I agree most of what is needed in a modern software development job can be self taught or trained once on the job. Especially given how fast tools and methodologies change. It ends up being about the ability to get and keep new information and adaptability.
Do you feel your time in the military helped as a way to get potential employer’s interest as much as a college degree would?
The hard algo stuff is easier to have been taught in school. But honestly, I just don’t think most coders I’ve met in my career use much of that.
And if your only option is to borrow? Then what?
Disclosure: I paid my student loans off. But I also never finished college. How well do you think that’s worked out?
If student loans were fair, this wouldn’t need to be a conversation.
Maybe they shouldn’t loan to people who won’t ever be able to reasonably pay it back.
Not by many. And it wasn’t going to be done by me without it. Or my wife.
Step outside your bubble sometime and look around. “It can be done” is not a typical experience.
Faking your own death style?
That’s exactly my point. No bank will lend an obscene amount of money to a teenager without some due diligence. For the article’s example, if the bank knew that lendee’s career plan was shaky and the guarantor father wasn’t exactly making a killing, they wouldn’t risk the investment. She wouldn’t go to an expensive private university because she wasn’t able to afford it. If banks can’t regulate themselves and keeps making bad investments, it should shut down as any business do. If not, they should be regulated.
If banks weren’t allowing reckless loans, there will be less Kaitlyn paying universities’ obscene tuition. As you said, less demand means university will cut down on tuition and overspending on useless administrators and shiny new dorms and stadiums to “attract” prospective idiots who think they deserve pampered treatments on loan.
I have zero sympathy for the author’s whining, as not only did she make bad decisions on repeatedly getting worthless and expensive degrees, she did it ignoring her parents’ advice, looking down on them as “working class”. White folks should really take a look around and realize that expensive college isn’t a “necessity”, it’s that good education is required for getting cushy jobs. If they can’t afford it, work hard picking fruits and save it for the next generations like previous ones did.
While I salute you for being able to bootstrap, this will be 10x harder to pull off if you aren’t a white dude. I know, because I did it without loans too.
Trot that one out in front of someone who is a geneticist and let me know how that conversation went.
The lender can afford to lose out on $60k. It’s built in to the business model: some of that interest is there to offset the number of people you expect won’t actually pay back.
The custom antibodies used in my doctoral research retailed for $6,000,000/litre. And even if I’d somehow got my hands on a stash of those, the nuclear reactor would have been difficult to procure.
Apologies - I’m not American, but I thought American State universities were not unlike our Canadian universities, which last year was about $8K Canadian. This is still a very stiff burden, especially for out-of-town students, but about the same inflation-wise as it was 35 years ago.
Yeah, everything is for profit in the US, even things that claim to be non-profit. The amounts below are for the school year that just ended.
I think you underestimate the growth of credentialization. Being without a post-secondary degree is now about the equivalent of being without a high-school degree. You can be successful, but you need to be very lucky to find an employer who is willing to take a chance.
Realistically, policy should not be based on those who are very skilled (can self-learn) and very lucky. They form too small a proportion of the population. And yes, that means that people like yourself (and myself, although my middle-class success was simply following the road life laid out for me) should be paying more taxes.
$15K for a State school!??!?
Have the costs to the State gone up astronomically, or are students paying a much higher percentage of their education? (It was about 17% in my day, I think in Ontario it’s about 20% now).
My sympathies (once again) to Americans.
No. The state barely funds universities anymore.
Reading this, I’m so damn glad I live in a country where university education is essentially free.
Right? (?!?!?!).
Let me try to appreciate the math here, as fairly as I can without getting bogged down in the weeds.
In 1990, the median household income in the USA was $53k. Now, it is about $59k. Not much different.
In 1990, a typical tuition for a 4 year private college was about 18k a year. (That’s what I was paying. Still high! I had massive student loans when I was done… but wait for the rest of this story…)
University of Michigan in 1990 was $1600 for residents, $6k for non-residents. Which was pretty typical for back then for state universities around the USA.
http://www.umich.edu/~bhlumrec/um-fees/1990_fees.pdf
So, total cost of attending was probably $5k to $10k for residents, you know, room and board, books, etc.
Or for private school, total cost per year was around $20k, twice as much or more.
Now, you are looking at $30k for state schools, for residents of the state. For typical 4 year private schools, total cost of attendance is $60k per year.
So, let’s compare these numbers.
In other words, what used to be an expensive but attainable reality is now disproportionate and out of reach financially for most people. Which means that the only reasonable way to attain that degree is for students and their families to go into deep debt.
Now think about families with more than one kid who needs to go to college. Come on. Imagine if cars had become so expensive that people couldn’t even get one. We treat our cars better than our kids in this country. It’s SICK.
Let’s not forget how fast tuition went up in the 90’s. It went up 8-12% a year. My first year at uni cost about $8k (out of state student), my last year (1995, because engineering is really a 5-year program) cost $16k. Tuition doubled in 5 years at a public, land-grant university.
Yes. By the time I was done with undergrad, tuition had doubled from that 18k to just under $40k. Just suck city for someone not knowing precisely what I wanted to do as a career. It’s so unfair to kids. We are telling them they have to KNOW, like, RIGHT NOW when they are 14 or 15 years old what they are going to do as a career for the rest of their lives. Is that really fair to a kid? They don’t get a few more years to explore being a kid and figure it out as a natural process of maturation? Nope. You decide now, punk, if you’re going to be a dish washer or a doctor and there’s no going back. Come on. The USA has become such a mean place. Meaner than ever.
That’s what happens when you let a very small percentage of the population control a hugely disproportionate amount of the overall wealth.
You know… Late stage capitalism and all that.
