The previous title was better. Why was it changed?
On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
281–290 of 669 posts
Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
#282Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
#283As 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…
They're not saying going to college and making the most of it is a waste. They're saying shipping all kids off to college under the presumption that things will sort themselves out and you'll end up with a bucket of money and a good job at the end is the problem. Kids need to be taught what college can offer them, how to make the most of it, and whether it'll even benefit them before we push them into going.
Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Government spending on higher education peaked in the mid 70s, dropped in the 80s, and has not kept up with the population increases. The focus on loans, instead of government funding, was basically a new tax on the poor and middle classes in order to fund the Reagan tax cuts for the rich.
Ah, the ol' trickle down fallacy.
Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
#285Earlier 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 US colleges are better than international on average?
Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
#286As 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…
> What about... offering college for free like the rest of the modern world?
Free only means someone else pays for it. It is still a bad deal if you make someone else pay horrendous amount of money for a worthless degree.
> What about as a society/culture you start telling people that the country should offer education for free instead of not getting educated?
What you are saying is that vast majority of the people who themselves have not gone to college should be FORCED to pay for someone else's degree in French Literature ?
I see that as highly immoral.
Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
#287This is a provocative but deeply misleading calculation. It assumes that our no-college-S&P-investor is a stoic enough soul to live on truck drivers' wages for 24 years, so that the stock market can do its magic, before collecting what genuinely would be a giant windfall. That's really hard to imagine. Missing out on the more robust income of a college graduate in your late-20s and early-30s means making sacrifices i…
> ...is a stoic enough soul to live on truck drivers' wages for 24 years
Truck drivers make decent money. $40k, usually closer to $50k+ if you're experienced without accidents. Much more importantly, you don't need to be in an office building in a high rent area every morning. If your spouse also works, those salaries buy a REALLY nice house in Nowhere, MS/WI/KS!
"Has the nerve and patience" might be a better way of saying it for truck drivers, at least. The job's downsides are the stress, risk of death/injury, and the crap hours.
> The temptation to start plucking out money from the S&P honeypot -- in the name of having a better life
And "temptation for a better life" isn't the only source of risk.
A lot of low-skill but decent-paying jobs are extremely vulnerable to economic cycles.
"Making the mortgage that was comfortable before the market crash / paying for medical bills that accrued while my insurance lapsed" can make a life time's worth of savings disappear in a matter of months.
Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
#288This is what I did. It worked well (for me). I would recommend it to someone like me. If you are smart and hard working, University or no University you will eventually be reasonably successful in the right circumstances. If you want to do something abstract, like invent or do business, it probably makes more sense to skip University. If you want to do something more professional or conventional, like engineering or medicine, you probably have to do University. For the most part, the implicated disparity is actually priced into jobs. Part of doctors income implicates paying off tons of debt and opportunity cost. Likewise, through compounding, hard work and networking, you can end up with the same net worth by other means. The key is to approach it in a self aware way. People rarely make any decisions on a purely rational basis, why start with University? University is easily reversible. Spend less time worrying about what major you take or college you attend. Spend more time worrying about being self aware, choosing a life partner and taking care of your physical and mental health.
Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 don't have an answer either. I do think they should make student loans bankrupt-able. It's time. Oh yea, and put a hiring freeze/salary cap on all administrative personnel for any school that accepts federal loans. The best teachers I had were at community colleges, and usually had summer jobs. I never figured out what most of the administration did besides irritate the better teachers.
Bankrupt-able student loans will not help the problem. The universities who are taking advantage of the easily available money from the government will still get paid. During bankruptcy, the loan write down hurts the lender. In this case it's us taxpayers.
The real answer is to cut what's funded by the government, make the rest of the financing come from the universities themselves, AND make it bankrupt-able. Then as demand declines and universities share the hit for each bankruptcy, universities will lower prices to something more reasonable to increase supply.
Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>Regarding buildings and marketing: you have to work hard to attract the absolute top students, especially in a huge education market like the US. Government paid higher education usually don't care that much about getting top students. They may or may not come. This attitude makes saving on all the extra stuff pretty easy. Anyway, not all universities can have top students, by definition, so most universities' gener…
State universities are absolutely trying to pull in better students. They track average SATs and every other metric. For the top schools in each state, this is not just an issue of prestige, public funding, and attracting stronger faculty, its also about endowments growing because those students graduate and have more money to contribute.