That wouldn’t have happened without getting my degree, I am going for Management Information Systems. I think it has a lot to do with it being in technology and everyone wants MIS or similar. Business schools probably churn out more grads that get jobs right away than the lib arts college here, even IT does pretty well, I know a bunch of CSci people at my internship got offers too.

I think it’s different for other majors. A lot of my friends are living in dingy apartments during the summer, etc. I am fortunate enough to have some good skills, but it could have been a lot harder. It is very true that many majors don’t offer a clear career path after graduation. My friend is an Film major and he graduated and is working at Blockbuster (ironic?). I think it also depends on your own experience, my other English major friend is a project manager at her dad’s company, but again, she doesn’t necessarily like it but doesn’t want to leave it because she doesn’t think there’s anything she could do. They aren’t dumb either, they’re all smart people…

The economy just kinda sucks for jobs at the moment, I was lucky enough to get an “in.”

College is not an option – unless you are a blue collar worker, or are very serious about starting your own business. How many serious employers, facing a stack of dozens of resumes, would pick a high school only educated prospect over a Harvard grad?

Graduating from an elite school is not mandatory, but acts as a great filter for employers – all else being equal (such as GPA), would you rather interview a ‘no-name tiny state school’ applicant over an Ivy? Employers only have so much time to spend on hiring – they can not give everyone a chance – having an elite school on your resume acts as a huge horn blaring “Look at me!!!!”. It is the same reason schools look at SAT scores – being in the 99% percentile might not mean you are going to succeed over someone in the 50% percentile, but without knowing more about the students, and faced with thousands of applicants, they have to go with the higher scores!

Sure there are exceptions, but for the most part having a college degree can mean a difference of 10s of thousands on your salary as you progress in your career! If you are viewing college as a bad investment, think of how it is rare to see someone at Goldman, JP Morgan, PWC, E&Y, KPMG, etc. with only a community college degree – or who did not graduate from a ‘top 50′ program! Making $150k+ a year before the age of 30 because you spend $200k on an Ivy is not a bad investment, if that investment nets you an additional $50-100k+ on your yearly income!

By the way, I totally agree that the education you get in any college is, for the most part, wasted. The experience of being at school is what is important – the connections you make, the friends you meet. It gives you a chance to ‘grow up’ without really doing so – a needed transition from childhood to adulthood. When you think of the rest of your life – growing older, having children, financial struggles, the death of loved ones, and any of the other issues that come with ‘growing up’, wouldn’t you like to look back at the few years of care-free, uninhibited fun you had? And it if ends up netting you a few thousand more on your salary annually, the more the better!

I will never regret my college experience – and after 6 years I am now going back for my MBA (part-time) at a top program. Again, it is not cheap – but my predicted jump in position will allow me to progress 10 years in my career path, with an anticipated $50k salary bump to go with it.

Still don’t think it is worth it?

If the child develops health problems that will make him/her uninsurable as an adult, that life insurance policy you buy will the the ONLY way they will be able to get life insurance for their own family later. It is pretty darned cheap to get this for them. Since you don’t know if your child will be in this small but critical group, I would purchase it.

Maybe I missed something here. I read about the low-interest debt debate (http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2009/03/25/the-low-interest-debt-debate/) and I read this. As a mortgage is (all things considered) a low-interest debate, why is it treated differently?

I love your site, btw. Not all of it is applicable here, but most is.

greetings from Belgium,
Jeroen

Now I’m getting ready to make two major life changes – get married and go to law school (yeah, you need a degree to be a lawyer, I can’t avoid that). It turns out law school finaid wants to shaft you in the same way – since I’ll enroll after I’m married, they’re looking at my spouse’s income, my parent’s income, my income from the past years and my savings (which are for a house and retirement and NOT for law school so much) and using all of that to determine my financial need. Would saving anything actually help me? It didn’t in college.

I am a software engineer with MS/CS and 25 years of experience working for a major technology company (IBM). We’ve been hiring new graduates for years. They are perfectly capable of doing productive work right away. Not only that, but we’ve also been hiring students to do work for us in summer. Sure, we are careful to separate out small stand-alone projects that can be completed within a month or so. But these are still useful projects. Most of the students we’ve had were perfectly capable of doing so.

Sure as I now work in research, we mostly get MS or PhD candidates, but I’ve seen people with BS/CS – both in research and before I transferred to research. Nope, they don’t just learn theory in school. In fact, some of the projects I did in college – way before I got hired by IBM many years ago – were more difficult than some of the assignments I had at work, at least initially.

One other thing: I am very good at what I do, and I can learn new technology quickly. Still, I have to work hard to keep up with new graduates and their up-to-date knowledgeable and to prove that I do know more.

Also, a personal quibble- I have an interdisciplinary studies degree and I’m getting an interdisciplinary studies master’s degree. I think it has fundamentally improved me as a human being, because I approached my studies from a classical liberal arts education standpoint. If I wanted to do electrical engineering, or medicine, of course I would have gotten a specific degree, but barring that the vast majority of jobs require extensive on the job training. I think my degree made me into an educated, well rounded person. I have taken difficult honors classes in subjects from science to government to psychology to economics. I thought that I should get a specific master’s degree, so I embarked on an International Management program- a year in I was bored to tears with the same ideas recycled over and over. There wasn’t enough variety. I made mostly A’s and a few B’s in graduate level management, accounting, and marketing classes having absolutely 0 experience in anything like them from an undergrad. I’ve worked in the financial sector, I’ve taught English in Japan, I’ve done sales, I’ve managed large groups of people- my degree gets me over the “college degree required” hump but after that I know how to sell myself, relate to people from many different backgrounds and cultures, I’m autonomous and hardworking, etc. I personally don’t like the idea that one has to have a college degree to get a job, because I really do think that as high as 90% of jobs just require dedication and hard work and a commitment to learning and training effectively.

Worked at least 20 hours per week at the same time. I’m not saying it was easy, only that it’s doable. That’s often preferable to graduating with a boatload of debt or bankrupted parents.

I’ll concede that you probably couldn’t do this if you were in a pre-med program, but 99% of college students aren’t.

It’s also a matter of adjusting your plans to fit your financial circumstances, and that’s never a bad lesson to learn early in life.

The example you cite for fine arts would fall under the “internship” category — devoting time to practicing the music, instrument and working with other (while unpaid) is definitely part of becoming a better musician.

But that’s not the type of student I’m getting at. Anyone who has spent time on a college campus knows that for a lot of students, there is a LOT of “downtime”. I’m not even suggesting that all that “downtime” be given up — but that it’s not at all hard to find if you are willing to look. Where I went to school a lot of students spent a lot of time sunning themselves on the quad and playing Frisbee for a few hours a day. I’m not going to say that this was an entire waste of time (I like to sun myself and play Frisbee, too), but spending 3 hours a day playing on the quad every day speaks to having a lot of free time, doesn’t it?

The real problem, of course, is that the debt being piled up by these students will severely limit their ability to chart their own course after graduation by saddling them with hundreds of dollars a month in student loan payments, in addition to the reality of paying rent, buying food, getting to work, and so on. It can be the difference between pursuing a passion you love that doesn’t pay well and having to take a job that does pay well but isn’t your passion.

Life is really a series of trade-offs, and while paying your own way entirely through school may be entirely out of reach for many people, it’s not unreasonable to do things like only take out the absolute minimum amount of loans possible, and find some sort of way to defray costs while in school by working a little bit — or working a lot in the summer. Maybe you can graduate with $10K in loans instead of $40K using tools like budgeting and work, for example, which works out to a lot less to get through when you are starting out.

It’s just so astonishingly easy to come by student loan money, and people will sign up for it and spend it on cars, stereos, TV’s, drinking and so on. The sad part is when they are still paying for that car or TV for ten years after they graduated.

My assumptions:
– A full-time student takes four classes per semester for eight semesters, meaning that 32 classes are required to graduate.
– An average class taken during the semester requires 15 hours a week of effort for 16 weeks, and an average class taken during the summer requires 40 hours a week for 6 weeks – either way, that is 240 hours total, per class.
– Before you graduate, you can work part time for $15 an hour for as many hours as you want. After you graduate, you can get a full-time job at $20 an hour, or $42,000 a year.
– This particular college doesn’t charge extra tuition for taking summer classes or extra classes during the semester – tuition is only charged by the year.

So taking an extra class means spending 240 hours studying that you would otherwise spend working – that is, giving up $3600 in income from your part-time job. To graduate early, you need to take eight extra classes (say, one per semester for six semesters, plus two during the summer sessions), for a total of $28,800 in lost income.

But in return for that, you save a year’s worth of tuition payments, which can be anywhere from $4000 on up. (You still have to pay for food and shelter, whether you’re in school or not, so I’m not counting room and board as savings.) Plus, you get an extra year’s worth of full-time income at $42,000, putting you at least $17,200 in the black ($42k + $4k – $28.8k). Taxes will eat some of that difference, to be sure, and the interest on the extra student loans you’ve had to take will eat some more. But there are other benefits to starting your $42k job early – like an extra year’s worth of seniority – that I haven’t included.

So, for a motivated student who can make the extra time for either work or study, it looks to me like it’s as least as good an idea to take the extra classes and graduate early as it is to try to work your way through school. And the more expensive the tuition, the more attractive the early graduation route becomes.

Also, it sounds like your degree was easy for you to get, either because you are quick and don’t need to study too much, or because you took an easy degree. I don’t think it’s safe to assume that someone else could necessarily take 20 hours a week away from studying and have respectable grades.

There were tons of kids I went to school with who would schedule all their classes in three or four days out of a week. That leaves three or four days with nothing at all on the schedule. In addition, some would schedule things so the first class was at 10 or 11 AM. There’s plenty of time to work a couple 6-8 hour shifts and then pick up a few more hours on the days you have classes or the weekend.

And it’s not like the typical college job requires you to “take work home with you”.

The only possible exception I would make for this would be an internship. I was lucky to have the job I was working also be an internship that was related to my major. I didn’t get any credit for it, but I did get paid. I know in some other fields, internships are typically unpaid, but they do open doors and give valuable work experience that are going to help with the future — be it in academia, the public sector or the private sector.

But really, you can cut out 20 hours a week of XBox, Facebook and television and not really miss out on that much.

Seriously, congratulations. However, I would wager a year’s salary that while I could do your job, you can’t do mine. That’s the value of a degree with an emphasis on math. Granted, I do pay a mechanic to install a transmission in my vehicle, but that’s the value of a vocational degree. And the vo-tech guy probably doesn’t have student loans, either.

As for graduating without student loans: yes, it is possible. It does require that one not spend his free time partying like a rock star. If a student were to work instead of do the normal ‘college thing’ he would have boatloads more experience to offer a potential employer.

If a student really has a spare 20 hours a week, another option I’d suggest they consider would be to take an extra class or two each semester, and to graduate in three years, or even 2 1/2. That saves them a year’s worth of tuition and lets them reap whatever financial benefits their degree offers a year sooner.

Here is my situation: I just got into my dream school (I’ve wanted to go to their law school since I was 15). I already have a degree from this same school that my Mum paid for along with a government subsidy. The problem is, the law programme has no subsidy and works out to US$10,000 for tuition. With inflation here, that works out to about JA$1,000,000 a year. My whole B.A. didn’t even cost that much.

There is another school that costs about US$5000 for the 3 years. It ain’t my dream but it does teach me what I need to know.

I will have to work full-time and go to school full-time however. And that is scary for me.

I just made a decision though. Debt is slavery and to take on $3 million dollars in debt for a fancy campus and a pool is not in my budget.

I went through my first 4 years of school without a single loan, and without my parent’s help either. I lived really close to college with a bunch of roommates, so I didn’t need to drive. A college student should not have a car or cell phone when they are broke. I didn’t bought new clothes, and never ate out. I was living off less than $350/mo.

I ended up getting stupid and started taking out loans for my last 3 years of college. My tuition was all paid for but I was tired of living within my means, so I got a car, cell phone, my own bedroom, new clothes, laptop, xbox, digital camera, etc… basically started living like all the other kids in college with student loans. I ended up with $20k in loans, in which I could’ve totally avoided.

Current tuition is $4,350 and the typical cost of tuition, room and board at a SUNY (State University of New York) school is about $15,000 a year for a state resident.

NY minimum wage is $7.25/hr. But lets say your kid makes double that ($14.50/hr), worked 20hrs/wk during the school year (16 weeks + 16 weeks; nothing over winter break), and 40/wk during the summer (12 weeks). This is all just an estimate so no need to nitpick. Gross earnings is $11,200 per year. That is ~75% of the cost of the SUNY bill. If they only got minimum wage, then about ~40% of tuition, room, & board are paid for.

So before taxes, books, and any entertainment, car/transportation, new cloths, spring break trip money, or whatever may interest them, AND not including scholarships and gifts, they could accumulate $15-40K in debt over 4 years. No too bad. Living on campus can be extremely expensive.

I’m not trying to make any point, just sharing some numbers I played around with.