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Comment by ipnon | Hacker News Reader

I will recommend my kids go to college outside the US unless they get into a household name university. It’s not worth the money anymore. If college was about education surely a benevolent government-university axis would conspire to lower the price by any means; if it were about signaling inclusion into a higher social strata perhaps we might expect college to become ever more expensive…

Thiel and Will Hunting have said it better: “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library.”

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Cynically, the university education will be a much bigger boost to job opportunities than the public library books. Because you're right: university's primary purpose is indeed signaling capability. A transcript and a diploma serve as proof of completing and doing acceptably on coursework, which self learning does not confer. And in some fields (e.g. military officer) a university degree is a requirement.

My suggestion would be to get into a high caliber university, and drop out after one or two years if they can find full-time employment. The ability to get admitted into MIT, Ivy League, et. al. is about as good at signaling ability as it is to graduate. If I saw an applicant with 1 or 2 years of uni followed by full-time work, that'd be just as impressive as a graduate.

That said, Reporting from the economist suggest that university is a net negative for ~15% of people, and ~25% of young men: https://www.economist.com/international/2023/04/03/was-your-...

People don't like to talk about it because it comes off as elitist, but someone going to a university with an >80% admissions rate isn't really effective at signaling capability. If one of my kids only got into such universities and didn't garner much in terms of grants and financial aid, I'd want him or her to seriously consider alternatives like trades, community college, or a technical boot camp.

in-state tuition for a CS/eng degree at a good school still seems affordable to me. I checked my alma mater in Indiana and I'd do it again.

i will say - the merit-based scholarships have dried up a bit though.

It's true, unfortunately. If we had more funding for public universities, the aid would be re-appropriated, but for now they're struggling to make it affordable for students who are just "average."

Yeah, public universities in the US are often comparably priced for in-state students--after financial aid does all their clerical bullshit--to the prices in the 70s and 80s, adjusting for inflation. And you can't replace the experience of being amongst other students, professors, club members, etc. who are all contributing to the ensemble of your intellectual and personal development. Sure there are things you can find in the library, but oftentimes you won't be embedded directly with those who are working on these problems, and you won't be thinking about/discussing them on a day in, day out basis.

Does the tuition depend on the course?

Typically not. Book and lab fees do vary, however.

That’s rare in the US. Generally a credit hour has a fixed cost + incidentals like textbooks or occasionally lab fees.

I remember a 1 credit hour horseback riding class having a rather steep extra fee attached to it.

No...I've heard of this happening in Australia. Its a very sad state of things, but even if they wanted to do something like that, it would be impossible, since American universities are organized usually into just two or three colleges (School of Arts & Sciences being the largest, comprising of everything from CS to English to Physics to Psychology; then there's usually an Arts school--music, painting, etc.--and/or an Engineering school and/or an Agro/environmental sciences school), and you share courses with everyone in your college, and the majority of your classes are not actually for your major, so most students end up learning a great breadth of things and engaging in pet interests (I myself was always interested in historical linguistics). If you charged less for a CS degree, you'd just get a lot of shitty CS students who are only in the major because they want to do something else. And oftentimes engineering/arts degrees are more expensive anyway, since they are seen as purely professional training.

Most private schools are heavily discounted from their advertised price--currently well beyond 50% discount on average (see below)--so don't focus too much on sticker price. The old wisdom among the college marketers was 'high prices [i.e., tuition sticker prices] send a signal of quality in the market' and that worked for quite a while. ('Ha! I got a great education and a great discount!') The Forbes article might suggest that's not the case any more.

https://www.nacubo.org/Press-Releases/2023/Tuition-Discount-...

> Thiel and Will Hunting have said it better: “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library.”

I used to think this is true. Moving to SFBA has disabused me of any notion that expensive college is about the education. Seeing the network that Stanford kids have access to is wild.

Me: "Oh hey this company just raised <lots of money>". Friend: "Oh yeah I know Joe, he's great, his best friend was my room-mate in college. We've already been talking for a few months about hiring them as a vendor at our company. Happy to see they finally announced the raise I heard about last year"

That's true at Stanford and Harvard, perhaps a few other schools, but it's not the experience of 99% of college students.

100% - I went to Cal, however after spending time in finland I would've been equally happy going to University of Helsinki (which costs pennies on the dollar compared to here), or a myriad of other schools - TU Delft, ATH Zurich, University of Oslo, etc. We're definitely not getting our money's worth here in the bay area anymore, and amongst the severe rise in gun violence, theft, extreme politics - my wife and I are trying to plan the next 20-30 years in places with a strong education system and safety profile like Dubai, Helsinki, etc.

Depends on the field. CS can be learned better online than in a school, probably because the people who built the internet are cs nerds, but medical fields, law fields, and some areas of engineering are much less accessible. The big issue imo is employers using a college degree as an easy filter for applicants results in everyone needing one to be competitive regardless of any utility. It’s gotten to where people tell me I oughta go to grad school to look better than the average applicant.

Depends on the student too.

Some people just don't learn as effectively in an online environment.

>CS can be learned better online than in a school, probably because the people who built the internet are cs nerds

I would disagree. Learning things, for me at least, was something social. And talking lectures over or solving problems together with other people was crucial for me for understanding things. Furthermore, university was a good place to network. I think it's difficult to find something similar on the Internet.

Whether it's worth taking on tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, probably not. But that's not a problem where I come from.

The trick is to have them move out on their own for a gap year in a state that provides free tuition below a certain income threshold.

You might even be able to skip the gap year. My brother went to Rochester Institute of Technology a decade ago for less than what public universities cost in California after the university endowment halved the tuition. FAFSA covered enough of the rest that he didn’t have any debt to speak of from school.

Probably worth speaking about in the same vein as high tuition costs and the loans taken to cover them, is that parents (like mine) will have their kids take out student loans so they can supplement their own income. I’ve known a lot of people that managed to go to reasonably priced schools but ended up taking out $20,000 in debt for their parents. There are a few reasons why that range from unfortunate to opportunistic (in my case, my parents are not good people). The fact that university costs so much that tens of thousands of dollars in debt is acceptable to be freely loaned to be arbitraged is a huge problem.

I have a feeling (but no evidence) that this applies upward pressure on the amount that can be loaned and that this increased lending reinforces upward tuition costs.

When I went to RIT it was 14k a year. It has to be quite a bit more now.

Overall a great school and worth the money at the time.

Totally. It depends on what kind of life you want them to have, or more appropriatly they want to have.

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