9 ms·

The University Has No Clothes

71 points by joubert 15y ago

stcredzero 15y ago
College is just an avenue to doing substantive work -- which is when the real learning happens.
- GaryOlson 15y ago
  So those who do not attend college don't have access to do substantive work? I agree. Too many job postings minimum requirements include a college degree even if the actual work -- substantive or not -- do not need a college education. So, a person cannot start in industry in a less substantive position and move into a position which includes more substantive work.
  - stcredzero 15y ago
    So those who do not attend college don't have access to do substantive work? I agree. Wow, is putting words into another's mouth a standard HN move now? Getting into college is not an insurmountable barrier. Find a professor who is genuinely interested in the work you're interested in. Start learning the background information required to do the work. Between the two of you, you should be able to figure out a way to work together. This works for both financial and admissions barriers. There are also many kinds of substantive work one can do without a college degree.
- pnathan 15y ago
  I learned a ton in college that my job could never have taught me. I received an education. Of course, employers want training, not an education, and there the disconnect lies.
zwieback 15y ago
These articles always focus on liberal arts and private universities, which is completely uninteresting to me. I'd like to know the historic development of public school tuition for actually useful degrees like engineering and business, which don't have the steep salary curves of doctors and lawyers.
- nkassis 15y ago
  Don't forget science degrees. But it's interesting to note that engineering degrees cost more than liberal arts degrees to universities yet in general students in engineering are paying the same. It's changing now, where engineering cost per hour are going up but liberal arts students are still subsidizing engineering students.
- scott_s 15y ago
  This is my common complaint when the issue comes up. From the article, In a typical semester, one third of the students Arum and Roksa followed for their recent book, Academically Adrift, did not take “any courses that required more than forty pages of reading per week” and half did not take “a single course that required more than twenty pages of writing.” I had semesters that were nothing but math, physics and computer science and they fall into the above category. There was reading in those courses, but it was mainly in a textbook, and 40 pages out of a physics textbook is a lot of material. Likewise, I didn't turn in any writing assignments for these classes, but I turned in problem sets and programming projects on a regular basis.
greencircle 15y ago
I like the approach that Summerhill and Sudbury students tend to follow: after finishing "high school", they work in the world, thus earning money and gaining experience, and then they attend college if they think it is right for them. They work for their tuition, and they don't party away their school life.
tokenadult 15y ago
A quotation inside the article points to the public policy issues connected to the value of college: "This isn’t just a matter of harnessing people’s resources more productively, Altucher insists. It’s a matter of harnessing the country’s resources more productively. 'Let’s take a step back,' Altucher says. 'What’s the other American religion? Owning a home.' For years, the government encouraged home ownership for all citizens. 'So we got more and more loans that were considered subprime, and look what that did. The idea, the religion of home ownership for all, turned into a national nightmare, a national apocalypse instead of a religion. The same thing’s going to happen here.'" Indeed, if government subsidies for college attendance (government allocations of funds to colleges, individual grants for college attendance, and below-market-rate-terms loans for college attendance) change individuals' estimate of the cost:benefit ratio of college, without increasing the actual societal value of college attendance, then current college funding policy might end up being as harmful to the national economy as previous decade housing policy was. P.S. This article had a previous submission (no discussion that time, perhaps because of the title change): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2522135 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2522135
DanI-S 15y ago
I'd like to know why American university courses cost so much. The UK punches above its weight in research and quality of education, yet the maximum fee universities can charge is around $14k per year. The majority charge substantially less than this. Whilst government subsidy explains some of the mismatch, it's still very significant. In addition, the cost of buying books, which seems to make up a gigantic portion of college costs in the US, is not even remotely as large. I can think of the following theories: - In the absence of a "socialist" state, US colleges provide poorer students with a free/subsidized education by charging richer students more. - US faculty receive massively higher salaries. - In a country where college education is commonly used as a mark of social status, they can charge a premium and people will still pay. - There is limited public understanding of the drawbacks of debt, so people are more willing to incur it by paying extreme fees. - It's a big bloody racket. Do any of these hold any truth?
- joubert 15y ago
  Perhaps because they are the best in the world and there is a huge demand (from across the globe) to get in? http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp
  - DanI-S 15y ago
    That's a valid point, and an impressive list - but perhaps they are able to be the best in the world because they are able to charge so much.
    - Locke1689 15y ago
      That's not always true historically, though. It seems more like a relatively recent phenomenon, but US schools were still the best in the world a century ago. Perhaps it's more accurate that they are able to continue cementing their lead by charging so much.
  - tokenadult 15y ago
    Thomas Sowell is one of many commentators who point out that United States universities will be attractive at EQUAL quality, because they are located in the United States. But indeed, as United States universities attract students from all over the world, that helps even second-tier universities raise the quality of their programs, by gaining diverse groups of students with reasonably strong academic ability.
nazgulnarsil 15y ago
Universities don't charge enough as evident from the fact that there are an order of magnitude more applicants than spaces at many of them. The more they raise the prices for those willing to pay the more money they'll have to subsidize brilliant students who can't. "normal" people should be studying practical skills. It's a product of our egalitarian mindset that we regarded the status of research institutions as everyone's right, and then used subsidies and legislation until the elite institutions were so watered down that their degrees became a joke. You can't give away status, status will just flee and look for darker corners to hide in.
- beaumartinez 15y ago
  > Universities don't charge enough [...] there are an order of magnitude more applicants than spaces at many of them. And that's bad?! What about public schools―free tuition! Universities―all education and knowledge―should be free. It's unfortunate teachers and teaching materials are in short supply, and hence we have to afford these to only those most "willing", but stratifying education by cost is a very poor method. Look at the UK. Some institutions can now charge GBP 27,000 for a degree―which may or may not be of any use!―which students will repay the rest of their lives.
  - hugh3 15y ago
    Some institutions can now charge GBP 27,000 for a degree―which may or may not be of any use!―which students will repay the rest of their lives. Twenty-seven thousand pounds, in the scheme of things, is chickenfeed. It's certainly much less than the opportunity cost of going to university for four years. Students need to take responsibility for their own education. You've got four years, hundreds of different lecture courses open to you, and a five million book library -- it's a huge opportunity to educate yourself, but it's up to you to actually extract education from it. Many students will acquire knowledge which will be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, or even millions, over the course of their degrees. If you haven't extracted a mere twenty-seven thousand pounds' worth, that's your own damn fault. People who complain about not getting their money's worth out of university education are like people who go to Disneyland, sit on a bench near the entrance all day, and complain that it wasn't worth the money.
ams6110 15y ago
I've been wondering lately if the time might be right for the re-emergence of "guilds" i.e. organizations that promote the mastering of a craft. Not really "unions" in that the primary motivation would be teaching and improving, not bargaining with employers (though I realize that many modern unions do both). A software engineering "guild" would seem to me to be a way to offer structured mentorship and certification of mastery without the need to also pay for years of busywork in humanities courses that, let's face it, are never applied by the vast majority of people working in our field.
- MarkPNeyer 15y ago
  a 'programmers guild' would be awesome. imagine learning to code at 14 instead of going to some worthless high school. you would start as an apprentice, watching an experienced programmer write code, helping fix syntax errors and spelling mistakes, while learning through osmosis. as a journeyman, you'd write simple unit tests, then more advanced functional tests, and then graduate by releasing your first app into production. by age 18 you could have four years of real world coding experience, while having earned a salary (albeit a small one) from age 14.
  - ZackOfAllTrades 15y ago
    Zoho does this. http://blogs.zoho.com/general/how-we-recruit-on-formal-credentials-vs-experience-based-education http://blogs.zoho.com/general/how-we-recruit-on-formal-crede...
  - nprincigalli 15y ago
    That's how it works with many opensource projects. You get around, contribute with docfixes, learn a little, then send a patch here and there, and sooner than you realize you can be doing contract or employed work related to the tools being used by the project, or to the project itself. IMHO, there's no shortage of well-paid work for those known to be talented by their peers.
daniel-cussen 15y ago
> [Peter Thiel's Stanford education got him] a job trading derivatives at Credit Suisse before he returned West to join the Internet rush. Thiel got this job by taking a math test and getting all the answers right.
impendia 15y ago
According to my calculations, assuming a normal course load and no financial aid, the students in my Stanford combinatorics class were paying $129.00 an hour, each, to listen to me lecture. And I'm not senior faculty -- I'm a postdoc a couple years out of grad school. Moreover, I'm not even properly an expert on the particular subject, I had to spend some time before lectures reviewing it and learning new material to lecture on. No question, I'm the beneficiary of all this. I make good money to carry out independent research, and my department apologizes for those semesters where I am "burdened" with six classroom hours a week of teaching. Good or bad, the purpose of elite universities is research, not teaching. There is certainly room to criticize this, but that's the career path the senior profs aim for. Elite universities hire the best researchers, and there is a trickle-down effect -- that is what you are paying for with a Stanford education. Worth it? Dunno. Seems implausible from the perspective of just thinking about it, but looking around, the evidence seems to be that it is.
- nagrom 15y ago
  I cannot find it online, but I remember reading an essay by an ex-faculty member in CS who eventually went to work for Sun. He thought that academia was a rip-off, training-wise, when compared to Sun. At his job in Sun, when he trains people he spends 40 hours preparing every hour of material. In academia, we spend two, perhaps three, hours per hour of training material. I think it's probably fair to say that people overpay to be taught material by faculty who really view the lecturing as an imposition on their time.
  - impendia 15y ago
    I think it's important to remember that students are getting what they in fact paid for. There are colleges which de-emphasize research and prioritize outstanding teaching. Harvey Mudd comes to mind as an outstanding example. But for whatever reason, top research universities have much higher clout. I think perhaps because being at a top research university is ideal for exceptionally strong students; being around exceptionally strong students is very good for above-average students; and so on.
lr 15y ago
I have no data to back this up, but perhaps the reason college tuition has increased tenfold in the past 30 years is that the government (especially US state governments) is subsidizing it less and less... I work for a university (two different ones in the past 12 years), and there is less and less money from the state going into education. I also think we need to start looking at the $40K college education vs. the $160K college education. Unless you want to be a corporate executive, do you really need to go to Yale, Harvard, Stanford, etc? I think PG once wrote that there is no correlation between going to a very expensive school and being a successful startup founder...
- redsymbol 15y ago
  While I don't have data to cite right now either, a decrease in government subsidies is more likely to push prices DOWN, all else being equal. Increasing loan disbursements will, effectively, increase the available money supply in that market (of young adults entering college); and significant increases in money supply are by themselves inflationary, i.e. tend to push prices up. To help see why, imagine you have one apple to sell. Alice and Bill are quite hungry, and both have $5 to spend. The maximum you can get from selling your apple is $5, because that's all either has to offer. Suppose I come along and loan $20 each to Alice and Bill. Now if one offers $5, the other has the power to outbid. This new situation certainly won't DECREASE the amount of money you'll finally get for the apple, and could in fact end up dramatically increasing your profits. This is oversimplified, but illustrates the legitimate macroeconomic essence, I think. Of course, we have to qualify this with "all else being equal", which the real world is too messy for. I thought total student loan payouts in the USA had been increasing on average the past few decades, but don't know for sure: can anyone verify one way or another? The best I could quickly find is the "Average Debt Over Time" chart here: http://projectonstudentdebt.org/files/File/Debt_Facts_and_Sources.pdf http://projectonstudentdebt.org/files/File/Debt_Facts_and_So...
  - redsymbol 15y ago
    Update: while government-sponsored student loans can be considered a form of subsidy, I realize now you were referring to something else, lr. So, my comment is kind of tangential to your point :)
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
ctdonath 15y ago
http://ocw.mit.edu http://ocw.mit.edu among others: Education is free. Certification is expensive.
- billswift 15y ago
  Education is always expensive, even if not in direct monetary terms. Learning anything worthwhile takes time and effort. Time and effort that you can't apply to other things - aka opportunity costs. I mostly read and study in my "spare time", but even that means I can't do other things.
scott_s 15y ago
Quoth Altucher, "When [my daughters are] 18 years old, just hand them $200,000 to go off and have a fun time for four years? Why would I want to do that?" I was in undergrad at Virginia Tech from the fall of 1999 to the spring of 2003. The total cost was less than $30,000 for all four years. Of course, keeping me fed and housed all four years cost more. I find his argument disingenuous, because only the elite private schools cost that much. Of course, it would be equally disingenuous for me to imply that everyone has access to a decent state school with relatively low in-state tuition. But surely that should be a part of the discussion.
earl 15y ago
While the article has it's points, Altucher complaining about $200k for a college education is stupid. For every Stanford or Harvard out there, there's a Berkeley, UW Madison, U Washington, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, Ann Arbor, etc.
- rayiner 15y ago
  My GT degree cost ~$60k in the early 2000s. If you started today, it'd be north of $100k.
antihero 15y ago
Honestly I've learned more playing around on my own than I did at university. Lectures really aren't for everyone, it's a really old-fashioned, outdated learning style. Whilst secondary schools have progressed hugely, university's have stayed with the sit their and suck up knowledge approach. Which sucks for me, because I learn by doing things. I guess I learned a lot from labs, and doing projects, which were awesome. But sitting there in a lecture just felt so removed from what I was actually supposed to be learning about. Combine that with ADHD and I don't think I'll be graduating in the next few months :( A lot is my fault, but I really can't stand lectures, unless the lecturer is exceptionally engaging.

71 points by joubert 15y ago

stcredzero 15y ago

College is just an avenue to doing substantive work -- which is when the real learning happens.

GaryOlson 15y ago
So those who do not attend college don't have access to do substantive work? I agree. Too many job postings minimum requirements include a college degree even if the actual work -- substantive or not -- do not need a college education. So, a person cannot start in industry in a less substantive position and move into a position which includes more substantive work.
- stcredzero 15y ago
  So those who do not attend college don't have access to do substantive work? I agree. Wow, is putting words into another's mouth a standard HN move now? Getting into college is not an insurmountable barrier. Find a professor who is genuinely interested in the work you're interested in. Start learning the background information required to do the work. Between the two of you, you should be able to figure out a way to work together. This works for both financial and admissions barriers. There are also many kinds of substantive work one can do without a college degree.
pnathan 15y ago
I learned a ton in college that my job could never have taught me. I received an education. Of course, employers want training, not an education, and there the disconnect lies.

zwieback 15y ago

These articles always focus on liberal arts and private universities, which is completely uninteresting to me. I'd like to know the historic development of public school tuition for actually useful degrees like engineering and business, which don't have the steep salary curves of doctors and lawyers.

nkassis 15y ago
Don't forget science degrees. But it's interesting to note that engineering degrees cost more than liberal arts degrees to universities yet in general students in engineering are paying the same. It's changing now, where engineering cost per hour are going up but liberal arts students are still subsidizing engineering students.
scott_s 15y ago
This is my common complaint when the issue comes up. From the article, In a typical semester, one third of the students Arum and Roksa followed for their recent book, Academically Adrift, did not take “any courses that required more than forty pages of reading per week” and half did not take “a single course that required more than twenty pages of writing.” I had semesters that were nothing but math, physics and computer science and they fall into the above category. There was reading in those courses, but it was mainly in a textbook, and 40 pages out of a physics textbook is a lot of material. Likewise, I didn't turn in any writing assignments for these classes, but I turned in problem sets and programming projects on a regular basis.

greencircle 15y ago

I like the approach that Summerhill and Sudbury students tend to follow: after finishing "high school", they work in the world, thus earning money and gaining experience, and then they attend college if they think it is right for them. They work for their tuition, and they don't party away their school life.

tokenadult 15y ago

A quotation inside the article points to the public policy issues connected to the value of college: "This isn’t just a matter of harnessing people’s resources more productively, Altucher insists. It’s a matter of harnessing the country’s resources more productively. 'Let’s take a step back,' Altucher says. 'What’s the other American religion? Owning a home.' For years, the government encouraged home ownership for all citizens. 'So we got more and more loans that were considered subprime, and look what that did. The idea, the religion of home ownership for all, turned into a national nightmare, a national apocalypse instead of a religion. The same thing’s going to happen here.'" Indeed, if government subsidies for college attendance (government allocations of funds to colleges, individual grants for college attendance, and below-market-rate-terms loans for college attendance) change individuals' estimate of the cost:benefit ratio of college, without increasing the actual societal value of college attendance, then current college funding policy might end up being as harmful to the national economy as previous decade housing policy was. P.S. This article had a previous submission (no discussion that time, perhaps because of the title change): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2522135 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2522135

DanI-S 15y ago

I'd like to know why American university courses cost so much. The UK punches above its weight in research and quality of education, yet the maximum fee universities can charge is around $14k per year. The majority charge substantially less than this. Whilst government subsidy explains some of the mismatch, it's still very significant. In addition, the cost of buying books, which seems to make up a gigantic portion of college costs in the US, is not even remotely as large. I can think of the following theories: - In the absence of a "socialist" state, US colleges provide poorer students with a free/subsidized education by charging richer students more. - US faculty receive massively higher salaries. - In a country where college education is commonly used as a mark of social status, they can charge a premium and people will still pay. - There is limited public understanding of the drawbacks of debt, so people are more willing to incur it by paying extreme fees. - It's a big bloody racket. Do any of these hold any truth?

joubert 15y ago
Perhaps because they are the best in the world and there is a huge demand (from across the globe) to get in? http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp
- DanI-S 15y ago
  That's a valid point, and an impressive list - but perhaps they are able to be the best in the world because they are able to charge so much.
  - Locke1689 15y ago
    That's not always true historically, though. It seems more like a relatively recent phenomenon, but US schools were still the best in the world a century ago. Perhaps it's more accurate that they are able to continue cementing their lead by charging so much.
- tokenadult 15y ago
  Thomas Sowell is one of many commentators who point out that United States universities will be attractive at EQUAL quality, because they are located in the United States. But indeed, as United States universities attract students from all over the world, that helps even second-tier universities raise the quality of their programs, by gaining diverse groups of students with reasonably strong academic ability.

nazgulnarsil 15y ago

Universities don't charge enough as evident from the fact that there are an order of magnitude more applicants than spaces at many of them. The more they raise the prices for those willing to pay the more money they'll have to subsidize brilliant students who can't. "normal" people should be studying practical skills. It's a product of our egalitarian mindset that we regarded the status of research institutions as everyone's right, and then used subsidies and legislation until the elite institutions were so watered down that their degrees became a joke. You can't give away status, status will just flee and look for darker corners to hide in.

beaumartinez 15y ago
> Universities don't charge enough [...] there are an order of magnitude more applicants than spaces at many of them. And that's bad?! What about public schools―free tuition! Universities―all education and knowledge―should be free. It's unfortunate teachers and teaching materials are in short supply, and hence we have to afford these to only those most "willing", but stratifying education by cost is a very poor method. Look at the UK. Some institutions can now charge GBP 27,000 for a degree―which may or may not be of any use!―which students will repay the rest of their lives.
- hugh3 15y ago
  Some institutions can now charge GBP 27,000 for a degree―which may or may not be of any use!―which students will repay the rest of their lives. Twenty-seven thousand pounds, in the scheme of things, is chickenfeed. It's certainly much less than the opportunity cost of going to university for four years. Students need to take responsibility for their own education. You've got four years, hundreds of different lecture courses open to you, and a five million book library -- it's a huge opportunity to educate yourself, but it's up to you to actually extract education from it. Many students will acquire knowledge which will be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, or even millions, over the course of their degrees. If you haven't extracted a mere twenty-seven thousand pounds' worth, that's your own damn fault. People who complain about not getting their money's worth out of university education are like people who go to Disneyland, sit on a bench near the entrance all day, and complain that it wasn't worth the money.

ams6110 15y ago

I've been wondering lately if the time might be right for the re-emergence of "guilds" i.e. organizations that promote the mastering of a craft. Not really "unions" in that the primary motivation would be teaching and improving, not bargaining with employers (though I realize that many modern unions do both). A software engineering "guild" would seem to me to be a way to offer structured mentorship and certification of mastery without the need to also pay for years of busywork in humanities courses that, let's face it, are never applied by the vast majority of people working in our field.

MarkPNeyer 15y ago
a 'programmers guild' would be awesome. imagine learning to code at 14 instead of going to some worthless high school. you would start as an apprentice, watching an experienced programmer write code, helping fix syntax errors and spelling mistakes, while learning through osmosis. as a journeyman, you'd write simple unit tests, then more advanced functional tests, and then graduate by releasing your first app into production. by age 18 you could have four years of real world coding experience, while having earned a salary (albeit a small one) from age 14.
- ZackOfAllTrades 15y ago
  Zoho does this. http://blogs.zoho.com/general/how-we-recruit-on-formal-credentials-vs-experience-based-education http://blogs.zoho.com/general/how-we-recruit-on-formal-crede...
- nprincigalli 15y ago
  That's how it works with many opensource projects. You get around, contribute with docfixes, learn a little, then send a patch here and there, and sooner than you realize you can be doing contract or employed work related to the tools being used by the project, or to the project itself. IMHO, there's no shortage of well-paid work for those known to be talented by their peers.

daniel-cussen 15y ago

> [Peter Thiel's Stanford education got him] a job trading derivatives at Credit Suisse before he returned West to join the Internet rush. Thiel got this job by taking a math test and getting all the answers right.

impendia 15y ago

According to my calculations, assuming a normal course load and no financial aid, the students in my Stanford combinatorics class were paying $129.00 an hour, each, to listen to me lecture. And I'm not senior faculty -- I'm a postdoc a couple years out of grad school. Moreover, I'm not even properly an expert on the particular subject, I had to spend some time before lectures reviewing it and learning new material to lecture on. No question, I'm the beneficiary of all this. I make good money to carry out independent research, and my department apologizes for those semesters where I am "burdened" with six classroom hours a week of teaching. Good or bad, the purpose of elite universities is research, not teaching. There is certainly room to criticize this, but that's the career path the senior profs aim for. Elite universities hire the best researchers, and there is a trickle-down effect -- that is what you are paying for with a Stanford education. Worth it? Dunno. Seems implausible from the perspective of just thinking about it, but looking around, the evidence seems to be that it is.

nagrom 15y ago
I cannot find it online, but I remember reading an essay by an ex-faculty member in CS who eventually went to work for Sun. He thought that academia was a rip-off, training-wise, when compared to Sun. At his job in Sun, when he trains people he spends 40 hours preparing every hour of material. In academia, we spend two, perhaps three, hours per hour of training material. I think it's probably fair to say that people overpay to be taught material by faculty who really view the lecturing as an imposition on their time.
- impendia 15y ago
  I think it's important to remember that students are getting what they in fact paid for. There are colleges which de-emphasize research and prioritize outstanding teaching. Harvey Mudd comes to mind as an outstanding example. But for whatever reason, top research universities have much higher clout. I think perhaps because being at a top research university is ideal for exceptionally strong students; being around exceptionally strong students is very good for above-average students; and so on.

lr 15y ago

I have no data to back this up, but perhaps the reason college tuition has increased tenfold in the past 30 years is that the government (especially US state governments) is subsidizing it less and less... I work for a university (two different ones in the past 12 years), and there is less and less money from the state going into education. I also think we need to start looking at the $40K college education vs. the $160K college education. Unless you want to be a corporate executive, do you really need to go to Yale, Harvard, Stanford, etc? I think PG once wrote that there is no correlation between going to a very expensive school and being a successful startup founder...

redsymbol 15y ago
While I don't have data to cite right now either, a decrease in government subsidies is more likely to push prices DOWN, all else being equal. Increasing loan disbursements will, effectively, increase the available money supply in that market (of young adults entering college); and significant increases in money supply are by themselves inflationary, i.e. tend to push prices up. To help see why, imagine you have one apple to sell. Alice and Bill are quite hungry, and both have $5 to spend. The maximum you can get from selling your apple is $5, because that's all either has to offer. Suppose I come along and loan $20 each to Alice and Bill. Now if one offers $5, the other has the power to outbid. This new situation certainly won't DECREASE the amount of money you'll finally get for the apple, and could in fact end up dramatically increasing your profits. This is oversimplified, but illustrates the legitimate macroeconomic essence, I think. Of course, we have to qualify this with "all else being equal", which the real world is too messy for. I thought total student loan payouts in the USA had been increasing on average the past few decades, but don't know for sure: can anyone verify one way or another? The best I could quickly find is the "Average Debt Over Time" chart here: http://projectonstudentdebt.org/files/File/Debt_Facts_and_Sources.pdf http://projectonstudentdebt.org/files/File/Debt_Facts_and_So...
- redsymbol 15y ago
  Update: while government-sponsored student loans can be considered a form of subsidy, I realize now you were referring to something else, lr. So, my comment is kind of tangential to your point :)

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

ctdonath 15y ago

http://ocw.mit.edu http://ocw.mit.edu among others: Education is free. Certification is expensive.

billswift 15y ago
Education is always expensive, even if not in direct monetary terms. Learning anything worthwhile takes time and effort. Time and effort that you can't apply to other things - aka opportunity costs. I mostly read and study in my "spare time", but even that means I can't do other things.

scott_s 15y ago

Quoth Altucher, "When [my daughters are] 18 years old, just hand them $200,000 to go off and have a fun time for four years? Why would I want to do that?" I was in undergrad at Virginia Tech from the fall of 1999 to the spring of 2003. The total cost was less than $30,000 for all four years. Of course, keeping me fed and housed all four years cost more. I find his argument disingenuous, because only the elite private schools cost that much. Of course, it would be equally disingenuous for me to imply that everyone has access to a decent state school with relatively low in-state tuition. But surely that should be a part of the discussion.

earl 15y ago

While the article has it's points, Altucher complaining about $200k for a college education is stupid. For every Stanford or Harvard out there, there's a Berkeley, UW Madison, U Washington, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, Ann Arbor, etc.

rayiner 15y ago
My GT degree cost ~$60k in the early 2000s. If you started today, it'd be north of $100k.

antihero 15y ago

Honestly I've learned more playing around on my own than I did at university. Lectures really aren't for everyone, it's a really old-fashioned, outdated learning style. Whilst secondary schools have progressed hugely, university's have stayed with the sit their and suck up knowledge approach. Which sucks for me, because I learn by doing things. I guess I learned a lot from labs, and doing projects, which were awesome. But sitting there in a lecture just felt so removed from what I was actually supposed to be learning about. Combine that with ADHD and I don't think I'll be graduating in the next few months :( A lot is my fault, but I really can't stand lectures, unless the lecturer is exceptionally engaging.