In WA, there is a program where you can finish the last two years of high school at a community college and graduate with a two year degree for free. It was probably the best decision of my life. I basically got to trial and error all of my interests for free much earlier and cheaper than everyone else.
And it went against the guidance of my school counselors. They thought community college would hurt my chances at getting into "Prestigious Schools". They also knew tons of kids who screwed off the minute they were given an ounce of freedom (you know, kids who would have wasted money at college anyway).
Community college is the best. Everyone should do it. And it's actually designed for you to learn, not just get a degree. Take a year off, explore your interests, take an internship if you can. Then decide the degree you want to go for (if you actually want to at this point), and find an affordable place to do it.
Too many of my friends got suckered into "there's a school in Vermont that offers the exact program I want, and they are offering me an arbitrary discount on their huge out of state rates".
> And it went against the guidance of my school counselors. They thought community college would hurt my chances at getting into "Prestigious Schools".
I mean, they're not wrong. You will statistically be less likely to get into those schools. Once you're a transfer student, your acceptance rates go down significantly for prestigious private colleges. (And some public universities too)
If your goal is to graduate from a top school, you're less likely to be accepted as a transfer student.
You have the option of going as a normal student. If you do, top-tier colleges usually look at college and AP courses taken at other institutions as a bonus towards admission.
I went to Amherst College (#1 liberal arts college in the U.S. when I matriculated), having taken courses at Harvard Extension School, UMass Lowell, and Boston University as a high-schooler. They didn't give me credit for any of them, nor for the 8 AP tests I passed. However, I was told that they were a big plus on my otherwise-lackluster application. The fact that I could take and ace college courses at other institutions was a great way to nullify the fact that I was failing my high-school courses.
My sister did courses at Middlesex Community College (again, through the same MA dual-enrollment program that I used) and went to Rice University and my wife did courses at Foothill Community College (through CA's dual-enrollment program) and went to UC Berkeley, so not an isolated experience.
It depends on the school. Dual-enrollment often does not count as entering college to the eyes of admissions committees. However, if you enter in a full-time degree program, you may be required to apply as a transfer student.
> You're a transfer student if you enrolled in a regular session (fall, winter or spring) at a college or university after high school. (Taking a class or two during the summer term immediately following high school graduation doesn’t make you a transfer student.)
> Students who have enrolled either full-time or as a degree-seeking student after leaving high school or through an early college entrance program must apply for transfer admission.
I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying it's just less likely. The admissions statistics for these universities show that. After all, they really only admit transfer students to fill in for students who dropped out of their school. They base class size solely on the freshmen class.
In your case, I don't think you were applying as a transfer student. You were also not going to your local CC. Those universities are a higher tier than your local CC.
In the case of "running start" the whole premise is that you have 2 years of college completed when you graduate. Not that you spent 2 years doing college courses to just restart from level 1. You can do that but I think it's a waste of resources and will unnecessarily crowd local community colleges. And it did where I went to community college. I had to deal with a bunch of 14-17 year old high school age kids. >=25% of the student body was high schoolers with some of my classes at 50%+. Gets kind of annoying when you have to constantly deal with those kids still being kids.
I wasn't applying as a transfer student, and I'm saying that it absolutely does make sense to restart from level 1 if you get into a high-tier university, and that doing so can help you get into such a high-tier university.
Yes, it does unnecessarily crowd local community college. Such is the arms race that is today's college admission's scene.
You're not considered a transfer student when you do Running Start. As long as you haven't actually graduated high school when taking the community college classes, you're considered a freshman applicant when applying to colleges. It's offered as a better alternative to just taking more AP or IB classes, which are also 'college level'.
The program doesn't require you to be a transfer student. You actually get a HS and AS/AE degree at the same time. So you have the option to be a transfer student but you also have the option to go through the normal application process and have your credits treated as HS classes.
All that said, it is probably still more likely to hurt you on an application to some programs. Now they've got to compare apples to oranges rather than an easy AP student to another AP student.
I did the program and got into most of the schools I wanted to but missed out on one that I really wanted. I saved myself 1 years worth of college, and could have saved more if I'd planned a little better (taken engineering physics instead of normal physics) and a few more classes that would have transferred directly. Overall I saved about 2x on credits as much some of the AP students, which would have been 3x if I'd known better.
Maybe they're pushing people to get the best school for their major.
I think going to Stanford for CS will open more doors than going to Oregon State. There is a significant networking aspect to these top schools as well. I see it very clearly with my friends who went to CalTech and Stanford.
It's probably not a coincidence that many (most?) of my peers in the bay area are people who graduated from top schools and/or programs.
> I think going to Stanford for CS will open more doors than going to Oregon State.
This concept stops being applicable the minute you get out of the HYPS tier of colleges. If you're cut out to go to HYPS and want to work in finance or top-tier consulting, then you should go. I understand the situation is similar these days with FANG companies. Once you're outside that tiny range of schools, save your money and go to the best in-state school you can get into.
You don't have to be in finance either. The people I'm mentioning are all in software.
Turns out - some of these graduating classes from these prestigious colleges end up running a lot of the bay area. It's not a diverse educational background.
Berkely (BSD), MIT (of MIT license fame) & CMU (Sphinx) have a history of notable software that has enabled computing for decades, most HN users can name software developed by either institution.
Stanford doesn't have that cache, despite what US News & World might say. US News & World rankings tend to be fairly subjective, look at their top 15 cities.
Are you seriously saying Stanford doesn't have the same cache as Berkeley, MIT, or CMU in CS because you couldn't name something invented from Stanford?
How about number of Turing laureates? Stanford has the most for alumni + faculty, and comes second if you only count alumni (to Berkeley), and comes second if you just count long-term faculty (to MIT), and comes first for short-term faculty.[0]
I mean, you could look at Google, Yahoo, SnapChat, VMWare, Sun, and Cisco as "interesting software invented at Stanford".
Not to mention TAOCP and TeX. Only difference is that Stanford alums tend to get rich off their inventions because they don't bother to share the source code (usually; Knuth is an exception) while Berkeley & MIT have more of a history of public-domain contributions.
I think this is an uncomfortable truth for many people. People don’t like to admit that their performance at the time they got admitted to college is a reflection of their status and future ability but it unfortunately is.
For sure, if you want to get into Harvard, you may have to forge your own path.
But I think for the average job and lifestyle people actually want to live, I think they will discover on their own how unimportant the school they went to will be.
AP isn’t the worst thing in the world. I technically entered college as a junior. I still took four years, but I got preference in picking my courses, dabbled with extra math classes (was going for a minor but it would have taken me past 4yrs which is all I had funding for), and I changed my major slightly.
I went to Utah Valley State College and was accepted into the Georgia Tech's ONLINE machine learning master's program-- But maybe that had to do with me being an Adobe employee and less about my less-than-impressive selection of college. Or maybe it was because it was the online program. Furthermore, I've never taken the SAT or ACT.
I imagine you just wouldn't apply as a transfer student.
Texas has a program called TAMS where you take your 11th and 12th grade classes at the University of North Texas. While some students "transfer" at the end (I think to do an end run around UT Austin's 10% rule?), most apply to college as normal high school seniors.
I was a Running Start alum as well (along with many of my friends). If you're in Pullman, you can take courses at Washington State University. It was incredible for me - for my friends who went to UW or WSU after graduation, they got 2 years of college credit and many graduated early. I went out of state and was able to skip introductory courses, and having already been to college in high school meant I was way more mature than many other students.
Honestly, for the cost of the program, it is extremely impactful. I didn't feel like I missed out on high school much either - I still took half my classes there.
I guess to counter the idea that it hurts on college applications: I can't say anything definite, of course, but I'm fairly certain taking physics at WSU looks much better on an application than taking your high school's physics. You look like a more ambitious and capable student.
You lived in Pullman and didn't attend WSU after high school? I'm quite curious about this. I thought WSU was awesome and if I could have gone without as much debt (living at home) I would have in a heartbeat! Also, the Palouse is such a fantastic place. Pullman in summers was the best. Were you just tired of it by the time you graduated?
The Palouse is really beautiful, but honestly I felt like I'd kind of grown past Pullman by the time I finished high school - you can only go bowling at Zeppoz so many times :)
Running Start alumni here. It's an amazing program, but I often wonder if it was the right decision. Leaving high school at 10th (of 12) grade had a major impact on my life. I lost out on those long term friendships, prom, senior year, graduation, and the collective preparation for college, as well as missing out on freshman year OF university, etc. I don't have high school reunions to attend. In the end, it didn't catapult me to anything special, just saved my parents a lot of money on tuition.
> I lost out on those long term friendships, prom, senior year, graduation, and the collective preparation for college, as well as missing out on freshman year OF university, etc.
The importance of these "experiences" is garbage baby boomers feed young people because they're the decadent generation. Most generations prior to them never had those things. (It wasn't until WWII that more than 50% of Americans graduated high school.) I skipped senior prom to go to a robotics competition. I assume I attended graduation, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you where it was or anything that happened. I have plenty of friends from college and law school. I missed my 10-year high school reunion because my daughter was born the same week, but as far as I can tell from the pictures it was in a large basement of some sort.
Outside of the MAGA contingent, people hope to build a better life than the previous generation had. Working 50 years at the steel mill isn't the American Dream.
If you live your life in a bubble apart from the rest of humanity, and you are happy, good for you. If you couldn't find friends in high school, sympathy for you. But most humans are social creatures who put value on having community.
Working in a steel mill would be a much more valuable life experience than senior year of high school for most people. And it’s not like people in the 1930s didn’t have community. To the contrary, they had much more of it than we do these days, where everyone leaves their home town to go office to college, chasing a school a few points higher on some ranking.
I went to a similar program, I personally loved it. It's not for everyone, but for me it was amazing.
The 7 AM to 4 PM schedule of high schools is just insane. No kid needs to be at school that long, and that early. And most classes give out excessive homework on top of that.
Conventional high schools are infantilizing, harmful to health (waking up at 6 AM to get to class is absurd), and teach people to hate learning. And if you're not a social butterfly you can expect to be bullied as well.
My eldest has chosen the CC route, started by graduating HS early and been taking CC classes in the spring and now summer. So far so good, and is really teaching him about where he wants to take his education.
Wish I would have done this 25+ years ago, as someone who does indeed feel like my college degree from a "Prestigious School" was not worth the time and money investment.
This program is called running start. It's amazing. All you pay for is books.
IF you transfer in state the college has to take the credit. If you transfer out of state you're typically treated as an AP student. (My experience 15 years ago).
Does anyone here have good research on the difficulty of getting into elite schools as a transfer student? I tried to do a little research and found this page:
Which seems to indicate it's slightly harder, but not by much. But, I'm concerned that your average transfer student looks a lot different from your average freshman, so I don't really believe the stats; for example I could imagine that your average transfer student has somehow "failed to launch" at their current institution, implying they're a weaker student than your average freshman application. Or, I could imagine the other way around; they've already succeeded at a community college, so they are actually stronger than your average freshman applicant and these stats are underrating how hard it is to get a transfer.
I was also a running start student. I think that it was not a good choice for me. I was not well prepared for the responsibilities of managing my time, and had no desire to think long term. I doubt I'm alone, or even unusual. I know I would have gotten more out of my education had I waited a few years.
I think community college is fantastic, but I'm not so sure about starting so young.
I did this in North Carolina. I’m still not sure if it was a good decision or not - the degree I received is useless and counts negatively towards “prestigious” schools (didn’t get into any and it haunts me to this day)
There is a worthwhile discussion to be had about the cost of college tuition and actuarial tables of different degrees and their earning power and how that relates to pay structure for graduates and for professors and how college programs are run.
Trying to have that discussion on hacker news starting from a primary source consisting of a CBS News poll is like trying to get to the moon on a North Korean rocket with sadness and starvation as your rocket fuel.
If you want to measure economic potential vs cost, what you propose is reasonable. If you want to measure regret, it's not. Regret could have more causes than cost vs payback. (It's interesting, though, that loans were the primary regret, and choice of major was also high.)
If I remember correctly, the previous administration proposed a program where schools and degrees were valued based on their potential earnings but the collective pushback from universities killed the idea.
The idea got killed because it's really hard to measure value added as opposed to just graduates' earnings (students who appear identical on paper self-select into schools and majors and later on careers based on non-measurable stuff). And if you basically just measure graduates' earnings, you're going to punish schools that take a chance on less prepared students, majors that cater to students with weaker backgrounds, etc.
University administrators and professors aren't dumb. They know that good faith efforts to measure value added today will give way next month or next year to laziness and crude numerical targets. The end result will maybe be better numerical scores, but little substantive improvement in how well students are educated or prepared for life.
"Most satisfied: Those with science, technology, engineering and math majors, who are typically more likely to enjoy higher salaries, reported more satisfaction with their college degrees. About 42% of engineering grads and 35% of computer science grads said they had no regrets.
Most regrets: Humanities majors, who are least likely to earn higher pay post-graduation, were most likely to regret their college education. About 75% of humanities majors said they regretted their college education. About 73% of graduates who studied social sciences, physical and life sciences, and art also said the same. "
Important to note the phrasing of this. 58% of engineering grads and 65% of CS grads still said they regretted their degrees - which isn't far off the numbers of those in the humanities.
This really surprises me. I would have expected maybe 30% based on so many people not making it through the program. At my school they had to get 2/3rds to drop by junior year or there would be too many in the program, and they never missed that goal. I saw very few make it through who were not genuinely interested in the subject.
How many young devs have you met who you were sure were going to wash out? Many of them got the degree to have a comfortable life, not because it felt like a calling.
All of those people are going to regret struggling through the CS program only to find out that the programming problems in school were trivial and the real stuff is messy and confusing as hell.
I tell anyone who asks that they should get some sort of programming job as an undergrad. If you can't hack it, you can get some other degree in 5 years. If you can, you'll learn so much more from your classes, because you'll have the practical bits down pat and you can focus on the theoretical.
One of my friends got a job junior year. I would ask him how long the homework took him and he would say something like 2 hours. Bullshit. It took me 10 and there were people in the lab a lot longer than me. There is no fucking way that's true. I stopped asking him because it just pissed me off. Senior year I got a job working at the same place, and within a couple months I was down to 4-5 hours. Ok, maybe he wasn't bragging. Maybe practice really is that important.
By the time I left, with maybe a couple thousand hours of programming under my belt, I had one class with a shortage of machines (3D cards). I would sit in my apartment writing code in a terminal window on one of those machines, essentially blind, for two hours. When I'd get a clean compile I'd go over to the lab to debug for 40-75 minutes. Because doing the homework was just doing the homework, like a math class, instead of a huge production.
Then I'd go back to work and stare at a complex memory corruption bug for 5 hours...
People don't realize that whatever path in their career they choose it is going to have its own set of obstacles, pitfalls and frustrations which results in false impression that would they choose something else they would live happily ever after.
It's crazy to spend so much time and money in school and not have a plan for what kind of career you are going to get when you get out. Parents and educators are failing these young people in not guiding them into realistic jobs and careers. The process before anyone attends college should be to decide on potential careers and then pursue the schooling and other qualifications you need to succeed in that career. A study of the job market and relative availability of different jobs should play into that process as well.
Unless you come from a wealthy family, before you spend a dime on higher education you should spend some serious time looking at websites like this one:
I'm a huge fan of the Occupational Outlook Handbook. That said, it's breakout of some interesting categories is fairly weak. Many medical specialties are simply not listed, while virtually every subset of engineering is listed, except software engineering (perhaps due to a lack of PE involvement?)
I did look and I still did not come out the other side ok.
I think personality is an underrated factor. I would've been happier working at 7/11 for the rest of my life than having to go to university (which I hated) and then to a job I hated to pay it off.
It's worse than zero information. As the saying goes, it ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble, it's what you know for sure that just ain't so.
15 years ago when I was doing the university thing, I was surrounded on all sides by adults who were chock full of "helpful" information. While this career advice was probably sound back in the 70s and 80s, the world has drastically changed. It's pure lunacy to expect 18-22 year olds to not only recognize the bullshit, but also figure out the actual truth.
Zero information? Young people have so much information: government job statistics, job growth predictions, free career advice, peer-led career forums, etc.
This is disingenuous, data you either don't know exists or lack the tools to parse is useless.
Even if a young person does know it exists and can parse it, it is often the case that every authority figure in a young person's life is giving bad information. Often times your teachers, guidance counselor, school administrators, and parents are pressuring you to go to some middling 4 year institution. We spend 18 years training kids to treat the adults in their life as authority figures, expecting them to make their own decision against the desires of these authority figures is naive.
> This is disingenuous, data you either don't know exists or lack the tools to parse is useless.
If what you say is true, then we are failing our students far far earlier that when they are making decisions related to college and it's futile to address this problem before we address why they lack these tools by ages 17 to 18.
The problem is who we have as authority figures. Teachers and school administrators are people who took easier coursework than say a biologist or a computer scientist and then got a government job. That pathway isn't like most of employment and frankly most of the teachers I had wouldn't be able to hack it in a private company.
All throughout high school I was told that I would be unable to become a software dev without college. I dropped out of high school, work as a software dev and make more per year than any of the people who said I wouldn't be able to do that. They simply aren't the kind of people to ask if you are planning a career that isn't in unionized government work, most of them have never done anything else.
The same thing happens with IT security. A common question that comes from high school or college students is how to get started in the field. When the question is answered by people in IT security its pretty common to see college isn't required and be given paths to getting into IT security that don't require a degree. When its answered by people outside the field, go to college and get a degree is the answer.
The reality is a degree isn't required its only one path of many someone can take. And often those with degrees eventually follow the same path those without went. The difference is they are four years behind in career progression and thousands in debt.
Who is "we", and what are the details of this "letting"? Why 18-22?
A more specific proposal to consider: Congress could revert the 2005 decision that made private student loans much harder to discharge in bankruptcy. I don't know if that would be enough for the problem to then resolve itself, as I don't know what percentage of the student loan debt is made of private vs federal loans, but it's something specific and targets a particular feedback loop.
The problem isn't the young age of these decisions, the problem is that childhood now lasts until your mid 20s, as opposed to ending in your late teens.
When you have visibly aging people in their 30s saying stuff like "adulting is so hard gaiz!!", the problem is the culture.
Before being an SE, I had many shit jobs and getting the college degree unlocked many doors for me.
I went to a state uni, it was relatively cheap, I don't think I would make anything close to what I make now as I hate sales. However, I know smart people with art degrees, which are useless to them.
Every competent person I have met when studying computer science is doing very well, would they achieve the same success without a CS degree? Maybe, but that degree definitely helps getting jobs at non-tech companies.
In my experience tech companies tend to be the ones that are snobby about degrees. I know Fortune 50s (non tech companies) that don't care about degrees.
>Most satisfied: Those with science, technology, engineering and math majors, who are typically more likely to enjoy higher salaries, reported more satisfaction with their college degrees. About 42% of engineering grads and 35% of computer science grads said they had no regrets.
>Most regrets: Humanities majors, who are least likely to earn higher pay post-graduation, were most likely to regret their college education. About 75% of humanities majors said they regretted their college education. About 73% of graduates who studied social sciences, physical and life sciences, and art also said the same.
I love the idea of free college. That said, I feel weird about subsidizing something people regret doing in the first place. If this doesn't provide $X value to you, having the tax payer pay that much for it instead of you paying for it seems weird. I hesitate to make a HN tech bubble comment, but it really seems like only making certain degrees free could make sense. Like, I'm a lot happier paying taxes to educate doctors than poets, even though there's value in having both.
Is it just me or are those two paragraphs worded in a way that makes the difference between most and least satisfied larger?
If only 35% of computer science grads say they have no regrets does that not mean that 65% of them have regrets? That's pretty close to the 73%-75% for the "Most Regrets" group.
I don't think that's true unless you become a specialist. If you become a GP, or a pediatrician, or work in a rural area where docs are in short supply you don't make huge money.
Does not surprise me at all. It was unfathomable to me the number of pretend students I met at school who were racking up bills discovering themselves while pursuing studies in subjects with little hope of remunerative employment. They seemed to outnumber the actual students, at least the 1st year or two.
The fact that schools take advantage of unsophisticated customers with such shoddy products, and that this is heavily subsidized by taxpayer money - just ridiculous.
Thanks! The CBS write-up is really, really awful – from the headline (about respondents regretting "their degrees" as opposed to having a mix of debt/topic/networking/institution/etc regrets) to the confusing prose descriptions of alternating "regret" or "no regrets" levels.
The raw tables, & accompanying descriptions, at your link are much clearer.
It's in History, but that's not the issue. The issue is that I wasn't mature enough or academically inclined enough when I was 18-22. I did very well in High School due to fear of disappointing my parents but I didn't do any work in college and now I regret it. I did learn how to program.
I have a coworker who worked in a kitchen for a year after high school which spurred him to get a college degree. I think that's a good fit for lots of people and possibly would have been a better fit for me.
Only took me 2 weeks of working in a kitchen to figure that out! Still chose the wrong major for me (physics), but it opened enough doors to have a sw dev career.
What do you regret about the history degree? Job applicability or that it didn’t interest you enough to continue with it? The latter was my problem... I do wish I could have had two BAs, one in a blended-subject liberal arts...
Imagine how much more sane tuitions would be if these people had just done something else with their lives.
Unintended consequences of federal loan guarantees: education becomes more expensive, leaving young graduates who should be finding their financial footing trying to understand what happened to them.
Schools have all the info and yet they still are more than happy to sign kids into mountains of debt. Nothing would have lowered tuition because it doesn't take all of the money brought in to school the kids, most of the money is going into growing the school's endowment and to maintain their status as a charity so they don't pay taxes. So 58% of kids MUST take some form of aide or charity. And as society has plummeted, more kids are pushed into Uni and therefore tuition MUST be raised to keep the charity status.
https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-uncharity-of-colle...
I have two Civil Engineering degrees (BS and MS) and have been working in the field for some time now and I think the opposite, CE should be a minimum 5 year program. The people I see as fresh undergraduates do not know enough to do the job but those with master's degrees do. I guess it is forcing those that do the hiring to select for those who have more schooling.
A fresh graduate also isn't going to be able to walk out with a PE until they've held some kind of industry role. I would think that this is a good indicator that a fresh graduate isn't supposed to be ready-to-go but ready to be trained.
It seems more like it's those doing the hiring who are slacking on their responsibility than the school.
Right now it is 1 year, plus another 3 years of filler. We could make it 5 with another year of filler, but I don't think that would help. Suppose we mandate another year worth of classes: Ancient Mesopotamian Art, Intersectionality in Sports, Flute Performance, Zoology, Sexual Development in the Infant, Ballroom Dance, French Existentialism, Phlebotomy, Astronomy, History of Jazz. Does this help? We already have 3 years of it.
Chains of prerequisites are long enough that we might need 2 years by the calendar, but there is only 1 year worth of material. Going half-time for 2 years would provide the same benefit as the modern American 4-year degree.
This, I dropped out of college after doing the majority of the "core". I do well and can easily afford to finish without loans, but finishing requires a bunch of general education credits that I see no benefit from.
It's unclear what 'advanced' means in that bullet; most of the article seems to refer to undergraduate majors, or perhaps all post-secondary (after high-school) education.
The confusing writing continues when the article gets to numbers for different areas-of-study, as it alternates between reporting percentages for "have regrets" and "no regrets". (The last 7 paragraphs would be clearer as a table taking 1/3 the space.)
Maybe they don't regret their degrees but their jobs. The current job market totally disregards the passions and aspirations of our generation. Maybe we should treat enrolment per degree as a sort of voting system and allocate financial resources accordingly. After all students are drown from the society, so their aspirations are society's aspirations. Unfortunately capital allocation decisions are made by managers who are rather detached from real communities.
You want to let students' aspirations guide jobs, rather than what companies need? That seems really unlikely to work out well for the society.
Society needs companies that can actually produce stuff that people need and want, worse than they need companies that create jobs that fulfill everyone's aspirations.
When I went to study computer science, Google did not exit yet. Facebook did not exist. Apple was an obscure company. World Wide Web was a hobby. My parents were genuinely worried I wouldn't be able to get a job. Fast forward. Had I been more realistic and chosen a degree that better matched the job market of the time I would probably be unemployed by now.
Sometimes the two coincide. Had you been born 20 years earlier but still had the same passions, how might things have been different?
Another fun thought exercise, what subject can someone go study today that would be a hobby right now that parents would worry about with respect to job prospects, but that in 5, 10 and 20 years will have its own Google, Facebook, Apple and World Wide Web?
> Another fun thought exercise, what subject can someone go study today
That's a nice one. As Alan Kay said - the best way to predict the future is to invent it. I guess we should let kids study what they like and then let them go explore and discover and make mistakes and invent that future. Instead of trying to shoehorn them into the existing job market.
Of the kids who take that approach, some huge fraction will not invent the future. ("The future wasn't artisanal baskets with rap lyrics enscribed? Who knew?")
For the ones who succeed, your approach will work brilliantly. For the ones who are off on a dead end that they imagine to be obviously right... some other approach might be more useful.
The job market totally disregards the passions and aspirations of any generation.
There is nothing special about the current generation except that they have been given unrealistic expectations by their parents.
The job market is all about doing things that other people are willing to pay for. They are willing to pay for that work to be done for a variety of reasons like:
(1) they don't have the skills to do that job or time/capacity to learn;
(2) they could do that job, but would prefer not to and are willing to pay to avoid doing that job; or
(3) they could do that job, but their time is better spent earning more money doing some different job.
None of these three reasons makes any guarantee that the job will match the passions and aspirations of those in the job market.
Throughout history, doing a job that matches your passions and aspirations is a rarity and it continues to be a rarity to this day.
Furthermore, lots of people tend to share passions and aspirations and there are only so many jobs for all those people, so typically even if you do try to land a job that matches your passions and aspirations, there are a million other people doing the same and that depresses prices because of a glut in supply.
Ultimately, the real problem is that expectations were not tempered and realistic. You're far less likely to have regrets if you had more realistic expectations going in.
It's a good thing the military that drafted him, a sugar mill, IBM and Oracle catered to my Dad's passions so much. That must be how he was able to put food on the table and keep us out of debt.
This is truly shocking to me. I'd have thought that most people value the experience of college so immensely that it was worth the cost. I'll be paying student debt for the rest of my life, but in retrospect I'd have happily paid double for the experiences and perspectives I gained.
I don't know how to explain how the college experience is amazing without writing several paragraphs. I honestly thought my sentiments were near-universal. For several years I got to literally pick a topic out of thin air and then have seasoned professionals teach me all about it three days a week. I got to live independently and among bright people all in my age group and craft whatever life I wanted within the relatively safe confines of a university. Then there's all the tradition and legend and adventure that goes with the average college experience. Meeting so many new people from so many different places and backgrounds...
Moved from a small rural town to Chicago. Was surrounded by professors and industry professional instructors. Most of my non PhD instructors had decades of industry experience from the likes of Motorola, Comes or Bell labs/Lucent.
Classes at my school were generally pretty small, except for a few weeder classes in freshman/sophomore years.
I studied Electrical and Computer Engineering (got 2 B.S. degrees). All of the instructors in the EE department were extremely approachable and really cared about their students (at least about the students that cared for themselves and sought engagement). I had one professor that helped me move from a half tuition scholarship to a 3/4 tuition scholarship.
The school I went to also set me up well to succeed professionally. Not just theory, but leadership roles, independent projects, interprofessional projects, etc.
Not to mention the social aspects. I lived on campus my first 2 years, off campus my last 2 with a roommate. I got my internship end of my sophomore year as I replaced a graduating senior on my floor when I was an RA that year, and he referred me (he knew I was already dabbling in the tech stack he used). Spent 3 years working as an intern before I got my first salaried position in finance on a referral of my best friend from school. Spent 9 years at that job before moving on. Went from being a very junior dev in that role to owning several critical systems for trading at a hedge fund. Ive now spent 15 years in finance and have school to thank, though I never expected to be there. Hell, I wanted to design processors.
But, do I regret going to college? Not one bit. Sometimes, I wish I'd finished my masters, but I don't need it for more than resume fodder. My work experience amd the companies I've worked for open far more doors. I get at least 5-7 emails from recruiters per week.
And it went against the guidance of my school counselors. They thought community college would hurt my chances at getting into "Prestigious Schools". They also knew tons of kids who screwed off the minute they were given an ounce of freedom (you know, kids who would have wasted money at college anyway).
Community college is the best. Everyone should do it. And it's actually designed for you to learn, not just get a degree. Take a year off, explore your interests, take an internship if you can. Then decide the degree you want to go for (if you actually want to at this point), and find an affordable place to do it.
Too many of my friends got suckered into "there's a school in Vermont that offers the exact program I want, and they are offering me an arbitrary discount on their huge out of state rates".
I mean, they're not wrong. You will statistically be less likely to get into those schools. Once you're a transfer student, your acceptance rates go down significantly for prestigious private colleges. (And some public universities too)
If your goal is to graduate from a top school, you're less likely to be accepted as a transfer student.
I went to Amherst College (#1 liberal arts college in the U.S. when I matriculated), having taken courses at Harvard Extension School, UMass Lowell, and Boston University as a high-schooler. They didn't give me credit for any of them, nor for the 8 AP tests I passed. However, I was told that they were a big plus on my otherwise-lackluster application. The fact that I could take and ace college courses at other institutions was a great way to nullify the fact that I was failing my high-school courses.
My sister did courses at Middlesex Community College (again, through the same MA dual-enrollment program that I used) and went to Rice University and my wife did courses at Foothill Community College (through CA's dual-enrollment program) and went to UC Berkeley, so not an isolated experience.
http://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/transfer/index.h...
> You're a transfer student if you enrolled in a regular session (fall, winter or spring) at a college or university after high school. (Taking a class or two during the summer term immediately following high school graduation doesn’t make you a transfer student.)
https://admission.stanford.edu/apply/transfer/credit.html
> Students who have enrolled either full-time or as a degree-seeking student after leaving high school or through an early college entrance program must apply for transfer admission.
In your case, I don't think you were applying as a transfer student. You were also not going to your local CC. Those universities are a higher tier than your local CC.
In the case of "running start" the whole premise is that you have 2 years of college completed when you graduate. Not that you spent 2 years doing college courses to just restart from level 1. You can do that but I think it's a waste of resources and will unnecessarily crowd local community colleges. And it did where I went to community college. I had to deal with a bunch of 14-17 year old high school age kids. >=25% of the student body was high schoolers with some of my classes at 50%+. Gets kind of annoying when you have to constantly deal with those kids still being kids.
Yes, it does unnecessarily crowd local community college. Such is the arms race that is today's college admission's scene.
All that said, it is probably still more likely to hurt you on an application to some programs. Now they've got to compare apples to oranges rather than an easy AP student to another AP student.
I did the program and got into most of the schools I wanted to but missed out on one that I really wanted. I saved myself 1 years worth of college, and could have saved more if I'd planned a little better (taken engineering physics instead of normal physics) and a few more classes that would have transferred directly. Overall I saved about 2x on credits as much some of the AP students, which would have been 3x if I'd known better.
But why is that always the goal that counselors push? The data shows that future income is most closely correlated to major, not school choice.
I think going to Stanford for CS will open more doors than going to Oregon State. There is a significant networking aspect to these top schools as well. I see it very clearly with my friends who went to CalTech and Stanford.
It's probably not a coincidence that many (most?) of my peers in the bay area are people who graduated from top schools and/or programs.
This concept stops being applicable the minute you get out of the HYPS tier of colleges. If you're cut out to go to HYPS and want to work in finance or top-tier consulting, then you should go. I understand the situation is similar these days with FANG companies. Once you're outside that tiny range of schools, save your money and go to the best in-state school you can get into.
Turns out - some of these graduating classes from these prestigious colleges end up running a lot of the bay area. It's not a diverse educational background.
Meanwhile, not really sure I think of Stanford as a CS school, unlike MIT & similar.
Stanford doesn't have that cache, despite what US News & World might say. US News & World rankings tend to be fairly subjective, look at their top 15 cities.
Edit: CS School Rankings for those interested: https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-sch...
How about number of Turing laureates? Stanford has the most for alumni + faculty, and comes second if you only count alumni (to Berkeley), and comes second if you just count long-term faculty (to MIT), and comes first for short-term faculty.[0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Turing_Award_laureates...
But I think for the average job and lifestyle people actually want to live, I think they will discover on their own how unimportant the school they went to will be.
Top % of students likely transfer less often than bottom %.
Therefore transfer pool often has students from lower %. And statistically the applicants are worse than from initial application.
However that doesn't mean ones ods are less doing a transfer. It might be better given the transfer peers overall worse applications.
(This is all conjecture. I have no actual stats.)
Texas has a program called TAMS where you take your 11th and 12th grade classes at the University of North Texas. While some students "transfer" at the end (I think to do an end run around UT Austin's 10% rule?), most apply to college as normal high school seniors.
Honestly, for the cost of the program, it is extremely impactful. I didn't feel like I missed out on high school much either - I still took half my classes there.
I guess to counter the idea that it hurts on college applications: I can't say anything definite, of course, but I'm fairly certain taking physics at WSU looks much better on an application than taking your high school's physics. You look like a more ambitious and capable student.
The importance of these "experiences" is garbage baby boomers feed young people because they're the decadent generation. Most generations prior to them never had those things. (It wasn't until WWII that more than 50% of Americans graduated high school.) I skipped senior prom to go to a robotics competition. I assume I attended graduation, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you where it was or anything that happened. I have plenty of friends from college and law school. I missed my 10-year high school reunion because my daughter was born the same week, but as far as I can tell from the pictures it was in a large basement of some sort.
This abject bitterness is only a minor counterpoint to harmless rituals held by many many people.
If you live your life in a bubble apart from the rest of humanity, and you are happy, good for you. If you couldn't find friends in high school, sympathy for you. But most humans are social creatures who put value on having community.
That would still have happened, only two years later.
> I don't have high school reunions to attend.
Is this an american thing? I am living in Germany and I know plenty of people that don't care about high school reunions at all.
I don't know your situation, but you might be idealizing.
The 7 AM to 4 PM schedule of high schools is just insane. No kid needs to be at school that long, and that early. And most classes give out excessive homework on top of that.
Conventional high schools are infantilizing, harmful to health (waking up at 6 AM to get to class is absurd), and teach people to hate learning. And if you're not a social butterfly you can expect to be bullied as well.
Wish I would have done this 25+ years ago, as someone who does indeed feel like my college degree from a "Prestigious School" was not worth the time and money investment.
IF you transfer in state the college has to take the credit. If you transfer out of state you're typically treated as an AP student. (My experience 15 years ago).
https://www.collegetransitions.com/transfer-admission-rates
Which seems to indicate it's slightly harder, but not by much. But, I'm concerned that your average transfer student looks a lot different from your average freshman, so I don't really believe the stats; for example I could imagine that your average transfer student has somehow "failed to launch" at their current institution, implying they're a weaker student than your average freshman application. Or, I could imagine the other way around; they've already succeeded at a community college, so they are actually stronger than your average freshman applicant and these stats are underrating how hard it is to get a transfer.
I think community college is fantastic, but I'm not so sure about starting so young.
Trying to have that discussion on hacker news starting from a primary source consisting of a CBS News poll is like trying to get to the moon on a North Korean rocket with sadness and starvation as your rocket fuel.
University administrators and professors aren't dumb. They know that good faith efforts to measure value added today will give way next month or next year to laziness and crude numerical targets. The end result will maybe be better numerical scores, but little substantive improvement in how well students are educated or prepared for life.
"Most satisfied: Those with science, technology, engineering and math majors, who are typically more likely to enjoy higher salaries, reported more satisfaction with their college degrees. About 42% of engineering grads and 35% of computer science grads said they had no regrets.
Most regrets: Humanities majors, who are least likely to earn higher pay post-graduation, were most likely to regret their college education. About 75% of humanities majors said they regretted their college education. About 73% of graduates who studied social sciences, physical and life sciences, and art also said the same. "
All of those people are going to regret struggling through the CS program only to find out that the programming problems in school were trivial and the real stuff is messy and confusing as hell.
I tell anyone who asks that they should get some sort of programming job as an undergrad. If you can't hack it, you can get some other degree in 5 years. If you can, you'll learn so much more from your classes, because you'll have the practical bits down pat and you can focus on the theoretical.
One of my friends got a job junior year. I would ask him how long the homework took him and he would say something like 2 hours. Bullshit. It took me 10 and there were people in the lab a lot longer than me. There is no fucking way that's true. I stopped asking him because it just pissed me off. Senior year I got a job working at the same place, and within a couple months I was down to 4-5 hours. Ok, maybe he wasn't bragging. Maybe practice really is that important.
By the time I left, with maybe a couple thousand hours of programming under my belt, I had one class with a shortage of machines (3D cards). I would sit in my apartment writing code in a terminal window on one of those machines, essentially blind, for two hours. When I'd get a clean compile I'd go over to the lab to debug for 40-75 minutes. Because doing the homework was just doing the homework, like a math class, instead of a huge production.
Then I'd go back to work and stare at a complex memory corruption bug for 5 hours...
Unless you come from a wealthy family, before you spend a dime on higher education you should spend some serious time looking at websites like this one:
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/
I think personality is an underrated factor. I would've been happier working at 7/11 for the rest of my life than having to go to university (which I hated) and then to a job I hated to pay it off.
15 years ago when I was doing the university thing, I was surrounded on all sides by adults who were chock full of "helpful" information. While this career advice was probably sound back in the 70s and 80s, the world has drastically changed. It's pure lunacy to expect 18-22 year olds to not only recognize the bullshit, but also figure out the actual truth.
Zero information? Young people have so much information: government job statistics, job growth predictions, free career advice, peer-led career forums, etc.
They just ignore all of it.
Even if a young person does know it exists and can parse it, it is often the case that every authority figure in a young person's life is giving bad information. Often times your teachers, guidance counselor, school administrators, and parents are pressuring you to go to some middling 4 year institution. We spend 18 years training kids to treat the adults in their life as authority figures, expecting them to make their own decision against the desires of these authority figures is naive.
If what you say is true, then we are failing our students far far earlier that when they are making decisions related to college and it's futile to address this problem before we address why they lack these tools by ages 17 to 18.
All throughout high school I was told that I would be unable to become a software dev without college. I dropped out of high school, work as a software dev and make more per year than any of the people who said I wouldn't be able to do that. They simply aren't the kind of people to ask if you are planning a career that isn't in unionized government work, most of them have never done anything else.
The reality is a degree isn't required its only one path of many someone can take. And often those with degrees eventually follow the same path those without went. The difference is they are four years behind in career progression and thousands in debt.
It's quite easy to come across it with a Google search.
> lack the tools to parse
The only "tool" you need is the ability to read.
> bad information
Which is not "zero information" anyway.
A more specific proposal to consider: Congress could revert the 2005 decision that made private student loans much harder to discharge in bankruptcy. I don't know if that would be enough for the problem to then resolve itself, as I don't know what percentage of the student loan debt is made of private vs federal loans, but it's something specific and targets a particular feedback loop.
When you have visibly aging people in their 30s saying stuff like "adulting is so hard gaiz!!", the problem is the culture.
I went to a state uni, it was relatively cheap, I don't think I would make anything close to what I make now as I hate sales. However, I know smart people with art degrees, which are useless to them.
Every competent person I have met when studying computer science is doing very well, would they achieve the same success without a CS degree? Maybe, but that degree definitely helps getting jobs at non-tech companies.
I have no "regrats"
>Most regrets: Humanities majors, who are least likely to earn higher pay post-graduation, were most likely to regret their college education. About 75% of humanities majors said they regretted their college education. About 73% of graduates who studied social sciences, physical and life sciences, and art also said the same.
I love the idea of free college. That said, I feel weird about subsidizing something people regret doing in the first place. If this doesn't provide $X value to you, having the tax payer pay that much for it instead of you paying for it seems weird. I hesitate to make a HN tech bubble comment, but it really seems like only making certain degrees free could make sense. Like, I'm a lot happier paying taxes to educate doctors than poets, even though there's value in having both.
If only 35% of computer science grads say they have no regrets does that not mean that 65% of them have regrets? That's pretty close to the 73%-75% for the "Most Regrets" group.
Thought that was interesting framing.
IMO that always made sense to me. States paying to help train people to work for jobs in the same state.
The fact that schools take advantage of unsophisticated customers with such shoddy products, and that this is heavily subsidized by taxpayer money - just ridiculous.
Do they regret not choosing another major? Which major? Would they have been successful / happy in that major?
Do they regret not going to a cheaper college?
Do they regret not getting a job after high school? What job? Would they have been happy in that job?
The raw tables, & accompanying descriptions, at your link are much clearer.
It's in History, but that's not the issue. The issue is that I wasn't mature enough or academically inclined enough when I was 18-22. I did very well in High School due to fear of disappointing my parents but I didn't do any work in college and now I regret it. I did learn how to program.
I have a coworker who worked in a kitchen for a year after high school which spurred him to get a college degree. I think that's a good fit for lots of people and possibly would have been a better fit for me.
What do you regret about the history degree? Job applicability or that it didn’t interest you enough to continue with it? The latter was my problem... I do wish I could have had two BAs, one in a blended-subject liberal arts...
Unintended consequences of federal loan guarantees: education becomes more expensive, leaving young graduates who should be finding their financial footing trying to understand what happened to them.
It seems more like it's those doing the hiring who are slacking on their responsibility than the school.
Chains of prerequisites are long enough that we might need 2 years by the calendar, but there is only 1 year worth of material. Going half-time for 2 years would provide the same benefit as the modern American 4-year degree.
The confusing writing continues when the article gets to numbers for different areas-of-study, as it alternates between reporting percentages for "have regrets" and "no regrets". (The last 7 paragraphs would be clearer as a table taking 1/3 the space.)
Society needs companies that can actually produce stuff that people need and want, worse than they need companies that create jobs that fulfill everyone's aspirations.
Passions and aspirations are for hobbies.
Jobs are about providing value to others in society in exchange for IOUs that you can exchange with others.
When I went to study computer science, Google did not exit yet. Facebook did not exist. Apple was an obscure company. World Wide Web was a hobby. My parents were genuinely worried I wouldn't be able to get a job. Fast forward. Had I been more realistic and chosen a degree that better matched the job market of the time I would probably be unemployed by now.
Draw your own conclusions from this.
Another fun thought exercise, what subject can someone go study today that would be a hobby right now that parents would worry about with respect to job prospects, but that in 5, 10 and 20 years will have its own Google, Facebook, Apple and World Wide Web?
That's a nice one. As Alan Kay said - the best way to predict the future is to invent it. I guess we should let kids study what they like and then let them go explore and discover and make mistakes and invent that future. Instead of trying to shoehorn them into the existing job market.
For the ones who succeed, your approach will work brilliantly. For the ones who are off on a dead end that they imagine to be obviously right... some other approach might be more useful.
There is nothing special about the current generation except that they have been given unrealistic expectations by their parents.
The job market is all about doing things that other people are willing to pay for. They are willing to pay for that work to be done for a variety of reasons like: (1) they don't have the skills to do that job or time/capacity to learn; (2) they could do that job, but would prefer not to and are willing to pay to avoid doing that job; or (3) they could do that job, but their time is better spent earning more money doing some different job.
None of these three reasons makes any guarantee that the job will match the passions and aspirations of those in the job market.
Throughout history, doing a job that matches your passions and aspirations is a rarity and it continues to be a rarity to this day.
Furthermore, lots of people tend to share passions and aspirations and there are only so many jobs for all those people, so typically even if you do try to land a job that matches your passions and aspirations, there are a million other people doing the same and that depresses prices because of a glut in supply.
Ultimately, the real problem is that expectations were not tempered and realistic. You're far less likely to have regrets if you had more realistic expectations going in.
It's been that way for generations.
Hell, I'd pay triple.
Moved from a small rural town to Chicago. Was surrounded by professors and industry professional instructors. Most of my non PhD instructors had decades of industry experience from the likes of Motorola, Comes or Bell labs/Lucent.
Classes at my school were generally pretty small, except for a few weeder classes in freshman/sophomore years.
I studied Electrical and Computer Engineering (got 2 B.S. degrees). All of the instructors in the EE department were extremely approachable and really cared about their students (at least about the students that cared for themselves and sought engagement). I had one professor that helped me move from a half tuition scholarship to a 3/4 tuition scholarship.
The school I went to also set me up well to succeed professionally. Not just theory, but leadership roles, independent projects, interprofessional projects, etc.
Not to mention the social aspects. I lived on campus my first 2 years, off campus my last 2 with a roommate. I got my internship end of my sophomore year as I replaced a graduating senior on my floor when I was an RA that year, and he referred me (he knew I was already dabbling in the tech stack he used). Spent 3 years working as an intern before I got my first salaried position in finance on a referral of my best friend from school. Spent 9 years at that job before moving on. Went from being a very junior dev in that role to owning several critical systems for trading at a hedge fund. Ive now spent 15 years in finance and have school to thank, though I never expected to be there. Hell, I wanted to design processors.
But, do I regret going to college? Not one bit. Sometimes, I wish I'd finished my masters, but I don't need it for more than resume fodder. My work experience amd the companies I've worked for open far more doors. I get at least 5-7 emails from recruiters per week.
It seems you lucked out with some great human relationships, for both your internship and getting your foot in the door for your first job.
That's not a guaranteed result, it depends a lot on what you're willing to put into it and the choices you make.