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Comment by nhangen | Hacker News Reader

I think your first and last points are probably most accurate.

Rich people will pay, and poor and middle class students will use grants and loans to get through. The problem with that is the loans seem like a great deal, because of the racket, and only when students get out of college and are still waiting tables to they realize that the coming out of school with tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands of debt, debt which you cannot escape, is a bad deal.

Perhaps I'm jaded because I funded my education with student loans that I used to receive a B.S. in Psychology and wish I would've studied engineering. I tried to move into post graduate studies, but I couldn't afford it - by that time I had a family and couldn't afford the time away from work.

The military paid off my student loans, but my degree has been useless since.

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My deepest sympathies for your degree in psychology.

It seems that the best thing we could do for the university system is to stop treating all degrees as equal. We need folks standing outside the university gates on day one of freshman year going "Hey you, what are you studying? Cultural studies? Hahaha, no really, here's a calculus textbook, get to work."

I agree completely. Getting a degree in philosophy sounds cool until you realize that you've just wasted your money and could have studied philosophy for free by reading books while you paid the bills with the education from your CS degree, etc.

That's the the thing really though isn't it. It's YOUR degree. Who are you to say that someone made the wrong choice? I have liberal arts and a music degree. I'm now a self-taught web developer earning good money, building a start-up and paying my student loan (interest free because I stayed in New Zealand) off. My arts education helped with my general understanding and comprehension of the world and I credit it for making it easier for me to pick up development.

I'm so sick of the belittling of the humanities by commerce and science. We're all needed, if there's any elephant in the room robbing people of value there, to me it is commerce. I studied some marketing while I was at uni as well, and it felt like I was no longer at university but at some parallel universe on my campus where suddenly creative thinking was discouraged, intellectual creativity was discouraged and you'd succeed if you submitted answers the lecturers wanted to hear.

NOTE: I'm also educated enough in research methods to know that my anecdotal proof is not conclusive, however I find that in NZ, the people who I meet who generally seem like they're less intelligent are the ones with business degrees. It's the science and humanities grads who are the ones who seem smarter and more motivated. There's even a successful business person here (bob jones) who refuses to hire commerce grads and insists on hiring humanities and science grads because he believes they're more suited (once trained) to coping with a complex business environment..

That was my impression in the UK. One could argue the toss whether, say, being able to read ancient texts in the original Greek was easier or harder than quantum physics (or the relative usefulness of either) but there was general contempt for the seeming lack of intellectual curiosity and love of learning for its own sake among business students.

Most of whom, depressingly, would become our managers.

Well I minored in religion, so I understand your feelings on this. My point wasn't that those degrees are worthless, just that they are worthless for the purpose of job security.

There are of course exceptions, but a CS major has a much higher chance of getting a job out of college than a humanities major.

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