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"Not all of us can afford to burn $12k." Getting an education is never burning money. I could have made the minimum payments of a couple of hundred dollars per

"Not all of us can afford to burn $12k." Getting an education is never burning money. I could have made the minimum payments of a couple of hundred dollars per month for the next ten years but I wanted to live free so I mercilessly paid it off as fast as I could because freedom is dear to me, I had my entire life ahead of me (I was 21 at the time) and many plans fueled by megalomaniacal ambition. I paid it all off from my salary working in IT. If you think like you do, then it's no wonder a mere $12,000 USD is a lot of money to you. Not only was I a full time student, but I also worked full time and for about six months I'd rack up another 30 hours working part time every weekend, just in case I lost my first job. I did the bulk of my homework on the bus and then I studied when I got home. 134 miles round trip every day. Moving on to your comment about Brian: all he is saying is that computer science education is well worth it if one works in the computer industry, and he is qualified to say so because not only is he a computer scientist but also a kernel engineer and exceptionally good at both writing and debugging code. And yes he's super smart. Finally, I want to touch upon your remark that my comment was elitist. I thought about that for quite a while, and I concluded that yes, it is elitist, and there should be no apologies made for that: computer science is hard, and managing to get a degree in it does make one intellectual elite. It's elitist because it's hard and challenging to earn. I studied like crazy, graduated at the top of my class, I applied myself because I lived for computers and therefore I refuse to make any apologies for becoming the elite just as I refuse to feel bad about it.

yellowapple 8y ago
"If you think like you do, then it's no wonder a mere $12,000 USD is a lot of money to you." $12k is a decent down payment on a small house or condo (at least if you're living outside of a place with grotesquely-inflated property values like the SF Bay Area), or a significant amount of the way toward a new or lightly-used car. It's more than the vast majority of Americans have in their savings accounts. That you consider that to be trivial betrays how thoroughly out-of-touch you seem to be with the real world. Regardless, given my mediocre-at-best academic record in high school, my tuition likely would have been much higher than a "mere" $12k even with my (at the time, and probably still in effect) plan of pursuing the Associate's degree first (unless I stop at the Associate's degree, but I have a feeling folks like you would still be snobbish about that). "managing to get a degree in it does make one intellectual elite" No, it really doesn't. Not all institutions are equal in terms of academic rigor, and not everyone graduates from CMU or MIT; some of them went to ITT Tech or got to be a "Legacy" at Harvard. High-schoolers in America (myself included) were/are constantly bombarded with propaganda about how "if you just get a college degree you'll make so much more money" and then the kids flock to whichever degree mills will get them that piece of paper. And again, I know from direct personal experience dealing with CS-degree-holders that the degree itself is not a reliable indicator of competence for that reason. If you think that a piece of paper is the thing making you an "intellectual elite", then you're in for a rude awakening when the rest of us manage to peer through that veneer. What does make you an "intellectual elite" is actual merit, and that is earned, be it through actually-rigorous academic study or actually-rigorous experience in the real world (and ultimately, the elite of the elite will more often than not have an abundance of both; most such folks start with the academic side of that equation, but I missed the boat on that so I guess I'll have to make do coming at it from the opposite direction).

yellowapple 8y ago

"If you think like you do, then it's no wonder a mere $12,000 USD is a lot of money to you." $12k is a decent down payment on a small house or condo (at least if you're living outside of a place with grotesquely-inflated property values like the SF Bay Area), or a significant amount of the way toward a new or lightly-used car. It's more than the vast majority of Americans have in their savings accounts. That you consider that to be trivial betrays how thoroughly out-of-touch you seem to be with the real world. Regardless, given my mediocre-at-best academic record in high school, my tuition likely would have been much higher than a "mere" $12k even with my (at the time, and probably still in effect) plan of pursuing the Associate's degree first (unless I stop at the Associate's degree, but I have a feeling folks like you would still be snobbish about that). "managing to get a degree in it does make one intellectual elite" No, it really doesn't. Not all institutions are equal in terms of academic rigor, and not everyone graduates from CMU or MIT; some of them went to ITT Tech or got to be a "Legacy" at Harvard. High-schoolers in America (myself included) were/are constantly bombarded with propaganda about how "if you just get a college degree you'll make so much more money" and then the kids flock to whichever degree mills will get them that piece of paper. And again, I know from direct personal experience dealing with CS-degree-holders that the degree itself is not a reliable indicator of competence for that reason. If you think that a piece of paper is the thing making you an "intellectual elite", then you're in for a rude awakening when the rest of us manage to peer through that veneer. What does make you an "intellectual elite" is actual merit, and that is earned, be it through actually-rigorous academic study or actually-rigorous experience in the real world (and ultimately, the elite of the elite will more often than not have an abundance of both; most such folks start with the academic side of that equation, but I missed the boat on that so I guess I'll have to make do coming at it from the opposite direction).