Am I the only one that went into a cheap in-state university with a great engineering program that only cost me $4500/year including a meal program and a room? I was turning down job offers during my third year. My ex-wife on the otherhand went to a for-profit art school that cost $25k per quarter and it was a year round school. She maybe earned 40k with her degree total before she gave up and stated teaching yoga. What a fucking waste of money. Thank God her parents covered it and I didn't get stuck with that bill
That's the right idea. University itself isn't a scam (although prices are inflated right now), but there are ways of doing it that are a really bad idea, and we need to stop telling 18 year olds to follow your dreams, go to whichever place you feel called, etc. Certain majors offer poor return on investment, and certain schools do as well. Once you're a few years into your career nobody will care where you went, and there isn't any difference between expensive private school vs cheap in state public. It might be a good idea to stop perpetuating the myth that college is a ticket to prosperity: it's really all about what marketable skills you have, and it just so happens that in some circumstances college can be a good place to pick up those skills.
Of course certain careers (e.g. investment banking, consulting, big firm lawyer, etc) will require Ivy League credentials, but that isn't relevant for most people.
require Ivy League credentials
My god, one of my best friends is a lawyer and his credentials were his single most important thing for him. He did start out at a shitty little community college for 4 years and then went to two great ivy league schools to make his name. He even went to Dubai for an unpaid internship relating to his field, and he's Thai and Thai people are literally slave labor there so he was terrified he'd get abducted and forced into labor. That's dedication.
But yeah, I bought into the fancy expensive university thing at first. I went to Pepperdine my first semester, then left when I realized how retarded their computer science program was. That one semester there cost more than the rest of my 4.5 years at the other university
Bingo. It's a spiral of affordability
"Everyone should be able to afford to go to college" -> everyone gets loans -> college prices increase with the expansion of credit -> middle class get priced out of college without huge loans.
We're right back to where we started but now with 100k debt. The problem is once a credit bubble is inflated, it is difficult to disinflate without real pain: if government loans disappeared tomorrow, 3/4 of students wouldn't be able to afford attending. Of course over time prices would fall, universities would make necessary cuts to administrative bloat, etc. But the suffering in the near term would be real. This is why a little responsibility up front to prevent these problems from forming is vital.