Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, what happens if we don't go to any of these schools?
Meaning what, not going to college or going instead to the local State U?
Going to a State U instead of those elite Us
On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
581–590 of 669 posts
Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
#582Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also come with income based repayment plans that mean you'll never have to pay more than 10% of your discretionary income (income above 10% of the poverty line), and they are cancelled after 20 years of payment.
That is still a reasonable period of time to make them low risk. So we get a market flooded by cash. And now due the ubiquity of degrees, many are worthless but necessary. They are becoming the high school degree.
The risk doesn't really have anything to do with "a market flooded by cash".
The government distributes loans because legislation forces them to--not because they are low risk--and the money comes directly from the department of education not private investments. Private loans are only about 7% of the loan disbursements.
Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
#583Earlier quoted context omitted.
I came here to say this. My wife left the private sector four years ago to work in higher ed. This was a huge epiphany to both of us after she had been there a while and we could see the big picture from the inside. Sure there are a couple other factors at play, but it's small potatoes, comparatively. If you look at the big state schools and the support they receive from the community, they've systematically had thei…
Um, not sure what you are talking about wrt community support? The community, and the state was supporting the university quite liberally. My observations from attending and then later working at a large southern public university is that a bunch of things happened: 1) The financiers got in bed with the financial aid office, figuratively and possibly literally. 2) The campus went on an inexplicable building boom the…
There are huge discrepancies in student preparedness in different areas. It's possible your right, the South has long viewed education with suspicion and this has gotten worse, probably insuring students today are less ready for college.
It's also possible that states where education was valued have pulled back funding. There is actual hard data to indicate this is the case, but I'm also trying to avoid dismissing your claims out of hand.
Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
#584Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where do you get this impression, because it's simply not backed by any study, or even any anecdotal information? Quite the contrary, most people attend a college within 50 miles of their home[0]. [0] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/02/03/when-students...
No anecdotal information? My life? I went to the local college and graduated with less than 8k in debt and no scholarships. And that study doesn't really dispute my point, most may not, but a large percentage do, and those those who do are the ones without mountains of debt.
Find a study, because "my biases are correct," isn't an argument.
Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
#585Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point of subsidizing college is to give the person who might otherwise become a roofer the option of a more pleasant, lucrative career. Scientific and technical knowledge drives innovation. Economic growth on a per-capita basis is entirely driven by innovation. Thus scientific and technical education directly impacts your quality of life. With regards to liberal arts education, I'm inclined to agree that governme…
> With regards to liberal arts education, I'm inclined to agree that government subsidies may not be the best use of tax money. Who do you think will start going to college more once it's free? Students who are driven to get a STEM career are already pursuing college. Making it free will attract the people who think along the lines of "I don't wanna start working yet, might as well go live the college lifestyle for f…
The key value of making STEM degrees free isn't that it will cause a massive increase in the number of people who get them. I suspect that the increase would be rather modest. Instead, it is to free people who pursue STEM degrees from the burden of debt, so they're more able to take the kinds of risks that can result in big wins for society. Innovation is an inherently risky pursuit, and if we make potential innovators risk-averse through debt we're wasting much of the value of their education.
To be fair, I'm not totally against (at least partially) funding certain liberal arts degrees either. Specifically, creative writing and journalism are both valuable. For example, it would be profitable to subsidize many thousands of creative writing students to produce more popular writers like J.K. Rowling or Stephen King. Total yearly sales of fiction books in the US is ~14 billion, taxes from that could cover subsidies for creative writing if they were merit based.
Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
#586Earlier quoted context omitted.
While the college coach is often highly paid, keep in mind that the football program usually brings in a boatload of money, and that money goes on to subsidize other NCAA sports and in many cases even returns money back to the university. I'm not a fan of the sports-fetish of college sports, but I do want to make a balanced point for others to consider.
> football program usually brings in a boatload of money Let's ask some nice people at NCAA to quantify those boatloads. http://www.businessinsider.com/ncaa-revenue-expense-report-2... "Of the 120 athletic departments in Division I-A (sorry, the Football Bowl Subdivision) just 22 were self-sufficient last year. That's actually actually an improvement from 2009, when only 14 schools turned a "profit.""
And as your link says 58% of football programs are self-sufficient. Your link is also referring to sports programs as a whole. So yeah cut out all the women's sports and even more will be self-sustaining (not that I'm advocating that). And, it appears that more programs are making more money as time goes on.
So sure boatload could be a mischaracterization, but majority certainly isn't.
Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
#587I 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 can't understand the paradox that as tuition increased, tenured professor jobs became more scarce and other professor jobs lower paying. I guess fancy facilities and less gov't subsidy helps explain.
It's gotten to the point that you might consider the alternative of starting a higher education co-op to hire associate professors and frustrated, underemployed phds while minimizing tuition by meeting in un-fancy locations or online.
Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
#588How do you skip college and invest the tuition in the S&P 500? Ah, you can't: Of course, lenders won't give out large loans for an individual to skip college and dump tuition into the stock market, this is just a hypothetical scenario. So this article is unrealistic.
True, but not having the student loan debt means you have more disposable income and that can be invested starting straight after high school.
Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
#589I 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…
Some interesting questions arise from these observations. * Other comments in this thread rightly point out that US higher education loan policy is largely the cause of unsustainable growth of college tuition. However, instead of bloated bureaucracies and buildings that are unmaintainable at lower budgets, why didn't at least some colleges invest the proceeds into index funds to directly defray the costs to students,…
The Fast Company story is weird.
It lists Scala and Go as "MOST SOUGHT AFTER" skills.
First, IMO it's weird to consider particular languages as "skills" when talking at a sort of macro level about educational preparedness. "Go schools" and "Scala schools" won't fare much better than "Java schools", and we'll be having this same conversation but replacing Scala with Haskell and Go with Rust (etc. -- you get the idea). (And if you need to go to a finishing school to learn Scala or Go after college, the college has fundamentally failed at its primary task.)
Second, Ctrl-F for Scala in the latest Who's Hiring thread -- some Javascript frameworks are more in demand. And I'd imagine Who's Hiring threads are more representative of the sort of companies hiring FP programmers than a generic jobs board.
The Forbes article is more interesting -- communication, interpersonal skills, teamwork, data analysis (which, if we step outside the zeitgeist and generalize across several generations of in-demand technical skills, we should really just read as "mathematical maturity" and "ability to self-learn").
Those are all the sorts of things you don't simply teach in a single course. They require prolonged situational exposure, of the sort that colleges readily provide. The problem is that students don't avail themselves of challenging course work and extra-curricular activities, and universities don't demand it.
Re: On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
#590I 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…
> reconsider mortgaging the house (figuratively) to No, this is real. One of my kid's friends is going for Mechanical Engineering at a school that will cost her $60K per year. And she is committed to go past and Bachelor's and obtain a Masters. I have begged and pleaded with her to reconsider. I have done all the research for her showing salary potential, payments and a comparison showing what would happen if the del…
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