It's mind-blowing how the majority of high school students are lied to each year about the ROI of college. The internet has re-written the rules, and high school educators don't know how to teach that.
I would have benefited so much more from a program that taught how to be self-sufficient and the major, major benefits of living debt free.
Context: $150k in student loans - lucky enough to have an electrical engineering corporate job to (minimally) pay the bills.
EDIT: More Context: I went to an engineering focused private university, borrowed my way through the whole thing (housing, food, everything), parents didn't pay a dime. Stupid? Yes.
IMHO, reality paints a sightly more optimistic picture...the average debt per graduate is $30,000--about the price of a new car, but as measured by wages, a degree gains value (this is because since 2009 wages for grads have seen much stronger growth than wages for non-grads) http://greyenlightenment.com/is-college-a-big-waste-of-time-...
I read stories on Reddit about grads who have debt but are also making decent 5-6 figures and paying the student loan debt, but also also investing the stock market and buying a home, so it's not like they are in poverty or living paycheck to paycheck. The student loan debt can be manageable in many instances, especially if you major in a high-ROI subject.
It would be helpful (though very difficult) if we could isolate the branding/signaling value of certain colleges from the education/training value of colleges, to ascertain the nature of the return on investment value that is being derived from colleges or varying statures, locations, etc.
"What we are buying" through 4 years of college seems to be getting less and less clear to me, and the administrators are very much involved in keeping things as difficult to measure as possible.
The Department of Education has stats on the average salary after graduation at many institutions (realize this is only a weak proxy for the signals you want, but is at least correlated). You can play with, and download, their data here:
Just looked up the school I dropped out of. I made >2x in my first year of dropping out than what it says is average salary for new graduates. Suckers.
Tuition + room and board was about $40K for 4 years.
The school has a good internship/co-op program, so I was fortunate to step into a junior engineering role right after graduation. I'm a C+/B- student. Graduated with a 2.98 GPA.
The median student debt is a lot more interesting, it's much lower than $30,000. The median of all outstanding student debt is around $14,000 today (for households that have any student debt). The median debt for individuals that went to public universities is closer to $10,000.
The average is massively skewed by the top few percentage of all borrowers that have taken on almost unfathomable loans.
You're comparing two different cohorts - newly graduated students, and everyone who has any student debt. Obviously the second group is going to have lower median and average, so comparing the two is pointless.
Because I think HN likes data I plotted some for ease. We can see that by linear fit the cost grows 2.5 times that of the number of students. The 2015 cost of school is 3.5 times that in 1990. The 2015 number of students is 1.47 that of 1990 students.
What's interesting here is the average or median debt of just-graduated students though; counting those who already repaid almost all their debts isn't meaningful.
College degrees still mostly have a good ROI. The huge lie is the ROI on pedigree, prestige, whatever you want to call it. Kids are still being told to apply to expensive small private schools and to worry about the financial aid process later. Kids are told to find the right fit.
None of that really matters. The big ROI is just getting a degree or the type of degree. There are few elite schools that have a much better ROI but they tend to be very generous with financial aid anyway.
Also, community colleges are a great resource. As long as community colleges exist, we shouldn't even allow student loans for the freshman and junior year. You can do your first two years while working part time to pay the very minor tuition. Then you can transfer to another school. Every flagship state school takes tons of transfers. My buddy transferred from a podunk community college to Stanford.
And when you transfer you should go to a cheap school. Unless you get a great college scholarship, it should be your state's flaghship public school.
Nortwestern is a great school, but not 150k better than UIUC (and for engineering its not better period). If you get a nice financial aid award, great, but otherwise don't go. My college counselor in high school was telling people to pay full price for DePaul instead of UIUC just because they wanted a "city experience." No, that's not worth it.
I agree with this 100%. I went to a state school (michigan state) on an academic scholarship instead of going to rensselaer or MIT, where i'd been accepted but with a lot more loans in my financial aid package.
It's conceivable that I'd have had a better job right out of college, especially given the network effects of the big-name schools, but I got an excellent education. Of course, my job prospects were helped by grad school (UC Berkeley), but by that time I knew very well what I wanted to Be When I Grew Up, so the investment was worth it (and ended up being very small, as I managed to live cheaply (it was the early 2000s) and swing a grad assistantship most of the time. On top of all that, the stuff I'm doing means I have to keep learning all the time, so the actual stuff I learned as an undergrad and in grad school was far less important than the habits of mind I acquired there that made me a good learner.
Bargain hunting for an education is really important. I've met lots and lots of people since graduating, some were amazing at their jobs and could get work anywhere and some were ... not. That didn't seem to correlate much with alma mater.
So yeah: a college degree can be great, but you don't need to go to a small elite private school to hone your analytical, technical, communication, and creative skills. It's way more about making use of what's available.
I think my lackluster grades in High School were actually a blessing in disguise. I attended Rockland Community College (as no one would accept me anywhere else) and received an A.A.S. in Cyber Security with a very high GPA. Due to my performance at my CC I received a great academic scholarship to Rochester Institute of Technology.
I graduated RIT with just more than $15k in loans.
I'm glad it went the way it did. But, coming out of HS the stigma of CC was palpable, and it shouldn't be - the education at my CC was surprisingly good. Many of my peers who graduated with me at RIT, and those who graduated with me in HS but went straight to private well renowned schools, are in 10x more debt than me.
Luckily I'm the oldest off all my cousins, and will be drilling this into them when they start looking at schools.
Depends on the job. If you want to get on the US Supreme Court, you have to go to Yale or Harvard.
But in general yes, it's a good idea to shop around. It also depends on the field you want. CSU Northridge is a pretty marginal school, but it's great at geology.
Law is a big outlier in general. There the degree doesn't matter at all, only the prestige. But I still wouldn't recommend paying 200k to go to Yale if Northwestern offered you a full ride. There is one SCOTUS job every 4-5 years.
For law, I'd say get a scholarship or aid at a great school or don't go at all.
In many ways grad school is an outlier in general. It's often just not worth it to get a PhD from a less respected institution. The difference is that most PhD programs pay you, not nice versa.
High school should teach students how to get what they want from life and give them the rudimentary foundation they need to attain it. In retrospect my education was greatly lacking in certain aspects. High school should involve at least one course on directing your life - studying the benefits and downsides of trade school, college, university, proprietorship, basic business operations, political action, personal finance... give them a taste of the options at least. Seems like home economics was an attempt at this but grew outdated and became an elective. This education should be mandatory for all students regardless of what they want to do with their lives. They are the basics of earning a living in the US and even if the skills do not become necessary for an individual, they should know where to start looking when they need money. Without these skills people resort to shitty options like payday loans, student debt, etc...
Did you run the numbers? Look at the outcomes for those with just a high school diploma, they are very grim. If the internet has re-written the rules it sure hasn't shown up in the data yet.
That's not a direct comparison, though - that's all people with a high school diploma versus all people with a college degree.
To draw any conclusion off this, you'd need to compare people who were considering college but do not attend versus those who were considering college but did attend - even if they didn't graduate. Only then do you have a metric that you can use to represent the ROI of attending college.
No, go learn a trade, join a union, and in 5-10 years, make 100k+...
You can easily make what an average lead developer makes if you pursue a career in the industrial operations industry (power plant operator, bulk electric system operator, etc.)
I don't have much to add but that it's nice to see comments from someone in the same situation as me. When I was growing up, I was basically told that an undergrad STEM degree was a golden ticket, and when I asked about how such an expensive tuition could be worth it, I was told time and time again that I would make more than enough money to pay it off. Turns out I make just enough money to keep up with my minimum payments, but not enough to keep up with terrible interest rates on 100k+ of debt and pay rent.
What're you doing? My current plan is to try my damnedest to get a big 4 job. It sounds like you're trying to freelance in your off hours? How is that going?
The first plan is to get a 100% remote job in front-end development to save costs and time, and then use that to continue working on the side.
I've been working on the side to learn web development for the past year and a half, and I have only now been reaching out to job applications that I qualify for.
I at least want to pick up some higher paying part-time hours.
I plan on using the debt snowball to get out of debt faster and live within my means. If I follow that, the maximum time I will be in debt is 10 years, and that's with no income increase or extra income on the side.
I want to cut it down to 5 years or less.
Just trying to build skills and find ways to use them for profit!
There is absolutely no reason to pay so much for a BA. For example, annual tuition for an BA from a California State University is $5,742 (2017-2018; there are some fees on top of this). Many "working class" public universities have a large positive ROI. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/opinion/sunday/americas-g...
On the flip side, your chances of ever getting past 200k/year (or equivalent) are much better with a degree... if you accept that you aren't likely to hit the top 5-10% of income earners, then most people are not better off with the college experience.
I know 200k is much more, and the point is nearly as relevant even at 100k... the percent brackets are more relevant. It's just worth knowing what you want to do, and if it requires a degree, and what you're likely to make working at it for 2-5 years or getting the degree first, then paying back loans.
My advice to people today, is go to the cheapest school you can, local community college is probably the best option, unless you're going to a top tier school, and have plenty of funding for it without student loans.
It's not just the internet. It's also a question of supply and demand. Supply is up; demand is down. ROI on college can be quite good, but you have to pick the right major - "have a college degree" won't get you too far any more unless you're planning to work for the government.
One of the big problems is structural changes in the legal business. It used to be if you didn't have a very marketable undergraduate degree you would go to law school. But discovery work that used to be the bread and butter of newly minted lawyers is now being done by computers.
I would have benefited so much more from a program that taught how to be self-sufficient and the major, major benefits of living debt free.
Context: $150k in student loans - lucky enough to have an electrical engineering corporate job to (minimally) pay the bills.
EDIT: More Context: I went to an engineering focused private university, borrowed my way through the whole thing (housing, food, everything), parents didn't pay a dime. Stupid? Yes.