in a large, well-educated labour pool that its entrepreneurs and companies can draw from. They can then employ these people, and pay them high salaries, a part of which goes back to education, and there you have a positive spiral.

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

#215

Post by vilmosi »

madsbuch wrote: post #137
vilmosi wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it's negative. You can make that money working at McDonald's in Denmark in 3 years. I still think college is worth it long term, but it's not really a negative cost, it's an investment.

Well, the cost for the student is negative. :-) A danish student get paid roughly 600£ a month, and there is not tuition. Classical European.

There's a cost of opportunity that you're not taking into consideration. Also, that money doesn't usually include food and rent, meaning you definitely lose money in the short term.

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

#217

Post by netsharc »

pmiller2 wrote: post #196
netsharc wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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....

Ah.. you can see my response above about that. They have residency permits for the purposes of study, you have to show that you can finance yourself or have a sponsor (e.g. a parent).

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

#218

Post by ecshafer »

Cyph0n wrote: post #151
ooqr wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's still time opportunity cost for the student and merely shifts the financial burden. I'm not against a liberal education for the betterment of the person, but it's not a sound investment. We should not aim to make college free by means of government sponsorship, but rather education free or inexpensive by means of lowering the actual costs. As someone else said in this thread, certain kinds of knowledge are rat…

> We should not aim to make college free by means of government sponsorship, but rather education free or inexpensive by means of lowering the actual costs. I think that you're vastly underestimating how much money is needed to provide quality higher education. Trust me, the last thing we need is a race to the bottom when it comes to higher education.

The amount of money that goes towards marketing, administration, and buildings that are far fancier than they need to be is the issue. The professors are a fraction of the costs. Universities spend far more money than they need to on useless extraneous offices and bloat. Get back to focusing on education and the costs will drop.

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

#219

Post by cletus »

The real problem here is the culture of telling people how amazing they are without them actually having achieved anything, which is really the basis for the negative views people have about millenials.

For example, the hordes of people who chase their dreams of becoming famous by acting, singing or, worst of all, just for being famous (aka the Kardashians). The dark side of all this pops up as many of these people get spit out. Some turn to drugs (I saw a show about meth usage in Hollywood and there were an awful lot of addicts of people who moved to LA to pursue their dream).

Not weighing up the cost of college is a big one. It's not that college has to have a positive ROI. There's something to be said for quality of life and the actual experience but still, we're asking 18 year olds to be realistic of how they'll pay for this eventually and that's a lot to ask of an 18 year old who has been told their entire life to follow their dreams and how amazing they are.

It's fair enough for something like this post to try and quantify the true cost of college but don't that having more money and working as a truck driver is not necessarily a better outcome for that person.

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

#220

Post by rubber_duck »

habitue wrote: post #200

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 coll…

Going to college is not really a cost benefit calculation - there are plenty of degrees with low job market demand and a lot of them are popular. Part of the reason why there is such pressure on the prices, sort of like palliative care vs. spare no expense for the aging population drives up medical prices.
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