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Comment by tgrass | Hacker News Reader

The opportunity cost does not have to be more than one's liesure time. I worked thirty hours a week as a waiter in engineering undergrad and was a part time single dad. I averaged 17K a year. This is not unusual.

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Opportunity is opportunity. If you weren't in school, you could have worked 30 hours per week as waiter plus the time you were studying.

Realistically, if we assume you work for minimum wage, you're going to be around $200K short by the time you finish a four year program, and that does not include any costs associated with actually going to school, which could easily run you another $100K+, depending on the circumstances.

Perhaps nothing you cannot overcome with the right program and a solid plan, but if you're going to college just because that's what people out of high school do, you should probably think long and hard about it.

This is incorrect. It is unlikely the average individual will work more than forty hours, so the opportunity cost is realistically the difference: 10 hours. At 7.25 an hour, pre-tax annual that's a mere $4k, for a four year degree that's $16K. Out of undergrad I went from a possible annual income of $20K (qualified for nothing but waiting tables) to $50K. The opportunity costs were paid for in the first six months.

It is unlikely the average individual will work more than forty hours

Unless you were only working for 10 hours at your course, this is false. You could have a 40 hour per week job plus the 30 hour per week job at night. You were working anyway.

Minimum wage is actually $10/hr. here, so that skews things slightly, but let's assume $20K per year anyway since you mentioned it. It's been a while since I've done the math, so I was actually off by a bit. It turns out to be about $108K by the time you graduate given the current state of things.

However, if we assume you live to be 80, it actually works out to be about $640,000+ that you lost out on by not working for those four years.

In your case, you are definitely ahead, but can the average student claim the same? I'm not confident that they can. More importantly, were you really stuck at $20K for the rest of your life? If you had the chops to go to college, it seems like you probably had the chops to find yourself in better standing anyway. The first four years of my career didn't pay much more, but I leveraged that experience to move to a six figure income soon after.

The concept of opportunity cost has nothing to do with the "average individual" it is the cost of the "next best alternative usually forgone". I did not go to college, during most of my "college years" (18-22) I worked a total of 50-80 hours at as many 3 different jobs. That was my next best alternative. I still work 50-70 hours, between different jobs and businesses and transitioned from working class to upper middle class. In retrospect, I can see, for me, the opportunity cost of attending college would have been very high...

I agree, individuals need to evaluate the opportunity costs for themselves based on their own circumstances.

For a policy discussion, the average or median is relevant; and you are an outlier. The median income for 25-34 with just a high school education was $25K in 2009[1].Average work week is internationally around 40 for 25-34 year olds (post-industrial) [2]

1. http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=77 2. http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryId=9694

[EDIT] I am terribly average, hence my personal experience above serves as a humanizing tale to convey the statistical average.

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