Comment by Diederich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Diederich | Hacker News Reader

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The other replies are interesting and insightful, so I wanted to add a little anecdata here.

> some massive college bills

In the late 1980s I started a Computer Science program at Cal Poly Pomona https://www.cpp.edu/ If memory serves, my tuition for a quarterly full load was less than $300. That's not per credit, that was for as many classes as I wanted. Books added up to a bit less.

Working at Jack in the Box and later McDonalds, I was making minimum wage which was I believe $4.25/hour. Assuming I kept 70% of that after taxes it took me about 185 hours to pay my combined tuition and books, which comes out to about 19 hours a week over the 10 week quarter.

And I did, in fact, work about 20 hours a week.

This doesn't include housing, but it was also fairly affordable. I believe another 10 hours a week could have covered some basic shared rent. I had a place to live for free, fortunately.

EDIT: I haven't done any math for how this would look today, but I'm pretty sure it's not quite so friendly.

At CSU Long Beach, tuition is about 7k per year. We hire our student assistants at 13/hr, so they can make around 8 or 9k year in salary. Not nearly as cheap when I went, we paid around 2k a year for tuition. So if you are willing to go to a state school, you can come out with relatively small amounts of debt. Now if you go to a really nice private University and live on campus, all bets are off.

I'm glad to hear that state schools are still reasonably inexpensive.

In California, at least, it used to be that(still may be, but my data is a couple years old) you could get about 2 years of your prerequisites done at a community college and then use that to funnel into the Cal-State schools.

That was a significantly cheaper option for most students. And the classes tended to be smaller and, often, much better quality.

My state does something like that. You do an associates at the state community college system in a field geared towards your planned university major and as long as you get good grades, you get guaranteed admission to a state 4 year school. It helps the student by reducing cost and helps the 4 year schools by reducing the number of incoming freshmen.

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