I agree with the ultimate sentiment, which is that it's generally inadvisable to try and pay your way through school these days. The federal government will let you and your parents borrow as much as you need to pay for school, and you'll make more money after you finish your degree, so your efforts are better spent trying to finish in as few semesters as possible to minimize the amount of money you need to borrow instead of trying to pay for things as you go.
This is an area, unfortunately, where kids from wealthier families have a huge advantage. Even if your parents aren't willing to pay for college for you, they are much less likely to be hesitant to take PLUS loans on your behalf that they expect you to pay back. And as a general matter, people who came from wealthier backgrounds are much less afraid of debt and leverage.
I'm not saying that it's the most desirable state of affairs. My total cost of attendance in the early 2000's at Georgia Tech (in-state) was only $10-12k (including housing and food, tuition was just a few thousand) which I could make during the summer. But that's increasingly something that's not possible, even at state schools. And under the new paradigm, debt is the way to go. Especially with the new PAY-E repayment terms.
I'm currently a PhD student. I quit a fairly lucrative trading career in 2010 and went back to school without any intention of doing a GRA (I was fine with self-funding; to be honest, I wanted to not have a boss for a while)... that lasted one semester.
My adviser realized she liked the idea of paying 1/10 my old salary and getting an actual software engineer on her staff. I'm not one to complain or turn down money, so I took the gig and I'm near finished with the degree.
Moral of the story #1: Go back to school for a PhD with a boat load of cash in your pocket, legitimate skills and solid work experience. You won't have to pay tuition.
My wife and also decided to start a family during this time. We paid for her insurance out of pocket. Once the little guy came into the world, we started getting pamphlets in the mail from the state (aka the broke state of Illinois) regarding free programs (health insurance, food and formula vouchers) that we qualified for due to my lowly GRA salary (my wife is a stay-at-home mom). They don't care about or penalize high savings; these program managers just want to get as many qualified participants on the dole as possible to justify their existence. "Need" is not important; quotas are.
Moral of the story #2: Quit producing taxable income, go back to school, breed like a rabbit. The state will provide.
I realize this may sound harsh to those students currently getting by thanks to federal grants, but if you want to fix the problem, we need to get rid of these fucking programs. Prices will drop. All these loans accomplish is artificially inflating demand and putting graduates deep in debt. It'll be messy, sure, but the system is not sustainable in current form.
I've seen others make a comparable choice for the same reason of independence and also for getting out of workplace politics. I'm completing a GRA now, though not self-directed and only for a Master's. Though the stipend is… humble, without it, I wouldn't even have gone to grad school.
Something specific? Overall, I was surprised to find out how political journal publications are. Before I started, I kinda naively assumed that the best ideas are pushed to the top "because science".
Oh man, don't get me started on pubs. I've actually had it pretty easy, but yes, a minefield. I could publish used toilet paper if it had the right names on it.
The big annoyance for me has been dealing with academics as managers (they're not very good, IMO; there are some phenomenal exceptions, but they tend to leave for industry).
Yep. If your parents are wealthy and don't want to help you, you are most definitely not going to a high-end school, not even a state flagship. At that point community college is the only reasonable option (because it's actually possible to earn enough without the degree to cover the cost).
You couldn't really have it any other way without drastically altering the structure of higher education: the alternative is that everyone's parents will "refuse" to pay and the financial aid system would be totally overwhelmed.
I am incredibly lucky and incredibly thankful that my parents value high-quality education and come from a tradition of academics who help their children through college. Some of my friends who are far smarter than me had to give up on dreams because their parents don't understand how inflation works and think you can still pay your own way through high-quality undergrad in the US.
That is, until you get to the high-end Ivies. Harvard would have cost me $12,500 over UW Madison's $24,000, but I was never going to get accepted there.
My parents had just gotten divorced. My dad had zero net worth, my mom very little. Full federal financial aid and need-blind admission at Columbia U. Super cheap, but only later did I realize how lucky I was (in a way) compared to a kid from a moderately wealthy family with two siblings in college. Let alone my friend who came to CU from a rich family but with no parental support who had to get an official parental divorce to make it work!
The financial aid system shouldn't be pre hoc means tested, it should be post hoc means tested. 18 years old is old enough to vote, marry, and enlist in the military. The government ought not to be looking at parents to foot the bills for legal adults.
Students do not have anything close to enough money to cover the actual cost of their education before earning it.
The value of an education I can pay for by mowing lawns is going to be lower because that necessitates zero research, extremely poor student:faculty ratios, etc.
The solution, to me, is to drastically increase government's share of the burden. But try introducing that in Congress.
The schools should lend students their education. They are in the best position to underwrite such loans, and such a system would eliminate the current perverse incentives the schools face.
I think your analysis is mostly correct, but it leaves out the option of really hustling for scholarship money.
My good friend from high school was in a position of not being able to afford our flagship state school, even though he got accepted.
He basically made it his full time job to scour all of the scholarship websites and apply to everything he was even minimally eligible for. He was constantly writing, or altering essays to fit a particular scholarship prompt.
All in all, he was able to afford school and has since graduated and become a pharmacist.
Like in a lot of things, hard work and hustle pays off.
The problem is most scholarship programs with significant awards have a single-digit number of winners.
This strategy works for a few of the most shining individuals in the country in any given year who dedicate the time required and get extremely lucky. I tip my hat to your friend, but the nature of scholarship programs is that for every kid like your brother, hundreds more worked just as hard, had just as much hustle, and got nothing (or a little, but not enough to make college affordable).
Paying for school on outside scholarships is an impressive accomplishment, but not something we can reasonably expect kids in general to pull off.
I think he means his friend hustled for the ones that on their own were not significant. Like I think my credit union gives out 5 $500 scholarships a semester. It wouldn't surprise me if the only people who apply are those who's parents work there. If you found a ton of programs like that it can make a pretty sizable dent.
Still, the availability of scholarship money doesn't scale up with the demand for it. They're designed to reward the extraordinarily gifted (or whatever minority status their endowment specifies), not fund education in general.
The incremental cost of going to school versus "just" living is like $6000. Even the child of a rich parent with no financial aid should be able to pull that together, especially if you manage to swing any scholarship money.
No, they shouldn't, because "just" living gives you 40-60 hours/week to work, and going to college doesn't. Especially at a high-level, challenging school.
Declare yourself independent, move out, get a part-time job, remove yourself as a dependent from your parents taxes, etc. etc. Now you are the income source for your own education expenses, and if you don't make that much money should be eligible for all kinds of wonderful tuition assistance programs. If the school asks, just say you have a terrible relationship with your parents and are estranged from them.
They've thought of that. Even emancipated children are not considered financially independent for aid purposes until the age of 25. The only exception is if you can provide documentation of child abuse - police reports, DCF files, etc. Estrangement is not enough.
Even a noncustodial parent you've never met is expected to make the same sacrifice as your custodial parent.
At my school, I once worked with an administrator who helped with the admissions process (every application is read by a minimum of two people, at least back then), and she had her hands on a lot of data, including a big set of accepted students. We looked through them and noted a couple of things: a disproportionate number were first born (like me) or only children, and no admits she looked at were from broken families. She also got a feel for that based on people asking about going to the university in her department, she hears a lot of stories, arranges and gives lots of tours, etc. Hmmm, now that I think about it I cannot remember a single student I knew who came from a broken home.
Basically, it appears that once parents divorce, at least one parent is not willing to pay what the College Board/the school expects, and that's game over.
At least as of a few years ago, that's not quite true. I went back to school at 24, and because I had earned over 50% of my own income in the past year (100% in my case) and had not been claimed as a dependent on my parents' taxes, I was considered independent.
I brought that sort of scenario up, was told it wasn't an option, although the lower level staffer I talked to wished it was. Perhaps my school took a particularly hard line, I certainly had a few peers who boasted of scams they and their family were running, e.g. borrowing at subsidized rates and getting >20% returns that Carter era inflation allowed them to earn (the government was slow to acknowledge the inflation it had created back then).
Dunno then. It's exactly what I did. I had to show lots of paperwork, bills in my name, apartment rent payment and cashed rent checks, bank account info etc. But once over that hurdle I was in like Flynn (except I didn't have wealthy parents in the first place).
My school is exceptionally expensive, almost $60K last academic year, and had been historically very bad with their endowment and earning money from inventions, and was one of the post-Civil war ones so didn't it have centuries of compounding donations. Iffy alumni loyalty, particularly for unrestricted donations. In face, tuition was very very highly prized because it was unrestricted....
All I can say is, I hope a quarter million for an undergrad is worth it to you and that it helps you land a high paying job out of the gate so you can start paying off any loans. Statistically, at around 5 to 7 years post-graduation, your much lower tuition paying state school peers will end up at job parity with you. Unless your school offers some highly specific specialty program that you can't get anywhere else.
I've written here quite a bit about my school experience and why it doesn't have to put new grads into unbelievable debt. I did freshmen through MS for under $30k out of pocket -- in the U.S and not all that long ago. Looking at the subject the last few years I've no reason to think it can't still be done for maybe no more than $45-50k. Paying off all of my student debt 3 years out of undergrad, then earning enough to cover my M.S. out of pocket is a pretty awesome feeling. (BTW My school's entire endowment wouldn't even add up to MIT's yearly earned interest on their's)
If you really think that your school is where you have to go, most outrageously expensive private schools have a handsome tuition assistance program if you can figure out how to work the system -- these days you can probably get an undergrad from one of those schools for less than I paid for my education. They probably do everything they can not to advertise is. But you have to have lots of chutzpah and don't take no for an answer. Hit the tuition assistance office daily, be a squeaky wheel, adjust your living conditions to suite the requirements for maximum assistance. Need to make less than $x per year? Do that. Need to not be a dependent of your parents? Do that (make sure they take you off of their taxes, you might need a copy). Get extra assistance as a school employee? Get a crap job cleaning floors.
Do not pay the inflated sticker price just to have fashionable brand recognition for a brand that won't matter in the job market in 7 years.
Do the math and optimize. If you aren't willing to do that, it might be worth reevaluating why you went to an "exceptionally expensive" school in the first place.
Given that my calling is science, and an undergraduate degree is just a step toward your terminal Ph.D., and getting into a good program for the latter means a lot of luck if you don't have a professor who the admitting department knows recommend you and your ability to do research, yes, it would have been worth it. As long as you get a STEM degree (don't know about other departments, but then again all students have to do a serious amount of the calculus and calculus based mechanics and E&M) its generally considered to be worth the price. Ditto CalTech, and ditto the other 3 top in the world CS schools if you do that major (CMU, UC Berkeley and Stanford).
In my case, with multimillionaire parents who back in the '80s drove one vehicle with a depreciated value of 2 plus or minus years of full costs, no amount of cleverness would have helped with the financial aid office. Due to MIT's horrible money management and youth it just didn't have the money.
As for why I choose MIT, my parents attempted to set up a trap, they were sure I couldn't get into it or CalTech (I'm not a math genius, but good enough to do MIT's required level), so they said it "wasn't worth their money" to send me to any place good but those two. As it turned out, MIT was looking for people like me (ask for details if desired; one less obvious one is that they look for evidence the student can do projects, and submitted a couple of those) and I got in, not that they had any intention of paying more than they could get away with (a saving face sort of thing).
The later experiences of my younger siblings showed that it wouldn't have mattered where I went, except that I probably could have worked my way through the very cheapest possible place, but that was so down market getting into a good grad school would have been iffy. In my field of chemistry, the only none required by the subject accrediting organization courses they offered were analytical lab ones clearly intended for student for whom the undergraduate degree was terminal, for a lab tech career.
Prior to a fairly recent overhaul, the technology licencing office (rough quote from memory from Tech Talk, the Institute's official newsletter): "focused on the details of licencing vs. doing a lot of licences" and averaged a little over 1 per year (!!!). Given that I know 3 of those, the LMI Lisp Machine licenses and the same plus Macsyma to Symbolics....
They notoriously screwed up the 3D core memory patent ($40 million lump sum to IBM vs. the offered 1 cent per core) and a synthetic penicillin patent. Either could have paid for a complete replacement of the entire campus. I very strongly suspect these weren't the only screwups, and e.g. Symbolics scammed an exclusive license to Macsyma mostly to keep it out of other people's hands, one reason Wolfram was able to beat it sort of starting from scratch.
Back then, when the prime rate was over 20%, and inflation was over 15%, MIT was getting a much lower return on its endowment. I want to say 4%, but I'm not sure. MIT does a lot better now, but that is also recent.
It got its charter just as the Civil War started, and set up operations just after. So as noted it doesn't have the 2 centuries or more of additional compounding alumni donations the famous Ivies have.
Not sure when it started, and it was again fixed only fairly recently, but the alumni magazine, Technology Review, was dedicated to telling most of the alumni that what they were doing was evil. And again by then the Institute apparently had convinced a lot of alumni that it couldn't be trusted with unrestricted gifts. In its favor it never tried a Princeton Woodrow Wilson Center type donation theft, then again I don't know of any other top school so brazen.
Ah, it also was wretched, not interested or perhaps in part stymied by city government (which hates Harvard with a passion, and MIT gets some of the blowback) in making money off of local real estate. When I showed up the Kendal Square area had that bombed out sort of look, in part due to NASA deciding after JFK's assassination and LBJ becoming President that, oh, on second though Texas is where we should build our space center. There was almost no housing, let alone vaguely affordable and safe, to be found close to campus. I'm sure that bit of MIT's studied indifference to student welfare didn't escape some of the alumni who were the sort to later make a fortune.
Bottom line: not a lot of money to grant to students, and a total focus on needs based aid. And, hmmm, rather obviously students like me who were crushed by the intersection of the financial aid policies of MIT and their parents would never be in a position to donate a lot of money, and not inclined to donate much of what we do have.
Don't forget parents with modest incomes but a lot of savings from planning their own retirement. That's the reason I didn't get any financial aid (other than some subsidized loans to cover part of my costs).
This annoys the hell out of me. "Retirement account" here is a tax deferred account like a 401k or an IRA, right? There are limits to how much you can put into accounts like these, and in today's world it can be difficult to adequately fund a comfortable retirement on these savings alone.
If you make a modest income but are careful about your spending, it's not unreasonable to have leftover after-tax money that you can invest in other ways. That doesn't mean it somehow ceases to be retirement money.
> where they could use it for things other than retirement
Retirement isn't some thing you just go to the store and buy. There's no clear split between buying goods and services that are "retirement things" and "non retirement things."
Some people retire by quitting their job once they reach some magic number in an account, and then hope that they die before their balance goes to zero. This is increasingly harder to do if you don't want to be working past 70.
The age threshold for withdrawal from some of these tax deferred accounts can be a significant hindrance if you plan to fund your retirement in other ways such as by buying a rental property. You don't want to be buying the property at 60, you want to have already bought it, done maintenance, allowed it to depreciate a bit, etc. so that you can actually make a reasonable profit by the time you're 60.
But your concern of their limitations applies to so few people.
Roughly 30% of people have less than $1000 saved for retirement, in any kind of account [1]
Roughly 55% of people have less than $25K saved, in any kind of account
The 401k personal contribution limit is $17,500 this year, and if someone had a 50% match form their company, they could top that in just ONE single year.
Yes, I know that the vast majority of people don't/can't/won't plan for retirement at all. But we're already talking about "parents with modest incomes but a lot of savings from planning their own retirement." Many of these people could fall into this category.
Many private schools (including UChicago) supplement FAFSA with CollegeBoard's CSS PROFILE, which is more encompassing and looks straight through retirement savings, business assets, trusts, and everything else. My dad is a CPA and it took him several days to fill it out. He said it was very clearly designed by experts who are very good at finding hidden assets.
Before someone turns that into an argument for state schools, remember that it's really only private schools which give any financial aid at all to middle-class kids.
The part that killed the FAFSA was a mutual fund that my parents committed to use only as a supplement to their retirement accounts. Based on the amount in the mutual fund (in combination with all the other factors), FAFSA estimated that my family could afford $40,000 a year on college, which was over half the household's yearly income and was patently ridiculous.
Unsubsidized Stafford loans are, AFAIK, always available no matter what your parents make. They will cover half to most of in-state tuition (~3-5k) at many in-state colleges, but not much more. It wouldn't cover even half the tuition + fees at Cal Berkeley, but it would cover half to most at SFSU.
It's been my experience that when people say any they really mean the straightforward stuff like Federal and State grants and loans. Being Ineligible for Federal grants is one thing, but so long as you filled out a FAFSA you were still eligible for school grants, private grants, and private student loans with deferred interest payments. That's a huge incentive to complete a FAFSA. Even people who have used up their Federal and State aid should keep their FAFSA going and check their school's financial aid office for other types of aid.
Case in point: in high school I lined up thousands of dollars in financial aid that no one else bothered to apply to. The largest check being $4,000 from my Alumni association for writing two paragraphs about how much I liked my school. A white friend of mine even got a NAACP scholarship because no one else applied (In case you don't believe this happens or think I'm joking, see [1] (not my friend). No one seemed to mind in his case).
I had some family issues and then had a falling out with my family and was locked out of FAFSA until I turned 23. Now THAT is something that does made you ineligible for pretty much any financial aid aside from traditional loans and working a lot. That really sucked. I ended up having not finishing my bachelors as a result. Thankfully Community College worked out pretty well for me.
Well, none was available as far as my financial aid office knew. ALL the school's financial aid was needs based, so there were no scholarship or school grant options. It was very expensive (and worth every penny) so "small" checks like $4K wouldn't have helped much. And my parents certainly wouldn't have filled out a FAFSA/College Board CSS PROFILE (I believe the latter was required; it is now).
Only other option was the military, but my eyesight was too poor to even enlist in the Army (and this during the Carter nadir of the military).
Do you think the landscape is completely unchanged since the Carter administration?
While this history can certainly be interesting, you're anecdotes aren't all that helpful for people looking for options now such as the person who wrote the blog post.
I don't think it has changed significantly for the better with one exception:
By then, the cost of going to a top school was beyond what almost anyone could do to work through it (MIT used to be known as a place where working class parents could send their children to to become engineers, and they'd work on the side to put themselves through it; didn't Feynman do this in part?), and since academic inflation has been a lot greater than CPI inflation, it's only gotten worse. E.g. not too long after I started in the fall of 1979, as I understand it MIT's costs doubled in the space of a few years (no doubt due to Carter inflation plus MIT's horrible financial management which I detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6178931).
MIT still has the same needs based only financial aid system. Others have confirmed that if you don't need it as judged by FAFSA/College Board CSS PROFILE---which my parent would have refused to fill out anyway---you will get insufficient or no loans if your parents don't cooperate/co-sign.
The military eyesight situation has improved due to new procedures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refractive_surgery ; the radial keratotomy available then was right out), although I don't know if my astigmatism would be a disqualifier now, or if it could be arranged or maybe afforded by me as my eyesight was back then.
Bottom line: if the military is not an option, the kids of uncooperative rich parents are still seriously screwed, and for the same reasons.
Yeah, that is half of why I dropped out of MIT (the other half was chance to do an ecash startup, but I was financially screwed for this reason otherwise; the alternative was ROTC)
I'm wondering what the parent meant when they said that their parents were unwilling to help. Does that mean that they would not cosign for a private loan?
If you're referring to me, yes, they totally rejected cosigning a private loan. My school had its own independent program for this, and their credit was not exactly a problem (that year their main band issued them an unsecured note for more than 4 years of the total costs; ironically to set up a computer system, the brand of which I researched and specified as about the last thing I did before going to the university).
A bit more: they were quite determined to make sure none of us graduated from college, with one exception that proved the rule and another than paid her way through a community college level 4 year school, the sort that rents textbooks and was literally on the other side of a creek sharing a border with us. The other 2 of us were more ambitious and ruthlessly crushed.
The system assumes good will on the part of parents, and pretty much has to, to avoid free riders.
> The system assumes good will on the part of parents, and pretty much has to, to avoid free riders.
That's the second time I have read this lie in this thread.
Firstly, state governments are bound by the equal protection clause to ignore the assets of relatives (and all similar irrelevancies). They do just fine not soaking people for their ancestors wealth.
Secondly, university costs are in a financial bubble, for the exact same reason as house prices in 2007. The bizarre funding schemes and underwriting are a temporary state of financial cprruption, not the natural order of things.
Thirdly, the free rider problem only applies to zero sum games. If FedGov stopped blackmailing parents, it would not be education that collapses, just the bureaucracy grown fat on the back of ill gotten money.
Fourthly, to the extent that higher education is a zero sum game, that problem is trivially solvable by funding it with taxes. If higher education is a profitless necessary evil, like street construction and dog catchers, it should be funded the same way.
The equal protection clause is of no use to nineteen year-olds whose assets measure in the hundreds of dollars. What's your suggestion to the student who is wronged by the Fin Aid office? Hire a lawyer and sue? Ridiculous.
>Secondly, ... Thirdly, ... Fourthly, ...
What are you even responding to? None of your retorts are responsive to hga's or any of the other parent comments.
Well, the 2nd is responsive even if the author doesn't know it. MIT is a genuinely expensive place: the last time I knew the numbers, it spent about half your tuition on you in your freshman year and quite a bit more on average for the 3 remaining years. STEM subjects are expensive, all have lab work, and one of the reasons MIT is MIT is that with the rare exception that proves the rule, all courses are taught by tenure track or tenured professors.
You can't get tenure without being an adequate teacher and the vast, vast majority I knew really cared about teaching undergraduates. The school also constantly makes sure the professors are doing an adequate job (I once both read all the student evaluations for a disaster (only one was not negative and she was a special case), and then overheard the department head tell the professor, who's name you probably know, that he'd never be allowed to teach that particular course again), and e.g. has no hesitation about taking a course away from a professor who violates the rules like what can be asked for at the end of the term.
MIT is also in a very expensive location, the cost of living is very high. That's also true for many of the Ivies, Harvard up chuck river from it, Columbia in NYC, Princeton in NJ, etc.
3rd doesn't apply so much to MIT, although, yeah, it has too large a bureaucracy like pretty much every other institution of higher education. Just not one grossly out of wack with the rest of the school.
4th, no, MIT's independence is unquestionably one reason it's so good and continues to be. Go to 100% government spending and it would regress to the mean as government bureaucrats enforces their own irrelevant fantasies on it (even more than they do now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grove_City_College_v._Bell).
My comment was directed to the repeated claims that free riders mean the only viable way to pay for universities is to bill parents. I am apparently not able to make that clear after staying up to four in the morning.
Is MIT actually that expensive, inflation adjusted, compared to 1960?
Bureaucracy is not just about labelled bureaucrats, but about the well-meaning organizational structure that tends to spring up over time. Take an axe to the budget and the excess structure often disappears with no ill effect. (I'm looking at you, committee meetings and approval processes.)
For academic year 2012-3, the MIT nominal cost is $57,010. Plugging that into the BLS inflation CPI inflation calculator at 2012, that's $7350 1960 dollars.
But that's somewhere around what the tuition was 2 decades later from memory and someone graduating in 1980, the same as my first academic year. Can't remember the rest, maybe $3,000, could be less if you went for less expensive housing (not sure if that was much of an option) and especially food.
Looks like MIT's inflation rate 1979-2012 was very roughly double the CPI; I'm comfortable saying it was around that, and it's congruent with the general reports I've seen on US higher education inflation.
as a general matter, people who came from wealthier backgrounds are much less afraid of debt and leverage.
True, the debt seems a lot smaller in that context. I'm (very slightly) optimistic that the new rules which cap student loan payments as a % of income and also subsidize public service work will make this burden a little lighter and less intimidating.
But at bottom, it's still a terrible problem. Not everyone is a financial wizard, and after an unpleasant brush with debt as a youth I've been largely allergic to it since. It's disappointing that people who want to take a fiscally conservative approach and pay up front or as they go are finding that becoming ever more impractical, thereby limiting their economic opportunity and productivity. Although many schools offer scholarships and suchlike, they're far from transparent.
My parents helped me pay for college. In fact, they covered my tuition. We did take out some loans but not much. I am eternally grateful that this debt has not been saddled upon me for the rest of my life, because if it was I probably wouldn't have gone to college in the first place, seeing no way of ever making enough money back to warrant what I've learned.
I did not go to school for CompSci, btw, or anything programming-related (unless you count programming synthesizers as "programming" :P)
Have you ever worked hard for something and then realized it wasn't enough? Or worse, working hard brought you to this point, alone and unable to pay for school? It's clear that if she's writing this, she's trying talking to financial aid. She's tried saving as much as possible for school. She's tried all the options... but none were left for her. I go to Stanford and I found myself in a slightly similar situation on a smaller scale. I had $1.2k in debt before the start of the year. Yes you read that right, just over one thousand.
Well... Stanford won't disperse financial aid if you have a balance of over $1k. So, I had 2 days before school started and I didn't have the money to head back to school. No matter who I talked to or who I called, the story was the same. That $1k was my responsibility but to be honest, I didn't have it. That summer I barely made enough to support myself. I also maxed out my credit cards and because of my family situation, I didn't have a cosigner that could help me co-sign a private loan. I also couldn't apply for a loan through my school because that was also considered financial aid. That night I cried... so much. I called my financial aid office over and over only for them to tell me the same thing. I called relatives. I even begged my brother for a small loan just so I could register for classes (which he never gave btw). The next day at work I burst into tears for seemingly no reason at all. Why should I? I go to a school with all the bells and whistles. Why would that be a concern? Had a sorority sister not heard me crying, I would never have gotten the money to enroll.
It's because the system is broken. This story is not about amounts or what she "could've done," it's about the reality of being in a situation you can't possibly control.
We have a government-run loan scheme called HECS. You defer your university fees throughout the duration of your studies, apparently no matter how long they last. The programme is not means tested at all, so it is available for every single domestic student studying uni here, no matter what.
That loan is then paid back only once you start earning more than a threshold amount of taxable income (this year, $51,309 - it's not a low income by any stretch) and the payment amount is graduated depending on how much over you earn, from 4% of your income at that threshold amount to 9% once you hit $95,288 or above [1]. There is no real interest charged on the debt - the loan is only indexed to CPI every year, so that the real cost of the loan amount doesn't change. The repayment is treated like tax - either taken out as you earn your wage or squared every year upon doing your tax return.
The perk that rich people get is that if they pay their bill upfront (that is, each semester as they study), they get a 10% discount on the total cost of the tuition for that semester (apparently, off memory it was 25% when I went through about 5-10 years ago). If you put it on HECS, you instead pay the full amount.
Oh, and also for every domestic student, a semester of full-time study costs on the order of $3000-$5000, so a 3 year degree is about $18k-$30k of the above debt [2], depending on what you study. It's heavily subsidised by the government.
The system is funded, in part, by international students, who pay the full fee amounts (no government subsidy) if they choose to study here.
The major criticism of the system is that students can just incur this debt then flee the country. If they earn no taxable income here, they never have to pay it back no matter how much they earn overseas. I can't really think of an easy way to resolve this because it's impossible to garnish income from another country. Nevertheless, the system works reasonably well.
> The major criticism of the system is that students can just incur this debt then flee the country.
Do you have any stats on how much HECS is lost in this manner? I've not heard of this being a big problem. One of my friends is in this category - he got a PHD scholarship at a top institution in the UK and isnt likely to return to Australia anytime soon. But I'd have thought the overall impact of brain drain (Australia is generally not a good place for top end R&D [1][2]) would have a far greater impact on Australia's future than an unpaid $30k HECS debt.
That all said, HECS is an amazing system and we are so lucky to have it here. I remember as a teenager when I first learnt that you had to pay upfront to go to college in the USA. I thought it was bullshit. What happens if you're poor? It seemed so ridiculously unfair that I thought it must be false. Oh the innocence of youth.
edit: urgh, sorry about the paywall. Go via google and you'll bypass it.
I don't, but I'd love to see some if anyone has any.
The problem is that because the only interest on the loan is CPI, the HECS system is essentially a fixed pool of money that is temporary loaned to students then paid back, real-dollar for real-dollar. By not paying it back, it's essentially 1 student's volume of study that is lost out of that pool.
I don't know how significant that 'leak rate' is though, so I can't put a figure on whether it's stressing the funds or not.
The only reason I suspect its not a big problem is neither political party seem to be whining about it.
Perhaps the boom economy over the last few years has hidden the problem. Graduates from IT/Engineering/Geology had a very good chance of skyrocketing into a top income bracket after only 1-2 years on the job. In terms of NPV this accelerated repayment makes the pool of money larger. And vice versa in a slow economy. I'm quite certain the previous generation didn't see their income climb so fast relative to their years of experience.
All kiwis can get a student loan, which you can put class fees, some living costs and a few other expenses under. You can also apply for a student allowance which you don't have to pay back, but you have to qualify (e.g. you and your family are poor).
With the student loan, it's a no interest loan as long as you're in the country. If you leave it defaults to a normal loan (not sure the % is).
While you're working and make over a certain minimal amount the govt takes 10% of your income to pay it off.
I'm not sure how much it is now, but I graduated in 2006 with a BSc in CS and my loan was somewhere around 21k.
Australia has the same full-time study allowance (Youth Allowance). When I was at uni it was about $350 a fortnight. Enough money for rent in a share house, food, a carton of cheap beer and perhaps some petrol. You could survive on it if you were frugal.
The weirdest part was the means testing to make sure you were 'independent' and hence eligible to recieve the government money regardless of your parents assets. My parents werent poor but they were in no position to pay my living expenses whilst I went to uni.
Proving you were independent involved showing you'd worked full time for over a year or earnt a massive amount of money in a short period of time (I cant remember exactly but it was around $15k).
I worked 12 hour days at a factory over the summer break for 2 and a half months and with some other part time work managed to meet the income requirements. I started uni with a very healthy bank account.
I just thought it was somewhat weird that I had to work so hard and earn so much money...so I was eligible for the government to give me more money.
HECS is nice, I knew a number of Aussie engineers at Microsoft who got a good education and as you said, fled the country.
Low interest loans are not the worst idea if people actually stop to ask themselves if their major will provide the enough income to pay them back. They avoid the flee the jurisdiction problem an the waste money on a useless major problem.
Its reasonably rational to pay the money to go to Stanford for CS even if you pair full freight. It's probably not economically rational to do so for sociology.
The problem of course, in the US, is that no one asked themselves if they could afford to pay back the loans given what they intended to do. Its some mass collective delusion.
The other problem, is that every time they up the amount for federal student loans, universities up their tuition to match.
I'm an Australian ex-patriot who went straight to Microsoft after study and although myself and other friends who did the same aren't paying back their HECS now we all agree in the mid-to-late future when we return to Australia we will pay our HECS in full and likely later than others so with a little more interest too.
Honestly I think the brain drain is the biggest downside to Australians moving overseas after higher education, it's hard for me to move back after seeing the opportunities here.
Which isn't highlighted because the narrative that is not "Hey we are helping people get college educations" the narrative is "Rich people can afford to send their kids to school, poor people can't, its increasing the divide between the haves and the have-nots."
That second narrative gets you rage views and votes for office, pretty much without regard with evidence to the contrary. Students can get a college degree at state schools for about the same cost as buying a new car, and on much more favorable loan terms.
That said, there are lots of ways we could improve how we grant student aid, in my last letter to my Senators I suggested that providing need-blind aid for STEM degrees (Creating in demand workers and part of the alleged worker shortage) would serve the double benefit of both getting people college degrees, and getting employers the legal resident college graduates they seem to so urgently desire. It is a simple idea but if you subscribe to the idea that tax payer funds should be allocated for the improvement of the citizenry and society, having a larger qualified worker pool seems to meet that requirement.
Yup, HECS is wonderful. I'm a current engineering student and it's offloaded a major concern from my mind about university. University used to be free in Australia a few decades ago, I believe.
I think there IS a limit on how long studies go. When I changed degrees I remember one of the Centrelink mentioning something graduation date and if it's within a range—I should check. Also, they've proposed to remove the HECS-HELP discounts[1].
I thought there was too, but apparently that was removed as of 01/01/12. Quoth a big PDF [1]:
"As of 1 January 2012, there is no limit to the amount of study you can undertake in a CSP. However, it is important to note that some approved providers may have academic probation procedures in place and if you are not progressing satisfactorily in your course, your enrolment may be cancelled."
There was even a golden period, '84 - '88, where it was entirely free to get a degree in Australia.
Australia needs something like HECS to encourage skills. Even with the loss of those going overseas, to support a service-based economy, it's still necessary to maintain domestic skills. The US is less in need - it is where the brain-drain of the world goes - which may be why their government feels less of the pinch.
That's outstanding and to be encouraged, but I do think that HECS is an elegant solution - you're only eligible to pay back your studies when your salary rises above a mediocre level. Australians can also get a small stipend to live on during their undergraduate degree (I think Germany does this as well, but I'm not sure).
Yes, we have something called Bafoeg (great german abbriviation for a law ;-)). It's valid for all forms of education (most of them, apparently there's a white list), given you're total income and assets are below a certain threshold.
And yes, these systems are really nice for students with low income or wealth. They open up opportunities and provide education to more people, which is always good I think.
I don't see how HECS is a lot better than the US system.
"Poor" people still have to pay 10% (accumulated) interest on the loan (it does not matter if the interest is called 'discount') and you still leave the system with a loan of $18-30k.
If a country wants to advance technologically or academically, it should have cost-free universities like there are cost-free schools. Why do people not understand that?
It’s not clear that that would necessarily lead to better allocation of resources; I’m sure there are some degrees that give people skills to create a lot of value, but right now people can already borrow money to get a degree if they think it’s going to pay off; on the other hand, there’s currently so much societal pressure to go to college, a lot of students spend a lot of time and money on worthless degrees that don’t really help them, or if they do help them, only as a (very slow and inefficient) signaling effect that they’re the type of person that can make it through college. I’m not really sure what problem having the government pay for college tuition would solve. It would probably just exacerbate the current problem of colleges having no incentive to keep costs down as long as people are dead-set on getting a degree regardless of the costs or lack of benefit.
I think a better solution than basically throwing fuel on the fire is to educate people about what their options are to help them make sound economic decisions, including different degree options and their value in the job market, and also about options if they choose not to go to college, since a lot of college graduates end up taking jobs they don’t need degrees for. There also needs to be a reversal in the trend of employers requiring college degrees as a form of signaling; I think evidence suggests that college admissions boards aren’t really any better at predicting student success than results from intelligence tests like the SAT. It’s going to be very politically controversial to convince people that a lot of the value associated with having a college degree is actually just in being a smart person, but I think it would make the economy hugely more efficient and save people from having to go to college just to signal their intelligence. Another big part of the solution, for those who do actually need to learn things and earn licenses, is going to be legitimizing and popularizing new forms of education made possible by technology, e.g. MOOCs, and somehow setting more efficient methods of credentialing to go with.
Why do people not understand that many people are poor not because they were born into something less than a utopia but because they are lazy or happy that way or they make bad decisions or are just plain ignorant?
Have you once stopped to consider that there may not be anything close to a perfect system for lifting people out of poverty?
Perhaps a system that provides possibility that requires loads of effort to take advantage of is the best that can be done.
A country simply cannot pay for the aggregation of "necessities" that the populace dreams up.
In a lot of first world countries people get PAID to go to university. Expecting 17-18 year old's who finished high school to have tens of thousands of dollars to be able to go to good universities is beyond stupid.
I was not talking about poverty or who's paying what.
I'm just saying that putting economic burdens on higher education is not a wise decision for a country that wants to advance technologically or academically.
With respect to who's paying what: I think the country has way enough money, the question is "just" on what do you want to spend it.
> The major criticism of the system is that students can just incur this debt then flee the country.
That would be the big roadblock to implementing something like that in the US.
In the US, when evaluating whether or not to do (or continue) some program that provides aid or assistance, there are a lot of people who focus primarily on whether or not it is possible to cheat the system. It doesn't matter to them if 99 out of 100 people getting the aid are following the rules and having their lives greatly improved (and indirectly improving things for the country as a whole). It is that 1 out of 100 who gets aid who did not qualify that is all they see.
> If they earn no taxable income here, they never have to pay it back no matter how much they earn overseas. I can't really think of an easy way to resolve this because it's impossible to garnish income from another country.
This should be solvable. Change the law so that payment is owed on foreign income, even if that income is not taxable in Australia, and make it so that the Australian government can bring a civil suit for a monetary judgement against those who do not pay.
I believe (but someone should check me on this) that at least in the US, Australia could enforce that judgement. The US would recognize the Australian court's jurisdiction (assuming the defendant is still an Australian citizen), and would recognize Australia's right to tax foreign income. That, combined with whatever treaties I am almost certain the US and Australia have, should be enough for the US to consider the judgement enforceable, and to enforce it for Australia.
My recollection is that due to various treaties between most pairs of first world countries, escaping debt in one by going to another is fairly difficult, unless the debt in the first involved something that is morally frowned upon in the second. E.g., if you owed a pimp for prostitution services in some country where prostitution is legal, countries where prostitution is not legal might not recognize this even if they otherwise recognize debts from the first country.
Another advantage to paying full fees (and criticism of the HECS system) is that the score required to get into most courses is lower for full fee paying students. This is simply because there is less competition for those places but it does essentially mean that stupid rich kids can get into uni ahead of poor kids who are less stupid.
And not only do we have HECS, but we have Youth Allowance which gives you money while you're studying, to live on.
It's similar to the case described in this article, though: if you earn over a certain amount your Youth Allowance is reduced but it's clearly stated in the rules how it works so most students get jobs at small restaurants where they get paid under the table. Works out pretty well.
One of my friends back at university had his satae allowance reduced after his father retired and earned less than before. The reason was that now he fell into a higher category of a lower income bracket instead of the lower one of the higher bracket. Nice logic.
Another one had to fight off fraud charges after she declared a bank account her grandmother had created in her name over a decade ago she didn't know about before. That, and she lost a huge chunk of the allowance, too.
Are you a US citizen? If so, write your Congressman. Write the rep for the University's district, your home town rep, and the senators of both states. Make the letter one page, and attach a narrative with the gory details and figures. Give them details on how to contact the financial aid office, the dean's office, and any student ombudsman.
The idea here is to capture attention (short, punchy letter), provide all the ammunition a staffer needs to make a phone call asking what the hell is going on (the attachments), and the targeting information.
Send 'em hard copy, to both the DC and the local district office. Wait two days, send an email. Wait a day and call, asking to speak with someone in reference to same. You won't get the Congressman, of course, but if you get a competent staffer they'll know how to look into the matter and make people uncomfortable enough to do better. Get someone who's worked in the district a few years and they probably play tennis with someone at the University.
These offices are heavily dedicated to constituent service. If you get their attention and make it easy for them to investigate, some staffer will pick this as a lay-up "good deed for the day."
Congress doesn't have jurisdiction, of course, but any public institution steps to when the office calls. They'll pay attention, and they may very well look harder for some discretion to fix this.
The overall system is, of course, stupid. That won't get any better, it's a set of compromises among reasonable sounding concerns that have amounted to a Kafka-esque impossibility. But there is a lot of discretion in the joints -- if you can make someone notice this particular glitch, it might get fixed.
This is broken, and it shouldn't be this way. There are far too many broken bureaucracies in modern society, both governmental and corporate. And most of these impede those with the fewest resources or capabilities to work around them. Just because we've been trained to think that government or corporate policy is supposed to be complex and broken, doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to improve.
Without a ridiculously good merit-based scholarship from a great school, I never would have been able to attend any of the top-tier schools into which I had been accepted, because my parents' money was counted as my money, even though their money was clearly not mine, and not something that I could choose to spend.
The flip side to this is I know someone who went through the legal steps to have their parents money not be counted as theirs and got huge scholarships. Trick: Their parents still supported him and were worth about 100 million. So he got a nice Mercedes(2 actually, he crashed one) and cheap college.
It's a flawed system, but simply not counting your parents money is an even more flawed system.
IMHO, it's far more of an error that those without privilege/money are denied access to education than those with privilege/money get an undeserved benefit.
This doesn't just affect the individual, it affects all of us who are trying to hire good engineers. The smaller the number of people that are allowed to attempt an engineering degree, the fewer that will earn them. Every single potential engineer that is prevented from entering the field because of education hinders us.
Trying to bring this back to HN a bit more, I think that entrepreneurs and capitalists should realize (and you may already be on the same page with me) that they are in essence farming society; they are leveraging and multiplying the work and efforts of many others in order to enrich their own wealth and the wealth of others. The more fertile the soil, the more the entrepreneur can grow. For technology based capitalists, a more educated society provides far more fertile soil both in terms of workforce and potential customer base.
In Germany, there's the Duale Hochschulreife, where students apply to companies and colleges. The company will then pay for your degree in exchange of your working for them during the breaks and some additional periods fully sanctioned by the University in question. They also pay you a wage for the time and usually offer you a full time job after you've graduated.
The benefit for the companies which do this is that they've essentially trained engineers allready familar with their company culture, technology stack and working procedures, which require no additional time to train. Also it's beneficial for the image of the company.
The benefit for the students is that they graduate debt free and with solid job prospects (since they allready have one).
I'd agree, except that most financial aid is zero sum (in terms of scholarships/grants). If you don't get it, someone else will who also might become an engineer. Someone gets screwed either way if your parents really won't support you. But if they were lying, then you go to college anyway.
Or just marry your roommate. As soon as you're married (or get an honorable military discharge) you don't have to be saddled with your parents' income.
I worked a full time job during my undergrad for the same reason: my parents' income was above the threshold for government support, even though my parents didn't support me. It was frustrating that other people whose parents earned a tiny bit less but did pay for them to live and study, would also get a huge lump of free money from the government each year. But ultimately, not getting free money made me independent and forced me to learn to manage my time and make money from my skills. That lesson is going to pay dividends for a long time to come.
My parents repeatedly said they would support me, then didn't, after not letting me get loans (I had a pretty nice scholarship, but it didn't cover housing in a major city or fees or food).
I couldn't see that being possible with today's college costs.
Across this country, this very month, legions of rubes will be getting low-interest student loans to enroll in psychology, general studies, and undecided major degree programs, paying $40k per year, only to drop out shortly thereafter with a huge financial hangover and little ability to pay for it.
In contrast, an electrical engineering degree will easily pay for itself, particularly if you've managed to bootstrap yourself to a third year.
Why haven't you addressed student loans as a vector for finishing a highly lucrative degree program? Seems like you are (forgive the term) a poster child for student loans.
You say with great conviction that EE is the way to go, but with the world being what is is, who can predict the future these days?
In the early 2000s a degree in chemistry was considered a safe bet, especially with a biochemistry PhD tacked on. Then there was the 2008 recession, the great round of layoffs at the major pharmcos, combined with the offshoring of early discovery. If anyone says they feel cheated I'm not going to disagree. I'm not going to use the word "rube", and neither should you!
At the moment medical school is what the kids at my university are shooting for, that used to be the ticket into a safe career, but one thing is clear: healthcare in this country is in need of reform. I cannot say how it is going to look, but I will not say that taking out five-digit loans for medical school is a good idea.
And who can tell about EE? If they offshored chemistry they will offshore design. It's going to happen, the pharmaceutical industry has provided the blueprint.
Dude, you went through like 5 different unrelated issues there o_o. But to your first point, the original commenter was stating that EE is a safe bet now, and therefore will likely be in 2 years when the OP graduates.
Just wait until he gets Pfizered. At least all the experienced Med. Chemists that Pfizer let go since 2008 had ample time to pay off their student loans, nevermind that when they got their degrees 20 years ago it was actually possible to work one's way through school.
On a long enough time scale, everyone will get "Pfizered." What makes you think this is likely to happen soon? Genuinely curious, as a practicing (sort of) EE.
I'm looking at Albany Molecular. That is a contract shop in Albany, NY. Ten years ago they were still doing contract work there, and they advertising themselves as being in Albany. That was the downside, but the upside was that cost-of-living in Upstate NY is low.
Nowadays the work is done in Hydarabad, Shanghai and Hungary, and what is left stateside is supervisory work. I think we are seeing a trend in EE towards contract shops. The only thing that's yet missing is for the contract work to be done overseas.
In fact, I seem to recall some recent articles about the EE profession showing growing concern about the increasing unemployment rate in the industry. It is still quite low, especially compared to the national average, but perhaps is indicative of a trend?
You can't borrow enough to pay for tuition at many schools using federal loans as an undergraduate student. Stafford loans have a maximum borrowing limit of $12,500 per year, and 4% of that goes to origination fees, leaving $12,000 for tuition, less if you're a freshman or sophomore:
The only way to get private loans is to have a creditworthy cosigner. Otherwise, you need parents to take out Parent PLUS loans to cover the remainder.
I assume the person here was paying for tuition with a combination of school-provided need-based grants and Stafford loans. Now that the need-based aid has been cut because her Expected Family Contribution has gone up due to her paid internship, she can no longer get enough money to pay the full tuition.
There are also dozens of scholarship programs that, when I was in college, I didn't qualify for because I didn't look like the OP. A lot of them are only for upperclassmen, and a lot of them are only for STEM disciplines.
It may be too late to apply and get such things but I didn't read of any effort to track those down. Finding scholarships, even qty 10 of $500 apiece requiring 3 hours' work each, should be easier with this backstory than any other I've ever read.
I couldn't even afford to get INTO university. By 18, I had to pay $1000/month rent or get kicked out. My family had NO money saved to help with college. I wasn't eligible for any scholarships I could find. The city I was in paid minimum wage for EVERYTHING, even skilled work. I worked $8/hour doing web development.
I tried saving up enough to even just move away. 3 years later, and not a penny ahead, I just threw caution to the wind and plunged myself deep into debt to get the hell out of there.
A year later, I've made more than I did in those 3 years put together. I'm still in debt, but I'll comfortably be out in 6-8 months. At this point, university would only be of value to me if I felt like immigrating to the US.
The point is, if your situation sucks, change it. If school doesn't seem viable, skip it. Find a workaround. The point is not acquire a piece of paper, the point is to prove your worth.
Hey - Just wanted to say great job on taking the plunge to get yourself out of that situation. That really takes a lot of courage throwing yourself into an unknown situation like that - I really hope others can learn from your experience if they're in a dire situation as you were.
It's difficult to escape that sort of situation, but it doesn't get easier. It gets harder, and faster-paced. And that's a good thing.
Adversity is a force that not only pushes us back when we feel fear, but also pushes us forward when we feel determination. How much you want a thing will determine which way you move.
Given my experience in a similar situation several years ago, I don't think you have explored all of your options. Your Expected Family Contribution (EFC) and need-based limit may have changed, but there other ways to pay for school. (All of the following assumes you haven't already hit the overall government loan limit; if that's the case, you're at a university you honestly cannot afford.)
For example, the Stafford loan program offers unsubsidized loans (meaning interest accrues while you are in school) to all eligible students regardless of need. The eligibility requirements for these loans amount to being legally allowed to attend school in the US and not being in default on existing student loans.
As an independent student, you should be able to borrow up to $12,500 in unsubsidized loans directly from the government, regardless of your EFC. It will be more expensive than your other loans in the long term, so you should weigh the cost of two years of additional interest against not finishing school.
All of that said...
Something really feels wrong about your financial situation. The automatic-zero Expected Family Contribution limit for an independent student is $24,000. Assuming you were living on student aid from January to May and made $25.85/hour, 40 hours a week from June to December, for a full 30 weeks (unlikely given holidays, etc), you should have made right around $31,000 pre-tax. If that's the case, your EFC should be a _maximum_ of $7,000, but probably closer to half that.
My bet: your FAFSA EFC is incorrect. Find the worksheets and manually work it out for yourself.
I consider myself very lucky. I did my undergrad and never struggled with money. My parent never supported me with a dime since they didn't have much. I didn't have any scholarships. I saved up some money from high school and used that for the first year of college, then started working as an co-op. How did I do it? I went to school in Germany. That's also where I'm from. Back then there was no tuition and I only paid 120 Euros of administration fee per semester. I had it easy. I could study freely, I had everything I needed and the beer at the universities' vending machine was cheap. Life was good. Back then in 2004 I never read any English/US news or community web sites. I didn't know what college was like over there.
After I graduate came to the US and I've been living in a typical college town at the east coast for ~7 years. I have many undergrad and graduate friends most of which are American. I'm _BAFFLED_ at the simple acceptance of this rip-off fucked up higher education system. It's not even a topic ever that our local University President just raised tuition by another 5% this year. And a ~40% raise in the last couple year. In Germany, they started talking about introducing a 500 Euro tuition in 2006(?) and introduced it in 2007. Students where furious, they protested on the streets, they occupied the main buildings. They raised there voices. They started petitions. The press was on our side. They introduced them and students investigated on how the tuition was going to be used (contract only allowed to use it towards better education and not for maintenance/bills) and problems were discovered. Long story short: In 2013/2014 there is only one state left that still has a tuition of 500 Euros. The rest abandoned it all.
I have asked this question many times:
Why do Americans not protest?
Take the French: they kidnapped their CEO and threatened to kill them (~2009). They burned down parts of their factory. They raise their voice. Yet, with a ridiculous policy here in the US, I see nothing ever happen. I heard there was some protest about PRISM in S.F. last week. I frankly missed the coverage about that since it may have been to small. There were bigger protests about PRISM in Germany last week. This is sad and I don't understand it.
Students of America: Stop wining on Internet forum, they do not tend to often get coverage of the media.
You want main stream TV coverage: Go on the streets and protest.
With respect, it seems wrong to suggest kidnapping people and threatening to kill them unless they indirectly finance your education.
There are real expenses associated with running a university. Professors and staff have to be paid; buildings have to be maintained; supplies have to be purchased, etc.
Higher education in Germany is socialized. Socialism is EVIL, it will kill Grandma while she sleeps. Do I really need a sarcasm tag here?
We will all still pay for it, just with higher taxes for everyone all the time, not just students while they are in school. That kind of reform will never happen in the US, because we are afraid of it. We are afraid of the dreaded socialism, even though our primary education is free and socialized, also incredible uneven because it is funded by local property taxes.
Germany is über authoritarian, and the authorities are selected to be fairly intelligent. They tend to solve problems with elaborate, well thought out plans. (Sometimes based on mistaken assumptions, like energy policy.)
America is fairly democratic. We do not have plans, we have slogans that appeal to the dumbest 51% of the population. The problem is emotion-driven electioneering, and mass protests would only make it worse.
This is a travesty, and one I witnessed as a college professor again and again. Why does the US pretend that we don't have enough science and engineering "smarts" among our own students, and seek talent from other countries, when in fact our talent is right here, but unable to afford tuition. Moreover, we hear quite a lot about the lack of women in science and engineering fields.....and here is one who is passionate about engineering yet cannot afford to complete her degree. Something is terribly wrong with this scenario. Businesses: if you really want bright, gifted young women and minorities in the engineering field, put your money where your mouths are and pony up. The rewards will far outweigh your contributions.
This closely mirrors my experience, though my "summer job" straight out of my Freshman year of college was part-time cashiering at a pizza restaurant. From there, I temped as an office worker at a startup, convinced them to hire me full time and let me build databases, then pivoted that into writing Java code.
After a year of work wherein I made about $25k, I talked to the financial aid office and found out that my expected contribution towards tuition, room, and board was likely to go from about $5k/year (barely covered via loans and family support) to $15-20k, which was totally untenable.
My response was to drop out, keep coding, and figure out how to backfill the CS knowledge I needed by working with smarter, more experienced people than myself. 15 years in, it seems to have worked reasonably well, and I'm regularly reminded how much easier my life has been not having tens of thousands of dollars worth of student loan debt hanging around my neck throughout my 20s.
To be clear: I know that the plural of anecdote is not "data", and I don't want to suggest that the dropout -> tech industry path is easy or in any way guaranteed. However, I think that it's a far easier field to get into than many others if you have the aptitude and motivation to build some things on your own and learn as much as you can from the process.
Yeah, I realized it was hyperbolic immediately after posting; hence the edit to say "tens of thousands of dollars".
I also wasn't really trying to generalize; I was attending a fairly expensive liberal arts school (albeit to study math) with 100% need-based financial aid, and tuition alone doesn't cost nearly as much at most state schools.
My parents didn't help me either, but I had absolutely no problem with tuition. And it wasn't because I paid it off after every semester.
Why not just take out loans and go to a state school? I went to a good engineering state school in New York and many of my classmates got excellent jobs after that. The tuition is only $5k per year. Total tuition and other expenses can be easily paid off within a couple of years with an engineering job. The interest rate is only like 5% for people with OK credit.
Regarding credit cards: It definitely does not make sense to use credit cards to pay for tuition, because the APR is very high compared to student loans.
Edit: Regarding the amount you can take out in private loans: Discover lets you take out like 50k per semeseter. This is way more than enough.
Hey, at least you're not $250k in the hole with an incredibly low 7% interest rate, at the age of 26! What do you all think about a Kickstarter for student loans? I'm looking for $300k in investment or to validate my idea by raising $300k through the service.
I'm in the exact same situation. Except in my case, in Canada, and (only) after 1 year of full-time courses.
I also did a paid internship, for $18 an hour at a major software company in Vancouver, B.C. Now the Canadian government has decided that I have more than enough (assuming a cost of living of 0 for a 20 year old that has to support an elderly mother).
So basically, I have an income of 0 (aside from my freelance work), costs running at ~$1600 CAN per month for basic shelter + food for 2 people, AND the Canadian government is constantly on my back for student loan repayment. I did not choose to dropout of college, I was (essentially) forced to by the government.
Best part is, now any employer I talk to asks about the 1 year I spent in college. I'm sure they assume that as a 20 year old, I am either lazy, stupid, or irresponsible. But that couldn't be further from the truth. I've worked 18~22 hour days everyday of my life since I was 16, and I'm tired. Not tired of a (somewhat) difficult life, but tired of the assumptions people make. People in the government, people who have power of employment, people around me who judge a book by its cover.
I'm in a similar situation from paid internships and my own business. My advice: talk to your school's financial aid office and explain your situation. They should be able to help you. At the very least, it's worth TALKING to them.
(Disclaimer: I go to a need-blind school with very good financial aid. I don't know how engineering/state schools will treat this. But it's worth TALKING to them.)
Every time the idea of basic income is discussed I think that universal healthcare, subsidized education, and - possibly - targeted infrastructure spending are much better approach.
The system is set up in a way that OP (and I am sure many others) found herself in this strange valley, where you are damned if you do, damned if you don't.
The reason that economists like basic income is that each recipient is free to decide how to apply that income to best advance their lot in life. Any other breakdown, and you get more overhead of policy and administration because you are determining for a population some some mix of programs. The risk that you fall into some policy gap, just as in the article, is increased at that point; and the government is then paying both the benefit, and for a higher administration cost to qualify people and distribute the benefit.
I have a feeling that there are going to be more and more stories like this. Especially with 60% of Fed student loans non performant, interest rates increasing, and the cost to acquire the piece of paper (and the "college experience") increasing.
But Sallie Mae would have you think otherwise when their split goes through on wall st. I have a feeling someone is going to get rich off of CDS backed by securities on student loans… as for the rest of us, I guess we have to create new paths in life to acquire and apply knowledge for the betterment of our communities that we are apart of because going x times more in debt than the generation before, to acquire knowledge to apply in a world that is increasingly making it obsolete (as far as human labor is concerned in a service dominated economy) seems like an exercise in futility and fiscal suicide.
I keep hearing that the US student loan situation is a 'bubble' that is going to burst soon. Fine, but...what will that look like when it happens? I've read Michael Lewis's books---if you haven't, do!---and consequently I think I understand what happened during the mortgage crisis, and before that, M&A fever. But what would a student loan default crisis look like? Lenders can't exactly foreclose on college degrees. What might take the place of vacant houses in a student loan default crisis?
Seriously, I would welcome any speculative economic analysis here.
What potentially happens is too many people stop playing the game, or the game many schools require.
Harvard and MIT will be fine, but the schools that aren't worth $60K/year, or less for e.g. higher tier state schools other than UC Berkeley, are likely to see enrollment crashing. That's starting to happen with law schools.
Since I mentioned Sallie Mae, I'll set up the situation here (and ignoring the big players who are moving out of private student loans [0]):
-Sallie Mae (SM) completes its corporate split (Fed loans in one company, Private in the other) [1]
-People buy shares of SM, and get paid dividends every quarter (or w/e their terms are).
-As of today, 40% of Federal loans payments are being made, with $118+ billion Fed loans in their portfolio of $1+ Trillion outstanding Fed loans (so SM is probably the most statistically correlated to the total compared to others individual companies) [1][2]
-As interest rates go up on loans [3], and cost of tuition goes up [4], less people will afford to make payments (regardless of if they are in school, dropped out, or un/employed)
-As less people can afford to make payments, the current 40% making payments will go down (as it has untill this point under the current circumstances).
-Less people making payments means less money to go around to pay dividends
-lower dividends on shares means people try to sell shares.
-In attempts to raise capital to pay dividends (and stabilize share value), SM will accept cash/credit in exchange of secured student loans (delaying the issue of not being able to pay dividends due to market forces in response to status quo policies)
-If/When x amount of the secured loans become non performing, SM has to pay in full for the amount disclosed in the CDS deal.
Point 1: Likely what you want to learn you can
learn well without going back to school. Indeed, at
a high end research university, it is in effect or
explicitly assumed that you can teach yourself.
If you are in software, then likely you are heavily
self-taught. Well, being self-taught in nearly all
parts of academic engineering is easier than in
practical software if only because in nearly all of
academic engineering the learning materials are
much, much better written.
To do self-study in academic engineering, it is
crucial to get some of the best materials, usually,
still, textbooks. For this, investigate and pick
carefully. Indeed, you should have little trouble
finding what the favorite textbooks are for what you
want to learn -- likely can get enough just by going
to the Web sites of the most relevant universities,
departments, courses, and professors. For the
engineering schools, don't be reluctant to go right
to the top -- MIT, Cornell, CMU, Georgia Tech,
Stanford.
If you need more, then maybe send a nice e-mail to
some professors, in a few words explain your
situation, maybe include a list of the candidate
books you have found, and ask for suggestions, say,
the textbooks he's been using, on the list or off.
Point 2. If you want an 'expensive' Bachelor's
degree, say, for $50,000 a year at an Ivy League
university, instead shoot for a Masters or better
yet a Ph.D. from such a school. Why? In important
ways, the graduate degree is faster, easier, and
cheaper than the Bachelor's. In my experience, at
the best schools, Ph.D. students rarely pay tuition
anyway. And from the famous Ivy League schools,
it's generally easier to get accepted for a Ph.D.
than for a Bachelors.
Point 3: If you want a Bachelor's degree or need
one (say, to get accepted for a Master's or Ph.D.),
then one option is just go to about the cheapest
school you can, maybe starting with just a two year
community college and then transferring to a four
year college to finish your Bachelor's. "Don't pay
a lot for this muffler" -- uh, Bachelor's degree.
Everyone in higher education understands that there
are good students with little money or family
background in academics and respect such students.
If you learned well, then as you finish your
Bachelor's you can get some high GRE scores which
will look great applying to a Ph.D. program and make
up for starting at a community college.
Point 4. Even following Point 3, to save money and
get better results, still emphasize self-study.
That is, before taking the course, study the course
on your own first. Then take the course, lead the
class, ace the course, amaze the professor, and get
glowing recommendations, say, to a good four year
college for your last two years, or from a four year
college to a Ph.D. program, as the best student he
ever had, maybe get a scholarship. Besides, this
way might get to take extra courses at once, save
tuition money, time on campus, and expenses
commuting to campus and look still smarter, all
because you just studied the material before you
took the course.
Of course, this self-study stuff can work great for
the more theoretical and mathematical parts of
engineering but work less well where you might need
time in an expensive lab. So, emphasize the
theoretical and mathematical parts and for the rest
do what you can without a lab. Then in school, when
you take the lab course, you still have a head
start.
E.g., on self-study, I got a Ph.D. in essentially
applied math, but I never really took freshman
calculus. Instead, in my freshman year the poor
school I was at insisted I take some 'college
algebra' which was beneath what I'd covered in four
years of math at a relatively good public high
school. So, not to fall behind, I got a decent
calculus book and dug in. For my sophomore year, I
went to a much better college and started on their
sophomore calculus (right, never got course credit
for freshman calculus), was likely the best student
in the class, was a math major, wrote an honors
paper on group representations, and got 800 on the
Math knowledge GRE.
So, I covered freshman calculus well just on my own
from just a calculus book. You can too. Indeed, if
you take a calculus course, mostly you learn from
the book anyway.
Just study the material from the book before the
course instead of mostly from the book (which
usually you have to do anyway) during the course.
If you get hung up, then ask for some help, on-line,
from some videos (if they help -- not all of them
are good), knock on the door of a prof and ask a
question, etc. Tell him you are studying on your
own and want to be clear on, say,
f'(x) = lim (f(x + h) - f(x))/h
h --> 0
or some such. Mostly a prof's office hours are not
very busy, and a prof might answer one good question
for you even if you are not in such a class or even
in his school. If he refuses, then to heck with
him!
There are some poor textbooks out there, and some of
the better books will still have a poor chapter or
two. A bad book or chapter can be a chuckhole in
the road but only if you let it. If some material
seems not well written, like drilling through
bedrock, or needing prerequisites you don't have,
then get 1-3 alternate sources, maybe just by
photocopying some chapters from some books in a
library or buying some books as supplements. E.g.,
there is a book on linear algebra by E. Nearing, and
it quite good except it has a chapter in an appendix
on linear programming that is just awful. Nearing
understood a lot of linear algebra but not linear
programming!
So, get copies of, say, the three best books. Learn
mostly from the best book and use the other two for
alternate explanations (so that you won't get stuck
and won't misunderstand).
Now, textbooks are darned expensive, the latest
editions, in hardcover, commonly over $100 a copy.
Three such books could set you back $300 -- bummer.
So, instead, in nearly all undergraduate courses in
engineering, get used texts, in good condition, 5-10
years old. Such books will still be plenty good and
will save you a bundle of money.
E.g., I took sophomore calculus from the text by
Johnson and Kiokemeister. At the time, it was also
used at Harvard. It's a beautifully written, highly
polished book. Tough to write a better calculus
book.
Johnson & Kiokemeister's Calculus with Analytic
Geometry [Hardcover]
6 used from $9.25
So, can get it for $10. Don't pay a lot for a great
textbook.
Actually I got my copy 'used' from a student who had
tried the course the previous year and learned that
he should major in English or some such instead!
More generally, due to such circumstances, a lot of
used technical books are actually in quite good
condition.
You don't have to work all the exercises, but you
should work enough exercises so that you are sure
you can work all or nearly all of them. A good
textbook will have in the back answers to half or
more of the exercises; so check your work with the
answers. Occasionally an answer is wrong. If you
suspect such, then maybe e-mail the author! Or ask
a local prof to check your solution and impress him
that you beat the textbook!
Occasionally let a difficult exercise go unsolved or
ask for help; in some books, 1-2% of the exercises
are in there poorly written, out of place (need
material not yet covered in the book or not in the
book), or are to see if a student can recreate some
brilliantly clever argument mostly unrelated to the
book. Don't let yourself get hung up on 1-2% of the
exercises afraid you missed something -- give such
an exercise a good shot, then just ask for help or
drop it.
Continue this theme of self study, especially if you
want to go for a Ph.D. E.g., at one time the Web
site of the Princeton math department just flatly
stated that the graduate courses were introductions
to research by world experts; no courses were given
for preparation for the qualifying exams; and for
the qualifying exams students were expected to
prepare on their own. Indeed, in that case, why
bother to be on campus in expensive Princeton, NJ?
So, broadly, you can get a Bachelor's paying little
or no tuition.
Then for a Ph.D., or even some Master's degrees, the
big trump card is having published some research in
a good, peer-reviewed, academic journal of original
research.
For how to do the research, that would need another
post!
In the whole thing, nearly all the work was
self-study from used textbooks, and the tuition you
paid was tiny. You cut down on time and cost
commuting to campus, eating campus food, etc. You
aced nearly all your courses, and you avoided a huge
list of potential 'political' and other problems.
Learning is not a spectator sport but an individual
thing with hard work, done alone in a quiet room.
You can blow a lot of time and money going to class
when what you really need is just hard work, alone,
in a quiet room, which, indeed, the courses won't
much replace anyway.
Not everyone learns the same way. But, since you
learned the material before you took the course, the
profs never get to see how you learned; you never
fell behind in a course; you aced courses, and you
never got criticized for your learning style.
Net, lack of money is no great reason not to get a
degree, even a Ph.D., in engineering. Indeed, the
main challenge is just the learning and, then,
research; if you can do that, mostly on your own,
then money for your degree is not a biggie.
You spent a significant chunk of your post suggesting self study. For something like math, this is really really really unrealistic. Most pure math textbooks don't have simple problems you can just check in the back. They're multistep proofs that can be done in a number of different ways. Oh, and you encounter plenty of material where you can easily trick yourself into thinking that you really understand it when you actually don't. Additionally, there is a standard of rigor that you don't experience at bad schools (or with no schooling). You could be writing complete nonsense solutions and not even know it.
Also: how are you going to self-study when you don't live at home? Studying is a full time job.
I self-studied some amount of pure mathematics, having only an undergraduate CS degree and while having a 40 hour a week day job, and while it's definitely harder and slower than learning it at a university, it's not unrealistic. If you look hard enough, there are books with proof-based exercises with answers in the back (example proofs) that you can use to check your understanding (Spivak's Calculus, books from Springer UTM series). For many other books, you can find course pages online with homeworks+solutions, e.g.
has homeworks for Rudins "Principles of Mathematical Analysis", and Halmos "Finite-Dimensional Vector Spaces". Finally most problem books (again Springer has a nice selection) have very detailed solutions. Yes, there are proofs that can be done in a number of different ways, but in my experience diverging too far is not very common and in most cases some core ingredients have to make it in in the end anyway. It's impossible to go through a lot of exercises "writing complete nonsense solutions" like that, when you are precisely checking your solutions against the given ones. For many types of exercises there are also simple ways of validating your solution, for example, in probability theory you can often do a computer simulation. In the end that's what anyway has to be done in real world and in research work.
It's unrealistic because I really think you need the social aspect of it: collaboration and criticism. I didn't say you can't learn something on your own sometimes.
Also lots of people have convinced themselves of lots of silly things. You can probably find dozens of papers from people with bachelors in math (or no degree) claiming they have solved P=NP. A lot of these turn out to be completely bogus, but the authors nonetheless thought they were serious attempts.
What are you exactly claiming then, what would it mean that mathematics self-study is "unrealistic"? There is certainly a danger in not seeking external validation of your work (or denying it), and being at a university is very nice for getting that. But with some motivation I think you can get the knowledge equivalent of an undergraduate degree in mathematics by self-studying in maybe twice the time it would take at an university (I am speaking from personal experience and assuming full time job and having some life, and that you don't have kids yet). You can get feedback on the Internet as well nowadays, or seek university-level tutoring. And there is no shortage of people with degrees doing faulty P=NP proofs either.
Again, I agree doing it at the university is more effective way of doing it, and if you have the possibility to do it, good for you! But most of us can afford to dedicate at most 5 years to studying full time, and than other responsibilities kick in and you can't do it anymore. The majority of your life all the new knowledge you get will come from self-study. So you better learn to do it.
Having an undergrad CS degree is enough to self-study math, I believe. But having no formal education in the sciences/maths is not (unless you are a genius).
For me, merely pushing myself through a theoretical CS curriculum made me see (and write) hundreds of proofs, hear them explained by professors, and see non-trivial exercises solved during recitations. I don't think you can get the same kind of experience by just reading a textbook, even if it does offer full solutions to problems.
Maybe when there will be full video lectures for both lectures and recitations for the basic math (or theoretical CS) curriculum you could self-study by watching those and solving problem sets. Right now, the math courses offered by Coursera don't seem to match college level, and their platform doesn't really work for proof-based courses like Analysis, Linear Algebra (not the applied kind), etc...
I learnt only a bit of discrete math in my CS undergraduate degree, I had calculus and linear algebra but barely passed it by memorizing how to solve concrete problems and by having merciful professors - I was already working full time and had 4 or 5 courses going on, I just didn't manage to find enough time to study properly. If you have bigger gaps in your math knowledge and can't go to an university you just have to start at a lower level, there is a wide selection of "intro to higher mathematics" books meant for people like that, and if that level is still too high you might need to review high school math, e.g. Serge Lang has a good "Basic Mathematics" review book, or you can use Khan Academy videos etc. I myself had to review a lot of high school math when I was starting.
MIT OCW has excellent courses for discrete math, calculus and linear algebra and in some cases videos from the recitations are included.
I also stressed a few times already I don't think it is "the same kind of experience". But as long as you make an effort you will make progress and not everyone can manage to fit a university degree in their schedule.
You have a good point, but my post
was already at the limit of 10,000
characters. Of course the solution to
your point is partly a theorem proving
course in high school plane geometry
and then, finally, a theorem proving course as, say,
a college junior in abstract algebra.
For such a course, I did say that the
last two years should be at a four
year institution; at such a school,
a good enough course should be available
even if the first two years were in
a community college where the calculus
teaching was poor. Again your point
is correct: To learn how to do proofs
well enough to be self-sufficient,
need at least one theorem proving
course where can get homework and tests
graded by a competent mathematician.
Don't worry: I've tried to show that
P = NP and know that while I've had some
candidate ideas I don't have a good
idea or a proof. And, I've nearly never
written a bad proof; once catch on to
how proofs are done, they are surprisingly
easy to check for correctness.
Studying is not a full time job --
I was heavily self taught in math
and totally self taught in computing
and nearly never studied full time.
E.g., I read Nearing on linear algebra,
Halmos 'Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces',
Fleming 'Functions of Several Variables',
yes, with the exterior algebra,
and much more while working full time
in mostly DoD work around DC. I did
the research for my Ph.D. dissertation
in stochastic optimal control independently
in my first summer in graduate school.
Seconded. Math is one of the most easily self teachable subjects. The field of study is objects of mind (unless you're a platonist.) Literally no materials required except pen/paper, a brain and maybe a straightedge and compass. The point of math is not to do endless worked exercises. It's to understand mathematical objects and prove interesting things about them. You can generate unlimited problems for yourself by investigating some mathematical object at random.
Basically nothing you said actually made a case against anything I said, or for the thesis that it is easy to self teach. Just stating this for the record.
Well. There are no barriers to entry. If you have any inkling of logical ability, you should be able to tell when a proof is right. All it requires is critical thinking. Presumably humans come with that out of the box.
Well, what was his argument? Based on his second reply, he seems to think that because it only depends on your ability to reason that it should be easy. But doesn't that trivialize the matter? As long as we have mathematical models, as we do in physics and in chemistry, then it should be just as easy to learn physics and chemistry.* So then what does he consider hard to learn? Are the social sciences hard to learn? The 'it is of the mind' is a non-argument to me. And I don't think he addressed anything I said.
Anyway, this is almost irrelevant to what I was saying. Even if you assume every person can reason well, I'm saying you could still be in error unless you seek validation and guidance. It's really easy to think you've given a solid argument for something, but actually be wrong. It happens to everyone.
*By the way, there is a definite trend in physics for math, instead of experimentation, to be leading the way towards discovery.
You're right, the above posters generalize way too much. They are either CS or Maths students and as such are already well-prepared for self-study! If you study Maths you already know what all the symbols like epsilon, e etc. mean, you can just gloss over a mathematical text and get the gist of it. Same goes for many (but not all!!!) CS-students, some unis lean a lot on algebra, some don't do much maths after the first two courses.
As such, I think it's ridiculous to go up to anyone and tell him/her to just "study by yourself", I could give a maths book to a biologist and that person would understand absolutely nothing without guidance.
I was addressing the money issue
and tacitly assuming that they
could do the work. For just a
Bachelor's and then just a Master's
in engineering, they have a good
chance of being able to judge
correctly if they can do the work.
There is plenty of free access to materials and papers.
It's incredibly cheap and fast to communicate with pretty much anyone in the world.
All that is really required is motivation, discipline, and curiosity.
When there wasn't cheap access to global communication networks and near-zero cost to duplicating data then it made sense to go to university because that was where everyone who you would be interested in talking to would be. That's where the libraries and books were. I don't think that is the only option anymore. And that's a good thing.
You can learn anything you want on your own and still have all of the benefits of a college (access to knowledgeable people, peer review, etc).
I was on a forum where there was a guy who had self-studied maths and physics and was an 'ideas man'. The problem was that he just didn't have the standardised nomenclature to get his ideas across - and also meant that he couldn't understand the reasons why other mathematicians debunked him.
One outstanding example was his method for a 'free energy' spacecraft movement system, that hinged on an arm throwing -foo- into a receiver. The argument was that there is a difference between throwing something and merely releasing it at speed, and he didn't have the understanding of physics to realise there is no difference.
Another one of his ideas was a system for finding prime numbers, which he couldn't articulate well enough for people to figure out whether it was a valuable predictor or merely a sieve.
He was a regular at the forum and respected, and I've never seen so many people patiently explaining physics and maths at such clear lengths before... and he just couldn't grok it, because he didn't have the standard language to get his ideas across.
This anecdata doesn't contradict the GP though, who is talking about doing self-study in parallel with formal study.
Getting into Harvard, Princeton, or
Yale as an undergraduate is just
super tough. A sufficient condition is to give the university, say,
$10 million and be sometimes awake.
Having a parent
who went can help but not necessarily
enough.
Being a straight A student
with 800s on the SATs is not sufficient.
I never got anywhere trying to get into
Princeton as an undergraduate,
with average SAT scores over 700,
but did
get accepted in the math (or statistics)
department
as a graduate student. I'd read
lots of John Tukey's work --
uniformity in topology
(in the back of Kelley's 'General Topology'),
Tukey's lemma in axiomatic set theory,
stepwise regression,
power spectral estimation (Blackman and Tukey),
the FFT (Cooley and Tukey),
and 'Exploratory Data Analysis',
had been working in applied math
and computing, wrote G. Watson,
and got accepted. I also got
accepted in the Division of Applied Math at
Brown and in Operations Research at
Cornell.
I went to Hopkins.
Anecdotal evidence to be sure, but I went to an Ivy League School (Penn) on just straight-As and 700s (!) on the SATs. I was not a "legacy" student of any kind. I knew many such people there, and only about 10% of my colleagues admitted to being a legacy -- maybe it was just my social circle? Or that I didn't major at Wharton, which is stereotypically legacy?
Your point about graduate school is spot on, though. The game completely changes (though I think it's still mostly a game). I especially love the "don't buy this muffler..." quote!
Maybe you were just a more distinguished candidate during graduate admissions? Also, if you're international, PhD admissions are a lot less biased against internationals compared to undergrad admissions (most top universities have 8-10% internationals for undergrads vs. ~50% for PhDs)
Getting into an Ivy as an undergraduate is very tough if you aren't a potential legacy admit, that is, a child of an alum. Once all those slots are filled, there aren't all that many left over.
In many cases an Ivy League Bachelors is basically free as well.
Between tuition waivers for lower income students, and parents paying for higher income students, an Ivy League Bachelors is effectively free to most of the time.
The "free" Bachelors is still mostly the privilege of American students (with a few truly exception international students sprinkled in).
For PhD, As sidww2 pointed out, and what I have experienced as well, the admission pool becomes much more international; and now you are competing with the world. There is a phrase about China saying that underlines the scale well: "in China when you are one in a million -- there are 1,300 other people just like you".
Moreover, overall the number of spots in graduate schools is by far smaller than for undergrad; making competition even tougher.
About point 2 and point 3: the quality of the undergraduate education is considered in applicants to top schools. Like I said before, there is definitely a standard of rigor that you don't experience at every school. As soon as you decide to optimize for financial cost (picking the cheapest school, doing community college), you've already placed on a burden on yourself.
pretty quick to dismiss community college. I took lower division classes at one, my math classes were taught by PhDs or people with three decades of math and statistics experience. The rigor was pretty good, I transferred to a very good school from the community college and was well prepared.
1. The point was "there is a standard of rigor that you don't experience at every school". I could have used anything as an example. It doesn't matter that I picked community college. If you agree with that statement, then do you disagree with the conclusion: that once you go down that path, you the student, have a burden to explain to everyone how the quality of education compares with the best?
Technically, yeah, I made a generalization: cheaper schooling means shittier quality education (not bad, just worse). Of course, I haven't stepped into every community college classroom. But this is the psychology of the people looking at your application.
Technically technically, what actually matters is all the things that go along with going to a cheaper school, not really the fact that it's cheap.
2. "The rigor was pretty good" - does that mean you kept taking math classes (real analysis, etc)? If not, then how can you make that claim?
The OP was asking for an engineering
degree; there the math is powerful
support but only support.
Sure, the first two years at Harvard
can be something special, especially
if the student uses AP or tests out
of the standard first two years of
ugrad school. E.g., Harvard's Math
55 taught to freshmen at least at
one time used Halmos, FDVS, Rudin's
'Principles', and Spivak's 'Manifolds'.
That's usually junior or senior level
stuff.
I know one guy who went to Harvard and
as a sophomore took a reading course
from A. Gleason. So, if in the next
two years he knocked off one of Hilbert's
problems, like Gleason did, then he
could also become a Harvard 'Fellow'
and skip a Ph.D.! But, again, we're
talking engineering, not being so
advanced as a ugrad that really should
end up with a Ph.D. in math instead of a
Bachelor's.
What's so wrong about just taking the first
two years of college as just the
usual first two years? A CC can
provide that. A CC can use a
good calculus book; when I took
calculus, I used the same book
Harvard used; that is, Harvard
was willing to teach a calculus
course, just calculus from just
a common book, to I don't know
who took it. Given the book
and anything like a competent CC teacher,
the Harvard course doesn't have much
room to be better than a CC course,
especially if the student followed
my recommendations on self study before
the course.
I know; I know; maybe the freshman
English lit course at Harvard is taught
by a Nobel prize winner in literature
and can provide some astoundingly profound
insights into Henry James and, thus,
change the lives of the students. I'm
not impressed.
You seem eager to "pay a lot" for the first
two years of college.
I'm not sure about "cheaper schooling, lower quality". In engineering and computer science there are state schools that compete, IMO, pretty handily with "the best". you might snigger and scoff, but hiring managers at good companies don't.
also, if you start your degree at a CC and transfer to a 4 year to finish, what does it says on your diploma? exactly what it would say if you went there for four years. I wouldn't recommend keeping secrets about your life, but if no one asks...
I did keep taking math classes! I have a math minor.
yeah, so, I was rushing. I edited the previous post: what matters is all the things that go along with cheaper schooling, not that fact that it's cheap.
Sounds that it is a lot about credentials. Sadly enough it is. My experience with my education in industrial engineering at "university of applied sciences" in germany (whatever that would be in the US...) was rather good even when compared to the big names around here as far as knowldge is concerned. Yet, the fact remained that it wasn't a big name.
A graduate school will be eager to
forgive the first two years in
a community college given what
else I assumed: A four year
college for the last two years,
glowing recommendations from professors,
and excellent GRE scores.
That a guy started at a community
college and ended up with excellent
GRE scores is an impressive 'trajectory',
and mostly good graduate schools will
be sufficiently impressed. The graduate
schools are hungry for highly motivated,
good students and will want to grab
what I described.
I reread this branch and thought it sounded awful. What I meant to say is that if you optimize for low cost, you're limiting your choices to schools that lack the reputation. I don't know very many schools that have both (maybe some state schools). And yeah, this results in having a burden to defend yourself.
In the job market, reputation of your undergrad generally doesn't much doesn't matter after the first 5 years. Multiple studies show that students from different schooling backgrounds reach employment parity in most every situation.
Anecdotally, in my own case, I hit employment parity with my Ivy League/Top-10 school peers at 6 years, and have long since surpassed most of them in the job market and standard of living (due to an unbelievably smaller debt load).
The only people I know from my starting peer group who I could comfortably say have a higher standard of living than I do also went to regular 'ol state schools but just worked harder/smarter than I did.
I get fairly regular recruitment pitches from the Google's, Amazon's and Facebook's, and have worked for some of the biggest and best companies in their industries. (I've noticed an uptick in Google courtships over the last couple years as they finally brought their data crunching prowress to analyze hiring success and found that their traditional hiring pools did not necessarily provide the best employees)
All that being said, if I were so inclined, there are positions (high end consulting, finance, high-level politics) that I'm less likely to ever end up in due to fierce protectionism by "old guard". But I'm finding those hard kernels of school fashionistas are rapidly disappearing now as well.
Nice discussion, at least for me. So don't worry. Because you're right, having a big name like MIT on your CV opens doors that otherwise keep closed. That doesn't necessarily mean the education is really better, but the fact remains.
On the other hand, if you don't have the money there are not a lot of opportunities left. And I for my part prefer some who showed that kind of ambition over everyone else who hand it "the easy way" (not meaning an MIT degree is easy at all, just saying there are roads with more rocks than others).
graycat, would you mind putting an email in your "about" section of your profile so I can contact you? I have some questions about trouble I'm running into in regards to some of the examples you presented.
You first, and I'll read your "about"
and write you. For now I'm trying to
remain anonymous on HN. I may
not be able to help you much in
academics since I quit being a
college prof long ago and am
now a solo founder of an information
technology startup.
International students face a worse situation. Students on F1 visa are not even allowed to intern for 2 semesters in most universities. To make the situation worse, the tuition is almost thrice the normal amount.
Shitty deal for students from countries whose currency's value is less than USD.
I was in a similar situation in Canada (but of course, total cost for a semester in engineering school + housing + food amounted to about $8k - $9k). With an internship that landed me about $22/hr post-tax, 40% of the total I made was put towards paying for the next semester. That automatically kicked me out of the low-income family grant which would've given me $8k a year.
I remember some of my friends saying they received more in grants and bursaries than what I made in that 4 month period alone (with no effort, to boot!), and that slightly discouraged me a bit, but one needs to remember this is an investment that will pay off in the next few years.
That being said, I was enrolled in a software engineering program, but most of my friends have found work in EE as well.
It was my experience that every dollar I made came out of any potential financial assistance package I could get. So making $15k in an entire year, they expected that I could apply all $15k toward the school, which wouldn't have covered tuition. There was zero incentive to work as far as paying for school went, unless I could make substantially more than required for school.
I ended up just paying for school out of savings (I had worked 4 years before my junior year). Another thing about savings is that they expected I could spend 100% of my savings immediately. They don't even pro rate savings across the multiple years required for a degree. Financial aid is for them, not for the student.
Sounds like you're smart and have skills in demand. Try to get a job at a bay area company; living like a student should allow you to save enough money to go back to college within 18-24 months (if you even want to go back by then).
Another stupid thing is you're allowed to write off your education expenses from your taxable income, but only in the same year that you made the expenses. The tax deductions can't get carried over into future years.
This effectively means almost everyone who gets loans for their education pays full taxes on the money they used on that education. But if you have well-to-do parents pay for your education, they get to write the expenses off and pay much less in taxes during your college years.
It's a situation where wealthier people get a significant discount just for being wealthy, and there's really no social benefit to having it be this way.
There should be a way for companies to invest in promising interns, paying some of their tuition costs in exchange for a certain number of years employment with the company afterwards.
While this wouldn't work for many fields, it would certainly help in cases like this (and tech in general). It would seem that with as much as companies pay for head-hunters and recruiters (and how much they whine about the lack of quality candidates), it would be a no-brainier.
I'm not quite seeing that. Kobe signs a contract agreeing to play for the Lakers. Musicians sign deals to work for record companies, often for "advance" money up front and no guarantee of future payments.
Its just a contract. Mutually agreed upon. I'm sure it can be structured so that the student/employee can exit the contract with a reasonable repayment plan.
Are current student loans, non-dischargeable through bankruptcy really that much better?
This is actually one of the tuition options that the US armed forces offers students: we pay for your schooling, and you serve in the military for an equal number of years. It's also quite common for your company to pay for business school for a promising employee as well.
In ROTC programs, you also get military training while in school. They just don't pay for your tuition, it's an entire program, done with other recruits.
Referring to my post above, excluding the obligation to work additional years, a similar system is in place in Germany. Of course American tuition fees seem to make it infeasible.
I can empathize. My only constructive comment would be to never waste time complaining or exuding frustration. I understand your situation is tough, but everyone who does anything worth doing will undergo hardship. Find a way to make it work -- if it is impossible or not worth it, choose another route and go on. Your route should never be one of complaint. I don't mean to sound preachy, this advice comes from a sincere place.
I'm slightly confused about the logistics of this because I also attended Carnegie Mellon and received around $20k in financial aid per calendar year (grants and Stafford loans combined), and my parents made over $100k.
If this isn't too intrusive - how much were you making when you received $16k in financial aid vs. $104? Are you only including grants in this amount, or does this also include low-interest student loans?
I was actually at Pitt not CMU. I was not working when I received $16k, although I did do a work study position that year. My income to get $16k in financial aid because I had an income of zero. I had one grant in the 2011-12 year but for around $200.
I paid my way through the latter grades of college thanks to a somewhat devious manager at my first summer internship. That manager transitioned me to a part-time employee at the end of the internship period after the school year started. In the latter two years of college I was a full time employee while going to school. Now, I took five years to graduate a four year degree, but since I was cashflow positive (yay low cost cal-state tuition) and employed in a topical field, the extended time really didn't matter. Now the manager was somewhat devious because I don't think the internships were necessarily supposed to work that way for all interns, but really it worked out well for both me and the company in the long term.
It would be worth probing the internship company in this case to see if some similar arrangement could be made. (if the budget for tuition vs part/full time pay works out, I did this in the 90's, no idea how it would work now).
At Cal state in the 90's I was paying ~$4000 a quarter, now [1] it seems to be $6000-7000. It's not ideal, but not an order of magnitude either.
Today, the gap is undeniably tighter between college expenses vs living wages at available jobs. If you're sending yourself through college, working or with a loan or some mix, it seems like a career ROI calc and a budget/cashflow calc for during college is in order. You also might have some hard choices in deciding not to pay a premium for prestige, and look for a solid education at a discount at a less prestigious, but still perfectly functional college.
I had a similar experience. After an 8 month internship making ~$30/hr full time I ended up roughly about where I would have been financially had I not done the internship and just stayed in school. I was really upset when I went back to school, but now that I've graduated I look back on it and am just thankful that I was able to spend those 8 months living somewhere new doing something fun. (I would probably feel differently had I been unable to go back to school after the 8 months).
That being said, I think it really is horrifying that our education system rewards those students who stay behind and attend summer school more than those who secure good internships. I've never met a talented developer or engineer who didn't have at least 2 summer internships in undergrad. I have, however, met a ton of shitty engineers who took plenty of summer classes.
I entered Engineering school at a state University in 1974 and graduated in 1978 with a BSEE and NO loans. I was able to do so by working and going to school, tuition was $216 per semester, which even then was very affordable. It is a crime that today, this would be impossible. It is one of the greatest injustices today.
I waited until I was 24 to fill out a FAFSA. Once you are 24 you don't need to supply your parents info. I worked at a movie theater until I got a full ride from financial aid. I got to party and get get that out of my system before I started school.
And really, I am not sure how you couldn't get that any taxable income would cut into what you get. I was a drunk stoner and knew it. During the summers I got a real job and knew to never make over $9,500 in taxable income or it would eat into my aid. I quit jobs before school started so I wouldn't hit that number.
Yeah, the financial aid system is pretty bad. A single woman I know who lives alone got denied financial aid because her gross annual income was 31k instead of the limit of 29k that financial aid requires. If you do the math and include all average expenses for any single person, you'll see that there's no way to pay for tuition and/or housing without a student loan in a situation as this. Is financial aid only supposed to be for people who either have no job at all, are completely poor, or are doing fraud?
I feel terrible for Ingrid, but I think the end of her article requires a caveat. The financial aid system is a game, and learning the rules can save a lot of money.
Lets assume that your taxable income was 27k.(36 weeks x 40 hours a week x $26 an hour)
You will be in the 15% tax bracket, so the total tax liability on your income would be approximately(i'm assuming only federal income tax) 23k (27000*.85). This is the number that is used on the fasfa. You had mentioned that you suffered from some health issues and incurred medical expenses. Those are deductible, and should reduce your tax bill, as well as the amount of money that colleges should expect for you to spend on education.
Furthermore college 529 plans are something to look at when trying to fund college education. Contributions to these plans are tax free, so it will lessen your tax bill, especially if you don't work while you are in school. Also the 529's in your name are expected to go towards your education at the same rate as your parents income[1] this will help soften the blow of losing the financial aid.
Finally, don't shy away from student loans, especially subsidized federal loans. At around 4%, it is hard to find cheaper money, and wih subsidized loans, the interest on these loans are tax deductible.
At the end of the day, the moral of your story shouldn't be "Don't take paid internships they'll screw you in the end" and instead it should be "when you start get paid a significant salary hire a tax professional to make sure I hold on to as much of my moolah as possible."
You can put up to 5k in a Traditional IRA. Your deposits will be tax deductible, and withdraws for education forgo penalties of withdrawing money before your 59 and 1/2. You will also pay for tax on it at the level of income for the year you take the disbursements, so if you don't work your senior year or make less money it could work out to your favor. The downside of this strategy is that any money you put into the IRA that year will be counted as income. So no gaming the system on this one.
"Beginning Jan. 1, 2013, you can claim deductions for medical expenses not covered by your health insurance that exceed 10 percent of your adjusted gross income."
Previously it was 7.5%, but it's nothing if you can't file a Schedule A to itemize, and my very rough understanding is that few who aren't paying down a mortgage can do so.
I may be reading this wrong, but from what I understand anyone can file a Schedule A (which allows you to itemize your deductions), but in doing so you give up the standard deductions for your tax bracket, which for a single filer is 5350. So at 7.5% of her adjusted gross of ~25k which is $1875. So if her medical expenses are less than 5350 it would most likely make the most sense for her to take the standard deduction. Otherwise according to this info she should be able to write off the full amount.
I could be entirely wrong about this. I am not a tax professional, but I do think that a little bit of financial planning could go a long way in these types of situatons.
Ah, "can" was too strong, "saves money over taking the standard deduction" is what I meant.
I noticed something about a 2% haircut when skimming Wikipedia's entry on this, don't know if it would apply. Properly filling out a Schedule A would also cost, either in paying a preparer or opportunity cost in learning how to do it.
Agreed. These write offs were more of an after thought. It looks like she could also write off her educational costs as long as they are to "advance her career", which would effectively bring her gross taxable income pretty darn low and keep the financial aid coming.
That is, of course, if she is footing the bill like she says and her parents aren't helping her out.
I don't get it. Why can't you get loans? You don't pay them back while you are in school, and afterwards the minimum cost per month is pretty low. I had full, $16k per term FAFSA support for 12 terms, and then needed one more to finish some things up (poor planning). Federal student loans saw me through.
Although, yes, it's immensely frustrating that they take whatever money they can. I spent all the money I saved up from high school right before college so they couldn't take it away.
I did get offered the option to only take out a $104 subsidized Stafford loan for the school year. Unfortunately, I cannot take out an alternative loan. I am a US citizen and of the people that have offered to cosign a loan for me they were rejected. So alternative loans are not an option.
My school requires the College Board CSS PROFILE, and for one thing, my parents would have never filled it out. I also needed twice that if we assume last academic year's costs; perhaps when the financial aid people I spoke to said I was SOL they meant they couldn't come close to what was required, although by policy the school's financial aid is 100% means tested. I don't remember there even being any pure merit scholarships.
At my current pay it'll take close to 10 years to pay off my college debt. The only hope I have to shorten that period is to produce more value (I'm trying my best), or get lucky with a startup (I'm in a good market). I know I took the long investment, and I'm fine with that. I'm confident in my skills and my drive, but I couldn't imagine being in a different market. My concern lies in the arts and humanities. They are very important, but will suffer immensely.
"Despite having federal loans and a work study job, I had to borrow money from my friends and max out my credit cards just to make ends meet."
When I was in school, that was a red flag. Without knowing the details of Ingrid's education costs and spending habits, it's just as easy to conclude that Ingrid lived beyond her means.
Thus, before blaming the system, I'd want to know what Ingrid's numbers were. She did intern for Intel, which pays very well and provides lots of assistance.
Yeah, the numbers don't really make sense. My parents made over $100k per year and I still received about $20k in grants and low-interest student loans, AND I worked part-time during the school year in addition to full time during the summer.
It's unclear if her financial aid was grants or loans. If they denied her grants I'd say this (while unfair by current standards) is reasonable. Given her internships, it's reasonable to say she could probably pay for a chunk of her degree and certainly afford loan payments when employed later.
Now, of course, one wonder's why we are offering loans and aid to people who can't get such a return on investment ( regardless of whether they need to pay or not).
The government offers both need-based subsidized loans and unsubsidized loans. The latter are available to anyone, regardless of need. They usually won't cover everything, but they often cover a good chunk of your total bill.
The purpose of the student loan system to help extend credit to people who are otherwise less creditworthy. It's not a perfect system but it sorta works. In your case, you said you maxed out your credit cards. Presumably you managed your credit effectively aside from that, and then paid it off. If so, your Fico score should be high enough to qualify for a loan outside the federal student loan guarantee program.
I'm in a somewhat similar(though far less tough) situation. I am currently paying for my school myself and I simply was not going have enough to afford it even after my paid internship. So I opted instead to take a leave of absence and work for a while. I think this option is making more sense as the overall value of a degree declines, especially in fields like CS where a degree is not necessarily a requirement.
When I was applying for school (which was a while ago) public schools were actually getting hard to get into, because they were cheaper and college was becoming a popular thing, everyone was going, even people who it would be a waste of time for. All the psychology, art history, and undeclared majors were flocking there. I found a private school that was not much more expensive.
It is seriously not realistic that everyone go to public school. Also, public school funding is being cut, and students are being asked to pay bigger part of the tuition. Also, public school prices vary a lot by state.
Private universities might have a bigger sticker price, but there's more room for leeway. There's need based grants that can be given out by the school itself, for example (I got them from mine). I don't know if public schools can do this.
Just for clarification (I'm a Pitt alum): Pitt is sort of a public school. A portion of the budget comes from the state, but not as much as many other state schools (the California system, for example).
It's a crazy system indeed and it's not only for scholarships that marginal tax rates on the poor with benefits are often extremely high. Other examples include people on disability who lose their benefits forever if they try to work full time, even if they fail after a week.
It's going to be hard to change things because every little rule has people making a living a living of it.
Ingrid really sorry to hear this. I had to take out loans to help pay for college and found the entire process extremely convoluted and most aid offices quite unhelpful. Ultimately, I think our schools and government should be supporting students who are working hard to supplement loans with their own income, not punishing them by reducing your ability to take out a loan.
That was one of the reasons keeping me from doing a paid internship. My scholarship included full tuition and even paid for a lot of room and board. Furthermore, the university paid me an extra $15,000 scholarship just for doing a dual degree in philosophy and engineering. Sorry to hear about your story. It really does sound like a terrible situation.
I am totally stunned. Are you telling me that you are not going to fund a student who does not have a degree yet but found a good enough job where she gets paid? Man, in fact you need to raise the money given to her because it will ensure one persona out of unemployment for sure.
I am actually in a similar situation... except I'm in math. I can program though :/.
And by "similar" I mean that I may have to drop out because I cannot afford it. Loans from the government are not enough. Can't get private loans. Can't get money from the parents.
I am French and liberal, my views on economy are considered extreme liberalism in my country, but I when I read things like this I am even more thankful for our education system.
The French scientific higher-education system is weird and misunderstood even in other European countries, so here's a (very simplified) explanation of the road I followed and how much it cost.
After high school, if you have good enough grades (say top 10%) you can enter something called Classes Préparatoires, which is a rather intense scientific (Math + Physics) preparation for competitive exams for the Grandes Écoles. It lasts two years, three if you decide to repeat the second year because you are not satisfied with your results at the exams (repeating the first year is forbidden, if your fail you have to go to a regular University - which is also cheap anyway -, but only 10-20% fail the 1st year).
There is a lot to say about how the way we are taught in Classes Préparatoires should change, but there is something right about them: they are completely free. Oh, and if you (your family) cannot afford rent and/or food, you can get funding from the government for this.
After Classes Préparatoires, if you succeed at the competitive exams, you get into a "Grande École" (Engineering School). Studies usually last three or four years and you get a Diplôme d'Ingénieur at the end (basically what you call MSc in the US).
All the top Grandes Écoles are public and depend on different ministries (Education, Industry or Defense). The cost of studying there is below €1000/year. You can still be subsidized if needed, and you are encouraged (actually it is even mandatory) to make paid internships which pay for your studies. Actually, the two top Engineering Schools (Polytechnique and École Nationale Supérieure) even pay students who study there.
Oh, and you are encouraged to go abroad. You can do an internship in another country or go there to specialize during your 3rd year. In my case I went to a British University to specialize in Distributed Computing. The cost of studying there is much higher but since I was a guest student from another European University I didn't pay (except campus rent). It also works with the US, although I am not sure how: some friends did the same thing at Standford and MIT.
In the end, I got two MSc-s (one in France and one in UK), and my tuition fees for the entire thing amount to about €3000.
There are very few things I think a State should pay for, but top higher education is definitely one of them.
"That summer I started my first engineering internship for six months from June to December, making $25.85 an hour working for a well-known tech company.",
"It made no sense for me to stay in school; the financial stress was affecting my ability to get work done, and subsequently my GPA dropped.",
"This June, I was notified that my financial aid was reduced from $16,000 to $104 because I had made too much money in 2012, which put me in a higher income bracket to receive less financial aid.",
"Every attempt to contact my financial aid office has been unhelpful.",
"They have parents that pay for school and all their expenses, which makes their internship money pocket money."
Your going to have to bite the bullet and take a private loan if you want to finish school. It sucks, but that is the reality. I'm still paying my private loans off after 10 years, so it may not be worth it.
I can't afford to go back to school, even though I desperately want to for CS because I have $120,000 in debt from law school. Absolutely hate law and going to LS was the biggest mistake of my life.
I did the exact same thing a couple of months ago; ended up getting a reasonable job offer that will allow me to pay off my student loans. Higher education is (more or less) a waste of money these days.
That site messes with the vertical scrollbar on Firefox Android, how hard can it be to serve a page of text without doing any useless CSS or JS or who-knows-what trickeries?
Tell me about it. I just got my financial package last week and my aid went from 46k to 2k, so I'll have to take out over $50,000 to pay for one year of tuition.
Don't know about you, but there was no way she could win. Her financial aid package wasn't covering her costs, and making money to close the gap just reduced the aid.
Same here, on my third attempt to get Fin Aid, I tracked my time spent working on it. It was the first year that I received any money. It worked out to ~5 Dollars per hour.
Scandinavia is a possibility, since there are many degree programs in English. Germany is a fine choice too, but only if your German is sufficient to do coursework at a university level in that language; English options are more limited.
However not all programs will be free if you come from outside the EU.
I'm not sure that's actually the wisest course of action at this point. No matter what, it's almost certain she won't get as much aid as before, and completely certain she won't do any better than before, and what she was getting before clearly wasn't enough.
It sounds like the author is now extremely well-positioned to get reasonably good jobs and really start her career. Doing so and continuing her formal education part-time may be the best choice.
Limited application to STEM subjects. Yeah, CS and EE can finagle that nowadays (wasn't true for CS when I might have gone that route in the early '80s), but the sciences require lab work that you generally aren't going to be able to do, let alone afford, anywhere else but a school. And there are serious safety issues as well, plus the minor detail for them that an undergraduate degree is just a requirement to get your (paid for) terminal Ph.D., unless you're willing to end up being a lab tech.
Ingrid,
If you are reading this then please take another shot at the FAFSA. You are quite right that the computer systems and standard rules screwed you over.
That is why Financial Aid Advisers (the ones at your school) can make judgement calls on a case by case basis to override the computer system.
Specifically, there are two qualities of your described situation which qualify you for such an override.
1. You mentioned that you are couch surfing with friends. This means you are homeless
2. You made a good amount on previous employment and your story seems to suggest that said employment is no longer active. This means you have recently lost your job.
According to FAFSA guides for financial aid advisers, professional judgement may be used to adjust parameters which are used to calculate your expected family contribution.
Your situation appears to apply to several typical cases in which professional judgement is recommended.
1. "A student is considered homeless if he or she lacks fixed, regular, and adequate housing. This includes students who are living in shelters, motels, cars, or parks, or who are temporarily living with other people because they have nowhere else to go." -https://fafsa.ed.gov/fotw1314/help/fahelp29a.htm
2. "Special circumstances may include tuition
expenses at an elementary or secondary
school, medical, dental, or nursing home
expenses not covered by insurance, unusually high child care or dependent care costs,
recent unemployment of a family member
or an independent student, a student or
family member who is a dislocated worker
(as defined in section 101 of the Workforce
Investment Act of 1998), the number of
parents enrolled at least half time in a degree, certificate, or other program leading
to a recognized educational credential at
an institution with a program participation
agreement under section 487, a change in
housing status that results in an individual
being homeless (as defined in section 103
of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance
Act), or other changes in a family’s income,
a family’s assets or a student’s status. Special circumstances shall be conditions that
differentiate an individual student from a
class of students rather than conditions that
exist across a class of students. Adequate
documentation for such adjustments shall
substantiate such special circumstances of
individual students."
-http://ifap.ed.gov/fsahandbook/attachments/1314AVGCh5.pdf
-http://www2.ed.gov/policy/highered/leg/hea98/sec478.html
All of this amounts to the your case calling for professional judgement by your financial aid advisers. I do not know what made them turn you away before but it may be as simple as not knowing. I had a similar situation in school myself, it turned out that the first adviser I worked with was somewhat new to their job and just did not know they could make a judgement call.
Never give up. If it seems like the system is broken, make it work for you. I hope this information helps.
For anyone else who happens to know Ingrid Avendano or how to get her a message, please pass this info along.
Hi thanks for your reply. I actually I did do a dependency override in the past and I have been listed as a financially independent student. I didn't elaborate about it in the blog post because explaining it would be too complicated to go into. Being listed as financially independent helped at first because I qualified for grants and subsidized/unsubsidized government loans, but now I don't even have grants and for this coming year I only got $104 of subsidized loans to be able to take out. It has been difficult to get in contact with someone that actually understands what is going on with my financial aid.
>>"Students should be warned that doing a paid internship can negatively impact your ability to finish up paying for school."
Students should be warned that crossing the highway blindfolded if unsafe.
Students should be warned that the stove could be hot if you leave it on.
At some point, people need to take personal responsibility for their action. They need to understand how their actions effect them positively or negatively and balance out those decisions. People need to understand that there is nobody that is going to hand hold them through life.
She's not complaining or asking to be handheld. She's warning her fellow students that working to make money will impact the ability to pay for school.
It's counter intuitive. It's not obvious at all. It's barely mentioned or talked about. It can cost (and it did cost her) a college degree.
I don't disagree with the sentiment of your remark, but it's completely out of place here. She's simply warning others not to do the same mistake, since it's an easy one to make.
When I clicked on the comment thread, I made a bet with myself that some jackass would've shown up within the first hour to bellow "It's your fault your academic advisor/student aid office lied to you."
This is an area, unfortunately, where kids from wealthier families have a huge advantage. Even if your parents aren't willing to pay for college for you, they are much less likely to be hesitant to take PLUS loans on your behalf that they expect you to pay back. And as a general matter, people who came from wealthier backgrounds are much less afraid of debt and leverage.
I'm not saying that it's the most desirable state of affairs. My total cost of attendance in the early 2000's at Georgia Tech (in-state) was only $10-12k (including housing and food, tuition was just a few thousand) which I could make during the summer. But that's increasingly something that's not possible, even at state schools. And under the new paradigm, debt is the way to go. Especially with the new PAY-E repayment terms.