On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by jhedwards » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 12:06 AM UTC

forkandwait wrote: post #168

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…

> Wasting four years is a huge cost. At college I: learned calculus, computer programming, advanced mathematics, urban planning, how to communicate like a grown up, and those are just the big topics. I also took acting classes and learned social skills and made lifelong friends. When I graduated, a professor arranged my first professional job which was an order of magnitude better than any blue collar gig I had ever…

On the other hand I went to college and learned about biology, intersectionality, ancient and modern Chinese as well as English literature, I learned how to write an essay and construct an argument from evidence, and I met great friends. Then I was hugely in debt and had to work my butt off learning software to pay it off.

I STILL think it was worth it, but that was ten years ago and the cost has been rising steadily since then. University was conceived largely because an educated population is a great benefit to the culture and economy of the state, but it's being marketed like it was a four year luxury vacation. Something is terribly wrong. A humanities education shouldn't be a privilege and it shouldn't be an economic burden.

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

#252

Post by refurb » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 12:07 AM UTC

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.

Are you saying graduate students don't get paid in the US? If so, you're wrong. I got a stipend of $1400 per month and it increased each year. Not much, but enough to live on as a student.

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

#253

Post by almostApatriot1 » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 12:08 AM UTC

udkl wrote: post #223

forkandwait wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wasting four years is a huge cost. At college I: learned calculus, computer programming, advanced mathematics, urban planning, how to communicate like a grown up, and those are just the big topics. I also took acting classes and learned social skills and made lifelong friends. When I graduated, a professor arranged my first professional job which was an order of magnitude better than any blue collar gig I had ever…

I think you missed the point completely. The parent post isn't against college education. It is against spending those years studying 'non-professional' subjects and calls these a waste. This is corroborated by the statement : "Going to college with no plan about money? The costs are assured. (absurd)"

If 'non-professional' courses are taught well, they can be a huge asset. I personally learned quite a bit from the couple in-depth history courses I took because they taught me how to research, how to understand information, and how to understand the context in which information is presented.

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

#254

Post by MrTonyD » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 12:09 AM UTC

twotwotwo wrote: post #246

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…

And college got expensive partly through policy choices. Offering easy loans tends to make people price insensitive, so tuitions go up and a lot of that money goes to things like increasingly fancy buildings and making textbook publishers' shareholders rich. Meanwhile often less is going to state schools that, with low in-state tuitions, were historically a way up for a lot of people. (An older friend went to Berkele…

I remember reading an article describing how college costs can be explained by an analysis of supply and demand. There have been a variety of historic reasons for demand rising at different times - mostly related to unemployment and lack of other economic choices. I keep hearing the meme that low-cost college is the cause of college expense - but college is free in many countries where they are doing quite well. So I question the facile opinions I keep hearing.

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

#255

Post by eon1 » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 12:09 AM UTC

bdcravens wrote: post #241

forkandwait wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of the 100 or so people I know my experience is very typical.

> a professor arranged my first professional job Not typical.

Yeah, like.. scorchingly atypical. How many of these jobs are there that all 100 of your peers had a similar experience?

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

#256

Post by _jal » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 12:10 AM UTC

Cyph0n wrote: post #224

ecshafer wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not that simple at all. Regarding buildings and marketing: you have to work hard to attract the absolute top students, especially in a huge education market like the US. Now you may argue that students shouldn't be so superficial, but they are, so universities have to deal with that when competing at the national stage. As for administration, you probably have no idea how complicated it is to keep a university r…

Here is the problem.

By definition, not all schools attract the top students. We need a range of schools for the range of our society, not schools wasting the money of students actually attending the school competing for students that won't attend.

Schooling, like roads and health care, work better when run by government.

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

#257

Post by nikdaheratik » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 12:14 AM UTC

As someone who grew up from a poor background, I don't believe I was ever given the option of "investing" tuition costs. I did however get both academic and need-based scholarships to go to college. There really wasn't much cost-benefit analysis involved there.

Also, there's the larger question of whether good entry level jobs and investment opportunities are available at the same level if everyone were to start to put money into stocks, or whatever, at the same level they do for higher education. There is undoubtedly a ceiling on investment just as there is one for increased income for higher education.

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

#258

Post by throwawayjava » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 12:15 AM UTC

johnfn wrote: post #176

throwawayjava wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the hypothetical breaks down once you consider it as a proposal, which makes for a dubious social commentary. Hypothesis testing is far more valuable than pure hypothetical! 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…

> But the hypothetical breaks down once you consider it as a proposal, ...again, that's why you don't do that with hypotheticals intended to be social commentary. The article is saying "wow, college is sure overpriced for the amount of money you invest."

> ...again, that's why you don't do that with hypotheticals intended to be social commentary.

Good social commentary helps us identify and solve problems.

I don't think this particular commentary puts us in a good mindset for understanding or solving the problems with higher education funding in the united states.

> The article is saying "wow, college is sure overpriced for the amount of money you invest."

The article suggests thinking about the cost of college in terms of payouts to single individuals without any systems-level analysis. On the basis of this perspective, we conclude college is absurdly overpriced.

Perhaps college is overpriced. But not nearly as overpriced as this mindset would have us believe.

That 7% ROI from the S&P 500 isn't powered by pixie dust. It'd powered by mostly degreed people using their degrees.

Social commentary that distracts from the need for an educated populace and instead focuses solely on ROI to individual students is not good social commentary, IMO.

So even if we consider this as pure social commentary, my critique is the same: it identifies a problem, but does so in a way that doesn't emphasize the most important root causes of that problem.

(edit: also, I stand by my previous statement: IMO unreasonable hypotheses are almost always not useful hypotheticals.)

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

#259

Post by geodel » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 12:15 AM UTC

henrikschroder wrote: post #214

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.

> 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.

With rising level of joblessness across the world, I am not too sure societies are having difficulty in having large well educated labour pool.

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

#260

Post by nikdaheratik » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 12:19 AM UTC

ooqr wrote: post #121

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…

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…

I think most of the comments on this topic ignore the fact that the U.S. really does have a mult-tier education system. The most cost efficient ones are state sponsored public universities, which are also the ones that have had the largest cuts in their budgets over the past few decades.

The private ivy-league and liberal arts colleges are the ones with the highest price tag, and also seem to be the ones most likely to give someone a "leg up" into an upper class life, mostly through the contacts gained while attending. They're also losing quite a bit of their value, especially the smaller liberal arts colleges.