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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  973 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The swoon in college enrollment

I paid the same amount for a quarter of community college as I did for a quarter of the University of Washington in 1999. The 4-years have gone up a batshit amount but community college isn't nearly as affordable as it was. More than that, the costs-benefits analysis on a college education have basically shifted to "if you can't afford grad school it'll take hella longer to amortize that degree" while Generation Z has watched their cousins and uncles blow a fuckton on degrees that they maybe didn't finish (Corinthian College etc) or didn't get them fucking anything.

Wanna see a hilarious article?

    Recent film program graduates of Columbia University who took out federal student loans had a median debt of $181,000.

    Yet two years after earning their master’s degrees, half of the borrowers were making less than $30,000 a year.

    The Columbia program offers the most extreme example of how elite universities in recent years have awarded thousands of master’s degrees that don’t provide graduates enough early career earnings to begin paying down their federal student loans, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Education Department data.

I know a girl who graduated from Columbia Film. She's one of the richest people I've ever met. She went to Columbia because her parents insisted on an Ivy and she insisted on film school. Guaranteed - no one in her family has filled out a W2 at least two generations back.

When you see grad schools climbing? Know that it's the bored and wealthy.





uhsguy  ·  972 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I read that article when it was published it made me a bit angry but also Film school folks should know better.

Big picture the whole education racket really has me confused. I have no idea how to help optimize outcomes for my kid. The rules keep changing and the equity drive is causing some really wierd incentives.

My wife and I were planning to move out of Seattle to kenmore so our 4 year old wouldn’t have to go to SPS when she went to kindergarten. I honestly don’t know if that’s enough and we should just send her to private school. That being said I can’t exactly find a lot of good options in that realm either. When she’s ready for high school we will have to again figure out if we need to move to work the admission system out of we prioritize quality of education. It’s super annoying and difficult to navigate. What are you doing for your kid?

kleinbl00  ·  972 days ago  ·  link  ·  

We started our kid at an IB nonprofit when she was four because it was like $20 a month more expensive than daycare. They go through eighth grade; it works out to like $12k a year which we can afford. We also tested her into the Edmonds school district challenge program but opted out of that because their approach seemed to be pure short bus nerf helmet cloister the nerds for their safety. You're right, though - the King County private schools are dumbly expensive.

Jeff Selingo has written three books about how dumb college is and how to navigate the stupidity. I've read two. He used to help put together the US News & World Report list, and will explain to you chapter and verse what a terrible metric it is and how badly it has fucked things up. He was also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Higher Ed before he went rogue. "Selingo" is a statistically-relevant search term on this website.

My "a ha" moment was when I ran through a calculator that told me how much I needed to set aside for my kid's college when she was like seven months old. I shot the moon and said "maybe it takes her an extra semester to finish her private out-of-state bachelor's degree" and the the calculator said "maybe set aside $1800 a month starting right now 'cuz your kid's degree is gonna cost over a million dollars by the time she earns it." That's about when I started pricing Subway franchises and determined that a half-dozen fast food restaurants would probably serve her better than an English degree from Reed or whatever. And I can't be the only person doing that calculation.

So I figured whatever is going on now won't be going on then and a whole bunch of people older than my kid get to go through the meat grinder to figure out what happens next. And all the data above indicates that the bowl is filling with hamburger.