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Comment by chronic71819 | Hacker News Reader

> It's incredible to me that graduating college students, many presumably with student debt and little savings, can even consider taking the financial risk of starting a company (e.g. forgoing a salary).

When I visited the Stanford campus recently, it seemed like many students had the opposite of debt: massive savings indicated by personal electric scooters, Mercedes/Tesla/BMW/Audi in the student parking lots, combined with several FANG internships, it's fairly common for a CS undergrad to have $100K+ in savings when they graduate.

Whether it's family money or not, debt doesn't seem to be the big of a problem for these top students.

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Lol $100k is a bit hyperbolic considering even the top internships pay at most $11k/mo. A few tens of thousands is absolutely possible though.

Also lots of Stanford students have parents who are just rich af, those are probably most of the ones with really nice cars

> it's fairly common for a CS undergrad to have $100K+ in savings when they graduate.

I had 1 FANG internship, 1 near-FANG internship that paid the same, and 2 not-near FANG internships.

I didn't end up close to that, at all. Pretax for FANG internships is like ~$25k each on the upper end. Even if you do 4 of them you're still under $100k considering tax.

Now if you go to Waterloo and do 6 FANG internships, then maybe but only if you save everything.

I didn't pay for undergrad but I came out with a pretty mediocre positive net worth, unfortunately :/

Well they could have disposable income and longer term debt.

You must be kidding...

why do you imagine they're kidding?

Many students end up with 100k+ dollars in debt. How do you suppose these stanford kids end up with 100k in the bank?

Tuition is free at Stanford if your parents make less than $125K. Everything is free if they make less than $65K. 78% of Stanford students graduate debt-free.

https://news.stanford.edu/2016/02/25/tuition-financial-aid-0...

It's really important to understand that the elite non-profit private education system functions differently from mainstream higher ed. Elite private schools are already socialist: they jack up sticker prices for high-income parents and solicit their wealthy alumni for donations so that lower-income students who get in can go free. If you get in, you will probably graduate in fairly decent financial shape, particularly considering that many local companies give good internships to Stanford students.

The folks you hear about with six-figure student debt figures are typically products of mid-tier private colleges. These organizations don't have the endowment or wealthy tuition-payers to be able to subsidize lower-income students the way elite institutions can, and so they just put everybody in debt. Then their graduates get out into the working world and are indistinguishable from any other mid-tier private college graduate, and so they get indistinguishable (i.e. low) wages.

It really pays to be elite in America.

The ones you are talking about are those who earned need based financial aid for scholastic achievements. If that’s what you mean by “elite” I guess you’re right in the sense that it’s difficult to manage and they’ve done so, but that’s a strange way to describe hard working students.

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