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Dear Class of ’13: You’ve been scammed

marketwatch.com

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Re: Dear Class of ’13: You’ve been scammed

#81

Post by chalst »

jimhefferon wrote: post #59
chalst wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite. Furthermore... From the article: "Consider this: You have just paid about three times as much for your degree as did someone graduating 30 years ago. That’s in constant dollars — in other words, after accounting for inflation. There is no evidence that you have received a degree three times as good. " The assumption is that you would expect the cost of higher education to track the CPI. As a good that we get t…

> expect the cost to depend on the amount of face-to-face time students have with instructors and the growth of real wages I'm a college professor. I don't believe that the amount of face-to-face time has increased (I'd be interested to hear otherwise). Is there evidence that real wages have increased for people who teach? (I haven't gotten a raise in some years, and I hear all about increases in adjuncts which would…

I think the labour cost of university teaching has increased in the US:

1. I think (I haven't tried to dredge up numbers) that in the US, face-to-face time with professors has reduced for each student on average, but face-to-face time with more junior academic staff has increased greatly. To make a comparison between countries, rather than across time, certainly the number of supervised teaching hours per week I have seen in US universities has been much higher than even in the highest-rated universities in the UK and Germany.

2. The labour costs are not just in-class teaching time, but also all work that is attached to teaching activity. Much more effort is put into "compliance" issues than before (e.g., dealing with legal challenges to grades, and I think that admissions is a much more expensive process than before).

3. The most sought-after faculty (star professors) do earn much more than before, and for at least some faculties, the pay for star professors is proportionally high.

4. Faculty turnover is higher.

I'm sure concrete figures exist - I'd certainly like to see a solid analysis of labour cost trends in the US and elsewhere.

Re: Dear Class of ’13: You’ve been scammed

#82

Post by nostrademons »

mikegioia wrote: post #77
AJ007 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need any help, its math that any high school student should be capable of. Its the same as any time you borrow money to buy something like a car or house, except with this one your ability to ever discharge the debt is quite limited! When I was starting college none of my friends really knew what they wanted to do. Many switched degrees. Some more than once. While I had only a rough idea at the time, in gen…

This has nothing to do with what major or direction high school students want to pick. I'm talking about the decision of where to go to school, and specifically highlighting the fact that uninformed kids/parents (at least in my case) picked the more expensive, private university because all signs pointed to that being the correct choice. The answer here is to push lower cost, public colleges to kids who don't know wh…

A lot of this is simply that life is risky, and completely unforeseen circumstances can drastically change life outcomes.

I went to an expensive private college. My parents racked up over $100K in debt between my sister and I. Neither of us had any idea what we wanted to do when we went. Our parents were just like "Go to the best college you get into, and we will figure out the money."

The debt was paid off in full 4 years after graduation.

And the real reason it worked out were a variety of circumstances that could totally not have been foreseen when we matriculated. I flunked out of physics twice, and in my scramble to pick a new major and graduate, picked...computer science. And used a lot of the time I spent avoiding my physics homework to learn a bunch of cool programming languages, make contacts with real programmers on the Internet, and pick up internships. So when I barely-graduated, I already had a job lined up at a financial software startup that I'd interned with twice. If I had not flunked out of the physics major, I would likely be just barely finishing my Physics Ph.D now, having lived on $20K/year for the past 7 years, and would be coming into an uncertain job market with few marketable skills, no work experience, and a lot of debt.

My sister happened to go to school in Houston, at a school where her geology department had close ties to local oil majors, and so ended up with a bunch of oil industry internships before graduation. She had two of the majors bidding against each other for her after graduation, and got a lucrative job that way.

The interesting thing is that we both went into college knowing very little other than "Go to the best college you get into", and came out of it with that being the right choice but for reasons completely different than what we thought they'd be. A degree helps, but skills and contacts help more. Maybe the right move for entering students these days is to go to the best college you get into, but think carefully about what you want to do afterwards and put yourself in situations where you can rack up advantages for getting there afterwards.

Re: Dear Class of ’13: You’ve been scammed

#83

Post by nostrademons »

beachstartup wrote: post #62
jaxbot wrote: post #11

I'm class of '13 for grade school, entering college this fall at a state university. I've been programming since I was 8, and from what I can tell, my self-teaching has put me at a level above people fresh out of school with a flashy degree that says "hire me." I'm not good with words, but my point is this. I find it terribly concerning that I'm paying $50k to go to a school to learn something I already know, and kno…

do yourself a favor and major in something with a lot of girls in it. learn what makes them tick. TRUST ME ON THIS ONE. you will never, ever again be in the situation of having so many females vying for your attention. if you squander it, you will regret it. teach yourself computer science and get a degree in something else like psychology or biology or something.

Eh, not necessarily. In the 30-35 age range, if you're looking for an actual serious relationship and not just a fling, you'll find there are a lot of girls who spent their 20s getting their careers in order and amassing life experience, and now find they want a husband but all the decent guys were taken in their mid-20s.

I'd say that the teens and 22-28 range are hardest for guys, and 28-35 and 65-80 are hardest for women, with college being about equal for both sexes. In your teens most girls cluster their attention on the hottest or most socially confident guys, and from 22-28 guys have to compete with older, more established males for girls that are still somewhat attracted to the trappings of success. But once they get to their late 20s, most people realize that a.) if they want to start a family of someone roughly the same age, they better do it soon b.) the superficial things that most people like in a partner - hotness, money, success, popularity - don't really matter much when you spend every day with them and really get to know them, and what does matter are things like kindness, character, emotional stability, etc. and c.) most of the people who realized this earlier dropped out of the dating pool and got married in their 20s. Women have a much stricter time horizon than guys do at this point, so guys tend to have the advantage in the dating pool.

I've heard dating past the mid-30s is weird, with a lot of divorcees and a lot of folks with baggage from past relationships. I see a lot of age-unbalanced couples in this range, with guys in their mid-40s coming off a failed marriage dating girls in their mid-20s, or single mothers having a string of not-too-serious boyfriends while juggling childcare and a job. Then once you get to 65, guys again have the advantage, because women tend to live longer and so there are a number of widows while very few widowers. I've heard that single guys in retirement communities get so much ass, but for some reason nobody wants to talk about that...

Re: Dear Class of ’13: You’ve been scammed

#85

Post by Goladus »

nostrademons wrote: post #80
Goladus wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only problem with the article is overly emphasizing the "you are being scammed" angle. The article actually covers it from two angles, and the "net sticker price" is only the right metric for one of them (an individual student evaluating the ROI of their own personal education). Looking at the system as a whole, average net sticker price is the wrong metric. That's hiding real costs in the system. "Why is there $…

The difference between sticker price and net tuition (I don't understand what you mean by "net sticker price", that seems to conflate both metrics) is usually the result of price discrimination by the colleges. They raise sticker price so they can charge wealthy applicants more, and then offer generous financial aid so they can charge poor applicants less. It is a subsidy, but it's a subsidy within the organization.…

It is a subsidy, but it's a subsidy within the organization.

The original version of my comment explained this but I removed it for brevity. But yes you are right. From what I understand the money flow, especially at elite institutions, can be very complex.

Also "net sticker price" was the term used by the commenter I was responding to.

Re: Dear Class of ’13: You’ve been scammed

#86

Post by Goladus »

Alex3917 wrote: post #51
Goladus wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they're not making a specific claim. They're making a generalized claim to tell the story. Any one individual student should be able to compare their financial situation to the generalizations in the article. The final sentence of the article is this: How on earth do colleges today ramp up costs to $40,000 a year? And in fact, scholarships, grants and other subsidies would be but one part of the explanation for w…

>But they're not making a specific claim. They're making a generalized claim to tell the story. "Consider this: You have just paid about three times as much for your degree as did someone graduating 30 years ago. That’s in constant dollars — in other words, after accounting for inflation. [...] According to the College Board, in 1983 a typical private American university managed to provide a bachelor’s-degree-level e…

It's not meant to be taken literally. It's just part of the narrative. It's blatantly obvious that the author can't actually know how much his readers have actually paid for their tuition. In fact the audience for this article is probably not even recent graduates.

Re: Dear Class of ’13: You’ve been scammed

#87

Post by beachstartup »

nostrademons wrote: post #83
beachstartup wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do yourself a favor and major in something with a lot of girls in it. learn what makes them tick. TRUST ME ON THIS ONE. you will never, ever again be in the situation of having so many females vying for your attention. if you squander it, you will regret it. teach yourself computer science and get a degree in something else like psychology or biology or something.

Eh, not necessarily. In the 30-35 age range, if you're looking for an actual serious relationship and not just a fling, you'll find there are a lot of girls who spent their 20s getting their careers in order and amassing life experience, and now find they want a husband but all the decent guys were taken in their mid-20s. I'd say that the teens and 22-28 range are hardest for guys, and 28-35 and 65-80 are hardest for…

> you'll find there are a lot of girls who spent their 20s getting their careers in order and amassing life experience

yeah, in other words, they spent their best years on someone else (probably LOTS of someone elses), and now that they're hitting the limits of what their youth/sex appeal can get them, they want some guy with a paycheck who they can slowly mold into a schlub, only to divorce him later.

if you read your post carefully you say the exact same thing, just in 3 or 4 different ways.

if you want to land a good relationship you HAVE to expose yourself to women at an early age and actively work on attraction/improving yourself, or else you're going to be the fucking sucker who picks up the tab later on in life. the illusion of dating being "better" in your 30s is simply women with fewer and fewer choices settling for less favorable selections, which is a recipe for disaster.

the problem is so many guys, especially in IT, are completely CLUELESS to this dynamic and just go all-in the first time a reasonably pretty woman 'chooses' them.

if she wouldn't have dated/slept with the you in your 20s, you sure as HELL don't want to get involved with her when you're in your 30s.

Re: Dear Class of ’13: You’ve been scammed

#88

Post by codva »

demallien wrote: post #72
purplelobster wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have little sympathy? So for someone who doesn't live near a university, doesn't have daddy pay his tuition for him and provide free housing and food, it's just tough luck? Like another commenter said, that's $40k in tuition, probably another $40k for housing, food and other expenses during that period of time. Your attitude is not productive, and sounds to me like the typical "fuck you, I've got mine" attitude.

Noooo, not what the GP is suggesting at all. The GP is saying that local public schools generally pay subsidies to instate students, so that's not a very expensive proposition. He's saying that it shouldn't be $40k + $40k, but rather $10k + $0k (live at home with parents). Racking up an unnecessary $70k/annum debt is something of a self-infliceted wound if that more expensive option isn't going to pay itself off thro…

Exactly, and thank you. There are a lot of options between borrow 100% of a 4-year degree at the most expensive option available, and don't go to college at all. I think most people that want to go to college can find an option that works without burdening them with life-crushing debt. It might not be 4-years of the typical undergrad experience at State U though. You might spend a couple of years at community college. You might take 8 years to finish because you are working your way through school. There is nothing wrong with any of those options.
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