I realize I can't convince you, its part of what makes it sad for me.
> The upfront cost and risk is too high for the
> expected outcome.
I understand this is your thesis but you don't have the data to actually argue it. And those who have done the research have come to a different conclusion than you have, so its a good place to start to understand what they considered relevant versus what you consider relevant. There has been a lot of work done on this so its easy to find papers and articles to read.
I completely understand what you mean - As Neil Degrass Tyson said - you cannot put a price on ignorance.
But the argument I am making is the same argument that people make about healthcare cost. For example its hard to put a price on life but at the same time we need to be realistic.
Also I think there is a stronger argument for fairness.
If you consider me - with parents who were willing to pay for everything - vs students who are much more apt candidate but are unable to find the funding or get the loan.
Do you think society should run like that ? I would hope the best candidate gets placement in all the top schools regardless of their socio-economical background.
But all I noticed while in university are super rich kids.
No one is arguing that average expected value over a lifetime for better higher education is positive when subtracted from the investment. But is that what it comes down to ?
Do we want young people to waste their life's surplus produce paying back their debt ?
Even besides those things - it seems there is increased financialization of education. Should we allow students to gamble with 6+ years of their best years.
Obama famously finished paying back his student debt when he was in his 30s.
Its not so much of question of net positives and net negatives in terms of pure monetary outcome.
Its a question of what we want education to be - a public good or a private purchase like a car.
Vacuuming out surplus produce from young people also means less new young business / startup / etc.
Ben Bernarke is trying to understand why inflation is not rising - its simple, our generation has lost any faith in buying their own homes, cars or having more than 2 kids.
Ok, there are some interesting statements here that I would like to challenge. First there is this one:
> If you consider me - with parents who were willing to
> pay for everything - vs students who are much more apt
> candidate but are unable to find the funding or get
> the loan.
This implies there are students "much more apt candidate" who are unable to get funded. But really there are two things here, one is getting into a college and the other is paying for it. In the US there are a lot of colleges, and in my personal experience I got into MIT but there was no financial aid available, and I also got into USC and they offered me a full scholarship. So I went to USC rather than MIT (my first choice). Four years of "in state" tuition, (tuition at a state school where you already live) is generally less than $30,000 which is the cost of a nice car. Graduate school it gets even better since you can often trade tuition for teaching the undergrads or a lab or two.
Combining that knowledge with the experience of working with people from a wide variety of collegiate backgrounds and you will find that good people are good people, regardless of the status of the school they attended. What is more, smaller colleges tend to recruit people with similar values so when you find someone from a college who fits well with your company, chances are other people from that college will as well.
> Do you think society should run like that ?
And yes, it works as expected. Your statements seem to indicate that if you didn't go to a "good" school you can't get a "good" job, but in the STEM field that really isn't the case. And after you've worked for 3 years folks have a record of what you've done to start referring too and the pedigree of your school becomes less and less important as a discriminator. And if you go to graduate school (which can be cost neutral) you may find you "upgrade" your school pedigree.
So this seems to be your key pain point --
> Do we want young people to waste their life's
> surplus produce paying back their debt ?
And it's a fallacy. We don't want students to feel like they have to go to a "top" school to succeed, because they don't. As a student you have a choice of schools from the very expensive to the very modestly priced. That is a healthy market. And there will always be people who will try to make a status symbol out of where they live or where they went to school Etc. But as you get older you will see that those "values" are entirely artificial. Five years from now you will look back and say, "Gee, I really could have gone to any school and arrived at this same point in my career."
The cost of an undergraduate engineering degree in the US spans the range of $12,000 - $300,000. Everyone who graduates gets to be an engineer, depending on the size and influence of their school they may know people already in their chosen field. But I cannot find any examples of someone who was "held back" from their potential by graduating at a less well known school.
I'm really sorry you got so little value out of the money your parents spent on your education. And I know how "real" your personal experience is relative to your world outlook. However, there are other experiences out there which are very very different than yours and they are very common. You will meet these people in the places you work, and the communities you visit. I'm hoping you will find it isn't as bad as you might think.
I think part of your disagreement is that the original poster is from the UK and you're talking about US education. The systems are similar, but subtly different enough to cause talking past one another.
In the UK you don't pick universities based on price. The government imposes price controls on higher education and (as far as I know) ~all universities charge the maximum amount. Whenever the caps rise, they all raise their prices to the new caps simultaneously. So in effect universities do not compete on price, only on reputation. Students therefore all attempt to get into the "best" universities as determined by basically unchanging perceptions of reputation that exist on a global rather than per-subject level, and the admissions system ends up allocating people based on grades.
So your point about there being a healthy market isn't really on point. For the OP, there simply is no market.
As an additional point, in recent times there has been absolutely massive rises in the price caps and therefore prices. When I went to university it cost me about 10,000 GBP in total. The year I graduated the professors all went on a kind of pseudo-strike where they refused to mark exams (but they still did research and they still got paid their full salary). The strike was because the government had tripled the price caps in order to try and boost capacity, and the staff decided they wanted to keep capacity the same and all get a pay rise instead. Their strike was successful, the (unbelievably weak) administration caved and the entire tripling of their income was immediately passed straight through to higher pay.
The OP claims he paid around 60,000 (about $100k). This sounds plausible to me if it includes costs of living as well. This is a lot of money by anyone's standards, especially compared to the recent past when it was a lot cheaper.
So I sympathise with 1971genocide. I too went through the UK universities system, studying computer science, and had exactly the same frustrations. I went to a university that is considered to be in the tier just below Oxbridge, many of the students there were from very rich families. The universities reputation is good. Yet the staff were incompetent to a degree that was truly mind blowing. Very few of the people who graduated actually became software engineers full time (many went into e.g. generic consulting roles, consultancies, finance), partly because so many people graduated entirely unable to write even basic programs. Many who studied soft subjects there ended up in dead end jobs earning too little to even begin paying back their student loans.
Looking back, I probably should have skipped university. It made me miserable too, and I got a job offer (from Google) before graduating there based on open source work I'd done. If I had gone straight into a job from 18 I'd have probably been much happier and healthier in those years.
Fair enough, I could understand it is a local problem. This web site (http://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/student-finance/...) talks about the costs and points out that many UK schools have 3 year programs rather than the 4 (or 5) year programs in the US. Sort of minimal variation with the limits imposed by the government.
It helps me understand why UK residents come to the US for their college study as well.
