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Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

nytimes.com

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Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#81

Post by borski »

leetcrew wrote: post #61
colinmhayes wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of middle class families making low to mid 100k but not contributing to their children's tuition bill because they live in HCOL area. But yes, low income students don't pay.

$100k is not enough to totally phase out financial aid from top schools, but sure, there are some families that could afford to pay but refuse to. still, no one is writing $40k+ loans each year for students with no cosigner. if you have rich parents who won't pay and the school considers you a dependent, you're pretty much SOL.

Yeah, the last part sucks. It's not completely impossible, but it is certainly not easy if your parents will not help: https://www.quora.com/My-family-is-upper-middle-class-160-00...

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#82

Post by lumost »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #73
lumost wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umass opens doors, MIT opens more - in 2010 when I graduated, my friends who went to MIT and did ok landed at 90k/yr in comp-sci fields, my friends from Umass who did ok made 40-70k in comp-sci fields. Given that everyone was living in Boston post-graduation and the base CoL is somewhere between 40 and 50k per year. The MIT folks had somewhere between 2 and 20x the disposable income at graduation. Meaning their debt…

Maybe I should be more clear - I didn't go to a Tier1 public school, didn't get into an elite school, how screwed am I?

I specifically mentioned doing 'ok' as a frame of reference. Those who do 'well' in a comp sci program tend to cluster in the top companies straight from college and the top companies only negotiate ~20k on a 150-250k entry level offer.

I did ok in college and very well in the private sector. I started as a sysadmin for a small finance company and am now a senior software engineer at Amazon Alexa working on ML for search. Hard work always pays off as long as your in the right field ( comp-sci is a great field ).

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#83

Post by DC1350 »

A huge generational change is that young people can just google "best X" for every life decision instead of caring about what they're exposed to organically. What job to do, city to live in, how to dress, etc. They can also find a community and detailed guides for achieving pretty much anything they want, so the special in-group knowledge isn't a barrier anymore. Anyone familiar with the whole tech interview prep culture should be able to understand that similar cultures exist for everything from academia to online dating. The downside is that the upper tier of everything is a lot more competitive so it's harder to win without gaming the system.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#84

Post by borski »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #72
jawzz wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, but as I’d say that subjectively speaking, you’re better off going to MIT, but only if you have the passion and drive to succeed at a place like that (which you probably do if you got into MIT). But for Boston College, Boston University, or Northeastern? You’re probably going to end up paying more than MIT and get an education that’s indistinguishable from UMass, quite possibly worse in some respects. Wha…

Maybe I should be more clear - I didn't go to a Tier1 public school, didn't get into an elite school, how screwed am I?

You're fine. There are a ton of reasons MIT and UMass Amherst would help, but they are not for everybody, and I saw plenty of folks struggle at MIT and gain nothing out of it (even not graduating).

What matters a lot more than the name of the institution on your degree is experience; getting that experience may be a bit tougher at a small school (you don't have FAANGs or huge biotech firms recruiting there), but it is certainly not impossible.

Three of the last four engineers I hired had no formal CS degree (but they had gone to bootcamps).

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#85

Post by DC1350 »

kop316 wrote: post #54
DC-3 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did it ever occur to you at all that people might value education for its own sake and not for potential financial yield alone?

I have found Community Colleges to be the perfect place for this actually. Community College classes are MUCH cheaper, and are even more so if you don't take the class for credit (where I went, tuition was $20 for a 1 credit class for non-degree seekers. No that was not a typo, it was Twenty USD for the entire class). Community College professors don't do research, so they are usually focused much more on teaching cl…

The problem with community colleges is that you completely miss out on any meaningful networking. As long as all the best students see it as beneath them, you'll have a hard time meeting people in a community college who can actually help your career

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#86

Post by jimbokun »

endisneigh wrote: post #37

per usual I believe the issue here is that the government has been subsidizing schools which have created strange distortions. if Harvard were strictly private and received no government subsidies, funding or advantage a few things would happen: 1) poor people probably wouldn't be able to attend 2) it would be substantially more expensive 3) the acceptance rate would be much higher ideally this would result in school…

Harvard could easily fund all of their education expenses from their endowment, with zero incoming tuition dollars.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#87

Post by polka_haunts_us »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #73
lumost wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umass opens doors, MIT opens more - in 2010 when I graduated, my friends who went to MIT and did ok landed at 90k/yr in comp-sci fields, my friends from Umass who did ok made 40-70k in comp-sci fields. Given that everyone was living in Boston post-graduation and the base CoL is somewhere between 40 and 50k per year. The MIT folks had somewhere between 2 and 20x the disposable income at graduation. Meaning their debt…

Maybe I should be more clear - I didn't go to a Tier1 public school, didn't get into an elite school, how screwed am I?

Let's put it this way. I couldn't find a job out of college, despite having a CS degree. I ended up settling for a very shit job that pays 21 hourly, 40 hours a week. Because the dev team is very small, I ended up with my hands in literally every piece of the programming pie. I put all that info on my resume and took even more lessons from this crap job to interviews in the past couple of weeks, and I just signed an offer from a lucrative tech company for about $140k annually, over a 200% raise.

Once you've done something in the industry, almost no one is going to give a hoot about what school you went to, they're going to care about what you've done in the industry, but at the start at least, you may have to settle for something a little shittier.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#88

Post by offtop5 »

awillen wrote: post #70
offtop5 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll disagree with this. A very rough fact of life is not everyone will be able to go to a top school. For example the language requirement most top schools have excludes many people who didn't grow up with a second language, and lack the extra money to afford language tutoring.( Or a stable home life in highschool as most college language classes work much better if you took it in high school). I literally couldn't…

I don't actually think you're particularly far off from my point. In general, I think it's an ROI thing - the vast majority of non-technical degrees from low-tier schools have abysmal ROI. That said, ROI obviously depends on the I and the R - you intelligently kept the R down, and it sounds like you got a good I, so yeah, no disagreement. I just think you're very much the exception.

To be blunt, many of us graduate high school unable to properly read and write . At least 2 years of college is always needed to shore these basic skills up.

Then again I've worked many minimum wage jobs with master degree holders for

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#89

Post by 908B64B197 »

gonehome wrote: post #17
awillen wrote: post #7

I think this is generally a good thing. I believe there are really two positive things that can come out of going to college - either you get a name-brand degree that opens doors and gets your resume looked at, or you get useful skills that enable you to go down a particular career path (e.g. CS degree). Obviously in some cases it'll be both. The reality is it's really tough to make any case that a humanities degree…

There is so much broken with modern universities and incentives around pricing - why are all degrees four years? Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero? I wrote a little about it in the context of Lambda School, but it mostly applies: https://zalberico.com/essay/2019/04/08/lambda-school.html “The current university system in the US is a mes…

> Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero?

Because it has a large numbers of applicants. It's offer and demand.

> Universities also get a lot of their prestige from research and the majority of their effort is typically not spent on undergraduate education. This means professors are not typically rewarded for being (or even expected to be) excellent teachers.

Something I've noticed and take this with a grain of salt as this is a sample=1 observation is that the better researchers (more publications, better funded labs) were generally also better teachers.

Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants

#90

Post by DC1350 »

solosoyokaze wrote: post #43

Smart hiring managers in this industry know that college doesn't matter and that one good Github project > any degree. I've not once taken someone's schooling into consideration while interviewing and I've hired dozens of people. I'm not saying don't go to school if that's what you want to do, but you can easily get a much better return on your investment if you "buy" some time to work on OSS. That being said, it's a…

Lots of students who go to lower tier schools don't even know that their 'elite' peers are working on things like projects, OSS, or interview prep. I personally had never heard of a hackathon until after I started uni, but lots of my classmates had already been to dozens in high school. The real issue with going to a bad college is students have no idea what they're supposed to do to get a job. Those students are dead last in a game they don't even know they're playing. It happens organically at a good school.
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