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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

#431

Post by thefourthchime »

PretzelFisch wrote: post #425
thefourthchime wrote: post #192

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 ave…

Without a degree the job market is a desert, since the hr filters ignore your resume. I have met many people with degrees who have less understanding and ability. But that paper always buys them an in, I don't have.

That's b.s. If you contributed to a creditable open source project you'll blow paste the guys with degrees.

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

#432

Post by jimmaswell »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #430
jimmaswell wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't end up with virtually any useful networking from college like you're supposed to, and the job fairs were all worthless - not a single programming related employer showed up to a single one of them. I've never heard back from any of the places nearby that I've ever applied to (there were a lot of them) except for one that called me to tell me they accidentally posted the ad for junior level when they meant se…

Maybe there is something wrong with the way you present yourself or your skills? Or maybe money is somehow blinding you, I'm sure there are plenty of jobs if you are not going to for super high salaries (or maybe that is the norm in the US, I don't know, but at least here if you aren't asking for the Moon and you know basics for programming you can get a job for sure)

I've just applied to whatever was there regardless of the posted salary. I've shown my resume to various people in the field and they said it was fine aside from a few conflicting opinions of moving one thing somewhere else or other minor details.

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

#433

Post by ferdterguson »

GhostVII wrote: post #160
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…

Why don't you subsidize it so it is affordable, but not free? In Canada I pay ~8k per term (and that's higher than most Canadian schools), which I think is pretty reasonable. Plus there are tuition discounts for lower income levels, so it's more affordable for them. Seems to work pretty well, I think making it free would cause people to get more useless degrees, which would just cost taxpayers money for no reason.

Is that plus living expenses? I went to a large 'football school' type school which was not cheap, but tuition a hair under 8K for a semester.

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

#434

Post by nextlevelwizard »

jimmaswell wrote: post #432
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe there is something wrong with the way you present yourself or your skills? Or maybe money is somehow blinding you, I'm sure there are plenty of jobs if you are not going to for super high salaries (or maybe that is the norm in the US, I don't know, but at least here if you aren't asking for the Moon and you know basics for programming you can get a job for sure)

I've just applied to whatever was there regardless of the posted salary. I've shown my resume to various people in the field and they said it was fine aside from a few conflicting opinions of moving one thing somewhere else or other minor details.

There's a pretty big difference between "fine" and "great". Have you detailed what you actually did in each job/project? Are you somehow linking to the final code base? Do you have active Github page which shows your own projects?

My first impression from the fist comment (which obviously wasn't meant to be as a sales pitch, but it's all I got going) was that you've done something, maybe very little, on some open source game projects. Which raise questions like why are these games open source? If they are open source how complex can the games even be? What languages were the games coded in? What did you actually do, did you just adjust something small or did you actually make something sizable?

Even then I come back to "why games?" Maybe it's just my own bias, but there's something about games programming that feels weird if you have no other projects especially if you have no final product to show for it.

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

#435

Post by Steeeve »

goobynight wrote: post #408
Steeeve wrote: post #276

Skip college, invest in stock market. People love to chart out how great it is to invest in the stock market and how historically it generates great returns. Nobody seems to remember everyone around them losing enormous amounts of money whenever the economy tanks. Where were all those 7.1% earnings going when the banks were getting bailed out and people were camping on wall street because their houses were foreclosed…

You know that 7.1% average doesn't mean 7.1% every year. Anyone that didn't panic sell during the crash has recovered. There are ways to handle the risk of a crash. #1 is to not play the high risk-high reward game if you are near retirement or already in retirement. You can't handle big swings at that point, since recovery could take 10 years and you're already 70. #2 is to have a liquid emergency fund, so you don't…

> Anyone that didn't panic sell during the crash has recovered.

What does 500 shares of Pets.com sell for these days?

All the people who had pensions heavily invested in Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Enhanced Leveraged Fund came out OK after a bit of time?

--- Investment carries risk at all levels. The longer you play the market, the more likely it is that you'll get burned at some point. Professional investors can come up with plans to hedge their risk and avoid calamity. Some of those plans might even work. People who go straight to work out of high school are not professional investors.

"Panic selling" is not always a choice, and it's not always even possible. And no, not everybody who lost a boatload of money during any particular crash ended up OK because they decided to let their investments coast.

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

#436

Post by ferdterguson »

chasing wrote: post #190
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…

You're right that young people need to understand the costs of going to college and make an educated decision about whether spending the time and money on a four-year degree in their field of interest is worth it. If you're goal is to become a doctor, you may not have a choice. If you want to become a painter, maybe you don't need the extra burden of debt. I think you're misguided about the value of a liberal arts ed…

If money is no problem for you, hell yeah, get a liberal arts education and pursue your passions. I totally agree that a degree in something you enjoy can be very personally rewarding.

Most people don't give a shit about their jobs. They want to be comfortable in their lives, go home at 5, retire early and get on with doing what they like doing. To do that you need money. To get money, you need to have skills that create value for the entity paying you.

I'd argue that college is only about the money, because money is more freeing than anything you can learn. Just look at all the dumb rich people in the world and all the smart poor people that can't get a foothold.

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

#437

Post by strommen »

rebuilder wrote: post #395
kchoudhu wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't explain what's happening in private higher education though.

If public higher ed. has its capacity and/or quality cut, wouldn't that increase the demand for private education?

The public universities don't cut capacity or quality - they raise costs. And the private colleges follow suit because they can.

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

#439

Post by strommen »

ethbro wrote: post #381
gozur88 wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

College in the US is used by employers as a proxy for intelligence, something that's an outgrowth of laws and court rulings that date back to the '70s. So if you want to put yourself on the path to the C-Suite in a Fortune 500 company or to a partnership in a major law firm, you have to get into one of the very top colleges in the country. That, in turn, means top colleges can charge pretty much whatever they want an…

Above and beyond that, and to crib on one of the grandparent comments re: "Eventually, demand will decrease if prices continue increasing": If the minimum barrier to employment is having a college degree, then people will continue doing whatever they have to in order to get a college degree. The only way you're going to change demand is if decent jobs start being created that don't require a bachelor's degree. And I…

Electricians, plumbers, etc. all make very good money without 4- year degrees. But nobody aspires to these professions nowadays - everybody assumed they must go to university.

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

#440

Post by matchbok »

stale2002 wrote: post #416
sarchertech wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming the number of private schools that students want to go is in no way supply limited, which is an incorrect assumption. How long does it take to build and staff a private school? How long to get it into US News top 500? Even something like increasing the number of students admitted to existing private schools is tricky because they are tracked on their admission percentage.

You don't have to create a new college. All that has to happen is for EXISTING colleges to realize that they can make a ton more money by expanding in size. Obviously, this doesn't happen overnight. You have to hire new employees, buy more land, and build more buildings. But I'd argue that this process would happen a lot, lot quicker than "create new college". Colleges are already expanding all the time.

You don't think they know that? I'm sure they do. But the other option is to stay the same size, but charge much more. Either way, more money. Only one solution demands building more classrooms and housing.
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