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We need an AirBNB for Mentorship--not $35k a year wasted on college

anyone out there want to build mentormykid.com? dead serious... I will fund it. :-) i meet young adults all day long who are $100-200k in debt after school. makes no sense.

stdbrouw 15y ago
"Free labor is the exact point of interns! Why else would you waste your time mentoring someone who is gone in 10 weeks?" How utterly, utterly naive. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/opinion/03perlin.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/opinion/03perlin.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-10822784 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-10822784 To quote just one example: "One Ivy League student said she spent an unpaid three-month internship at a magazine packaging and shipping 20 or 40 apparel samples a day back to fashion houses that had provided them for photo shoots." That's what internships mean for many students not in IT or engineering nowadays. The problem isn't that nobody wants to mentor people and pay them, the problem is that a whole host of companies aren't paying interns and aren't teaching them anything either, knowing full well that colleges will keep sending interns their way, and that the interns themselves won't complain as long as they get course credits and something to put on their resume, even if it means nothing. "If you want to do grunt work in exchange for having Apple or NBC or GE on your resume, you should be allowed to do it. If I see a kid come in with those three companies on their resume, she has a good chance of getting a job -- I don’t care what she did there." ... um, yeah, right.
- ksolanki 15y ago
  I agree. That is close to what I argued here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2604734 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2604734
tomkarlo 15y ago
The solution to a broken higher-education system is not to encourage people to avoid it entirely. It's to fix the problem and make higher education affordable in the US in the same way it's affordable overseas. It's great to say "don't go to college" but the reality is that most employers NEED people with college educations. It's unlikely that any amount of mentoring it going to create the technical employees that our businesses are desperate for right now. Yes, a lot of kids are wasting their college education and not ending up with marketable skills. A big reason for that is our loan system that makes it easy to get a tuition loan for a field you'll probably never make a living in, because the party making the loan doesn't have to worry about a default. If the effective cost of an engineering degree was half that of a degree with fewer job opportunities, because there was real risk of default and that was priced into the interest rate, we'd see a much better hiring market for new college grads than we do right now. Loaning someone $100K so they can get a photography degree at NYU and make $40K a year (as per a recent NYT article) suggests that the market is not functioning properly, and it's obvious why.
- joshkaufman 15y ago
  To do what you suggest would require a massive restructuring of the entire US university system, and the governmental systems that continuously feed it easy money. There's a reason why college costs go up as federal educational dollars increase. Colleges don't care what you major in, as long as the dollars flow. Colleges have absolutely no incentive to provide educational experiences that are useful in the working world, since the money is already in the bank account. They have every incentive to maximize enrollments [1] and keep students enrolled as long as possible, while reducing costs via cheap graduate student labor. Colleges also have every incentive to massage outcomes statistics to keep federal dollars flowing. When a student defaults on a loan, the college doesn't bear the brunt of the impact - it's the responsibility of the government, and therefore, the taxpayer. "Fixing" the college system, as you suggest, would require eliminating many administrators and/or substantially reducing their salaries, structuring departments based on market demand vs. academic interest (no more liberal arts), and largely eliminating federal subsidies for academic research, student loans, and grants. You can bet that every single individual involved in credentialing as it presently exists will fight those changes to their dying breath. Since being "strong on education" gets politicians elected, this faction will find it easy to maintain political support. Personally, I think this sentiment sums up the alternative approach: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." - Buckminster Fuller Employers don't NEED people with college educations. They need employees with economically valuable skills. They're not the same thing. [1] http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_19/b4177064219731.htm http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_19/b41770642...
  - deleted 15y ago
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  - fecklessyouth 15y ago
    >structuring departments based on market demand vs. academic interest (no more liberal arts) This sort of view is rampant on HN, and I can kind of see why. The core mental skills engendered by a truly study in the liberal arts, users here pick up on their own. The more technical skills were either self-taught or learned in a technical educational program. And finally, many of you probably knew from a somewhat early age, at least college, that you wanted to do the sort of technical fields often discussed here. I don't think it's a false assumption to say that many users, probably like yourself, are "smarter," by some core measurement of reasoning and reading and writing, than the general populace. It's easy to see why you should brush away something like the liberal arts--it didn't do anything for you! Yet this ridiculous shortsightedness reminds me of recurring clarion calls about the end of religion. "Any second now, it will no longer become necessary. It's been central to (spirituality and life/education) for, literally, thousands of years, but THIS is the year we stop needing it." Even if we eliminate the huge debt that (Western) intellectualism owes to the liberal arts of classical era, reasons abound for continuing the tradition beyond mere duty. Before I continue, let me clarify what I mean by liberal arts. A degree in anything from a large public university is probably not a true liberal arts education. The liberal arts, to me, implies small classrooms, the Socratic method, great/classic literature, heavy reading assignments and papers, emphasis on reasoning and essay writing as opposed to memorization and test-taking, and faculty that take an active approach to students' lives, engaging them after hours. That sort of education, to me, is worth what I'm (currently) paying for it. I admit, the financial aid/tuition is in dire need of restructuring. The athletic departments and non-faculty employees are, more often than not, unneeded at their current levels. It is absolute folly to throw out the system that has worked nearly as long as civilization itself because the "market" demands different skills. I am all for changing departments to fit market skills, but we must remember: Departments can only change so fast, and sometimes the best way to learn those skills it simply by trying them, and not by learning about old models of them. I frequent this place enough to know that CS degrees are not necessarily the best way to make your living in programming. Though I offer no personal anecdote, one sentiment I come across is, they're simply outdated, and move too slow. YET, a department shifted to fit "market demands" might simply expand the CS department, despite the department's inability to quickly adjust to market demands. We must realize that there is a limit to how "new" an education can be. I trust the market to certain tasks, but not to determining what is most useful to study. That, in itself, presents an argument for the liberal arts. Technical skills change. Homer does not. Four years spent studying a now-dead skills are wasted years. Four years spent reading the Odyssey in Greek will almost certainly not grant any useful skills, but it will sharpen the mind far greater than any program shifted to meet "market demands." My greatest personal support for the liberal arts comes from long hours spent studying a single endeavor. I would think this is a universal feeling: time spent pouring over a subject or work or project should be rewarding. The more time I spent last semester delving into the Aeneid, the more rewarding and revealing it became. I have never felt this way about any subject, and certainly not ones adjusted to meet "market demands." I'll be damned if I devote four years to something unimportant. We can wax eloquent about useful skills, or we can draw a sharp contrast between needing to learn specific skills for a job, and needing to learn to learn, to "think outside the box," however cliche that may sound, to analyze arguments, and trends, and people, and events, to question, not authority, but everything, to develop a love of mental exploration and challenges, and to take "technical skills" with a grain of salt. Surely the college system needs overhaul. But it needs more of the true liberal arts, like what I described, not less of it. HN needs to take a step back, remember that programming is not reflective of every industry, not academic department, and finally... realize what the power would be in a mentorship with the figures the OP mentions. Surely the power would be in more than the networking, but what that person could learn. Not the mere marketable, technical skills you speak of, but the experiences that challenge them, and force them to think on their feet, and examine their beliefs, and learn, (FAST). These are the same core skills taught in a true liberal arts environment, and could be achieved by a mere alteration of the thread's title: "We need an AirBnB for tutorship."
foenix 15y ago
If anyone seriously wants to do this, they need to look at the meta-problem. All sorts of hackers are going to want to work on this project, but remote collaboration tool UIs are iffy at best. What if one were to pipe a screen session to a jailed *nix terminal and build a social application modeled around the use of screen-sharing. This would at least fill the niche of universities not offering a programming course. The "AirBNB"/couchsurfing aspect is already a philosophy of libre/open software practices anyway. By building a site focused around a shared command line, one could easily reach a wide number of hackers who would love to learn programming. They would, in practice, be building skills and a few would be able to improve the application. Finally, with the assistance of the now-established programming community, the application could be improved and perhaps merged with other online academic endeavours (eg Wolfram Alpha).
dangrossman 15y ago
> These interns are not slaves or indentured servants. They can walk out at any time Not in a school with coop degrees. If I had walked out of any of my internships I would have lost the credits, set my progress towards my BS degree back 6 months, and been out 6 months of tuition (Drexel University charges the same annual tuition for a year where you have classes for 12 months and one where you spend 6 months doing one of your 2-3 required internships).
DanielBMarkham 15y ago
I spoke with a professor at a regional nationally-known university a few months ago. He was setting up a program for students to get real-world experience working with startups. "Awesome!" I told him, "If I can have 2-3 kids for 3 days a week of around 4 hours, it will provide me with enough value to be worth my time, and in return they're going to get a lot of great experience. Just don't tell me you're sending a group of them here to do some kind of bullshit interviews, research, and reports. Really don't need much of that." To his credit, he agreed with me that yes, that was exactly how he was planning it: the post-grads would roll in, take a look at some problem, go away and study it, then provide me a nice bound report at the end of their time. He wanted me to present them with little nicely-wrapped problems to consume. I pointed out that this was not working in a startup. This was not entrepreneurial. This was -- for lack of a better term -- pre-consultant training. We parted on friendly terms, but it really made me sad. I feel like both the students and I could have gotten a lot of value from a short time together, I was willing to invest in infrastructure and my time in return for their participation, and it was a shame that the university couldn't work out something that would be beneficial to us all. This sounds like a great idea. Sign me up.
- staunch 15y ago
  How is what you're looking for any different from an unpaid internship?
- scott_s 15y ago
  Why not pay them, and have them work on actual things that matter to you, but you don't have time to address?
Locke1689 15y ago
Unpaid internships aren't illegal just because some students get taken advantage of by doing grunt work and not getting experience, it's because they have been used for discrimination. Top law firms are a great example. It used to be that if you wanted to get a job at a top law firm you had to do an unpaid internship for that company. Who has the money to not work for 3-4 months and still be fine? Kids with wealthy parents. This system ensured that minorities and underprivileged couldn't get into the field because they couldn't afford to take an unpaid internship. They were made illegal partly to try to prevent this "old boys" network from continuing and to instead help people succeed on the merits of their work, not who their parents were.
- qq66 15y ago
  A top law firm could just start a minimum wage internship which would have the same effect -- with $100,000 or more in law school debt, most people couldn't afford that either. There are other ways to help people from outside the "circle" break in, this in fact the genesis of most diversity programs at white-shoe firms.
  - Locke1689 15y ago
    Most people could get by on minimum wage for a little while. Law school debt usually doesn't have to be paid back immediately.
ChuckFrank 15y ago
Bruce Mau -- from Massive Change -- created a similar one-off program. http://www.institutewithoutboundaries.com/ http://www.institutewithoutboundaries.com/ . It is unclear how successful the program was. The main reason seems to be that the demand for mentorships exceeds the mentor ability to work directly with the interns. Many top architects actually charge students to participate in the studios as interns. They use some fancy french term to describe the relationship.
boohiss420 15y ago
College IS that experience that you're describing...but only if the student is wise enough to recognize it as such and if faculty are not tied up in chasing grant money. Believe it or not, many faculty forgoe the industry successes you're describing in order to be a mentor to their students. College provides students with the opportunity to be mentored by not just one person, but a wide range of people from different disciplines and with different perspectives. Here's an argument to think about: The "college bubble" argument is not about college itself, it is about the new American cultural view of college (a social experience and just another hoop to jump through) and the American portrait of success (fortune and fame). Why hold colleges responsible for the changing values of its people?
neolefty 15y ago
What if airbnb had the equivalent of sub-reddits? For now, it just has the "sleep somewhere" sub, but you can imagine all kinds of user-created ones. A cross between Meetup and AirBnB?
georgieporgie 15y ago
I've never understood the obsession with internships. Why be an (unpaid) intern when you can hold down an entry-level tech job during college? Why aren't there more summer/break jobs for students? (I paid my way through college by doing programming work. Part time during school, full-time during breaks)
- retroafroman 15y ago
  Outside of programming, many companies won't take people without the completed degree. Many people just don't work during college, and many who do, don't work in a field at all related to what they want to do. I was able to get jobs and internships that helped me gain valuable experience and lead to more job opportunities, but few students are willing to look for and hustle into opportunities outside a few job listings. The best, most valuable experiences I gained were simply by asking for a job that wasn't there yet. Also, I was mandated to do an internship that related to my major (paid or unpaid) for at least one semester, so I presume some other people are in the same boat.
- dagw 15y ago
  Internships, done right, offers something very different than an entry-level tech job. During an internship, you should get a chance to circulate through several different departments and try out several different positions under the mentoring of several different people and really get a chance to find out what you might want to do with your life, without any real demands to perform.
- alexsb92 15y ago
  In Canada the system is slightly different. We usually don't have as many internships as we have coops. The main differences between the two are the following: * Coop is usually paid * It's usually technical. * Some universities have programs to support coops. The biggest coop program is from the University of Waterloo. All engineering students are required to take part in the program which combines work and school by alternating between a school semester and work semester. The university has it's own job posting website, and it actively foes looking to find more employers to offer jobs. It also makes sure that the student gets to do real work, not make coffee all day. If a student feels like he's getting the short end of a stick with a job, he can complain to the university which will look into it and clear things up. Disclaimer: I am a student at uWaterloo.
gavanwoolery 15y ago
It's called the internet. Information is free - if you can't teach yourself something, you have no chance of survival in a world filled with jobs that often require you to learn and adapt independently.
- jackvalentine 15y ago
  Having a mentor is a very different thing to going to a library (or the internet, the greatest library that ever existed) and reading everything.
mdda 15y ago
One significant problem is the pyramid of management. Everyone would want to be managed by the top person. But these are in very limited supply, and they're being rationed one-to-one. In a university, the lecturers are one-to-many. How many top-dogs are there? 1000? 10000? That doesn't put a dent in university admissions. So, to go 'wider' one would need some kind of advertising for the middle-managers who would like to mentor. But the facts of life are the middle-management is pretty boring (at least from the outside). So, while the idea of being mentored by Steve Jobs (CEO) is compelling, the reality would come down to a family dinner-table discussion of whether Joe Schmo (middle-manager) is a rising star, or just someone who likes the idea of someone paying to pick up his dry-cleaning.
dfischer 15y ago
I really want to work on this. I bought some domains regarding it. I can work on something quick over a couple hours and have something going.
jasonmcalacanis 15y ago
it would be amazing if someone wanted to build out mentormykid.com. i would seriously fund it.
- smallegan 15y ago
  I find it crazy that it is assumed to be the parents role to pay for their kid to go to college or get a mentorship. What ever happened to being an independent adult when your 18? I feel like the type of kid who's parents are going to fork out the big bucks for this stuff aren't going to be the type of entrepreneurs the world needs.
- frankdenbow 15y ago
  There are many education programs in place that also need some funding, targeted at less affluent kids. In NYC alone there is MicroInterns (matching middle schoolers to tech startups) by George Haines: http://www.teacherhaines.com/microinterns http://www.teacherhaines.com/microinterns They could use a SquareSpace site... Also, NY Tech Meetup is doing a Startup Summer program where we get high school students into internships at tech startups: http://nytm.org/2011/05/04/nytm-to-host-2nd-annual-startup-summer-2/ http://nytm.org/2011/05/04/nytm-to-host-2nd-annual-startup-s... Programs like these that are supplemental to the general education kids will be getting in middle, high-school, and college are necessary, but they would never be able to replicate everything that a young person needs to learn in order to survive. There are many ways to make education better, lets try to have systems that support each other. Jason, want to donate to the MicroIntern program? :-)
- pilom 15y ago
  See, that's funny because you already own the domain.
- aik 15y ago
  I've seriously been thinking about starting a site like this for several months. However, I would like it to function as a free site for all, mentor and student, instead of a pay-for-the-mentor site. I'm fairly convinced that there would be plenty of people who would help out as a charity or philanthropy, but haven't thought of a good way to execute that thought yet. My motivation, as may be yours, is to disrupt this current increasingly flawed education system in whatever way I can. Working on a few other projects along this line at the moment...
mindcrime 15y ago
Well said, Mr. Calacanis. It'll be interesting to see if somebody actually picks this idea up and tries to make something happen with it. Sadly, if it did happen, I can already predict what'll come next... the inevitable whining and moaning about how bloody unfair it is that "some kid gets to be mentored by J.J. Abrams, just because his parents are rich... waaaaaaaahhhhh, waaaaah.... somebody should pass a law prohibiting this sort of thing, it's a return to the Robber Baron era, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, wahahaahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa."
pavel_lishin 15y ago
Sweet jesus, please kill this background: http://launch.is/storage/launch_bg.jpg http://launch.is/storage/launch_bg.jpg I scratched at my monitor for a good 15 seconds trying to figure out why a stain wouldn't come off.
- whimsy 15y ago
  Hah! I guess my screen is pretty dirty; I had to look pretty close to notice, even whilst scrolling.
- fuzionmonkey 15y ago
  Just scroll? If it moves it isn't your monitor. But yeah that background is a bit irritating.
kloncks 15y ago
Hehe. So typical of Calacanis, yet funny: Side note: Yeah, I got problems with Arrington, but I can’t deny that his prose can be compelling. Not as compelling as mine, mind you, but he’s in the top 10 of tech writers
TamDenholm 15y ago
A year in school from ages 4 to 18 inside this insanity costs $30K to $40K a year. People are spending $500K on their kid’s education -- before college! Insane! I'm dumbfounded by this. I went to a state school (well 4 actually, parents moved a lot) in the UK, left at 15 years old and haven't had any formal education since. I consider myself reasonably intelligent, i'm an autodidact and i only started real learning after realising there was a difference between education and school, after that epiphany i began to love learning. In the 10 years since leaving school, i've done pretty well for myself, i'm financially stable, know my shit in my chosen field and earn a good wage when i choose to work. While i'm not arrogant enough to think i've got everything sorted, i've always wanted to be a mentor to others and hopefully show them that school and education are different, i know i'd have done better if i had a mentor when i went through my learning experiences. Although, i suppose its still not too late for me to find some.
- Entaroadun 15y ago
  This is just what happens when you have a lot of money. Money is spent inefficiently because its all relative to the revenue you're taking in.
- uptown 15y ago
  The prices he mentions assume that everybody's sending their kids to private schools prior to college. That's really not the case. In cities, you'll see a higher percentage of it because city schools tend to be worse environments for learning and are stretched thinner budget-wise, but the vast majority of students in small towns and suburbs go to public schools paid for by their taxes and do not incur the kind of pre-college expense for education that he's talking about. Sure, the taxpayers are still paying towards their education ... but it's spread across the entire community, whether they have students in school or not, and not coming directly out of the pockets of individual students' families.
- arethuza 15y ago
  I'm in the UK and neither my wife or I went to private school (in fact I went to a school that consistently appeared towards the very bottom of the league tables in Scotland, before they stopped producing such things). However, our son has been privately educated for the last nine years and probably has another six years to go - and I have never regretted it, the quality of everything is qualitiatively better than state schools (even good state schools). One thing that is particularly noticeable in private schools is that the emphasis is not purely on academic performance (although that is important) - they are excellent in providing a very rounded education. My only regret is that the same level of education is not available to all children - regardless of the parents ability to pay (which is obviously the main selection criteria at the moment).
jasonfried 15y ago
This is apprenticeship. It's how the trades are taught and learned. I'd love to see more of it in the white collar world as well. Been thinking about how we can do more of this at 37signals.
- dzlobin 15y ago
  I think the system can and should be adopted for young programmers who would rather dive in than go to college, or even for college grads. Structure it exactly like a kitchen in the fine dining world. Young commis chefs start with learning products and techniques by doing the low-level prep work. After that's mastered, they graduate to garde-manger where they generally are in charge of cold apps, soups and sometimes more. Not only does this expand their technique repertoire and palate but it introduces the concept of being responsible for your dishes, with no excuses. This continues around every station, with the cook learning more and being responsible for more as they continue. While this is hard to reproduce exactly in a tech startup, it certainly wouldn't be hard to take on an apprentice who starts at the bottom and learns the basics under the mentorship of a more experienced developer while learning more and taking more on.
- imcqueen 15y ago
  Do you think it would be better to do something like a qualifying project to prove a foundation or would a blank slate be preferred? I feel like either could be argued, but I'm in total agreement about this learning style.
- tblancpain 15y ago
  Switzerland has a great apprenticeship system in which you do three years of apprenticeship with 3 days of work and 2 days of school per week, after high school (and instead of college). This exists for a variety of jobs, and includes the option to do a degree that allows you to study afterwards, either during your apprenticeship (more complex school studies in the same time frame) or afterwards, as a one year, purely scholarly extensions of your degree. If you do this study-ability option, you can go on to an applied university that offers a BA for a lot of degrees, although not all that 'proper' universities offer. Afterwards you can go on to an MA still. In the entrepreneurship world, three years may be too much. But I can see a solution in figuring out a system where each company keeps each apprentice for one year, so each apprenticeship includes work at three different companies. This would allow the apprentice to get to know the world of start-ups and big companies alike, allowing him to make a differentiated decision when it comes to search for an employer afterwards. While many companies in Switzerland will prefer a university graduate over an apprentice, I do think especially Silicon Valley would be open to look at (at that point) experienced programmers with a wide variety of start-up and enterprise experience under their belt, as well as a decent basic level of general knowledge due to the two days of school each week. What I'm coming at is that I doubt you would have to reinvent the wheel. Look at well-organized examples of apprenticeship-systems around the world, adopt and adapt the best-fitting one, and make it work for your ecosystem. It's a great way to make more practically oriented people more valuable for society.
calbear81 15y ago
Why limit it to just kids? We all need someone to give guidance and support some time in our lives. There seems to be some mentorship matching services but they're geared towards matching local mentors and mentees. How about an online mentoring matchup where: - Mentors and Mentees create a profile and upload bio (preferably a video bio) about why they are qualified to be a mentor and who they want to mentor and mentees talk about who they want to be mentored by and what they need help with. - Both groups can apply/offer to each other and they set the time frame and hours committed to being mentored. After an engagement is complete, mentees are invited to post ratings and review their mentor.
ksolanki 15y ago
Free labor in exchange for education, contacts and a resume builder. The idea sounds noble, in that, if such mentorship program is used in the right spirit, it could have a very positive impact on the youth's education and professional development. This sounds good on paper but I see potentially big downside with abuses. As a slightly related example, you could just look at the plight of illegal or early immigrants who end up working at below-market below-minimum wage jobs. If there are no laws to prevent such abuse of interns, people (read "market") would figure out a way to do just that. Such programs would help only in hands of right mentors. I also tend to disagree on the notion of 35K a year wasted on college. College is much more education than education about a profession. It teaches kids social interaction, and gives them lifetime friends. Edit: Corrected grammar.
- nickpinkston 15y ago
  I don't buy the "social interaction" stuff one bit. Most of my college friends were also my nerd friends I met from being a large city and going to tons of networking events. If you want, put your kid up in an apartment, do tons of networking in/out of their field of interest /and mentorship. Then let them figure out what to do after: be it a company, job or college. College is one way of making great connections, but it's a really expensive way!
  - ksolanki 15y ago
    I agree that colleges are really expensive and they are getting more expensive by day. This still does not take away the fact that college education and, in larger context, the existence of (high-reputation) Universities, is vital to society. The solution is to make colleges less expensive somehow, not to replace colleges with unregulated mentorships (which as I said earlier, will be effective only in hands of good mentors). There are numerous countries where college education is highly subsidized by the Government (example, India, where I went to college -- paid a total of $120/year as fees, for a top college). Universities also employ many scientists as professors and have a very good research output, that certainly has a bearing on our scientific progress.
    - 15y ago
arram 15y ago
It's interesting how 'AirBnB' has become a synonym for 'marketplace'. That's success.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
pnathan 15y ago
Hi Jason (since you're reading this!) * I spent about $20/year during my college years. That was tuition, room, and board, for graduate & undergraduate from 2002-2009 or so. * Interns at my company get paid, and well enough they can survive. But they usually work for 1-2 years, I think. Not 10 weeks. This is in line with a trades apprenticeship. I think the core problem is "going to expensive schools". edit: And there's an underlying surge in the cost of education, which is working to make all schools expensive. My total cost of college probably sat around $140K, but that that is far more than my debt load, and I made some poor strategic choices for college: a better set of choices would have dropped the TCC down to 100K or so.
- whimsy 15y ago
  $20/year? Did you mean 20K? Did you have full-ride scholarships? Did you get an education outside the US? Given your TCC, I assume you meant $20K.
  - pnathan 15y ago
    Give or take, 20,000 per year. Almost no scholarships. Yes, USA. No, not Ivy League.
rokhayakebe 15y ago
Interesting. How will it scale, though?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

anyone out there want to build mentormykid.com? dead serious... I will fund it. :-) i meet young adults all day long who are $100-200k in debt after school. makes no sense.

stdbrouw 15y ago

"Free labor is the exact point of interns! Why else would you waste your time mentoring someone who is gone in 10 weeks?" How utterly, utterly naive. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/opinion/03perlin.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/opinion/03perlin.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-10822784 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-10822784 To quote just one example: "One Ivy League student said she spent an unpaid three-month internship at a magazine packaging and shipping 20 or 40 apparel samples a day back to fashion houses that had provided them for photo shoots." That's what internships mean for many students not in IT or engineering nowadays. The problem isn't that nobody wants to mentor people and pay them, the problem is that a whole host of companies aren't paying interns and aren't teaching them anything either, knowing full well that colleges will keep sending interns their way, and that the interns themselves won't complain as long as they get course credits and something to put on their resume, even if it means nothing. "If you want to do grunt work in exchange for having Apple or NBC or GE on your resume, you should be allowed to do it. If I see a kid come in with those three companies on their resume, she has a good chance of getting a job -- I don’t care what she did there." ... um, yeah, right.

ksolanki 15y ago
I agree. That is close to what I argued here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2604734 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2604734

tomkarlo 15y ago

The solution to a broken higher-education system is not to encourage people to avoid it entirely. It's to fix the problem and make higher education affordable in the US in the same way it's affordable overseas. It's great to say "don't go to college" but the reality is that most employers NEED people with college educations. It's unlikely that any amount of mentoring it going to create the technical employees that our businesses are desperate for right now. Yes, a lot of kids are wasting their college education and not ending up with marketable skills. A big reason for that is our loan system that makes it easy to get a tuition loan for a field you'll probably never make a living in, because the party making the loan doesn't have to worry about a default. If the effective cost of an engineering degree was half that of a degree with fewer job opportunities, because there was real risk of default and that was priced into the interest rate, we'd see a much better hiring market for new college grads than we do right now. Loaning someone $100K so they can get a photography degree at NYU and make $40K a year (as per a recent NYT article) suggests that the market is not functioning properly, and it's obvious why.

joshkaufman 15y ago
To do what you suggest would require a massive restructuring of the entire US university system, and the governmental systems that continuously feed it easy money. There's a reason why college costs go up as federal educational dollars increase. Colleges don't care what you major in, as long as the dollars flow. Colleges have absolutely no incentive to provide educational experiences that are useful in the working world, since the money is already in the bank account. They have every incentive to maximize enrollments [1] and keep students enrolled as long as possible, while reducing costs via cheap graduate student labor. Colleges also have every incentive to massage outcomes statistics to keep federal dollars flowing. When a student defaults on a loan, the college doesn't bear the brunt of the impact - it's the responsibility of the government, and therefore, the taxpayer. "Fixing" the college system, as you suggest, would require eliminating many administrators and/or substantially reducing their salaries, structuring departments based on market demand vs. academic interest (no more liberal arts), and largely eliminating federal subsidies for academic research, student loans, and grants. You can bet that every single individual involved in credentialing as it presently exists will fight those changes to their dying breath. Since being "strong on education" gets politicians elected, this faction will find it easy to maintain political support. Personally, I think this sentiment sums up the alternative approach: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." - Buckminster Fuller Employers don't NEED people with college educations. They need employees with economically valuable skills. They're not the same thing. [1] http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_19/b4177064219731.htm http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_19/b41770642...
- deleted 15y ago
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- fecklessyouth 15y ago
  >structuring departments based on market demand vs. academic interest (no more liberal arts) This sort of view is rampant on HN, and I can kind of see why. The core mental skills engendered by a truly study in the liberal arts, users here pick up on their own. The more technical skills were either self-taught or learned in a technical educational program. And finally, many of you probably knew from a somewhat early age, at least college, that you wanted to do the sort of technical fields often discussed here. I don't think it's a false assumption to say that many users, probably like yourself, are "smarter," by some core measurement of reasoning and reading and writing, than the general populace. It's easy to see why you should brush away something like the liberal arts--it didn't do anything for you! Yet this ridiculous shortsightedness reminds me of recurring clarion calls about the end of religion. "Any second now, it will no longer become necessary. It's been central to (spirituality and life/education) for, literally, thousands of years, but THIS is the year we stop needing it." Even if we eliminate the huge debt that (Western) intellectualism owes to the liberal arts of classical era, reasons abound for continuing the tradition beyond mere duty. Before I continue, let me clarify what I mean by liberal arts. A degree in anything from a large public university is probably not a true liberal arts education. The liberal arts, to me, implies small classrooms, the Socratic method, great/classic literature, heavy reading assignments and papers, emphasis on reasoning and essay writing as opposed to memorization and test-taking, and faculty that take an active approach to students' lives, engaging them after hours. That sort of education, to me, is worth what I'm (currently) paying for it. I admit, the financial aid/tuition is in dire need of restructuring. The athletic departments and non-faculty employees are, more often than not, unneeded at their current levels. It is absolute folly to throw out the system that has worked nearly as long as civilization itself because the "market" demands different skills. I am all for changing departments to fit market skills, but we must remember: Departments can only change so fast, and sometimes the best way to learn those skills it simply by trying them, and not by learning about old models of them. I frequent this place enough to know that CS degrees are not necessarily the best way to make your living in programming. Though I offer no personal anecdote, one sentiment I come across is, they're simply outdated, and move too slow. YET, a department shifted to fit "market demands" might simply expand the CS department, despite the department's inability to quickly adjust to market demands. We must realize that there is a limit to how "new" an education can be. I trust the market to certain tasks, but not to determining what is most useful to study. That, in itself, presents an argument for the liberal arts. Technical skills change. Homer does not. Four years spent studying a now-dead skills are wasted years. Four years spent reading the Odyssey in Greek will almost certainly not grant any useful skills, but it will sharpen the mind far greater than any program shifted to meet "market demands." My greatest personal support for the liberal arts comes from long hours spent studying a single endeavor. I would think this is a universal feeling: time spent pouring over a subject or work or project should be rewarding. The more time I spent last semester delving into the Aeneid, the more rewarding and revealing it became. I have never felt this way about any subject, and certainly not ones adjusted to meet "market demands." I'll be damned if I devote four years to something unimportant. We can wax eloquent about useful skills, or we can draw a sharp contrast between needing to learn specific skills for a job, and needing to learn to learn, to "think outside the box," however cliche that may sound, to analyze arguments, and trends, and people, and events, to question, not authority, but everything, to develop a love of mental exploration and challenges, and to take "technical skills" with a grain of salt. Surely the college system needs overhaul. But it needs more of the true liberal arts, like what I described, not less of it. HN needs to take a step back, remember that programming is not reflective of every industry, not academic department, and finally... realize what the power would be in a mentorship with the figures the OP mentions. Surely the power would be in more than the networking, but what that person could learn. Not the mere marketable, technical skills you speak of, but the experiences that challenge them, and force them to think on their feet, and examine their beliefs, and learn, (FAST). These are the same core skills taught in a true liberal arts environment, and could be achieved by a mere alteration of the thread's title: "We need an AirBnB for tutorship."

foenix 15y ago

If anyone seriously wants to do this, they need to look at the meta-problem. All sorts of hackers are going to want to work on this project, but remote collaboration tool UIs are iffy at best. What if one were to pipe a screen session to a jailed *nix terminal and build a social application modeled around the use of screen-sharing. This would at least fill the niche of universities not offering a programming course. The "AirBNB"/couchsurfing aspect is already a philosophy of libre/open software practices anyway. By building a site focused around a shared command line, one could easily reach a wide number of hackers who would love to learn programming. They would, in practice, be building skills and a few would be able to improve the application. Finally, with the assistance of the now-established programming community, the application could be improved and perhaps merged with other online academic endeavours (eg Wolfram Alpha).

dangrossman 15y ago

> These interns are not slaves or indentured servants. They can walk out at any time Not in a school with coop degrees. If I had walked out of any of my internships I would have lost the credits, set my progress towards my BS degree back 6 months, and been out 6 months of tuition (Drexel University charges the same annual tuition for a year where you have classes for 12 months and one where you spend 6 months doing one of your 2-3 required internships).

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

I spoke with a professor at a regional nationally-known university a few months ago. He was setting up a program for students to get real-world experience working with startups. "Awesome!" I told him, "If I can have 2-3 kids for 3 days a week of around 4 hours, it will provide me with enough value to be worth my time, and in return they're going to get a lot of great experience. Just don't tell me you're sending a group of them here to do some kind of bullshit interviews, research, and reports. Really don't need much of that." To his credit, he agreed with me that yes, that was exactly how he was planning it: the post-grads would roll in, take a look at some problem, go away and study it, then provide me a nice bound report at the end of their time. He wanted me to present them with little nicely-wrapped problems to consume. I pointed out that this was not working in a startup. This was not entrepreneurial. This was -- for lack of a better term -- pre-consultant training. We parted on friendly terms, but it really made me sad. I feel like both the students and I could have gotten a lot of value from a short time together, I was willing to invest in infrastructure and my time in return for their participation, and it was a shame that the university couldn't work out something that would be beneficial to us all. This sounds like a great idea. Sign me up.

staunch 15y ago
How is what you're looking for any different from an unpaid internship?
scott_s 15y ago
Why not pay them, and have them work on actual things that matter to you, but you don't have time to address?

Locke1689 15y ago

Unpaid internships aren't illegal just because some students get taken advantage of by doing grunt work and not getting experience, it's because they have been used for discrimination. Top law firms are a great example. It used to be that if you wanted to get a job at a top law firm you had to do an unpaid internship for that company. Who has the money to not work for 3-4 months and still be fine? Kids with wealthy parents. This system ensured that minorities and underprivileged couldn't get into the field because they couldn't afford to take an unpaid internship. They were made illegal partly to try to prevent this "old boys" network from continuing and to instead help people succeed on the merits of their work, not who their parents were.

qq66 15y ago
A top law firm could just start a minimum wage internship which would have the same effect -- with $100,000 or more in law school debt, most people couldn't afford that either. There are other ways to help people from outside the "circle" break in, this in fact the genesis of most diversity programs at white-shoe firms.
- Locke1689 15y ago
  Most people could get by on minimum wage for a little while. Law school debt usually doesn't have to be paid back immediately.

ChuckFrank 15y ago

Bruce Mau -- from Massive Change -- created a similar one-off program. http://www.institutewithoutboundaries.com/ http://www.institutewithoutboundaries.com/ . It is unclear how successful the program was. The main reason seems to be that the demand for mentorships exceeds the mentor ability to work directly with the interns. Many top architects actually charge students to participate in the studios as interns. They use some fancy french term to describe the relationship.

boohiss420 15y ago

College IS that experience that you're describing...but only if the student is wise enough to recognize it as such and if faculty are not tied up in chasing grant money. Believe it or not, many faculty forgoe the industry successes you're describing in order to be a mentor to their students. College provides students with the opportunity to be mentored by not just one person, but a wide range of people from different disciplines and with different perspectives. Here's an argument to think about: The "college bubble" argument is not about college itself, it is about the new American cultural view of college (a social experience and just another hoop to jump through) and the American portrait of success (fortune and fame). Why hold colleges responsible for the changing values of its people?

neolefty 15y ago

What if airbnb had the equivalent of sub-reddits? For now, it just has the "sleep somewhere" sub, but you can imagine all kinds of user-created ones. A cross between Meetup and AirBnB?

georgieporgie 15y ago

I've never understood the obsession with internships. Why be an (unpaid) intern when you can hold down an entry-level tech job during college? Why aren't there more summer/break jobs for students? (I paid my way through college by doing programming work. Part time during school, full-time during breaks)

retroafroman 15y ago
Outside of programming, many companies won't take people without the completed degree. Many people just don't work during college, and many who do, don't work in a field at all related to what they want to do. I was able to get jobs and internships that helped me gain valuable experience and lead to more job opportunities, but few students are willing to look for and hustle into opportunities outside a few job listings. The best, most valuable experiences I gained were simply by asking for a job that wasn't there yet. Also, I was mandated to do an internship that related to my major (paid or unpaid) for at least one semester, so I presume some other people are in the same boat.
dagw 15y ago
Internships, done right, offers something very different than an entry-level tech job. During an internship, you should get a chance to circulate through several different departments and try out several different positions under the mentoring of several different people and really get a chance to find out what you might want to do with your life, without any real demands to perform.
alexsb92 15y ago
In Canada the system is slightly different. We usually don't have as many internships as we have coops. The main differences between the two are the following: * Coop is usually paid * It's usually technical. * Some universities have programs to support coops. The biggest coop program is from the University of Waterloo. All engineering students are required to take part in the program which combines work and school by alternating between a school semester and work semester. The university has it's own job posting website, and it actively foes looking to find more employers to offer jobs. It also makes sure that the student gets to do real work, not make coffee all day. If a student feels like he's getting the short end of a stick with a job, he can complain to the university which will look into it and clear things up. Disclaimer: I am a student at uWaterloo.

gavanwoolery 15y ago

It's called the internet. Information is free - if you can't teach yourself something, you have no chance of survival in a world filled with jobs that often require you to learn and adapt independently.

jackvalentine 15y ago
Having a mentor is a very different thing to going to a library (or the internet, the greatest library that ever existed) and reading everything.

mdda 15y ago

One significant problem is the pyramid of management. Everyone would want to be managed by the top person. But these are in very limited supply, and they're being rationed one-to-one. In a university, the lecturers are one-to-many. How many top-dogs are there? 1000? 10000? That doesn't put a dent in university admissions. So, to go 'wider' one would need some kind of advertising for the middle-managers who would like to mentor. But the facts of life are the middle-management is pretty boring (at least from the outside). So, while the idea of being mentored by Steve Jobs (CEO) is compelling, the reality would come down to a family dinner-table discussion of whether Joe Schmo (middle-manager) is a rising star, or just someone who likes the idea of someone paying to pick up his dry-cleaning.

dfischer 15y ago

I really want to work on this. I bought some domains regarding it. I can work on something quick over a couple hours and have something going.

jasonmcalacanis 15y ago

it would be amazing if someone wanted to build out mentormykid.com. i would seriously fund it.

smallegan 15y ago
I find it crazy that it is assumed to be the parents role to pay for their kid to go to college or get a mentorship. What ever happened to being an independent adult when your 18? I feel like the type of kid who's parents are going to fork out the big bucks for this stuff aren't going to be the type of entrepreneurs the world needs.
frankdenbow 15y ago
There are many education programs in place that also need some funding, targeted at less affluent kids. In NYC alone there is MicroInterns (matching middle schoolers to tech startups) by George Haines: http://www.teacherhaines.com/microinterns http://www.teacherhaines.com/microinterns They could use a SquareSpace site... Also, NY Tech Meetup is doing a Startup Summer program where we get high school students into internships at tech startups: http://nytm.org/2011/05/04/nytm-to-host-2nd-annual-startup-summer-2/ http://nytm.org/2011/05/04/nytm-to-host-2nd-annual-startup-s... Programs like these that are supplemental to the general education kids will be getting in middle, high-school, and college are necessary, but they would never be able to replicate everything that a young person needs to learn in order to survive. There are many ways to make education better, lets try to have systems that support each other. Jason, want to donate to the MicroIntern program? :-)
pilom 15y ago
See, that's funny because you already own the domain.
aik 15y ago
I've seriously been thinking about starting a site like this for several months. However, I would like it to function as a free site for all, mentor and student, instead of a pay-for-the-mentor site. I'm fairly convinced that there would be plenty of people who would help out as a charity or philanthropy, but haven't thought of a good way to execute that thought yet. My motivation, as may be yours, is to disrupt this current increasingly flawed education system in whatever way I can. Working on a few other projects along this line at the moment...

mindcrime 15y ago

Well said, Mr. Calacanis. It'll be interesting to see if somebody actually picks this idea up and tries to make something happen with it. Sadly, if it did happen, I can already predict what'll come next... the inevitable whining and moaning about how bloody unfair it is that "some kid gets to be mentored by J.J. Abrams, just because his parents are rich... waaaaaaaahhhhh, waaaaah.... somebody should pass a law prohibiting this sort of thing, it's a return to the Robber Baron era, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, wahahaahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa."

pavel_lishin 15y ago

Sweet jesus, please kill this background: http://launch.is/storage/launch_bg.jpg http://launch.is/storage/launch_bg.jpg I scratched at my monitor for a good 15 seconds trying to figure out why a stain wouldn't come off.

whimsy 15y ago
Hah! I guess my screen is pretty dirty; I had to look pretty close to notice, even whilst scrolling.
fuzionmonkey 15y ago
Just scroll? If it moves it isn't your monitor. But yeah that background is a bit irritating.

kloncks 15y ago

Hehe. So typical of Calacanis, yet funny: Side note: Yeah, I got problems with Arrington, but I can’t deny that his prose can be compelling. Not as compelling as mine, mind you, but he’s in the top 10 of tech writers

TamDenholm 15y ago

A year in school from ages 4 to 18 inside this insanity costs $30K to $40K a year. People are spending $500K on their kid’s education -- before college! Insane! I'm dumbfounded by this. I went to a state school (well 4 actually, parents moved a lot) in the UK, left at 15 years old and haven't had any formal education since. I consider myself reasonably intelligent, i'm an autodidact and i only started real learning after realising there was a difference between education and school, after that epiphany i began to love learning. In the 10 years since leaving school, i've done pretty well for myself, i'm financially stable, know my shit in my chosen field and earn a good wage when i choose to work. While i'm not arrogant enough to think i've got everything sorted, i've always wanted to be a mentor to others and hopefully show them that school and education are different, i know i'd have done better if i had a mentor when i went through my learning experiences. Although, i suppose its still not too late for me to find some.

Entaroadun 15y ago
This is just what happens when you have a lot of money. Money is spent inefficiently because its all relative to the revenue you're taking in.
uptown 15y ago
The prices he mentions assume that everybody's sending their kids to private schools prior to college. That's really not the case. In cities, you'll see a higher percentage of it because city schools tend to be worse environments for learning and are stretched thinner budget-wise, but the vast majority of students in small towns and suburbs go to public schools paid for by their taxes and do not incur the kind of pre-college expense for education that he's talking about. Sure, the taxpayers are still paying towards their education ... but it's spread across the entire community, whether they have students in school or not, and not coming directly out of the pockets of individual students' families.
arethuza 15y ago
I'm in the UK and neither my wife or I went to private school (in fact I went to a school that consistently appeared towards the very bottom of the league tables in Scotland, before they stopped producing such things). However, our son has been privately educated for the last nine years and probably has another six years to go - and I have never regretted it, the quality of everything is qualitiatively better than state schools (even good state schools). One thing that is particularly noticeable in private schools is that the emphasis is not purely on academic performance (although that is important) - they are excellent in providing a very rounded education. My only regret is that the same level of education is not available to all children - regardless of the parents ability to pay (which is obviously the main selection criteria at the moment).

jasonfried 15y ago

This is apprenticeship. It's how the trades are taught and learned. I'd love to see more of it in the white collar world as well. Been thinking about how we can do more of this at 37signals.

dzlobin 15y ago
I think the system can and should be adopted for young programmers who would rather dive in than go to college, or even for college grads. Structure it exactly like a kitchen in the fine dining world. Young commis chefs start with learning products and techniques by doing the low-level prep work. After that's mastered, they graduate to garde-manger where they generally are in charge of cold apps, soups and sometimes more. Not only does this expand their technique repertoire and palate but it introduces the concept of being responsible for your dishes, with no excuses. This continues around every station, with the cook learning more and being responsible for more as they continue. While this is hard to reproduce exactly in a tech startup, it certainly wouldn't be hard to take on an apprentice who starts at the bottom and learns the basics under the mentorship of a more experienced developer while learning more and taking more on.
imcqueen 15y ago
Do you think it would be better to do something like a qualifying project to prove a foundation or would a blank slate be preferred? I feel like either could be argued, but I'm in total agreement about this learning style.
tblancpain 15y ago
Switzerland has a great apprenticeship system in which you do three years of apprenticeship with 3 days of work and 2 days of school per week, after high school (and instead of college). This exists for a variety of jobs, and includes the option to do a degree that allows you to study afterwards, either during your apprenticeship (more complex school studies in the same time frame) or afterwards, as a one year, purely scholarly extensions of your degree. If you do this study-ability option, you can go on to an applied university that offers a BA for a lot of degrees, although not all that 'proper' universities offer. Afterwards you can go on to an MA still. In the entrepreneurship world, three years may be too much. But I can see a solution in figuring out a system where each company keeps each apprentice for one year, so each apprenticeship includes work at three different companies. This would allow the apprentice to get to know the world of start-ups and big companies alike, allowing him to make a differentiated decision when it comes to search for an employer afterwards. While many companies in Switzerland will prefer a university graduate over an apprentice, I do think especially Silicon Valley would be open to look at (at that point) experienced programmers with a wide variety of start-up and enterprise experience under their belt, as well as a decent basic level of general knowledge due to the two days of school each week. What I'm coming at is that I doubt you would have to reinvent the wheel. Look at well-organized examples of apprenticeship-systems around the world, adopt and adapt the best-fitting one, and make it work for your ecosystem. It's a great way to make more practically oriented people more valuable for society.

calbear81 15y ago

Why limit it to just kids? We all need someone to give guidance and support some time in our lives. There seems to be some mentorship matching services but they're geared towards matching local mentors and mentees. How about an online mentoring matchup where: - Mentors and Mentees create a profile and upload bio (preferably a video bio) about why they are qualified to be a mentor and who they want to mentor and mentees talk about who they want to be mentored by and what they need help with. - Both groups can apply/offer to each other and they set the time frame and hours committed to being mentored. After an engagement is complete, mentees are invited to post ratings and review their mentor.

ksolanki 15y ago

Free labor in exchange for education, contacts and a resume builder. The idea sounds noble, in that, if such mentorship program is used in the right spirit, it could have a very positive impact on the youth's education and professional development. This sounds good on paper but I see potentially big downside with abuses. As a slightly related example, you could just look at the plight of illegal or early immigrants who end up working at below-market below-minimum wage jobs. If there are no laws to prevent such abuse of interns, people (read "market") would figure out a way to do just that. Such programs would help only in hands of right mentors. I also tend to disagree on the notion of 35K a year wasted on college. College is much more education than education about a profession. It teaches kids social interaction, and gives them lifetime friends. Edit: Corrected grammar.

nickpinkston 15y ago
I don't buy the "social interaction" stuff one bit. Most of my college friends were also my nerd friends I met from being a large city and going to tons of networking events. If you want, put your kid up in an apartment, do tons of networking in/out of their field of interest /and mentorship. Then let them figure out what to do after: be it a company, job or college. College is one way of making great connections, but it's a really expensive way!
- ksolanki 15y ago
  I agree that colleges are really expensive and they are getting more expensive by day. This still does not take away the fact that college education and, in larger context, the existence of (high-reputation) Universities, is vital to society. The solution is to make colleges less expensive somehow, not to replace colleges with unregulated mentorships (which as I said earlier, will be effective only in hands of good mentors). There are numerous countries where college education is highly subsidized by the Government (example, India, where I went to college -- paid a total of $120/year as fees, for a top college). Universities also employ many scientists as professors and have a very good research output, that certainly has a bearing on our scientific progress.
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arram 15y ago

It's interesting how 'AirBnB' has become a synonym for 'marketplace'. That's success.

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pnathan 15y ago

Hi Jason (since you're reading this!) * I spent about $20/year during my college years. That was tuition, room, and board, for graduate & undergraduate from 2002-2009 or so. * Interns at my company get paid, and well enough they can survive. But they usually work for 1-2 years, I think. Not 10 weeks. This is in line with a trades apprenticeship. I think the core problem is "going to expensive schools". edit: And there's an underlying surge in the cost of education, which is working to make all schools expensive. My total cost of college probably sat around $140K, but that that is far more than my debt load, and I made some poor strategic choices for college: a better set of choices would have dropped the TCC down to 100K or so.

whimsy 15y ago
$20/year? Did you mean 20K? Did you have full-ride scholarships? Did you get an education outside the US? Given your TCC, I assume you meant $20K.
- pnathan 15y ago
  Give or take, 20,000 per year. Almost no scholarships. Yes, USA. No, not Ivy League.

rokhayakebe 15y ago

Interesting. How will it scale, though?

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