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> People see the "$30K" price tag for Lambda School and other programs and assume it's a steal, yet most in-state tuitions are in the same range and provide substantially more education.

on the other hand, the time cost of a bachelor's in CS is much higher than that of an 8 month (?) bootcamp. four years is a long time to spend treading water wrt employable skills.

I do feel that the degree is better long-term if it's at all possible. but that's not realistic for everyone. if at the end of the bootcamp you get a decent job that you wouldn't have otherwise, that seems like a good deal. if not, you're out a lot less money and time than flunking out of undergrad halfway through.

> four years is a long time to spend treading water wrt employable skills

Internships during school can be a massive salary increase for many people. Even 25+$/hour is quite a large pay bump for a large chunk of the population, and many internships go well past that.

good point. getting an internship for summer and maybe fall/spring part time is a good way to defray the opportunity cost of not having a full-time job for four years. I think you have to be a pretty strong student and well organized to get an internship before junior year though.

> four years is a long time to spend treading water wrt employable skills.

Only if your sole goal in life is the pursuit of money. Most of the people I know enjoyed their time at university, they got to learn in a structured manner about philosophy and other interesting topics while having freedom to indulge in intellectual curiosity. Life isn't a race to get on a career path.

I do agree that flunking out is probably the worst outcome though, so if academia isn't for you don't feel pressured to pursue it - it certainly won't make any difference in terms of your job prospects by the time you're 30 as a developer. We just need to stop treating university as a vocational training session.

People joining boot camps are often later in life than your typical college student and time is at a greater premium.

> We just need to stop treating university as a vocational training session.

Is it treated as a vocational training session? I thought university was more about signaling some combination of socioeconomic status and ability to learn/motivation. More selective schools and more difficult coursework (such as hard sciences or engineering) signal a potential employee who is able to learn and manipulate the system they are put in, as well as possibly bringing useful connections.

> Life isn't a race to get on a career path.

Presumably life isn't a race at all, which makes you wonder why everyone is in such a rush to attend university when they are young and don't yet have the resources to pay for it. It will be still be there when you are older and the pursuit of knowledge will still be every bit as enjoyable. It may be even more enjoyable as you then have the life experience to appreciate it. Retirement is meant for these types of hobbies.

> Presumably life isn't a race at all, which makes you wonder why everyone is in such a rush to attend university when they are young

It’s the networking opportunities (i.e. “the college experience”) which suffer as the age gap grows between you and the other students. Since networking is the bulk of the value of university, your age during attendance is of disproportionate consequence. I’m speaking from personal experience here — going into a post-grad program, it was immediately obvious to me that the age gap would act as an all but uncrossable chasm. And I’ve seen this chasm in action in undergrad, where it was even more pronounced.

Simply put, university is a lot harder to justify when a significant age gap exists. To your point, maybe most people should wait a few years before attending university, but they don’t, and those who’d otherwise prefer to wait before starting university — which is doubtlessly a wise move for some — have to risk their college experience to do so.

> It’s the networking opportunities

The move to taking university online, and the masses of students following, through the COVID period suggests not. Online university does not provide any unique networking opportunities that aren't already available through every other online service, HN included.

I don't want to spend my whole life waiting for a retirement that might never come - I might die, my mental faculties might degrade, even if everything went right I might still burn out.

If I thought I could take a three- or four-year break to study in my thirties or forties without it hurting my career I absolutely would. But employers seem to be suspicious of that kind of thing (unless it's something like a 1-year MBA). So if I want a sabbatical without hurting my earnings too much, a college degree seems like my best option.

> What most people miss is that almost nobody pays full price for college. They have a high headline number for the wealthiest families, but virtually everyone else pays a fraction of this cost or some times nothing at all.

You're using this statement to claim that college is not actually expensive but I'm pretty sure it supports the opposite claim. Anecdotally, I was accepted into a range of universities and ended up picking ~ the worst one because that was the university which gave me the best scholarships.

If college is extremely expensive then it makes perfect sense that the only people paying full price are the people who have a lot of money: everybody else is filtered out by the high price.

I totally agree. A lot of people talk about ISA being scams and I basically agree. But I don't think it's a scam in how they assume. If you do your research most ISA agreements are good about being more straightforward than most other types of loans. The scam is usually solely in the principle amount being charged.

That being said, I think ISAs are actually partially successful in that they provided a way for someone broke like me to try something and not have to worry too much about the impact if it doesn't end up succeeding. I wish people in my position had more negotiating power to avoid being overcharged, but that's not a problem unique to ISAs

To put it another way, it’s a high risk loan from the perspective of the ISA lender — which they offset with a high premium to get around the adverse selection are problem. It’s basically a mirror image of the problem that insurance providers face.