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Comment by dml2135 | Hacker News Reader

No, it’s not flawed and it’s not a hypothesis — I’m speaking from specific knowledge and experience regarding particular degrees.

Those averages include things like medical school for doctors and law school for lawyers. Tuition and expected salary are more aligned there.

Where tuition and salary are not aligned are fields like the humanities and social sciences. At top graduate schools for those fields you will have tuitions in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, with average salary expectations far below that.

The only way that it makes financial sense to get a degree like that is if you are independently wealthy to begin with, but these schools will not tell you that and will cheerfully direct you to take on a ruinous amount of debt.

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Why didn’t you start with that? You implied all professional degrees and then all graduate degrees and only mention humanities now? Forgive me for not catching your unstated assumptions. So who was under the impression they’d get rich with a graduate degree in social science or humanities? Seems like it has been common knowledge for many decades that humanities jobs pay considerably less than medicine or engineering, since long before today’s tuitions blew up. It’s been a cultural trope as long as I can remember that parents try to steer their kids away from humanities and towards higher paying fields. You could make a decent living in academia with humanities up to maybe 5 or 10 years ago, but I totally agree it’s getting a lot harder now. All tuition has blown up. Calling humanities graduate degrees a scam is a bit hyperbolic. Going to a state school won’t usually leave you with ruinous debt, that’s something that’s more likely to happen when choosing to go to a highly ranked big name school. Knowledge of outcomes in various fields is relatively well known and available information, and the amount of debt you end up with is mostly under your control. Sure some people might egg you on but nobody is hiding it or tricking you; most humanities graduate advisors I’ve met will tell you to study something else with very little prompting.

School should be provided, IMO, and nobody should be left with ruinous debt. This country can afford it, and money invested in education comes back in multiples in economic output, and yet we choose to keep education out of reach from many poor people and make it extra hard for those who can only just afford it. I’m sorry if you got stuck with a load of debt that’s difficult to manage. That sucks and it’s not fair.

I qualified my initial comment with "for professions that do not provide a salary that could pay for said tuition".

And my comment is not about people thinking they'd be getting rich -- it's about people making a (or what should be) reasonable assumption that they'd make enough money to pay off their tuition without lifelong financial struggle.

Yes, state schools are the smart choice here.

My point is it's not all on the student, they are victims to a large extent. We should also place blame on these elite institutions for suckering in young adults with their prestige and then not delivering a product that is worth what they charge. And on the government for providing a blank check for this nonsense.

Anyway, I do think we're mostly in agreement. And btw, I'm fine, I'm just speaking from the experiences of many of my peers, which have left me pretty teed-off at a prestigious university in my city that I will refrain from calling out by name.

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