Somehow the Americans outdid themselves. Six figure debt is now the norm? Despite being completely over funded colleges still cut their important staff?
A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t
111–120 of 187 posts
Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have a scholarship, this advice may not be good. I think most scholarships expect you to start that fall; if you don't, you may lose the scholarship. (Some or all of them will accept a "gap year", but most won't accept you going to community college for two years and then trying to take the scholarship. Or at least, that's how I think it is. Your mileage may vary, so if you have a scholarship offer, check the…
I'm on the fence about how scholarships should factor into the total cost of college. I feel like there is a decent amount of scholarship money freshmen year that disappears after that. So that the student ends up with a lot of student loans debt to finish school. It's all well and good that freshmen at an expensive college will be cheaper than some alternate school. Though is it really going to be cheaper overall? I…
Good point. Is it a four-year scholarship, or a one-year scholarship, or a one-year-with-option-to-renew scholarship? If it's the last, how common is renewal? And, do you feel lucky?
Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t
#113Another twenty-year professor here. I would just like to point out that this article is articulating -- with absolutely accuracy and lucidity -- every college administrator's worst nightmare. They've all been discussing the possibility (that parents and students will make this very decision) for weeks. It might be the right decision to make, but it would be absolutely catastrophic for most schools.
In Australia many schools are additionally worried because the net effect of government interventionism on visa issuing, international arrivals and quarantine have hit the travel sector so badly that existing international students (their cash cow) have been forced to discontinue studies, and new international students are unable to arrive.
Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t
#114I'm looking at college this fall and seriously wondering about this. I'll have to spend a lot of money if I go to an "elite" school, and the point of doing that is to make connections with my peers and with professors. I don't see the point of paying that kind of money for that sort of experience. That aside, not starting college may not be a good idea, either. Does anyone with more experience have advice on this? I…
Go to college. While I have worked with engineers who didn’t attend university who were good engineers, the ones who attend university have a better, more mature approach to problem solving and learning new technologies. If you find a good computer science program, you’ll also gain a solid foundation on the underpinnings of the systems you’re working on — compiler design, CPUs, mathematics — and be worth so much more…
Different perspective here. All the best engineers I have met are self-motivated generalists. Furthermore, I have had career mathematicians beg me not to study it, on the grounds that applied forms are more efficient. (Then again, I don't tend to hang out in large organizations that engage in relative edge-case activity such as compiler design or processor design. Probably mostly because I find large organizations deeply sociopathic and unproductive.)
The best pre-university advice I received was "if you can't decide, get some life experience first, since a huge percentage of people spend four years studying something then discover they dislike or aren't motivated by, then have to start from scratch and change professions".
We should all aim to study every day at a pace, breadth and currency that is unsupported formally. Set aside time to learn every day, and you will always be wise. You are perhaps most successful if you learn throughout most of the day.
The real job of upper management in the 20th and 21st century is to learn things, because change is the constant thing that's going on. - Alan Kay (2017)
Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t
#115Here's my take: if you get into a top engineering/CS program, you should still go.
Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t
#116Another twenty-year professor here. I would just like to point out that this article is articulating -- with absolutely accuracy and lucidity -- every college administrator's worst nightmare. They've all been discussing the possibility (that parents and students will make this very decision) for weeks. It might be the right decision to make, but it would be absolutely catastrophic for most schools.
Where is the money going ?
Honest question here. Are professor really well payed?
Facilities cannot cost that much.
Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some people take community college level courses at university, payit inflated prices for the false prestige of a mid tier school like American University. That's a waste. If you start University at a level above community college (which many people here did), and get a decent price, it's good.
If you can do both at the same time, or get basic classes out of the way in the summer at a community college, then it may be ok. But delaying electives for two years would put you at a significant disadvantage in technical fields, imo. Not to mention the basic classes (math, physics, etc) will be a joke at a community college so you will have a weaker background.
The basic classes had good teachers and content at the CC I went to, on the same level as the university.
Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
The open source community serves as an ad hoc application of the apprenticeship / guild concept. I have some friends who don't have college degrees but have been hired due to their demonstrable and attested technical skill in serious FOSS projects
Wouldn't working on FOSS projects be closer to an internship rather than apprenticeship? Are they really being mentored and taught while working on the FOSS projects?
Yes it would be more akin to an internship rather than an apprenticeship. Also, contributing to open-source is not a learning experience like an apprenticeship can be. You cannot contribute to FOSS without a minimal skill level. Whereas, you can enter an apprenticeship from scratch.
Whether or not you agree with apprenticeship systems being good or bad, it is clear that the GP comment on FOSS being a replacement for an apprenticeship system is wrong.
Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t
#119Another twenty-year professor here. I would just like to point out that this article is articulating -- with absolutely accuracy and lucidity -- every college administrator's worst nightmare. They've all been discussing the possibility (that parents and students will make this very decision) for weeks. It might be the right decision to make, but it would be absolutely catastrophic for most schools.
Universities would seem uniquely capable of just going into hibernation for a while. They do it every summer, after all. That tradition is even because of infectious disease risk!
What does it really cost to park a campus in "summer mode" a while longer?
Re: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 2) If you are studying a technical field, even if you are average, a degree has greater ROI than just about anything else. You can pay off your debt in the first few years out of school and continue earning dividends for the rest of your life. What's the downside to going to a community college? Where I grew up the credits were transferable. They did say, "Most people spend the first two years figuring stuff out".…
The downside is that you basically won't get into Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale... or most any other "top" college after going to community college. I know of one counter example, and I know of many very smart capable people who would have been capable and profited from such a degree, but missed their chance... which in turn made it VERY difficult to get any advanced degree. Maybe that doesn't matter in CS/programming…
> get into Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale
Based on everything I've seen over my roughly 20-year career in academia, plus the 18 years before that living in that world (my parents are both professors), what you get from going to Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale, and all the other "Big Name" schools is just that: the name.
The education you get there is not better than the education you can get at a small liberal arts college—in fact, it's often worse, because you're just one of tens of thousands, lost in the crowd, and you're extremely unlikely to get one-on-one attention from the professor if you have any trouble with the material.
Small liberal-arts colleges, on the other hand, so long as you're avoiding the ones that are specifically party schools, generally tend to focus much more on the teaching aspect, and especially on the personal attention aspect.
For more specialized degrees like engineering you may need to narrow your pool of those schools to find one that has a good program, but there are enough that unless your field (at undergrad level) is suuuuper-niche, you're very likely to be able to find one that works for you.
And while it's not universally true, they tend to be pretty good about taking transfer students.