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

erikrood.com

621–630 of 669 posts

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

#621

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…

What state is your university located?

NY

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

#622
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, education in America is expensive. If tuition was free or cheap, you could work part-time to pay living expenses and take more time to finish your degree as many students in Europe do.

More important: if tuition were free you could fail your students. With the present model there is a perverse incentive to pass everyone no matter what because they pay the salary.

The other factor being that colleges want to boast about their 99% four year graduation rate.

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

#623
post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 don't see that happening... I do. At the lower end, if employers can't afford to pay people enough to make their loan payments, they'll start hiring people without debt.

But there are already more applicants than jobs. Labour is a buyer's market at the moment.

Right, but people with loan payments can't take jobs that won't allow them to make the payments. If they can't take those jobs, the jobs will go to people without degrees.

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

#625

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…

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...

That line of argument would be more persuasive if it explained why tuition has increased at private colleges? Suffolk University is an unimpressive college in Boston that is at risk of losing its accredidation, yet charges $37K/year for tuition. Harvard, arguably the best college brand in the world, costs $43K. It seems like there should be a bigger delta between the two, right? Why not? Might it have something to do with the amount of loans students are allowed to take out with government underwriting? Perhaps.

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

#626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That, in turn, means top colleges can charge pretty much whatever they want and it's still worth the money. The most prestigious colleges actually don't charge much money, except for families that can easily pay. Financial aid, including stipends for living expenses, is extremely generous at elite schools. The sticker price might be high, but few people actually pay it. The problem is more with second tier schools…

I've seen this mentioned several times, and I wish I had realized this when I was younger. I didn't even bother to apply to top tier schools even though I would have probably been accepted there because I knew my parents weren't too well off and I didn't think they'd be able to afford to support me, and I really hated the idea of taking out big college loans ($20k+ per year to go to school just seemed insane to me at…

That's absolutely a thing, and the knowledge of that fact is more limited than it should be. At my alma mater, I had friends who were getting almost a full scholarship. They left with only a few thousand dollars of debt (as opposed to tens of thousands) because they were able to pay off most of it with a part time on-campus job like being a lab technician.

It's an example of how inequality along financial or racial lines can be real despite there being no theoretical reason for it: if you don't know that you could attend a top tier university and leave with very little debt, you'll consider applying as a student. If you don't, then you've preemptively rejected a very good opportunity for upward mobility. Too many people just don't know because their families or communities don't play the college admissions "game."

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

#628
post #16

The true value of a college education is intangible. https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/f7f7e126-8aac-40bc-9478-70b6bea...

Many of my friends have found their college educations to be a thing beyond price.

More specifically, they've yet to find anyone who would give them a penny for it.

They have, however, found a few people who insisted that they keep making their student loan payments.

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

#629

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...

That line of argument would be more persuasive if it explained why tuition has increased at private colleges? Suffolk University is an unimpressive college in Boston that is at risk of losing its accredidation, yet charges $37K/year for tuition. Harvard, arguably the best college brand in the world, costs $43K. It seems like there should be a bigger delta between the two, right? Why not? Might it have something to do…

Or might it have something to do with the fact that Harvard has a massive multi-billion dollar endowment. Tuition is a tiny fraction of their income.

70% of Harvard students receive financial aid from the institution, and they pay an average of $12k a year total. Harvard clearly isn't charging a market rate for tuition.

Also government backed loans aren't nearly enough to cover tuition plus housing at these schools, so if your argument is that the prices are similar because they are both near the max loan amount, they aren't.

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

#630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But private schools have to compete with each other. If this was really about increased demand from students who would have otherwise gone to public schools, what we'd see is an increase in the number of private schools, not an increase in tuition.

You are right, there's no increased demand. Advertised sticker price and actual price of a private education can be substantially different https://www.wsj.com/articles/private-colleges-see-record-dis... For decades the private sector has been feeding off the gravitas created by Stanford, Harvard, Yale and other superb private institutions. Maybe time has helped, maybe the Internet made comparisons easier, but it's p…

Trump U literally was fraud. He paid out millions in settlements.
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