Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It’s impossible to work your way through college nowadays

randalolson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 205 posts

Re: It’s impossible to work your way through college nowadays

#181

Post by Nrsolis »

smm2000 wrote: post #135
Fomite wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of people have no aspiration towards being an academic administrator, and academic administrators aren't exactly a powerful voting block.

But disabled veterans are a voting block and they vote themselves extra services on campus and those services come with administrator. Repeat this process with every disadvantaged group and you have tremendous bloat.

You could make the argument that disabled veterans are the MOST important voting block and with good reason.

Please refrain from reducing veterans to a political action committee. They deserve much more than they currently get under our system. Try and get through the red tape at the VA and then tell me how you feel about the outsize effect that the veterans are having on the benefits debate.

Re: It’s impossible to work your way through college nowadays

#182

Post by xerophtye »

traviscj wrote: post #94
theorique wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have to ask ourselves why college is so expensive. It's certainly not due to inflation in quality of education. More and more classes are taught by graduate students and adjuncts rather than actual professors (who are mostly focused on their research programs in order to earn tenure). There are probably a few factors. - increased student expectations of 'fun', leading to new facilities (dorms, student centers, etc…

> It's certainly not due to inflation in quality of education. More and more classes are taught by graduate students and adjuncts rather than actual professors (who are mostly focused on their research programs in order to earn tenure). UGH! These kind of comments make me so angry. Sure, lots of graduate students are sub par due to inexperience or distraction or pure, simple busy-ness, but lots and lots of professors…

No one is saying that it is bad to have TAs than professors. But the default assumption is that if a college increases tuition fees, then they are probably hiring better professors. But if you increase fees and hire lowly paid TAs, then that is certainly not fair is it? (or atleast increase TA's salary!)

PS: I actually hated most of my TAs and loved the courses where the professor didn't use a TA and was involved in teaching, himself.

Re: It’s impossible to work your way through college nowadays

#183

Post by vacri »

macshaggy wrote: post #15

Forget minimum wage. I work a full time way above minimum wage and two things make it hard for me at school. a) tuition is a beast but at least my job as some reimbursement – though it pays for a semester 6 hours. b) the school barely has any classes geared towards someone who works. I know I could have gone to school at a technical school I did that years ago and I don’t recommend it. I went back over 5 years ago an…

the school barely has any classes geared towards someone who works.

Reminds me of my time hitting the books. We complained about our schedules that had huge gaps in them, like a one-hour lecture in the morning, then four or five hours later, another lecture in the afternoon. Why couldn't they be scheduled more closely?

The response was "You are full-time students. You are expected to be free from 8 to 5"

So we replied "Why then is our main lecture set assigned for 7pm? That's outside this 8 to 5 timeframe" (evening was popular with part timers)

The response was... crickets. There weren't many contact hours - 20-25/week - but they were somewhat hostile to people being able to work at the same time.

Re: It’s impossible to work your way through college nowadays

#184

Post by MisterBastahrd »

davidf18 wrote: post #127

In years past, states contributed a much larger proportion of public school budgets than they do today. Much of that money now goes towards Medicaid. Much of that Medicaid money does not go towards the poor but rather middle class who go to nursing homes. They spend down their assets and transfer them to their children. Hence, at least partially because of the middle class not buying nursing home insurance, the publi…

Seems to me that states which are cutting education the most are doing it out of a slavish determination to balance their state budgets at all costs to score national political points. Here in Louisiana, Bobby Jindal has given away what would have been billions of tax dollars to private industry with little to show for it, cut income and corporate taxes, slashed medical spending for the poor and indigent, and raided medical funds which were supposed to last decades all in order to fuel his idiotic political agenda.

Universities have had to close entire departments in order to make ends meet, and some regional schools have even contemplated the idea of becoming junior colleges. This is at a time when the state was largely shielded from the larger national economic downturn because of the economic boom that happened during the recovery from Katrina. He will go down as the worst governor in at least the last half century, which is quite a feat, given that Kathleen Blanco and Edwin Edwards occupied the governor's mansion for nearly half that time.

Re: It’s impossible to work your way through college nowadays

#185

Post by xerophtye »

bsder wrote: post #117
HarryHirsch wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's popular here to blame the growth of administrative and non-teaching staff on a self-serving bureacracy, but I don't think that's the case, it is due to circumstances. The size of IT infrastructure has grown immensely compared to 30 years back, so you need people to take care of that. My department has four IT support people, and they carry a full workload. The amount of foreign students has grown, consequently y…

> The amount of foreign students has grown, consequently you need people to keep track of immigration requirements that seem to get worse each passing year, and you also need cultural programs, you can't expect people from non-western countries to be thrown into an alien culture and succeed. Um, most of the reason foreign student enrollment has grown is because foreign students pay cash . Adding bureaucracy to manage…

Not to mention colleges usually charge foreign students DOUBLE, even when they are from third world countries.... So if foreign students extra cost, it must already get covered by what they pay extra

Re: It’s impossible to work your way through college nowadays

#186

Post by xerophtye »

mbesto wrote: post #142
jdreaver wrote: post #17

We have to ask ourselves why college is so expensive. When some people read articles like this, they call for more government aid to students. "We need to help young, hard working students from unprivileged backgrounds to pay for college!" Their hearts are certainly in the right place, and it isn't an unreasonable idea at first glance. However, could this idea be part of the problem? Maybe giving people free money fo…

> We have to ask ourselves why college is so expensive. I think there is a more simplistic answer to this question. 1. Obama said everyone should go to college. (demand increases) 2. Supply is scarce (we don't have enough good teachers, so people are battling to go to the best university however way - money - possible) 3. If demand increases, and supplies decrease, it means price elasticity expands (prices go up) 4.…

> So let's all go back to the beginning now and ask ourselves "Why does everyone need to go to college?" I think that's the real question to be answered here.

Nope.

Everyone should be able to get a college education without having to pay exorbitant prices. The solution isn't to tell people not to go to college. It's to make college education cheaper, and NOT by student loans etc. That just equates to free money/easy credit and thus lets colleges inflate their prices to ridiculous amounts.

Its simple as this: If you are selling candy to a kid and he asks the price, u ask how much money can u get your dad to pay? If the dad is wiling to spend a LOT (like the govt and its loans) then obviously price skyrockets

Re: It’s impossible to work your way through college nowadays

#187

Post by xerophtye »

Isn't this mostly US centric? The entire conversation in here is all about why colleges are expensive in US. What do the european HNers have to say for their colleges? I hear they are mostly free but the cost-of-living in europe is usally what weighs down foreign students

Re: It’s impossible to work your way through college nowadays

#188

Post by ludston »

Nrsolis wrote: post #181
smm2000 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But disabled veterans are a voting block and they vote themselves extra services on campus and those services come with administrator. Repeat this process with every disadvantaged group and you have tremendous bloat.

You could make the argument that disabled veterans are the MOST important voting block and with good reason. Please refrain from reducing veterans to a political action committee. They deserve much more than they currently get under our system. Try and get through the red tape at the VA and then tell me how you feel about the outsize effect that the veterans are having on the benefits debate.

Is it so unreasonable to believe that non-conscripted veterans deserve exactly the same financial status as their equivalent non-veteran counterparts? (Disabled or otherwise). This argument comes from anti-nationalist, pro-equality-of-opportunity values.

Re: It’s impossible to work your way through college nowadays

#189

Post by FG_Regulus »

gmays wrote: post #54

I graduated college in California late 2005/early 2006 (winter semester). My whole degree cost somewhere around $5,000 to $6,000. We didn't have much money, so I lived at home for the duration, went to a junior/community college for 1 year, then transferred to a local state college for another 18 months to graduate in a total of about 2.5 years. During that time I only took one summer off to work full-time. During th…

Wow - my degree lands me a beautiful $8k every year (2 semesters). But it gets better.

I thought about improving myself in high school by going into early college. A free AA degree and at the same time as my HS diploma? Hell yeah! They didn't tell me that almost none of the credits would apply to my degree because 4-year degrees have almost every single course planned - so I still have 4 years to go... Oh and the feds just made a law that says if you take to long your tuition doubles. So for about the last year of my college that's $16k instead. Oh yeah, and we forgot. This state school requires every single student to take 9 credit hours in the summer - where summers aren't covered by any federal loans.

So that's a lovely $40k pile of debt on me by the time I graduate.

EDIT: Oops, included living costs, not just tuition. Living cost is about $8k-$12k a year. So the real total of debt is $72k.

Re: It’s impossible to work your way through college nowadays

#190

Post by FG_Regulus »

morgante wrote: post #155

It's certainly a troubling trend, but it's not as troubling as it seems. One huge factor is the corresponding increase in financial aid, particularly at top institutions——if you came from a poor family several decades ago, you would have had to work your way through Harvard, now you will get full aid and can even get grants for summer activities. That's honestly a huge boon to meritocracy which we should not forget a…

White kid from the lower middle-class. 4.7 high school with all honors and graduating with an AA. Had to start almsot completely over classes-wise because of the structure of the CS degree so what should have been 3 years is now 4 years at $16k a year. And $24k for the last year because of the new "if you go over X hours in your degree you pay double tuition" rule. So $72k of debt stepping out of that door. Almost all the jobs I've had offered are barely above MW, and the internships are the same or unpaid entirely (which is a scam, of course).

So good for you - you can get your house. Meanwhile the other half of us cannot work off our debt even if we worked full time and put 100% of our income into paying it off.

Post reply on HN