15 ms·

As much as I'd love to pursue higher education and to get a degree, I simply can't afford thousands of dollars every semester. I'm not 17 anymore so it's harder

As much as I'd love to pursue higher education and to get a degree, I simply can't afford thousands of dollars every semester. I'm not 17 anymore so it's harder to convince me to get into that much debt. If I ended up owing 150k and could afford to pay back 1k a month, It would take me 12.5 years. I'm sorry but it's just not worth it. I can't think of many sober people that would disagree. If an organization like Khan Academy wanted to charge ~$1200 a year for a 4-year program that I could receive an accredited degree from, I'd sign up immediately.

awb 7y ago
> I'm sorry but it's just not worth it. I can't think of many sober people that would disagree. I've hired developers for the last 10 years and never looked at education, just skills. I think you're making a smart move and helping to hopefully boost these new forms of education that don't require sitting in a classroom for 4 years.
- jessehorne 7y ago
  This makes me extremely happy to hear and it seems others are following the same path! Good on you. For me, it just seems like the logical way to go. Progress comes for us all, no matter how many years we've carried a tradition. If the colleges are struggling with low enrollment, it must be time to go back to the drawing board.
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  The last 10 years have been hardly typical years for the job market, at least in software. I can't predict the future, but education is (or at least was) supposed to be a long term investment, and it might be a fallacy to assume the next 30-40 years will be like the previous 10.
  - StandardFuture 7y ago
    Well it is certainly possible that the labor market becomes even more saturated in software and education falls back into being an easy go-to natural filtration system. We are seeing the big tech companies more than ever use algorithmic puzzle questions, and startups using "culture fit" as easy go-to filtration systems. But, I imagine education might be an even simpler filter if labor supply keeps growing. It certainly makes for easy automated filtering if a person doesn't have a top-20 school listed on their resume.
    - shantly 7y ago
      If there’s a real downturn we’ll see the big boys cut jobs—maybe a lot. Or even just some regulatory changes (especially reigning in spying and fruits-of-spying monetization) without a broader downturn. Wages downmarket would suffer a ton with all those top-comp folks with (by definition) above-average résumés and work history suddenly looking for a job. Probably upward mobility (into lead/senior/et c.) will suffer a lot. Doesn’t take more supply, lower demand is something we will see again.
    - awb 7y ago
      > It certainly makes for easy automated filtering if a person doesn't have a top-20 school listed on their resume. That seems like a very weak hiring strategy. I'd imagine the top 10% of CS majors at a mid-tier school might be better than the bottom 10% at a top-tier school. Also, college rankings can include all sorts of factors like endowments that might only be weakly correlated with the quality of the education, which itself is probably very difficult to measure. Plus you're going to have a hiring bias against self-learners or those that can't afford a top 20 school. A quick quiz or sample of prior work is a much better filter than a college name.
    - tomp 7y ago
      > Well it is certainly possible that the labor market becomes even more saturated in software and education falls back into being an easy go-to natural filtration system. Education is a shitty filtration system. Work-examples and/or skill-demonstration based interviews like the ones used for programmers are much better. The only reason that so many other industries rely on education is that they don't have as good ways of testing the actual skills of job applicants (and/or because testing doesn't scale that well - e.g. you can give a coding test to every programmer, but can't give a "surgery test" to every doctor).
  - Zelphyr 7y ago
    In a 20+ year career in software engineering I've never once been told I didn't get a job because I didn't have a college degree.
    - BigChiefSmokem 7y ago
      Amazon engineering staff told me they wanted to hire me but could not because of some college degree policy they used to have. I dodged a bullet really, now I know better than to work for a company like Amazon.
    - alasdair_ 7y ago
      Have there been any times you applied and didn't get a job? I ask because it is very unlikely an employer will straight up tell you that this was the reason.
    - modo_mario 7y ago
      After a certain amount of experienced it isn't asked about anymore. Perhaps because a lot of what you would have learned would be outdated anyway or you would have picked it up on the job. When starting out tho at some you can get by by shown competencies, software you made or contributed to, tests, etc but it can matter at a lot of places
    - pingyong 7y ago
      While there certainly are a lot of companies that don't care about your degree, there are at least as many companies that won't even look at your resume without one. It literally gets auto-filtered. (Especially with less than 5 years of experience.) And as much as I'd like to say that you don't want to work for those kinds of people anyway, in my experience it is at best loosely connected to how your day to day work life actually looks like.
      - commandlinefan 7y ago
        > there are at least as many companies that won't even look at your resume without one And it’s about to get worse. You could get a job without a degree or any relevant experience in the 90’s because there were so many to be had and so few degrees to be found. Once you were in, you could stay in by virtue of your experience. This isn’t the case any more; it’s about to be impossible to get an entry level development job without a relevant degree. I think sometimes HN commenters forget that there’s a whole generation of kids in high school today who didn’t work for .com startups throughout the 90’s…
- donteatglitter 7y ago
  Hopefully there are more people like you and less HR depts looking at colleges first or asking random and irrelevant CS questions
- finneganscat 7y ago
  Could you imagine an electrical engineer hiring manager saying this? Or law partner? Or medical hospital? Software is the only professional field that I can think of where hiring managers often disdain or disregard diplomas in favor of “skills”. I think it misses the point that developing problem solving abilities outside of a particular programming skill will quite often carry over to superior abilities within that skill. I have physics and Computer Science degrees. Often, I find that the thought processes I used to learn quantum mechanics are beneficial to the logical thought required to successfully master a new programming language or framework. Is a diploma necessary to be a good coder? Absolutely not! Should it be disregarded? Absolutely not!
- foobiekr 7y ago
  I work with a number of people who are fixated and super judged about brand-name school when hiring, especially Stanford. Single anecdotal example though.
austenallred 7y ago
This is obvious self-promo, but with that out of the way I'm genuinely curious what you think about something like Lambda School - https://lambdaschool.com/isa https://lambdaschool.com/isa
- jessehorne 7y ago
  I have an extreme amount of respect for Lambda School. One of their funds helped me get out of a bad place. I just haven't written the follow-up article. As far as their model, I absolutely love it. It's at the very least, in my opinion, a great step in the right direction.
  - austenallred 7y ago
    Oh my goodness you’re that Jesse! Hope the car helped - from your LinkedIn it looks like you were able to get back on your feet.
    - jessehorne 7y ago
      It was a literal life-saver. There was still quite a journey to go from where I was, to where I am now, but without help from you guys I would still be knee-deep in the struggle. I've been able to find stability, this past year. I hope that I can pay it back, one day. I owe LS and this community a great deal.
- ac29 7y ago
  Its massively expensive @ $30k for 9 months. A year at a reasonably good California State University is <$8000 (http://www.sjsu.edu/faso/docs/1920_COA_ugrd.pdf http://www.sjsu.edu/faso/docs/1920_COA_ugrd.pdf), or <$32k for 4 years (that price doesn't include housing or other living expenses, but neither does lambda school). Yes, you wont pay $30k if you don't get a decent paying job - you'll just waste your time. https://twitter.com/lzsthw/status/1212284566431576069 https://twitter.com/lzsthw/status/1212284566431576069
  - mjfl 7y ago
ChuckMcM 7y ago
Just FYI state schools have generally have good resident tuition rates. You can get a 4 year EE or CS degree for less than $40k (cost of a nice car these days). Those degrees count just as much and they might fill in some gaps you don't know you have.
- jessehorne 7y ago
  That's a lot better than some tuition-totals I've seen but at the end of the day, my biggest problem with this system is that it's not accessible to the poor/working-class without loans. I attended a state school for around a month or two. I don't think I knew one person that wasn't paying for it with a loan. I think lower cost is a step in the right direction but I also think there's plenty more to do.
  - hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
    What's wrong with taking out loans in this situation? This is exactly what loans should be for - making a wise investment in your future. This is especially true if you want to get a CS or related degree. There is a lot of consternation regarding student loans because many students are deluded into getting way in over their heads for degrees that won't end up enabling well-paying careers. That's just not the case with a CS/EE degree at a state school.
    - LMYahooTFY 7y ago
      I think a lot of the problems stem from issues tangential to this, e.g. Numerous young people are terrible at managing money, delaying gratification and long term planning, committing to a path (often dealing with choice overload).
  - JamesBarney 7y ago
    My local community college is HCC which costs $3,500 a year, and U of H the local university costs $9,500 a year. So $27,000 to get a degree, which is not a lot of money compared to 4 years of time and effort. Assuming you're waiting tables that would be $120,000 in lost wages.
brians 7y ago
Yeah, but if it boosts your income by $50k, you’ll pay it back in 3. If you’re 37 now, and it’s paid off by 40, you’ll then have 25 or more years of $50k more a year. Let’s say you put that in a mattress, and so have an extra 1.25 million at retirement. You can then withdraw it at 4% a year for the 30 years after that. It’s an income boost of $50k/year through retirement. Now, of course, you can put it somewhere better than a mattress—but also of course, you don’t expect a $50k/year raise from a college education. Which educations might give that? Top tech schools. Pharmacy. Not much else.
- jessehorne 7y ago
  That's a BIG "if". The thought of paying $50k a year for three years sounds like a really efficient way to do it! In my experience, that's just not how life works. It's a happy thought, however.
- gpm 7y ago
  7 years to pay it off, 44 years old by the time they are done, you have to account for the 4 years in college. Also, 150k is almost certainly an underestimate unless that's only tuition. If we assume 150k tuition (over 4 years) and that they currently make 50k per year that's 350k their out for getting educated. So 4 years education + 7 years earning it back would be 11 years, they're now 48 by the time they broke even, before considering interest. That math still sort of works out, but it's far from a slam dunk. They're accepting a fair bit of risk. What if they study x and by the time they are out the job market has changed and their is no demand for x? What if they run into financial issues while in school and need to drop out? Etc.
  - oivey 7y ago
    $150k seems high, especially if you’re making any effort to choose your school based on price. Where I went it currently costs in the $10-15k/year range for tuition, lab fees, books, etc for state residents. You could further drive the price down by doing some of it at a community college and utilizing financial aid. The opportunity cost of leaving a $50k/year job far outweighs the price of tuition.
- 7y ago
yeswecatan 7y ago
That's also with 0% interest.
dahart 7y ago
For what it’s worth, the St. Louis Fed published a report recently on the income and wealth “premium” that people with degrees get. There was a long thread here on HN. The income premium is how much money people with degrees make per year, versus people without degrees. The wealth premium is how much money people with degrees save by the time they retire, versus people without degrees. The reports says the adjusted wealth premium is going to zero. However, note that people who have degrees actually save (a lot) more money on average, the report is controlling for several variables trying to answer a hypothetical question about the true “value” of college education. The report also show the income premium is, on average, about a factor of 2 for 4-year degrees, and a factor of 3 for advanced degrees. Meaning that, on average, people with degrees earn twice as much as people without. Several different studies have concluded that this income premium is not entirely based on skills learned at college, but is partly cultural and preferential behavior to people with degrees. That’s not a good thing, but it should factor into your calculations of whether a degree is “worth it”. > If I ended up owing 150k and could afford to pay back 1k a month, It would take me 12.5 years. I’m sorry but it’s just not worth it. I can’t think of many sober people that would disagree. Just curious, why would you end up owing 150k? That’s a lot, and you can get an education for a fraction of that at some very excellent state and private schools. The article said literally that students were paying 1/3rd of suggested retail for tuition. And also why would 12.5 years payback make it not worth it, if your salary was double for the rest of your life?
- jessehorne 7y ago
  I think the statistics sound nice and I think that earning a degree for much less than 150k is great! I'm just trying to figure out how much I'd have to be earning monthly for me to be okay spending 1k/mo paying something back for a dozen years. I think that I'd have to be earning 6k and live in a place where rent is super cheap. In those 12.5 years, I'd much rather be saving as much as I could, investing in property, stocks, business, anything...but that 1k a month is a lot and a degree doesn't guarentee that I'm going to be able to find a job that makes it comfortable for me to pay that sort of debt off.
  - dahart 7y ago
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
Look into Western Governors' University.
TrinaryWorksToo 7y ago
Try https://wgu.edu https://wgu.edu
barry-cotter 7y ago
If you don’t have a Bachelor’s and you have multiple years work experience you can get into a legitimate UK distance education Master’s as follows. Do a MicroMaster’s from EdX in anything, or show some other proof of being able to do the work. Apply somewhere that will let you take individual Master’s modules as standalone qualifications. I did the Centre for Financial and Management Studies [1]. There are others available through the University of London [2] though you’ll have to search through the linked list to find the Master’s level ones yourself as they only do BOTH not AND. If you want an MBA and have three years managerial experience look here [3]. If you have a lot of software engineering professional experience the Oxford M.Sc. in Software Engineering will accept “extensive experience in place of formal qualifications.“ CeFIMS Master’s cost ~£10K. I really doubt any of the above options cost over £20K. If you want to get a Bachelor’s fast, for cheap go to Degree Forum[5]. Very US centric. You can definitely get a degree for under $5K. [1] https://www.cefims.ac.uk/programmes/ipa/ https://www.cefims.ac.uk/programmes/ipa/ [2] https://london.ac.uk/courses/international_type_of_study/18 https://london.ac.uk/courses/international_type_of_study/18 [3] https://london.ac.uk/courses/global-mba#entry-requirements-942 https://london.ac.uk/courses/global-mba#entry-requirements-9... [4] https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/courses/msc-software-engineering?wssl=1 https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/courses/msc-softwar... [5] http://degreeforum.net/mybb/ http://degreeforum.net/mybb/
ramblerman 7y ago
In the UK, initiatives like the open university can offer you that, proper math degrees at a reasonable price. The problem is that in the marketplace, a degree is still more about prestige than actual knowledge.
- MagnumOpus 7y ago
  Open University used to be cheap before the uni fee hike in 2012. Now each course costs £1500, putting the cost of a degree at more than £18000. Cheap only compared to the US, but not if the alternative is an Oxford/Cambridge branded degree for £27,500.
  - ramblerman 7y ago
    I was unaware of the hike, that's a shame tbh, as it lessens their value. Thanks for the correction.
wutbrodo 7y ago
> If I ended up owing 150k and could afford to pay back 1k a month, It would take me 12.5 years Actually, it would take a _lot_ longer, almost twice as long. The average student loan rate is around ~6%, which means that a $1k payment a month would work out to 23 years (I compounded monthly for simplicity, so subtract a year for a fudge factor if you'd like).
hurricanetc 7y ago
It doesn’t have to be thousands and thousands of dollars per semester. You would have to attend some of the most expensive schools in the country and take out loans for tuition, room, and board to get to $150k in debt. Find a community college with a credit transfer agreement. Take your undergrad courses and then transfer. I used to live in Dallas and DCCCD charges $59 per credit hour in 2020. You can then finish the remaining 60 hours at a school such as UNT for a total of $24,000. Total spend of around $27,500. And Dallas is on the expensive side as far as cities in Texas.
- gowld 7y ago
  Room and board can be $80K/4yrs before you even look at tuition. Expensive schools are over $150k/4yrs in tuition alone.
  - hurricanetc 7y ago
    So don't take a loan for room and board? This is obviously from the perspective of someone who is actively working and presumably not homeless.
ryanmercer 7y ago
Exactly. I'm a 34, I've been told over and over by employer to get a 4-year degree if I want to advance beyond entry level. I have 13 and a half years of experience at my job, competing companies will not even interview for the equivalent of my current position without a 4-year degree (they'd rather have someone with 6 months experience ad a 4-year degree than someone with 13 and a half years of experience and no degree). I am not CS. So I can spend 4-6 years getting a 4-year degree and taking on 40-60k$ (my state's median household income is 54k!) of debt at 4.53% interest and probably around age 40 be able to compete for jobs with those that are 20-22 (as some kids are now simultaneously graduating high school and receiving associates degrees). At my current employer, moving up one position means a 7% increase in pay... so cool, I'd have 40-60k$ of debt, at 4.53% interest, and my 34k a year would bump up a to 36.4k a year... Yeah, NO. Even internally, training for job-related stuff is only given to those in higher positions... so their degree creates an immediate gap via advantage and then the training they are allowed access creates a further divide, as do awards that are only available at certain levels (get an award for doing X but only people in certain positions are allowed to even do X, someone with an award for X will get preferential treatment over someone without the experience of doing X and without an award for X). So at 34 I could try to go back to school, after 16 years of being removed from an educational setting, and try to learn how to study/write papers/etc and probably waste a couple of grand before I can get back into the groove and walk into my 40's with 1/3 of the cost of a house in debt for a piece of paper that says I toed the line and temporarily memorized random bits of material and finally have that de facto dues card employers require. By the time I pay that debt off I'm probably in my mid to late 50s (while having net less than I was without the degree for at least some of those years) and only have a 4-year degree, while I've spent a decade competing against people with Master's so I'm probably not netting much more per year than I would have been without the degree and will now heavily be fighting ageism and have 5-10 years of work left in me wishing I hadn't spent all of my free time in my mid 30's working on a degree. Efff.

awb 7y ago

> I'm sorry but it's just not worth it. I can't think of many sober people that would disagree. I've hired developers for the last 10 years and never looked at education, just skills. I think you're making a smart move and helping to hopefully boost these new forms of education that don't require sitting in a classroom for 4 years.

jessehorne 7y ago
This makes me extremely happy to hear and it seems others are following the same path! Good on you. For me, it just seems like the logical way to go. Progress comes for us all, no matter how many years we've carried a tradition. If the colleges are struggling with low enrollment, it must be time to go back to the drawing board.
mehrdadn 7y ago
The last 10 years have been hardly typical years for the job market, at least in software. I can't predict the future, but education is (or at least was) supposed to be a long term investment, and it might be a fallacy to assume the next 30-40 years will be like the previous 10.
- StandardFuture 7y ago
  Well it is certainly possible that the labor market becomes even more saturated in software and education falls back into being an easy go-to natural filtration system. We are seeing the big tech companies more than ever use algorithmic puzzle questions, and startups using "culture fit" as easy go-to filtration systems. But, I imagine education might be an even simpler filter if labor supply keeps growing. It certainly makes for easy automated filtering if a person doesn't have a top-20 school listed on their resume.
  - shantly 7y ago
    If there’s a real downturn we’ll see the big boys cut jobs—maybe a lot. Or even just some regulatory changes (especially reigning in spying and fruits-of-spying monetization) without a broader downturn. Wages downmarket would suffer a ton with all those top-comp folks with (by definition) above-average résumés and work history suddenly looking for a job. Probably upward mobility (into lead/senior/et c.) will suffer a lot. Doesn’t take more supply, lower demand is something we will see again.
  - awb 7y ago
    > It certainly makes for easy automated filtering if a person doesn't have a top-20 school listed on their resume. That seems like a very weak hiring strategy. I'd imagine the top 10% of CS majors at a mid-tier school might be better than the bottom 10% at a top-tier school. Also, college rankings can include all sorts of factors like endowments that might only be weakly correlated with the quality of the education, which itself is probably very difficult to measure. Plus you're going to have a hiring bias against self-learners or those that can't afford a top 20 school. A quick quiz or sample of prior work is a much better filter than a college name.
  - tomp 7y ago
    > Well it is certainly possible that the labor market becomes even more saturated in software and education falls back into being an easy go-to natural filtration system. Education is a shitty filtration system. Work-examples and/or skill-demonstration based interviews like the ones used for programmers are much better. The only reason that so many other industries rely on education is that they don't have as good ways of testing the actual skills of job applicants (and/or because testing doesn't scale that well - e.g. you can give a coding test to every programmer, but can't give a "surgery test" to every doctor).
- Zelphyr 7y ago
  In a 20+ year career in software engineering I've never once been told I didn't get a job because I didn't have a college degree.
  - BigChiefSmokem 7y ago
    Amazon engineering staff told me they wanted to hire me but could not because of some college degree policy they used to have. I dodged a bullet really, now I know better than to work for a company like Amazon.
  - alasdair_ 7y ago
    Have there been any times you applied and didn't get a job? I ask because it is very unlikely an employer will straight up tell you that this was the reason.
  - modo_mario 7y ago
    After a certain amount of experienced it isn't asked about anymore. Perhaps because a lot of what you would have learned would be outdated anyway or you would have picked it up on the job. When starting out tho at some you can get by by shown competencies, software you made or contributed to, tests, etc but it can matter at a lot of places
  - pingyong 7y ago
    While there certainly are a lot of companies that don't care about your degree, there are at least as many companies that won't even look at your resume without one. It literally gets auto-filtered. (Especially with less than 5 years of experience.) And as much as I'd like to say that you don't want to work for those kinds of people anyway, in my experience it is at best loosely connected to how your day to day work life actually looks like.
    - commandlinefan 7y ago
      > there are at least as many companies that won't even look at your resume without one And it’s about to get worse. You could get a job without a degree or any relevant experience in the 90’s because there were so many to be had and so few degrees to be found. Once you were in, you could stay in by virtue of your experience. This isn’t the case any more; it’s about to be impossible to get an entry level development job without a relevant degree. I think sometimes HN commenters forget that there’s a whole generation of kids in high school today who didn’t work for .com startups throughout the 90’s…
donteatglitter 7y ago
Hopefully there are more people like you and less HR depts looking at colleges first or asking random and irrelevant CS questions
finneganscat 7y ago
Could you imagine an electrical engineer hiring manager saying this? Or law partner? Or medical hospital? Software is the only professional field that I can think of where hiring managers often disdain or disregard diplomas in favor of “skills”. I think it misses the point that developing problem solving abilities outside of a particular programming skill will quite often carry over to superior abilities within that skill. I have physics and Computer Science degrees. Often, I find that the thought processes I used to learn quantum mechanics are beneficial to the logical thought required to successfully master a new programming language or framework. Is a diploma necessary to be a good coder? Absolutely not! Should it be disregarded? Absolutely not!
foobiekr 7y ago
I work with a number of people who are fixated and super judged about brand-name school when hiring, especially Stanford. Single anecdotal example though.

austenallred 7y ago

This is obvious self-promo, but with that out of the way I'm genuinely curious what you think about something like Lambda School - https://lambdaschool.com/isa https://lambdaschool.com/isa

jessehorne 7y ago
I have an extreme amount of respect for Lambda School. One of their funds helped me get out of a bad place. I just haven't written the follow-up article. As far as their model, I absolutely love it. It's at the very least, in my opinion, a great step in the right direction.
- austenallred 7y ago
  Oh my goodness you’re that Jesse! Hope the car helped - from your LinkedIn it looks like you were able to get back on your feet.
  - jessehorne 7y ago
    It was a literal life-saver. There was still quite a journey to go from where I was, to where I am now, but without help from you guys I would still be knee-deep in the struggle. I've been able to find stability, this past year. I hope that I can pay it back, one day. I owe LS and this community a great deal.
ac29 7y ago
Its massively expensive @ $30k for 9 months. A year at a reasonably good California State University is <$8000 (http://www.sjsu.edu/faso/docs/1920_COA_ugrd.pdf http://www.sjsu.edu/faso/docs/1920_COA_ugrd.pdf), or <$32k for 4 years (that price doesn't include housing or other living expenses, but neither does lambda school). Yes, you wont pay $30k if you don't get a decent paying job - you'll just waste your time. https://twitter.com/lzsthw/status/1212284566431576069 https://twitter.com/lzsthw/status/1212284566431576069
- mjfl 7y ago

ChuckMcM 7y ago

Just FYI state schools have generally have good resident tuition rates. You can get a 4 year EE or CS degree for less than $40k (cost of a nice car these days). Those degrees count just as much and they might fill in some gaps you don't know you have.

jessehorne 7y ago
That's a lot better than some tuition-totals I've seen but at the end of the day, my biggest problem with this system is that it's not accessible to the poor/working-class without loans. I attended a state school for around a month or two. I don't think I knew one person that wasn't paying for it with a loan. I think lower cost is a step in the right direction but I also think there's plenty more to do.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  What's wrong with taking out loans in this situation? This is exactly what loans should be for - making a wise investment in your future. This is especially true if you want to get a CS or related degree. There is a lot of consternation regarding student loans because many students are deluded into getting way in over their heads for degrees that won't end up enabling well-paying careers. That's just not the case with a CS/EE degree at a state school.
  - LMYahooTFY 7y ago
    I think a lot of the problems stem from issues tangential to this, e.g. Numerous young people are terrible at managing money, delaying gratification and long term planning, committing to a path (often dealing with choice overload).
- JamesBarney 7y ago
  My local community college is HCC which costs $3,500 a year, and U of H the local university costs $9,500 a year. So $27,000 to get a degree, which is not a lot of money compared to 4 years of time and effort. Assuming you're waiting tables that would be $120,000 in lost wages.

brians 7y ago

Yeah, but if it boosts your income by $50k, you’ll pay it back in 3. If you’re 37 now, and it’s paid off by 40, you’ll then have 25 or more years of $50k more a year. Let’s say you put that in a mattress, and so have an extra 1.25 million at retirement. You can then withdraw it at 4% a year for the 30 years after that. It’s an income boost of $50k/year through retirement. Now, of course, you can put it somewhere better than a mattress—but also of course, you don’t expect a $50k/year raise from a college education. Which educations might give that? Top tech schools. Pharmacy. Not much else.

jessehorne 7y ago
That's a BIG "if". The thought of paying $50k a year for three years sounds like a really efficient way to do it! In my experience, that's just not how life works. It's a happy thought, however.
gpm 7y ago
7 years to pay it off, 44 years old by the time they are done, you have to account for the 4 years in college. Also, 150k is almost certainly an underestimate unless that's only tuition. If we assume 150k tuition (over 4 years) and that they currently make 50k per year that's 350k their out for getting educated. So 4 years education + 7 years earning it back would be 11 years, they're now 48 by the time they broke even, before considering interest. That math still sort of works out, but it's far from a slam dunk. They're accepting a fair bit of risk. What if they study x and by the time they are out the job market has changed and their is no demand for x? What if they run into financial issues while in school and need to drop out? Etc.
- oivey 7y ago
  $150k seems high, especially if you’re making any effort to choose your school based on price. Where I went it currently costs in the $10-15k/year range for tuition, lab fees, books, etc for state residents. You could further drive the price down by doing some of it at a community college and utilizing financial aid. The opportunity cost of leaving a $50k/year job far outweighs the price of tuition.
7y ago

yeswecatan 7y ago

That's also with 0% interest.

dahart 7y ago

For what it’s worth, the St. Louis Fed published a report recently on the income and wealth “premium” that people with degrees get. There was a long thread here on HN. The income premium is how much money people with degrees make per year, versus people without degrees. The wealth premium is how much money people with degrees save by the time they retire, versus people without degrees. The reports says the adjusted wealth premium is going to zero. However, note that people who have degrees actually save (a lot) more money on average, the report is controlling for several variables trying to answer a hypothetical question about the true “value” of college education. The report also show the income premium is, on average, about a factor of 2 for 4-year degrees, and a factor of 3 for advanced degrees. Meaning that, on average, people with degrees earn twice as much as people without. Several different studies have concluded that this income premium is not entirely based on skills learned at college, but is partly cultural and preferential behavior to people with degrees. That’s not a good thing, but it should factor into your calculations of whether a degree is “worth it”. > If I ended up owing 150k and could afford to pay back 1k a month, It would take me 12.5 years. I’m sorry but it’s just not worth it. I can’t think of many sober people that would disagree. Just curious, why would you end up owing 150k? That’s a lot, and you can get an education for a fraction of that at some very excellent state and private schools. The article said literally that students were paying 1/3rd of suggested retail for tuition. And also why would 12.5 years payback make it not worth it, if your salary was double for the rest of your life?

jessehorne 7y ago
I think the statistics sound nice and I think that earning a degree for much less than 150k is great! I'm just trying to figure out how much I'd have to be earning monthly for me to be okay spending 1k/mo paying something back for a dozen years. I think that I'd have to be earning 6k and live in a place where rent is super cheap. In those 12.5 years, I'd much rather be saving as much as I could, investing in property, stocks, business, anything...but that 1k a month is a lot and a degree doesn't guarentee that I'm going to be able to find a job that makes it comfortable for me to pay that sort of debt off.
- dahart 7y ago

AnimalMuppet 7y ago

Look into Western Governors' University.

TrinaryWorksToo 7y ago

Try https://wgu.edu https://wgu.edu

barry-cotter 7y ago

If you don’t have a Bachelor’s and you have multiple years work experience you can get into a legitimate UK distance education Master’s as follows. Do a MicroMaster’s from EdX in anything, or show some other proof of being able to do the work. Apply somewhere that will let you take individual Master’s modules as standalone qualifications. I did the Centre for Financial and Management Studies [1]. There are others available through the University of London [2] though you’ll have to search through the linked list to find the Master’s level ones yourself as they only do BOTH not AND. If you want an MBA and have three years managerial experience look here [3]. If you have a lot of software engineering professional experience the Oxford M.Sc. in Software Engineering will accept “extensive experience in place of formal qualifications.“ CeFIMS Master’s cost ~£10K. I really doubt any of the above options cost over £20K. If you want to get a Bachelor’s fast, for cheap go to Degree Forum[5]. Very US centric. You can definitely get a degree for under $5K. [1] https://www.cefims.ac.uk/programmes/ipa/ https://www.cefims.ac.uk/programmes/ipa/ [2] https://london.ac.uk/courses/international_type_of_study/18 https://london.ac.uk/courses/international_type_of_study/18 [3] https://london.ac.uk/courses/global-mba#entry-requirements-942 https://london.ac.uk/courses/global-mba#entry-requirements-9... [4] https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/courses/msc-software-engineering?wssl=1 https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/courses/msc-softwar... [5] http://degreeforum.net/mybb/ http://degreeforum.net/mybb/

ramblerman 7y ago

In the UK, initiatives like the open university can offer you that, proper math degrees at a reasonable price. The problem is that in the marketplace, a degree is still more about prestige than actual knowledge.

MagnumOpus 7y ago
Open University used to be cheap before the uni fee hike in 2012. Now each course costs £1500, putting the cost of a degree at more than £18000. Cheap only compared to the US, but not if the alternative is an Oxford/Cambridge branded degree for £27,500.
- ramblerman 7y ago
  I was unaware of the hike, that's a shame tbh, as it lessens their value. Thanks for the correction.

wutbrodo 7y ago

> If I ended up owing 150k and could afford to pay back 1k a month, It would take me 12.5 years Actually, it would take a _lot_ longer, almost twice as long. The average student loan rate is around ~6%, which means that a $1k payment a month would work out to 23 years (I compounded monthly for simplicity, so subtract a year for a fudge factor if you'd like).

hurricanetc 7y ago

It doesn’t have to be thousands and thousands of dollars per semester. You would have to attend some of the most expensive schools in the country and take out loans for tuition, room, and board to get to $150k in debt. Find a community college with a credit transfer agreement. Take your undergrad courses and then transfer. I used to live in Dallas and DCCCD charges $59 per credit hour in 2020. You can then finish the remaining 60 hours at a school such as UNT for a total of $24,000. Total spend of around $27,500. And Dallas is on the expensive side as far as cities in Texas.

gowld 7y ago
Room and board can be $80K/4yrs before you even look at tuition. Expensive schools are over $150k/4yrs in tuition alone.
- hurricanetc 7y ago
  So don't take a loan for room and board? This is obviously from the perspective of someone who is actively working and presumably not homeless.

ryanmercer 7y ago

Exactly. I'm a 34, I've been told over and over by employer to get a 4-year degree if I want to advance beyond entry level. I have 13 and a half years of experience at my job, competing companies will not even interview for the equivalent of my current position without a 4-year degree (they'd rather have someone with 6 months experience ad a 4-year degree than someone with 13 and a half years of experience and no degree). I am not CS. So I can spend 4-6 years getting a 4-year degree and taking on 40-60k$ (my state's median household income is 54k!) of debt at 4.53% interest and probably around age 40 be able to compete for jobs with those that are 20-22 (as some kids are now simultaneously graduating high school and receiving associates degrees). At my current employer, moving up one position means a 7% increase in pay... so cool, I'd have 40-60k$ of debt, at 4.53% interest, and my 34k a year would bump up a to 36.4k a year... Yeah, NO. Even internally, training for job-related stuff is only given to those in higher positions... so their degree creates an immediate gap via advantage and then the training they are allowed access creates a further divide, as do awards that are only available at certain levels (get an award for doing X but only people in certain positions are allowed to even do X, someone with an award for X will get preferential treatment over someone without the experience of doing X and without an award for X). So at 34 I could try to go back to school, after 16 years of being removed from an educational setting, and try to learn how to study/write papers/etc and probably waste a couple of grand before I can get back into the groove and walk into my 40's with 1/3 of the cost of a house in debt for a piece of paper that says I toed the line and temporarily memorized random bits of material and finally have that de facto dues card employers require. By the time I pay that debt off I'm probably in my mid to late 50s (while having net less than I was without the degree for at least some of those years) and only have a 4-year degree, while I've spent a decade competing against people with Master's so I'm probably not netting much more per year than I would have been without the degree and will now heavily be fighting ageism and have 5-10 years of work left in me wishing I hadn't spent all of my free time in my mid 30's working on a degree. Efff.