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A Guide for Adults Going to College

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Re: A Guide for Adults Going to College

#111

Post by telchar »

leetcrew wrote: post #82
qubex wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t mean to be contentious here, but the reason for which student debt cannot be discharged by bankruptcy is pretty sound: it’s because education (theoretically) adds warning power to an individual and cannot be liquidated. (I’m not a lawyer and am not an American either.)

more to the point: it's an unsecured (ie, there's no collateral to take in the event of default) loan with a very low interest rate issued to a group of people who have little to no credit history.

The debt I've seen my peers saddled with has typically been 6-10%, issued mostly in the recession/post-recession years of low interest rates. It seems like exceedingly high interest to me when mortgages and car loans are half as much.

Re: A Guide for Adults Going to College

#112

Post by vondur »

sjg007 wrote: post #78
xyzzyz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will push college prices even higher.

There are plenty of mechanisms to counter this. One is direct funding of colleges as we did before via state and Federal funding. Another is to establish a feedback loop where loan guarantees and funding for the institution are a function of their students default rate: that way if the education doesn't lead to jobs then the school gets less money.

That will lead to universities only accepting students that would get jobs after graduation, which would probably kill many majors that don’t have high employment rates.

Re: A Guide for Adults Going to College

#113

Post by foldr »

lol768 wrote: post #106
BeetleB wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The fact that it’s a 4-year slog is one of the factors that make university degree holders earn premium in the labor marketplace — conscientiousness, conformity and consistency required to slog through 4 years needed for school to certify it send employers a strong signal that you’re the kind of person who will do their job well. In my career, everyone I've worked with had at least a Bachelor's. Most had a Master's…

>At the low ranked school, professors did not reuse homework or exams. They focused a lot more on what you were learning and less on how well you can do on the final exam. They had plenty of office hours - ranging from 3-12 hours a week (3 was considered low). Much fewer students per class. No TA's in between - faculty taught almost all the courses, and the office hours were with them. As someone who's spent a few ye…

>For some staff, teaching is clearly something they _have_ to do and effort is put in appropriately.

Well yes, of course. People don't go into academia because they want to teach. Academics are also not rewarded significantly for good teaching.

Re: A Guide for Adults Going to College

#114

Post by zerohp »

dwoot wrote: post #93
zerohp wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started college for the first time at 35 years old, and finished earlier this year after getting a BS CS, BS EE, and MS ECE. After 3 semesters at a community college, I transferred to a competitive engineering school (UIUC). My experience was very different from yours. Community college had a few great professors, but most were not good. They did not have high expectations for students, and it showed in the way tha…

Thank you for sharing this. A couple of questions: 1. Curious as to which sub-field you're currently working in 2. What was the impetus for you to make the decision to quit work full time and study again full-time? 3. When you say that you've not met anyone in your subfield that doesn't have a degree, how sure are you? I'd like to imagine that there are at least one or two that started school but didn't finish

1. Chip design

2. Prior to going to school I was a full stack web dev. I was tired of the framework of the week treadmill and didn't think it was something I could find fulfilling for the next 20-30 years until retirement.

3. I'm very sure. Hardware is a different beast than software. In order to excel as a modern hardware designer you need all of the fundamental EE knowledge and a lot of the fundamental CS/programming knowledge.

Re: A Guide for Adults Going to College

#115

Post by znpy »

jeena wrote: post #104

Because of how the German school system is build (Hauptschule, Realschule, Gymnasium) and me migrating to Germany at 11 years of age without the knowledge of the German language, I had to do it differently and attend something like Gymnasium as an adult after my first vocational training (to become a heating engineer) and because of life happening and me once again migrating to another country (Sweden) without the kn…

Keep going! Good luck!

Re: A Guide for Adults Going to College

#116

Post by BeetleB »

foldr wrote: post #113
lol768 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>At the low ranked school, professors did not reuse homework or exams. They focused a lot more on what you were learning and less on how well you can do on the final exam. They had plenty of office hours - ranging from 3-12 hours a week (3 was considered low). Much fewer students per class. No TA's in between - faculty taught almost all the courses, and the office hours were with them. As someone who's spent a few ye…

>For some staff, teaching is clearly something they _have_ to do and effort is put in appropriately. Well yes, of course. People don't go into academia because they want to teach. Academics are also not rewarded significantly for good teaching.

And "of course", this is one argument not to go to a top ranked research university for undergrad.

BTW, the low ranked university I went to was a research university. Professors got tenure/promotions based on that and not based on teaching. They still cared about teaching. It is at some level a matter of culture. If a top ranked university is worse when it comes to teaching, the reality is the university doesn't value education. Let's not use research as an excuse for poor education.

Re: A Guide for Adults Going to College

#117

Post by [deleted] »

learc83 wrote: post #107
two2two wrote: post #63

I'm a returning student about to complete my degree at the end of this year. I went to an art school for a few years out of high school and ended up in customer service positions with some great companies. I didn't want to continue in customer service, so I decided to go back to school. Started with two years at community college, and now finishing up my last two at university. Some insights I picked up along the way…

I also went back as an adult. I felt like the semesters were too short if anything. The types in-depth projects we did in upper division classes needed 15 week semesters. Even without the long projects, the vast majority of students in my CS and math classes couldn't have handled 2x the information. The shorter summer versions of hard classes always had a much higher fail rate. At my university you could also take up…

[deleted]

Re: A Guide for Adults Going to College

#118

Post by sjg007 »

vondur wrote: post #112
sjg007 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of mechanisms to counter this. One is direct funding of colleges as we did before via state and Federal funding. Another is to establish a feedback loop where loan guarantees and funding for the institution are a function of their students default rate: that way if the education doesn't lead to jobs then the school gets less money.

That will lead to universities only accepting students that would get jobs after graduation, which would probably kill many majors that don’t have high employment rates.

Nah.. right now the risk is born uniformly across all tax payers. We should make the school responsible for some of it.

Re: A Guide for Adults Going to College

#119

Post by sjg007 »

StevePerkins wrote: post #57
porphyrogene wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It will happen if you vote blue. Unfortunately it is a matter of voting blue enough, not just blue. In some areas politicians, even Democrats, regularly relate to their constituents by bashing "East cost liberal elites" despite having degrees from Ivy League schools. If Doug Jones had said that a liberal arts education is valuable for developing into a well-rounded citizen his race would have ended then and there.

I have a college degree. I hope for my kids to take the path of earning college degrees. I think that college is great in the abstract. I also think that until we sort out our health care system in this country (USA), a career in the trades is a very frightening prospect. Even so, this comment is very interesting to me. I frequently see on Hacker News the sentiment that modern higher education is a bubble. That if we…

Eventually that non-college grad will need the services of the college grad (and vice versa) so really it should all come out in the wash right?

Re: A Guide for Adults Going to College

#120

Post by ams6110 »

xyzzyz wrote: post #79
two2two wrote: post #63

I'm a returning student about to complete my degree at the end of this year. I went to an art school for a few years out of high school and ended up in customer service positions with some great companies. I didn't want to continue in customer service, so I decided to go back to school. Started with two years at community college, and now finishing up my last two at university. Some insights I picked up along the way…

- there should be 4 semesters a year, not 2, people should graduate in 2 years, not 4+ At the onset of this journey, I was enthusiastic to learn, but along the way I've been beat down to just wanting to get "the piece of paper" and be done. It's been a long three years and each day forward is increasingly difficult to stomach since I realized I can learn all of what is being taught to me faster on my own. The fact th…

If you take a full load of summer classes you can get a four year undergraduate degree done in 2-ish years.
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