I cannot afford to go back to engineering school • Hacker News Board

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#241

Post by hef19898 » Thu, Aug 08, 2013, 1:16 PM UTC

NamTaf wrote: post #101

The US university loan system is fucked. We have a government-run loan scheme called HECS. You defer your university fees throughout the duration of your studies, apparently no matter how long they last. The programme is not means tested at all, so it is available for every single domestic student studying uni here, no matter what. That loan is then paid back only once you start earning more than a threshold amount o…

One of my friends back at university had his satae allowance reduced after his father retired and earned less than before. The reason was that now he fell into a higher category of a lower income bracket instead of the lower one of the higher bracket. Nice logic.

Another one had to fight off fraud charges after she declared a bank account her grandmother had created in her name over a decade ago she didn't know about before. That, and she lost a huge chunk of the allowance, too.

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#242

Post by stefantalpalaru » Thu, Aug 08, 2013, 1:20 PM UTC

lotso wrote: post #132

susi22 wrote: post #114

I consider myself very lucky. I did my undergrad and never struggled with money. My parent never supported me with a dime since they didn't have much. I didn't have any scholarships. I saved up some money from high school and used that for the first year of college, then started working as an co-op. How did I do it? I went to school in Germany. That's also where I'm from. Back then there was no tuition and I only pai…

Students of America do protest. Here are a couple of examples. UC Student Protests http://www.google.com/#bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&fp=7608e52397923e7c... Cooper Union Protests http://www.google.com/#bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&fp=7608e52397923e7c... CUNY Protests http://www.google.com/#bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&fp=7608e52397923e7c... Rutgers Protests http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&tab=ww#bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&f...

Don't forget Kent State University, 1970: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#243

Post by m_ke » Thu, Aug 08, 2013, 1:25 PM UTC

Tell me about it. I just got my financial package last week and my aid went from 46k to 2k, so I'll have to take out over $50,000 to pay for one year of tuition.

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#244

Post by hga » Thu, Aug 08, 2013, 1:36 PM UTC

graycat wrote: post #207

e2e4 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And from the famous Ivy League schools, it's generally easier to get accepted for a Ph.D. than for a Bachelors. Since in many cases PhD is basically free, it is by far more competitive than Bachelors.

Getting into Harvard, Princeton, or Yale as an undergraduate is just super tough . A sufficient condition is to give the university, say, $10 million and be sometimes awake. Having a parent who went can help but not necessarily enough. Being a straight A student with 800s on the SATs is not sufficient. I never got anywhere trying to get into Princeton as an undergraduate, with average SAT scores over 700, but did get…

Getting into an Ivy as an undergraduate is very tough if you aren't a potential legacy admit, that is, a child of an alum. Once all those slots are filled, there aren't all that many left over.

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#245

Post by aestra » Thu, Aug 08, 2013, 1:45 PM UTC

ryanlchan wrote: post #135

noonespecial wrote: post #50

There should be a way for companies to invest in promising interns, paying some of their tuition costs in exchange for a certain number of years employment with the company afterwards. While this wouldn't work for many fields, it would certainly help in cases like this (and tech in general). It would seem that with as much as companies pay for head-hunters and recruiters (and how much they whine about the lack of qua…

This is actually one of the tuition options that the US armed forces offers students: we pay for your schooling, and you serve in the military for an equal number of years. It's also quite common for your company to pay for business school for a promising employee as well.

In ROTC programs, you also get military training while in school. They just don't pay for your tuition, it's an entire program, done with other recruits.

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#246

Post by agentultra » Thu, Aug 08, 2013, 1:49 PM UTC

gems wrote: post #172

graycat wrote: post #155

Point 1: Likely what you want to learn you can learn well without going back to school. Indeed, at a high end research university, it is in effect or explicitly assumed that you can teach yourself. If you are in software, then likely you are heavily self-taught. Well, being self-taught in nearly all parts of academic engineering is easier than in practical software if only because in nearly all of academic engineerin…

You spent a significant chunk of your post suggesting self study. For something like math, this is really really really unrealistic. Most pure math textbooks don't have simple problems you can just check in the back. They're multistep proofs that can be done in a number of different ways. Oh, and you encounter plenty of material where you can easily trick yourself into thinking that you really understand it when you…

I think it is very reasonable.

There is plenty of free access to materials and papers.

It's incredibly cheap and fast to communicate with pretty much anyone in the world.

All that is really required is motivation, discipline, and curiosity.

When there wasn't cheap access to global communication networks and near-zero cost to duplicating data then it made sense to go to university because that was where everyone who you would be interested in talking to would be. That's where the libraries and books were. I don't think that is the only option anymore. And that's a good thing.

You can learn anything you want on your own and still have all of the benefits of a college (access to knowledgeable people, peer review, etc).

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#247

Post by aestra » Thu, Aug 08, 2013, 1:52 PM UTC

digikata wrote: post #36

I paid my way through the latter grades of college thanks to a somewhat devious manager at my first summer internship. That manager transitioned me to a part-time employee at the end of the internship period after the school year started. In the latter two years of college I was a full time employee while going to school. Now, I took five years to graduate a four year degree, but since I was cashflow positive (yay lo…

Tuition is a magnitude higher now than it was in the 90's.

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#248

Post by aestra » Thu, Aug 08, 2013, 1:56 PM UTC

Glyptodon wrote: post #19

It's lame when a distant internship won't provide rent, but also possibly this person is going a too expensive school? It sounds like between the two internships combined they'd have made around $30k total, no? If so, that seems like just barely enough to cover living expenses and a year at a public university with $4 to $7k in tuition and fees a semester. Though it would be lame to have to spend 9 months off school…

When I was applying for school (which was a while ago) public schools were actually getting hard to get into, because they were cheaper and college was becoming a popular thing, everyone was going, even people who it would be a waste of time for. All the psychology, art history, and undeclared majors were flocking there. I found a private school that was not much more expensive.

It is seriously not realistic that everyone go to public school. Also, public school funding is being cut, and students are being asked to pay bigger part of the tuition. Also, public school prices vary a lot by state.

Private universities might have a bigger sticker price, but there's more room for leeway. There's need based grants that can be given out by the school itself, for example (I got them from mine). I don't know if public schools can do this.

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#249

Post by hga » Thu, Aug 08, 2013, 2:01 PM UTC

gaadd33 wrote: post #186

hga wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My school is exceptionally expensive, almost $60K last academic year, and had been historically very bad with their endowment and earning money from inventions, and was one of the post-Civil war ones so didn't it have centuries of compounding donations. Iffy alumni loyalty, particularly for unrestricted donations. In face, tuition was very very highly prized because it was unrestricted....

Wow I didn't think MIT was that badly managed.

It was:

Prior to a fairly recent overhaul, the technology licencing office (rough quote from memory from Tech Talk, the Institute's official newsletter): "focused on the details of licencing vs. doing a lot of licences" and averaged a little over 1 per year (!!!). Given that I know 3 of those, the LMI Lisp Machine licenses and the same plus Macsyma to Symbolics....

They notoriously screwed up the 3D core memory patent ($40 million lump sum to IBM vs. the offered 1 cent per core) and a synthetic penicillin patent. Either could have paid for a complete replacement of the entire campus. I very strongly suspect these weren't the only screwups, and e.g. Symbolics scammed an exclusive license to Macsyma mostly to keep it out of other people's hands, one reason Wolfram was able to beat it sort of starting from scratch.

Back then, when the prime rate was over 20%, and inflation was over 15%, MIT was getting a much lower return on its endowment. I want to say 4%, but I'm not sure. MIT does a lot better now, but that is also recent.

It got its charter just as the Civil War started, and set up operations just after. So as noted it doesn't have the 2 centuries or more of additional compounding alumni donations the famous Ivies have.

Not sure when it started, and it was again fixed only fairly recently, but the alumni magazine, Technology Review, was dedicated to telling most of the alumni that what they were doing was evil. And again by then the Institute apparently had convinced a lot of alumni that it couldn't be trusted with unrestricted gifts. In its favor it never tried a Princeton Woodrow Wilson Center type donation theft, then again I don't know of any other top school so brazen.

Ah, it also was wretched, not interested or perhaps in part stymied by city government (which hates Harvard with a passion, and MIT gets some of the blowback) in making money off of local real estate. When I showed up the Kendal Square area had that bombed out sort of look, in part due to NASA deciding after JFK's assassination and LBJ becoming President that, oh, on second though Texas is where we should build our space center. There was almost no housing, let alone vaguely affordable and safe, to be found close to campus. I'm sure that bit of MIT's studied indifference to student welfare didn't escape some of the alumni who were the sort to later make a fortune.

Bottom line: not a lot of money to grant to students, and a total focus on needs based aid. And, hmmm, rather obviously students like me who were crushed by the intersection of the financial aid policies of MIT and their parents would never be in a position to donate a lot of money, and not inclined to donate much of what we do have.

Re: I cannot afford to go back to engineering school

#250

Post by hillbillyjack » Thu, Aug 08, 2013, 2:04 PM UTC

DirtyCalvinist wrote: post #137

superuser2 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've thought of that. Even emancipated children are not considered financially independent for aid purposes until the age of 25. The only exception is if you can provide documentation of child abuse - police reports, DCF files, etc. Estrangement is not enough. Even a noncustodial parent you've never met is expected to make the same sacrifice as your custodial parent.

At least as of a few years ago, that's not quite true. I went back to school at 24, and because I had earned over 50% of my own income in the past year (100% in my case) and had not been claimed as a dependent on my parents' taxes, I was considered independent.

Well the current age for independence is 24 so it may have been the same when you went.