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

#591

Post by bcheung » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 4:30 PM UTC

One of the other things that will start entering the social consciousness is that a lot of the information (lectures, books) is available online for free.

This is especially true for computer science / programming.

Unless you need hands on access to equipment or to physically interact with people for your chosen field of study, the college format is a very inefficient means learning.

The "Cone of Learning" states the best way to learn is (in order):

  - Teach others

  - Practice doing

  - Discussion

  - Demonstration

  - Audiovisual

  - Reading

  - Lecture

What does college do the most of? The last 2.

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

#592

Post by scriptkiddy » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 4:31 PM UTC

m-j-fox wrote: post #587

twotwotwo wrote: post #246

Earlier 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 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 loca…

While a great idea for learning and purely academic purposes, a degree from such a co-op would mean nothing to potential employers. Actually, it would mean nothing to anyone. At least in the U.S., an institution must be accredited for the degree to mean anything at all.

That said, I would definitely join such a co-op as I feel the knowledge is more important than the paperwork anyways.

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

#593

Post by jrs95 » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 4:33 PM UTC

throwawayjava wrote: post #542

jrs95 wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's assuming that these degrees are actually necessary for these people to do their jobs, which isn't the case the majority of the time in my opinion

Read through the list of S&P 500 stocks. Almost none of those companies could exist -- especially at their current scale -- without a huge pool of college-educated engineers/scientists/doctors. There may be a lot of employees there not using their degrees. But the true value creators at S&P 500 companies are certainly not those people.

I just don't think scientists and engineers necessarily need a college education to be scientists and engineers. Some of them, maybe, but now we're talking about a fraction of a fraction of the output of these institutions. We can do better than just making all college education free.

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

#594

Post by fastaguy88 » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 4:45 PM UTC

conanbatt wrote: post #450

learc83 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article from 538 argues that almost 3/4 of the rise in tuition is accounted for by a drop in state support. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-m...

Interesting! Does this mean that education budgets for the states has had cuts in the last 16 years? Where is that state money saved going?

In almost all states, the money has gone to Medicaid. In Virginia (which I know well), the money also went to build a bunch of prisons in the 80's and 90's. But, if you look at the distribution of state budgets over the past 40 years, health care expenses and prisons have been the growth areas.

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

#595

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 4:47 PM UTC

rebootthesystem wrote: post #449

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…

> 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…

[deleted]

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

#596

Post by fastaguy88 » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 4:55 PM UTC

This article, and the one it cites, have two serious flaws: (1) Their "ROI" for college is based on some average of high-school earnings. But average high-school only earnings is the wrong number. We don't care about what 50-65 year-old union employees with a high-school education are getting today, we care about earnings over the next 20 years for today's high-achool, non-college, graduate. That number is dropping, as the number of good paying high-school only jobs decreases. Jobs that a generation ago only required a high-school education now want college (deservedly or not).

(2) The distribution of ROI is based on numbers of institutions, not numbers of graduates. There are far more students graduating from large, cheaper, public schools than Harvard or Princeton, but there are many more small private schools in the distribution of costs. But ROI is not based on a distribution of graduates, it is based on a distribution of schools.

While it does not make sense to take out large loans to finance poor-paying occupations, and it certainly makes more sense to spend less money on college, these articles are very misleading.

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

#597

Post by prostoalex » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 4:56 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #564

prostoalex wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Banks will step in to provide private loans on whatever terms they feel like. They'll be bankruptable. The banks can make their own judgements about the borrower's ability to repay it Banking industry does not have a concept of a college loan. A loan is either secured (mortgage, auto, HELOC) or unsecured (personal, credit card). Without government participation all college loans are treated as unsecured, which mean…

I think the degree should be security for the loan. You can discharge your degree in bankruptcy, but you also lose the degree. Your resume legally has to show a blank spot that you cannot explain as anything other than wasting your time. (or possibly working part time if you had a job). Want a new degree, your credits won't transfer so you start over as a freshman. (if you can get in - school is competitive and the b…

A very significant portion of college entrants do not receive a degree.

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40

"The 6-year graduation rate was 58 percent at public institutions, 65 percent at private nonprofit institutions, and 27 percent at private for-profit institutions."

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

#598

Post by AstralStorm » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 4:59 PM UTC

musikele wrote: post #502

I would suggest to US citizens to come in EU, study in the best colleges (there are some that are just great and cheap) and come back. I expect the exepence to be half. At that point the ROI should be greater

Or better yet, stay and enjoy the more stable job market.

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

#599

Post by AstralStorm » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 5:03 PM UTC

ada1981 wrote: post #161

Consider an undergraduate program where ~150 people each contributed say $50,000 each to collectively buy a large parcel of land and create their own eco-regenerative village. That would be $7.5 MM dollars. Over the course of a few years they would build micro-homes, permaculture farms, invent, build, hack, create art, take free online courses, host traveling scholars, incubate start-up ideas, etc. They'd be a self-s…

The problem is that the solution is extremely fragile at the beginning. See, nobody is a specialist since birth and learning even mildly basic repair is getting harder each year, while the hardware gets more complex.

So such a society becomes fragile when important members who mentor a trade fall out (age, obligations etc.).

You can buffer those problems sometimes via shared funds, sometimes not.

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

#600

Post by ruste » Mon, Jun 05, 2017, 5:04 PM UTC

tvural wrote: post #48

This reminds me of Robin Hanson's criticism of medical spending - exercise and diet are much better predictors of health than money spent on healthcare, meaning that there's a large amount of waste in the system. I suspect something similar here, the amount of money people spend on education is uncorrelated from what they get out of it. The other factors, like whether you went to a top school and what you did in coll…

I wonder if it's reasonable to go even further and say there's a negative correlation between spending and what someone gets out of college. I'd say that's certainly the case when restricted to certain fields. In this case I definitely do not think correlation has anything to do with causation though.