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

Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 848 posts

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#241

Post by jackcosgrove »

mywittyname wrote: post #93
nimbius wrote: post #64

Disclosure: i never went to college, I went to a trade school. Colleges really only started scaring the heck out of me when I started enjoying my career. After spending a day wrenching in a garage, we'd hit miller time and head down to the Soapbox Bar and Grill. Over the span of a month or two ordering buckets and shooting pool I learned our bartender Javon had a masters in biology and his fiancee Cortisha who bussed…

It's hard to pick an economically viable major. There are lots of difficult fields to study that just don't pay well due to competition. People tend to think Science = STEM = Guaranteed Job, but that is not the case. Lots of sciences don't make much money, especially the ones driven by passion. Others are highly geographically dependent, so mining engineers might have a median salary of $80k after five years, but 80%…

Colleges should not even offer loans for non-viable majors.

Picking a major should not be like Indiana Jones picking which grail to drink from.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#242

Post by battery_cowboy »

cousin_it wrote: post #183
ryeights wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How else do you propose companies should assess new hires, especially young ones? And while the cost of tuition these days (IMO) outstrips the value of a college education, that’s not to say that value is zero.

The question is rather, how do you think degrees help assess new hires? 1) Programming skills? These are easy to assess with programming exercises. If someone has a degree but can't solve a programming exercise, I won't hire them. 2) Interpersonal skills? But a tech degree doesn't certify those, you need to assess them the hard way anyway. 3) Culture fit? But if you use degrees for that, it's simple discrimination, "…

> Culture fit shouldn't be assessed.

I can't agree with this, you need to work well with the people you see every day.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#243

Post by evolve2k »

jedberg wrote: post #210
Swizec wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s a lifehack: Attend college in Europe then move to USA for that high paying job. Works really well. Cheap to free education, better skills because you’re not just living the college life and professors have little incentive to make it easy. It’s great. Hell you don’t even have to fully graduate to get most of the benefit.

Aren't European colleges the same price as American colleges if you're not European?

Germany for example offers free education for Americans/foreigners. I remember this was discussed a while back on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9308261

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#244

Post by briandear »

tharne wrote: post #153
gwd wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He had some massive college bills too and i didnt understand how those worked, but you cant get rid of them like you can a car loan. This is the thing that is really the most shameful and outrageous thing about the US system. Our entire K-12 educational system and our culture is set up to paint a college degree as a ticket to "the good life". Then an 18-year-old, potentially with parents who aren't great at math bu…

> There's a reason many ancient religions forbid loaning money at interest entirely; It's sad that most cultures understood the danger and fragility that debt brings, and yet we've all somehow how forgotten it. We even have terms like "good debt".

Good debt is also known as leverage. It’s essential in the real estate business. Incurring a debt for a depreciating asset is dumb (cars, boats,) but for an asset that appreciates, it actually is good.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#245

Post by zarkov99 »

MattGaiser wrote: post #217
zarkov99 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some money maybe, but "the money"? Korean and Chinese families are paying 250K per kid in test prep?

It wouldn't be 250K USD due to lower incomes, but the average South Korean family spent 20% of their income on test prep and private tutoring back in 2011. Anecdotally, a friend in China is talking about his future with his girlfriend and they are looking at around that figure as well if they have kids. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/s-korea-tries-to-wrest-... http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,917…

Its a lot more than I expected. Thanks for pointing this out.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#246

Post by wegs »

elliekelly wrote: post #158
brownbat wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, I thought so too. This always made me so angry. Last time I posted a rant about that here someone urged me to read the REPAYE Act, and it completely changed my mind. Under REPAYE, students get income based repayment, even down to $0 payments if you're anywhere near poverty level. After a certain number of years o…

This program only applies to federal student loans. Anyone with private student loans (before ~2010 IIRC) is SOL.

I went to MIT. MIT is corrupt as !@#$. The amount of money flowing into private pockets at the higher levels is insane. Corrupt isn't the same is criminal -- most of the activity goes through networks of lawyers and loop holes (although criminal activity happens too).

My opinion is that to be eligible for federal financial aid, there ought to be some cap on tuition+expenses at a level students can afford. Subsidizing $200k tuition makes no sense to me. Either students are already very rich, or they'll end up with a painful amount of debt.

I'd much rather have an MIT with old, rundown buildings, low-paid professors, few administrators, and a focus on science and learning (rather than a focus on $300 million buildings, yachts, fancy faculty dining clubs, and increasingly creative ways to funnel money into people's pockets).

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#247

Post by danbolt »

0d9eooo wrote: post #165
twomoretime wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are lots of difficult fields to study that just don't pay well due to competition That may be the case, but speaking as a recent young person, the vast majority of college students I met did no actual research regarding the employability of their majors. It's also a disservice to group soft and hard sciences together under STEM - because you end up with millions of children who can't hack it in math, but they…

It's more complicated, and a deeper problem than that. For example, I'm one of those former psych majors, and though those majors are full of people who aren't good at math, there's also a lot of them who know more computer science and math than some of the comp sci majors I've worked with. In fact, a common problem for psych majors and other students is to take the first couple of psych courses, think it's a breeze,…

Reading your comment really affected me just now. I work in the video games industry, and since entry-level positions are quite competitive (video games are quite popular with younger folks), people make a lot of decisions to take a focused, employer-attractive, career path to be hired. Firms will often hire aspiring designers that have worked doing QA for a few years as well as programmers that have spent a lot of time intentionally studying C++ and rendering.

I appreciate the effort and enthusiasm my coworkers have, but sometimes I feel like the expertise in the industry is too overspecialized. Perhaps it's a product of larger-budget games being more conservative by financial/organizational necessity, but I'd appreciate if the people working there were more well-rounded. I would love more game designers to have a liberal-arts background to inject into their ideas.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#248

Post by burntoutfire »

bradstewart wrote: post #235
wutbrodo wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in AV development, and the number of refugees from the hard sciences is astonishing. I guess I don't blame them, but it's weird to have a physics PhD report to you and be able to use only a fraction of the skills she spent a decade and hundreds of thousands of dollars gaining. This isn't quite a complaint: adopting math and physics PhDs (first as a mentor and now as a TLM) that are seemingly unproductive has b…

"AV" being audio/visual, anti-virus, else?

Air conditioning, Ventilation perhaps?

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#249

Post by cableshaft »

nostrademons wrote: post #196
cableshaft wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colleges should be shaking in their boots for the next generation, because there's going to be a whole generation of parents that suffered terrible college debt they couldn't pay off and will likely be telling their children it's just not worth it (as opposed to the previous generation that had cheap college and a great economy and pressured all their children to go for that 'guaranteed better life'). I made it throu…

Also a generation of potential parents who won't be having kids because they can't afford to, largely because of student loan and housing costs. That's already hitting - the incoming class of 2023 (matriculating 2019) is the first cohort born since 9/11, and is tiny. A number of colleges are facing bankruptcy because there just aren't enough students to go around. And it'll only get worse. Birth rates were depressed…

I didn't mention that, but you're right. I also have been putting off having children (and the pandemic didn't help that at all) until my finances are in better shape, and I'm sure there are a lot of people in worse positions than I am.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#250

Post by HarryHirsch »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #155
gwd wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He had some massive college bills too and i didnt understand how those worked, but you cant get rid of them like you can a car loan. This is the thing that is really the most shameful and outrageous thing about the US system. Our entire K-12 educational system and our culture is set up to paint a college degree as a ticket to "the good life". Then an 18-year-old, potentially with parents who aren't great at math bu…

> Then an 18-year-old, potentially with parents who aren't great at math but have great aspirations for their child, is sat down and asked to sign a load of papers, not realizing that this will lock them into decades of unforgiveable debt and wage slavery. Well yeah, because us "adults" don't wanna pay the state and local taxes necessary to keep public universities affordable.

Why is this downvoted? In the European nations (with the notable exception of Britain), university is free or nearly so.
Post reply on HN