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

101–110 of 205 posts

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

#101

Post by jdreaver »

keeshawn wrote: post #84
jdreaver wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know anyone who gets free money for college Here you go http://studentaid.ed.gov/types/grants-scholarships

I didn't even think you were talking about grants. Are you saying grants are responsible for high tuition costs? Without grants, the gap would have to be made up in student loans. What good would that do? It would simply make students assume a higher debt burden to get the same education that society demands from them.

My whole original post is an attempt to refute what you just said.

Without grants, there wouldn't be a gap. College would cost less. Also, society "demanding" people to go to college is part of the problem.

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

#102

Post by waterlesscloud »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #29
bequanna wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It goes to inflating the administrative staffs and inflating the salaries of the highest ranked members of that staff. This. Bureaucratic bloat, no accountability and terrible efficiency. Many Universities are the largest employers in their state. Do our Universities exist to be Research and Educational institutions, or to employ armies of admin workers that push papers?

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…

Here's how to deal with many of them - Cut them.

They aren't necessary, they're nice to have.

When it comes to budgets, the nice to have things that aren't really necessary get cut.

It's not all that hard.

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

#103

Post by ronnier »

dtmooreiv wrote: post #89
ronnier wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked my way through school for both my undergraduate degree and a masters in computer science. It wasn't bad. Just have to work hard. The nice thing was, I finished up school with zero debt.

When did you do this?

I finished at the end of 2008.

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

#104

Post by jbooth »

jdreaver wrote: post #101
keeshawn wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't even think you were talking about grants. Are you saying grants are responsible for high tuition costs? Without grants, the gap would have to be made up in student loans. What good would that do? It would simply make students assume a higher debt burden to get the same education that society demands from them.

My whole original post is an attempt to refute what you just said. Without grants, there wouldn't be a gap. College would cost less. Also, society "demanding" people to go to college is part of the problem.

Gonna jump in here -- what makes you so sure it's grants rather than the way college loans work?

I haven't done the numbers but I suspect there's like 10x as much tuition coming from loans as there is from grants -- wouldn't that make grants a tiny portion of the problem?

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

#105

Post by ruswick »

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…

Although heavy subsidization is a major enabler of the problem, it is not the only factor. Affordable education is out there. The problem is that people have been conditioned to believe that cheap education is bad education.

The problem is the students have been fed the lie that more "prestigious" schools yield better outcomes. Although this might be true in an extreme minority of situations (investment banking is one example where prestige matters), for the most part, the ranking and cost of the college don't matter at all.

Everyone simply ignores selection bias and assumes that getting into the "best," most expensive school possible will improve their life. In reality, if you control for selection bias, there is no difference between the outcomes one gets from Harvard and the outcomes one gets from Suffolk. In fact, the people who make the most money out of college are community college graduates. (Obviously, this is influenced by a lot of factors, but the blanket assumption that a high-end four-year school is automatically better is clearly false.)

For some reason, no one bothers to actually evaluate the value of their education critically. Instead, everyone simply buys into the collegiate cult of prestige.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/10/who-need... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/03/community-college-g...

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

#106

Post by misterS »

> Most students take 12 credit hours per semester and only attend Fall and Spring semester. That’s 24 credit hours per year.

24 credits a year?! I am curious, is this really the norm in the US? At the universitiy I attended in mainland Europe you were excpected to do 30 credits each semester, so 60 CP a year.

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

#107

Post by coryrc »

superuser2 wrote: post #79
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…

>increased student expectations of 'fun', leading to new facilities (dorms, student centers, etc), as colleges compete with each other for students This gets cited a lot, and sometimes people actually go to the trouble of citing the cost of a new facility at $x million. Is there evidence that these facilities actually raise the cost substantially per student per year? Often when I hear people getting offended about,…

Every building has a large, recurring maintenance and services cost.

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

#108

Post by [deleted] »

jdreaver wrote: post #33
AaronFriel wrote: post #25

The solution though, isn't to stop providing money to students for college. If you don't have Pell Grants, Stafford loans and the like, lower income bracket individuals would never be able to afford college. There is a simple fact: I could not pay my way through my Midwest university education without these things. I will graduate and be in debt, but I'll be better off having done it. Certainly the experience is wort…

> I see several people putting forth the argument that people are the most efficient at allocating money for themselves. That is not true except in an Ayn Rand novel. I've never read an Ayn Rand novel, yet I still agree with that statement. I guess if you call someone an Ayn Rand supporter, that is supposed to discredit them? It's a pretty basic economic principle. If you take $10000 from your bank account, you are l…

[deleted]

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

#109

Post by Fomite »

RyanZAG wrote: post #91
glesica wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- increasingly top-heavy administration (hey, let's add another $300K Assistant Deputy VP of Student Diversity, etc) providing a path for faculty to 'advance' in their careers I'd like to point out that much of the administrative bloat has occurred because of new (bipartisan) laws forcing colleges to provide more services. There are services for veterans, services for the disabled, services for victims of crimes, ove…

" When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic. "

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

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

#110

Post by Fomite »

anigbrowl wrote: post #75
coin wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just work a government job for 10 years and the remainder of your student loan paid for by the tax payers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Service_Loan_Forgivenes...

Or a non-profit, which takes in a much wider range of jobs.

Indeed. State, Local, Tribal or Federal Governments, or 501(c)3s, IIRC.

The program has some great incentives for drawing qualified people in medicine, law, etc. into Federal jobs.

Post reply on HN