5 ms·

Some people claim college is the new HS, a new baseline that everybody is reaching. Why shouldn't hiring managers work with that baseline?

seanp2k2 14y ago
Because it marginalizes anyone who doesn't want / cannot afford to take on about $100k in debt?
- eropple 14y ago
  I think that's pretty grossly unfair. I graduated from undergrad from a good--not great, but good--state school with $17K in debt. My scholarships paid for about $9K. My parents and I (summer jobs, Google Summer of Code, etc.) chipped in about $26K. No, you're not going to Stanford on that, but you can still go to a good school with a respectable reputation for teaching, if not research.
  - michaelgrafl 14y ago
    Question from a European: what's the cheapest way to get a college degree in the US? In Austria you pay 363.36 Euros per semester, plus a ÖH-fee of 15 Euros. Some federal states pay the 363.36 Euros for you. If you're not from the European Union, you pay twice as much, if I remember correctly. I know there's a thing called community college. Does it cost money? Is a degree from one of those worth so much less than one from MIT/Stanford/Harvard/Yale/Caltech/etc?
    - rscale 14y ago
      Community colleges cost money, but they cost less money. In my county in Pennsylvania, the community college charges $7,140/yr for tuition and fees. Unfortunately, they issue 2-year Associates degrees that have relatively little market value. To earn a Bachelors degree, the student needs two more years at another university. My local state university, Penn State, is charging $17,824/yr. Add in the cost of books, and the total cost of a "budget" college education in Pennsylvania is roughly $55,0000. As a counterpoint, a private engineering school like Drexel University (also in Pennsylvania) currently costs $51,405/yr, plus books, for a five year program, for a total in the $250-275,000 neighborhood.
      - eropple 14y ago
        My degree program was something like $14K a year, in that ballpark. I don't remember, because at UMaine at least, nobody pays sticker price. Pretty much anyone with a pulse and a not-horrible high school transcript will get at least a few thousand dollars chopped off the per-year price; I think the total cost of my four years at a state university, including room and board, was under $60K. (Also, many private institutions, namely the ones with pretty nice endowments, have gone the route of covering most, if not all, of their students' tuition expenses.)
  - PerryCox 14y ago
    And if I didn't want to take $26k debt what then? I wouldn't have the option of having my parents pitch in, they never were able to save money for college. $26k is still a lot of money for a young person, I went straight into the workforce without college, I'm 21 now and while most people my age are in debt, I have a nice little bit saved in my bank account.
    - eropple 14y ago
      > And if I didn't want to take $26k debt what then? If you want to trade anecdotes: I'm 25 and have been out of college for about two and a half years. I spent two years at TripAdvisor and now oversee mobile development at a funded startup that actually, unlike certain TechCrunch favorites, has a thing called a "revenue model". I have about $3K left on my student loans which I haven't paid back because the interest rates aren't high enough to bug me; I would rather have enough in easily liquified assets to take a year off on a whim. I went into college a "pretty good" programmer. I came out a better hacker due to side projects and a better thinker because of the stuff college, both inside of CS and out, threw at me. I recommend it to pretty much everyone going into software development because without it you literally don't know what you're missing. College opens doors. It sounds trite, but it's true: it forces you to broaden your horizons in ways you may not have considered, it encourages you to build social connections among people not like you (which, sure, you might do, but let's be honest, most hackers don't), and, if you go somewhere with a decent CS background, puts a pretty handy layer of formalism on top of what a decent developer knows intuitively. It's the stuff "outside the lines" that I feel makes college so valuable. You sound like you're doing well for yourself, and congratulations! That's not an easy road. But I'd say that while the 0.1% probability outcome for college and no-college is about the same, I'd also suggest that delta at most other points tilts very hard towards college, even factoring in opportunity costs.

seanp2k2 14y ago

Because it marginalizes anyone who doesn't want / cannot afford to take on about $100k in debt?

eropple 14y ago
I think that's pretty grossly unfair. I graduated from undergrad from a good--not great, but good--state school with $17K in debt. My scholarships paid for about $9K. My parents and I (summer jobs, Google Summer of Code, etc.) chipped in about $26K. No, you're not going to Stanford on that, but you can still go to a good school with a respectable reputation for teaching, if not research.
- michaelgrafl 14y ago
  Question from a European: what's the cheapest way to get a college degree in the US? In Austria you pay 363.36 Euros per semester, plus a ÖH-fee of 15 Euros. Some federal states pay the 363.36 Euros for you. If you're not from the European Union, you pay twice as much, if I remember correctly. I know there's a thing called community college. Does it cost money? Is a degree from one of those worth so much less than one from MIT/Stanford/Harvard/Yale/Caltech/etc?
  - rscale 14y ago
    Community colleges cost money, but they cost less money. In my county in Pennsylvania, the community college charges $7,140/yr for tuition and fees. Unfortunately, they issue 2-year Associates degrees that have relatively little market value. To earn a Bachelors degree, the student needs two more years at another university. My local state university, Penn State, is charging $17,824/yr. Add in the cost of books, and the total cost of a "budget" college education in Pennsylvania is roughly $55,0000. As a counterpoint, a private engineering school like Drexel University (also in Pennsylvania) currently costs $51,405/yr, plus books, for a five year program, for a total in the $250-275,000 neighborhood.
    - eropple 14y ago
      My degree program was something like $14K a year, in that ballpark. I don't remember, because at UMaine at least, nobody pays sticker price. Pretty much anyone with a pulse and a not-horrible high school transcript will get at least a few thousand dollars chopped off the per-year price; I think the total cost of my four years at a state university, including room and board, was under $60K. (Also, many private institutions, namely the ones with pretty nice endowments, have gone the route of covering most, if not all, of their students' tuition expenses.)
- PerryCox 14y ago
  And if I didn't want to take $26k debt what then? I wouldn't have the option of having my parents pitch in, they never were able to save money for college. $26k is still a lot of money for a young person, I went straight into the workforce without college, I'm 21 now and while most people my age are in debt, I have a nice little bit saved in my bank account.
  - eropple 14y ago
    > And if I didn't want to take $26k debt what then? If you want to trade anecdotes: I'm 25 and have been out of college for about two and a half years. I spent two years at TripAdvisor and now oversee mobile development at a funded startup that actually, unlike certain TechCrunch favorites, has a thing called a "revenue model". I have about $3K left on my student loans which I haven't paid back because the interest rates aren't high enough to bug me; I would rather have enough in easily liquified assets to take a year off on a whim. I went into college a "pretty good" programmer. I came out a better hacker due to side projects and a better thinker because of the stuff college, both inside of CS and out, threw at me. I recommend it to pretty much everyone going into software development because without it you literally don't know what you're missing. College opens doors. It sounds trite, but it's true: it forces you to broaden your horizons in ways you may not have considered, it encourages you to build social connections among people not like you (which, sure, you might do, but let's be honest, most hackers don't), and, if you go somewhere with a decent CS background, puts a pretty handy layer of formalism on top of what a decent developer knows intuitively. It's the stuff "outside the lines" that I feel makes college so valuable. You sound like you're doing well for yourself, and congratulations! That's not an easy road. But I'd say that while the 0.1% probability outcome for college and no-college is about the same, I'd also suggest that delta at most other points tilts very hard towards college, even factoring in opportunity costs.