51–60 of 74 posts
Multiple residency? Is the author out of their minds? People cannot even afford residency for a 4 year university, now they want people to pay for high school residency?
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We're arguing exactly the design that you seem to be espousing. Taking into account cost, immaturity due to biological constraints at age 18-22 and rampant party culture, college is a particularily bad place to "find yourself". Young adults should be exposed to a wide diversity in age and demographics, not locked into a small area with a largely homogeneous group of individuals to "grow up". All of this was touched u…
> rampant party culture This greatly depends on the particular university. I really doubt there's much of a party at places like Cal Poly, Georgia Tech, or MIT when you compare them to FSU or a place like the University of Arizona.
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Weak earnings prospects? Unemployment among people with a bachelors degree was under 4% last year. It was over 7% for people without one. http://www.businessinsider.com/college-vs-no-college-unemplo... Edit: Obama's pay-as-you-earn program puts an upper limit on how harsh the debt load can get.
You seem to be confusing employment and earnings. Just because you're employed doesn't mean that your earnings prospects are good. Many college graduates are employed but underemployed, and many others have low-paying jobs that don't even require a college education. As for pay-as-you-earn, which I believe requires a high debt-to-income ratio (a red flag to begin with), you need to do the actual math. Even with forgi…
As for your other points, going to college is still generally profitable. http://www.npr.org/2014/02/11/275297408/going-to-college-may...
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> 'club-med'ing their dorms and such, No kidding. My university in the early 2000's started jacking up tuition every year by crazy amounts. And at the same time started building boutique cafes, little gazebos, parks, a new sports center with a large inside heated pool and a lazy river snaking its away around its perimeter. All at the same time as some colleges didn't have enough money for to print tests to professors…
So you were a jerk to a volunteer or student calling you to ask for a donation. Kudos. In all seriousness, I think most college administrators take their job seriously, and on the whole are not going to raise tuition $10k/year so they can add a gazebo or a river to campus. I think it's just an unintended consequence of not being forced to react to market stimulus. In a free market, a college that raised its tuition h…
Thanks for Kudos, I am quite proud of saving time and hasle in the future. But why did you asume I was a jerk?
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You seem to be confusing employment and earnings. Just because you're employed doesn't mean that your earnings prospects are good. Many college graduates are employed but underemployed, and many others have low-paying jobs that don't even require a college education. As for pay-as-you-earn, which I believe requires a high debt-to-income ratio (a red flag to begin with), you need to do the actual math. Even with forgi…
My point about employment is that if you're not employed, you have no earnings. Not everyone who goes to college should take the pay-as-you-earn route, but it does put a ceiling on the total amount a person can owe after college, which is a darn sight better than the situation before where that number was effectively unbounded. As for your other points, going to college is still generally profitable. http://www.npr.o…
Per the article you provided, "Those with a college degree now make $17,500 more per year than those without." I don't doubt that this is accurate. But here's the problem: not thinking through your decisions and banking on the assumption that you'll have an average outcome based on statistics is a great way to mess up your life.
There are plenty of people in tech who don't have four-year degrees who make multiples more than the median wage of college graduates of a similar age. And lest you resort to the "tech is an exception" argument, there are plenty of professions, from sales to construction to plumbing, in which you can easily find folks without four-year degrees making very good money.
In today's economy, anyone going to college without purpose and a plan expecting to earn $17,500 more per year "because statistics" is at risk of experiencing a rude awakening, particularly when debt is used to finance an education that will offer a piece of paper and little in the way of practical skills.
"Adult Education" has this nagging stigma associated with it (though, thankfully, that's changing due to MOOCs and such). But still -- even when the major universities offer it, it's seen with a skewed tilt by much of the rest of the world. Ask anyone who graduated from Harvard (undergrad), HBS, HLS, etc. about the Harvard Extension School and you'll get the eye-roll I'm talking about. I think in cases like this it's…
No you're not. My background is biochemistry (UK degree), biomedical image processing (UK PhD) and web development (self-taught). After a decade of academic research in medical imaging, I'm now moving more towards pure tech. I'd love to go back to uni, say full time for 6-12 months, either in the US or UK, and rigorously study the fundamentals of Computer Science, however I haven't found a mechanism that really works…
Cynicism alert. The purpose of widespread college education is socioeconomic. People simply wouldn't throw so much money and time after this game (starting, in some places, with preschool admissions, and often totaling near the half-million mark) if it weren't. The leaders of our society don't value culture or education that much; they do value tradition, pedigree, and position. Our colleges actually do a pretty good…
I could be very wrong here. I'd like to hear from HN'ers in other countries to either support or correct my opinion.
I think this idea of morally derailing in college is uniquely American. Do other countries have the equivalent of Spring Break and the idea of leaving your family to go to college and choose (not all, some) to engage in drugs, sex and levels of depravity? Or is college/university in other cultures a serious learning environment?
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Fully fledged citizen and adult are two concepts that deserve a distinction: http://hrweb.mit.edu/worklife/youngadult/brain.html Most 18 year olds are nowhere near mature enough to take college education as seriously as it deserves to be taken.
>Most 18 year olds are nowhere near mature enough to take college education as seriously as it deserves to be taken. But they're mature enough to kill for and be killed for the national military (sometimes against their will), contribute to governmental policy decisions, and have children? Just because their brains are still plastic doesn't preclude them from making good (or at least reasonable) decisions.
Cynicism alert. The purpose of widespread college education is socioeconomic. People simply wouldn't throw so much money and time after this game (starting, in some places, with preschool admissions, and often totaling near the half-million mark) if it weren't. The leaders of our society don't value culture or education that much; they do value tradition, pedigree, and position. Our colleges actually do a pretty good…
You over-systemize things. When congress subsidizes higher education, no one debates it primarily as needed to prevent horny male youth from revolution, but we are supposed to assume that is the subtext, and is the dominating reason really driving things? Which The Office episode is this from :-/?
Why should one assume that the actual reasons behind a policy are the same as the stated ones?
Even more, if these facts about the effects of the policy are true and important, then whether or not they comprise a large part of why anyone wants or says they want the policy isn't even that relevant.
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You over-systemize things. When congress subsidizes higher education, no one debates it primarily as needed to prevent horny male youth from revolution, but we are supposed to assume that is the subtext, and is the dominating reason really driving things? Which The Office episode is this from :-/?
I don't find it completely implausible that some people with influence in the lawmaking process (whether it be congresspeople, their advisors, or interest groups) have the historical knowledge and analytical ability to develop a perspective like Michael's. Why should one assume that the actual reasons behind a policy are the same as the stated ones? Even more, if these facts about the effects of the policy are true a…
You also shouldn't assume that the reasons that some random guy on the Internet gives for the policy are the real ones.
This is the big problem with believing in conspiracy theories: yes, you are being lied to by people in power. You are also being lied to by people not in power. They are being lied to by the people whose actions they use to build the theories that they espouse to everyone else.
Eventually, you realize that the only course of action that keeps you sane is to realize that society is built upon lies and misdirection, and it doesn't matter. We make the best inferences we can with the data we have available to us. And if we're wrong - well, so is everybody else, so the goal is just to be a bit less wrong than everyone else. Usually you get there by discounting everyone else's analyses and listening to their data and personal experiences only.