I cannot afford to go back to engineering school • Hacker News Board

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#251

Post by RabbitAngstrom » Thu, Aug 08, 2013, 2:14 PM UTC

graycat wrote: post #207

e2e4 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And from the famous Ivy League schools, it's generally easier to get accepted for a Ph.D. than for a Bachelors. Since in many cases PhD is basically free, it is by far more competitive than Bachelors.

Getting into Harvard, Princeton, or Yale as an undergraduate is just super tough . A sufficient condition is to give the university, say, $10 million and be sometimes awake. Having a parent who went can help but not necessarily enough. Being a straight A student with 800s on the SATs is not sufficient. I never got anywhere trying to get into Princeton as an undergraduate, with average SAT scores over 700, but did get…

Anecdotal evidence to be sure, but I went to an Ivy League School (Penn) on just straight-As and 700s (!) on the SATs. I was not a "legacy" student of any kind. I knew many such people there, and only about 10% of my colleagues admitted to being a legacy -- maybe it was just my social circle? Or that I didn't major at Wharton, which is stereotypically legacy?

Your point about graduate school is spot on, though. The game completely changes (though I think it's still mostly a game). I especially love the "don't buy this muffler..." quote!

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#252

Post by hga » Thu, Aug 08, 2013, 2:19 PM UTC

bane wrote: post #227

hga wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My school is exceptionally expensive, almost $60K last academic year, and had been historically very bad with their endowment and earning money from inventions, and was one of the post-Civil war ones so didn't it have centuries of compounding donations. Iffy alumni loyalty, particularly for unrestricted donations. In face, tuition was very very highly prized because it was unrestricted....

All I can say is, I hope a quarter million for an undergrad is worth it to you and that it helps you land a high paying job out of the gate so you can start paying off any loans. Statistically, at around 5 to 7 years post-graduation, your much lower tuition paying state school peers will end up at job parity with you. Unless your school offers some highly specific specialty program that you can't get anywhere else. I…

Given that my calling is science, and an undergraduate degree is just a step toward your terminal Ph.D., and getting into a good program for the latter means a lot of luck if you don't have a professor who the admitting department knows recommend you and your ability to do research, yes, it would have been worth it. As long as you get a STEM degree (don't know about other departments, but then again all students have to do a serious amount of the calculus and calculus based mechanics and E&M) its generally considered to be worth the price. Ditto CalTech, and ditto the other 3 top in the world CS schools if you do that major (CMU, UC Berkeley and Stanford).

In my case, with multimillionaire parents who back in the '80s drove one vehicle with a depreciated value of 2 plus or minus years of full costs, no amount of cleverness would have helped with the financial aid office. Due to MIT's horrible money management and youth it just didn't have the money.

As for why I choose MIT, my parents attempted to set up a trap, they were sure I couldn't get into it or CalTech (I'm not a math genius, but good enough to do MIT's required level), so they said it "wasn't worth their money" to send me to any place good but those two. As it turned out, MIT was looking for people like me (ask for details if desired; one less obvious one is that they look for evidence the student can do projects, and submitted a couple of those) and I got in, not that they had any intention of paying more than they could get away with (a saving face sort of thing).

The later experiences of my younger siblings showed that it wouldn't have mattered where I went, except that I probably could have worked my way through the very cheapest possible place, but that was so down market getting into a good grad school would have been iffy. In my field of chemistry, the only none required by the subject accrediting organization courses they offered were analytical lab ones clearly intended for student for whom the undergraduate degree was terminal, for a lab tech career.

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#253

Post by hga » Thu, Aug 08, 2013, 2:47 PM UTC

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #236

Daniel_Newby wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The system assumes good will on the part of parents, and pretty much has to, to avoid free riders. That's the second time I have read this lie in this thread. Firstly, state governments are bound by the equal protection clause to ignore the assets of relatives (and all similar irrelevancies). They do just fine not soaking people for their ancestors wealth. Secondly, university costs are in a financial bubble, for t…

The equal protection clause is of no use to nineteen year-olds whose assets measure in the hundreds of dollars. What's your suggestion to the student who is wronged by the Fin Aid office? Hire a lawyer and sue? Ridiculous. >Secondly, ... Thirdly, ... Fourthly, ... What are you even responding to? None of your retorts are responsive to hga's or any of the other parent comments.

Well, the 2nd is responsive even if the author doesn't know it. MIT is a genuinely expensive place: the last time I knew the numbers, it spent about half your tuition on you in your freshman year and quite a bit more on average for the 3 remaining years. STEM subjects are expensive, all have lab work, and one of the reasons MIT is MIT is that with the rare exception that proves the rule, all courses are taught by tenure track or tenured professors.

You can't get tenure without being an adequate teacher and the vast, vast majority I knew really cared about teaching undergraduates. The school also constantly makes sure the professors are doing an adequate job (I once both read all the student evaluations for a disaster (only one was not negative and she was a special case), and then overheard the department head tell the professor, who's name you probably know, that he'd never be allowed to teach that particular course again), and e.g. has no hesitation about taking a course away from a professor who violates the rules like what can be asked for at the end of the term.

MIT is also in a very expensive location, the cost of living is very high. That's also true for many of the Ivies, Harvard up chuck river from it, Columbia in NYC, Princeton in NJ, etc.

3rd doesn't apply so much to MIT, although, yeah, it has too large a bureaucracy like pretty much every other institution of higher education. Just not one grossly out of wack with the rest of the school.

4th, no, MIT's independence is unquestionably one reason it's so good and continues to be. Go to 100% government spending and it would regress to the mean as government bureaucrats enforces their own irrelevant fantasies on it (even more than they do now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grove_City_College_v._Bell).

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#254

Post by hga » Thu, Aug 08, 2013, 2:55 PM UTC

slajax wrote: post #196

"And then it will hit you. You spent 150k on an education you could have gotten for $1.50 in late fees at the public library" - Good Will Hunting

Limited application to STEM subjects. Yeah, CS and EE can finagle that nowadays (wasn't true for CS when I might have gone that route in the early '80s), but the sciences require lab work that you generally aren't going to be able to do, let alone afford, anywhere else but a school. And there are serious safety issues as well, plus the minor detail for them that an undergraduate degree is just a requirement to get your (paid for) terminal Ph.D., unless you're willing to end up being a lab tech.

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#255

Post by danielweber » Thu, Aug 08, 2013, 3:05 PM UTC

ohazi wrote: post #104

muzz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Retirement accounts don't affect financial aid, they are not even asked for on the FAFSA. Only if they had savings in a non-retirement account-- where they could use it for things other than retirement-- it would affect your financial aid.

This annoys the hell out of me. "Retirement account" here is a tax deferred account like a 401k or an IRA, right? There are limits to how much you can put into accounts like these, and in today's world it can be difficult to adequately fund a comfortable retirement on these savings alone. If you make a modest income but are careful about your spending, it's not unreasonable to have leftover after-tax money that you c…

It is a tax on savings. What's the alternative, not go to college? Ha!

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#256

Post by frogpelt » Thu, Aug 08, 2013, 3:42 PM UTC

wjk wrote: post #206

frogpelt wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people not understand that many people are poor not because they were born into something less than a utopia but because they are lazy or happy that way or they make bad decisions or are just plain ignorant? Have you once stopped to consider that there may not be anything close to a perfect system for lifting people out of poverty? Perhaps a system that provides possibility that requires loads of effort to tak…

In a lot of first world countries people get PAID to go to university. Expecting 17-18 year old's who finished high school to have tens of thousands of dollars to be able to go to good universities is beyond stupid.

You should read this book: http://www.amazon.com/Debt-Free-Outstanding-Education-Schola...

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#257

Post by digikata » Thu, Aug 08, 2013, 3:58 PM UTC

aestra wrote: post #247

digikata wrote: post #36

I paid my way through the latter grades of college thanks to a somewhat devious manager at my first summer internship. That manager transitioned me to a part-time employee at the end of the internship period after the school year started. In the latter two years of college I was a full time employee while going to school. Now, I took five years to graduate a four year degree, but since I was cashflow positive (yay lo…

Tuition is a magnitude higher now than it was in the 90's.

At Cal state in the 90's I was paying ~$4000 a quarter, now [1] it seems to be $6000-7000. It's not ideal, but not an order of magnitude either.

Today, the gap is undeniably tighter between college expenses vs living wages at available jobs. If you're sending yourself through college, working or with a loan or some mix, it seems like a career ROI calc and a budget/cashflow calc for during college is in order. You also might have some hard choices in deciding not to pay a premium for prestige, and look for a solid education at a discount at a less prestigious, but still perfectly functional college.

[1] http://www.calstate.edu/budget/student-fees/fee-rates/Tuitio...

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#258

Post by superuser2 » Thu, Aug 08, 2013, 4:09 PM UTC

bradleyjg wrote: post #178

superuser2 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. If your parents are wealthy and don't want to help you, you are most definitely not going to a high-end school, not even a state flagship. At that point community college is the only reasonable option (because it's actually possible to earn enough without the degree to cover the cost). You couldn't really have it any other way without drastically altering the structure of higher education: the alternative is tha…

The financial aid system shouldn't be pre hoc means tested, it should be post hoc means tested. 18 years old is old enough to vote, marry, and enlist in the military. The government ought not to be looking at parents to foot the bills for legal adults. Something like the Harvard Law School debt repayment program: http://www.law.harvard.edu/current/sfs/lipp/participant-cont... If a given college is worried that such a…

Students do not have anything close to enough money to cover the actual cost of their education before earning it.

The value of an education I can pay for by mowing lawns is going to be lower because that necessitates zero research, extremely poor student:faculty ratios, etc.

The solution, to me, is to drastically increase government's share of the burden. But try introducing that in Congress.

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#259

Post by bradleyjg » Thu, Aug 08, 2013, 4:15 PM UTC

superuser2 wrote: post #258

bradleyjg wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The financial aid system shouldn't be pre hoc means tested, it should be post hoc means tested. 18 years old is old enough to vote, marry, and enlist in the military. The government ought not to be looking at parents to foot the bills for legal adults. Something like the Harvard Law School debt repayment program: http://www.law.harvard.edu/current/sfs/lipp/participant-cont... If a given college is worried that such a…

Students do not have anything close to enough money to cover the actual cost of their education before earning it. The value of an education I can pay for by mowing lawns is going to be lower because that necessitates zero research, extremely poor student:faculty ratios, etc. The solution, to me, is to drastically increase government's share of the burden. But try introducing that in Congress.

The schools should lend students their education. They are in the best position to underwrite such loans, and such a system would eliminate the current perverse incentives the schools face.

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#260

Post by tedmiston » Thu, Aug 08, 2013, 5:37 PM UTC

fixxer wrote: post #169

tedmiston wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen others make a comparable choice for the same reason of independence and also for getting out of workplace politics. I'm completing a GRA now, though not self-directed and only for a Master's. Though the stipend is… humble, without it, I wouldn't even have gone to grad school.

Had I known how much bullshit graduate school involved, I might have stuck it out in finance. Might.

Something specific? Overall, I was surprised to find out how political journal publications are. Before I started, I kinda naively assumed that the best ideas are pushed to the top "because science".