Despite sticker prices, the real cost of getting a degree has been going down (opens in new tab)

Where do you get that? Federal loans are currently 6.5% for undergraduate, 8-something% for graduate. Private loans are higher than that.

1. Colleges set exorbitantly high prices.

2. The government-supported system assesses families' ability to pay though FAFSA process, where you submit your tax returns (not that you have to, IRS is government as well) with your wage/business income, then list all your assets (minus retirement accounts such as 401Ks) and liabilities. Then the FAFSA spits out your expected contribution, TELLING you how much you can afford to pay for your kids education.

3. Colleges and government then use this number to determine how much "financial need" you have. They can "meet your financial need" by letting you pay less than the sticker price (it's called "need-based scholarship"), or allow to take loans on favorable terms to close the difference between the sticker price and your ability to pay (that they determined). More often it's a combination of the two (depending how desirable college is and how good of the student they perceive your kid to be).

If you got lucky you got a junior dev or QA position at a small dev shop. Unless you were some kind of known prodigy no one got a FAANG job out of highschool with no degree or experience.

So the AP as a means of saving $$$ loophole has been hard closed.

Do you have examples? I haven't gone systematically digging into this, but the general impression I've gotten is that this sort of explicit demographic filters are largely associated with the "equity" crowd rather than the "merit" crowd.

Extending the party of youth is roughly one of the benefits of social welfare. When we took the children out of the factories in the 1920s, we extended their youth. When we sent them to college, we extended their youth. When we economically constrained them with high real estate prices, we extended their youth.

Extending youthhood is fine, so long as we do it appropriately. For example, if we did it right, someone entering retirement enters a new youthhood of carefreeness. If we do it wrong, someone enters youthhood in theirs 20s as a dependent of their parents. There's a lot of wrong versions of the last thing I said, where people are kept children in academia to be parented indefinitely by tenor.

It's delicate. We want to provide as much youthhood as possible in a good way, if we can.

As to your first point, you can only be speaking of white men. To this I'll say, white men that come from the same economic situation should have access to the same scholarships. That's a easy one to fix. If you are working class then you are working class, this life is hard enough already.

Luckily, software jobs in the beginning of my career was a strong market, so I aggressively paid them off early into the pandemic. About 3-4 years post grad. But I know that's not the normal story.

I’m not sure what you have in mind.

I’m assuming “get a local and cheap degree that gets you a job” means going to a community college and a directional school (at best).

The whole mentality behind this thinking is “I’m going to be the best worker bee I can be”. Worker bees cap out at middle management. When you go to schools like this, you are surrounded by future worker bees, that will probably be your mentality, and that will almost certainly be your social circle. It’s hard to escape worker bee status in that context — possible, just hard and not probable.

Note that there isn’t anything wrong with being a worker bee. The world needs a lot of them.

Upper management, owners of big businesses, politicians, etc. are thinking about how to utilize worker bees to accomplish goals grander than “getting a good job”. It’s a very different way of thinking. It’s not particularly difficult, but it’s foreign to most people who aren’t surrounded by it.

Note that I am not referring to a flagship state school, which usually produces the majority of your local and state leaders (see below).

As a side note, this worker bee phenomenon is in play at elite schools as well. The worker bees get “good jobs” as analysts at investment banks, entry level positions at consulting firms, or (later) associate positions at good law firms. They do their worker bee thing, make the principals a lot of money, and then plateau / wash-out mid-career when they realize that they don’t have the social capital it takes to be a rainmaker. Some folks adjust and do well for themselves, but others don’t.

So to address your comment about being “worth paying for”, it really boils down to a few things. Does the student already have a lot of social capital that they will be able to build on top of? If not, are they socially capable enough to do the things they need to do (mostly build social networks that will let facilitate them being rain makers and/or power brokers later in life)? This is a lot to ask of a kid who is not already part of the upper-middle class or higher (e.g., the capital class).

If a student is just going to go to college, play video games in their dorm room, maybe roll in the hay a bit, and be an average student with a mediocre degree, then paying for a top 5 school (or even a flagship state school) largely is not worth it, imho.

> For example, someone might secretly think state school education was a waste of time,

As long as the “state school” is the flagship school or the A&M school, then this would not be a smart thing to think. Exceptions exist (e.g., UCLA), but these are largely known schools.

It all gets back to how the student utilizes the opportunities presented to them.

> but not want to talk bad about their peer’s schooling.

Probably a good idea in general.

> Or want their child to socialize with other well-to-do families.

Well, this is a smart move for building and/or maintaining social status.

That said, outside of the northeast corridor and California, the state flagship school probably produces waaaay more local and state leaders (business, political, etc.) than top 5 schools. I’ve definitely heard of people having limited access to their state power scene because they went to an Ivy instead of making the right connections at State U.

Edit:

Note that there are other scenarios that make elite schools good.

If you want to become an academic/researcher (I suggest not doing this unless you know someone who will give you the “inside baseball” version of being an academic), the elite schools give folks advantages that state schools don’t.

If you are in a STEM field and you want to meet other super smart and super motivated folks to work with in STEM later, then elite schools can be a good deal. But again, we are back to social networking.

If you want to go to an elite law school or certain grad schools, I actually recommend most people go to State U. For most majors, the effort required to be middle of the pack at an elite school will put you at the top of State U. A super high gpa and recs saying that you’re one of their 1%er students ever are worth way more than being merely above average (e.g., 70th percentile) in a pool of very motivated and intelligent people.

It’s rough listening to folks at Ivy graduations who busted their butt to get into an Ivy and do well (but not top of their class) moan about how they are ending up at the same good-but-not-great law school as their buddy who had zero stress before and during college. Note that the Ivy grad may be better prepared for law school (maybe), but one has to wonder if the stress, money, and effort were worth it.

OK, but do you think these traits are primarily the results of nature, nurture, luck, or individual practice?

Good question! I think that can play out both ways, ultimately based on how wealthy the parents are. If money is no object, play the prestige game. If you are middle class and know the rules of the game, maximize value.

For example, I am acquainted with parents who are teachers at a prestigious private school. Their child attended said school because of subsidized tuition, and then attended college in an honors program at a state university in the middle of the country. He was paid to attend! The parents are fully abreast of all the studies on the effects of education, both being teachers and being in the middle of the college admissions frenzy that goes on in these schools. So they know how the game works, and they are playing it to the max for value.

On the other hand, at this school are children from generational wealth who play obscure sports from an early age to give them an edge in admissions. The children never need to actually earn a living, and the target school admission is seen as a defense of a family legacy and bragging rights for the parents - pure prestige.

The point is that there is no other alternative. My observation, at least in tech - is that the expectation of greater than 40 hours of work per week is ever present. There is no choice to earn less, take it easy, and have more time for other pursuits. If both parents are under this expectation then there are fewer hours to be involved. A break of 1-2 years will be held against you in future interviews.

From talking with other parents, this is a common conundrum across industries. No one feels that they have enough time to be a good parent.

More concretely, what work arrangements do you have or are aware of which allow you to cap the hours worked while affording a livable home life?

Now, some schools will give you more educational opportunities and better education, but honestly? The margins aren't that huge.

Instead, I went to a school that was in my home town. I learned things when I went to college, but that school was objectively the wrong choice. Not only did it cost double what the state school would have cost[0], I missed out on the reason young people ought to go to college in the first place: a once in a lifetime chance to spend 4 years hanging out and making friends with high achieving people who would go on to shape the face of the world.

Granted, one of my college friends ended up as a senior researcher studying cancer, and another went on to work for Mozilla, but I'm pretty sure in my class of ~300, there weren't too many CTOs, VPEs, star researchers, etc. Simply going to a bigger school would have been a better choice; going to a school that was both bigger and better than my undergrad institution would have been the best choice.

I guess that's what you get when society expects a 17-year-old to make what may be the single most impactful life choice they'll ever have. ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯

That said, going to a small liberal arts college had its advantages. I learned a lot. Some of that stuff I learned, I've even gotten to use once or twice. But, looking back, if I could send my past self a message back in time, I'd tell me to go somewhere else. I may not have been much better off financially if I had met someone in college at 20 who talked me into partnering up on some insane business venture or something, but that experience would have been priceless.

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[0]: This was even after I got a scholarship that reduced my estimated family contribution to 2/3 of what the sticker price was, on top of being able to stay at home and save money that way.

We're looking at Alabama at this point, either Tuscaloosa or Huntsville, I think they're even less known/lower ranked but not that bad for aerospace. That'd likely be full ride (national merit semifinalist or finalist).

The advice about lowering income is valid. I don't even have to do anything the shitty IT jobs market took care of that for me :(

> One of them actually dropped out of ~~college~~ high school(!), then went on to get hired at Netflix at 23 years old, back when they were only hiring senior engineers.

STEM are also, I think, the wrong field(s) in which to rely on critical thinking to, _broadly speaking_, be taught. The technical background - programming languages or maths or basic biology / chemistry - that have to be assimilated before reaching that point are too high a hurdle for most students. Humanities, with a natural-language corpus + common experience, are a more-accessible approach. (The trivium, if you're familiar with classical-education terminology.)

That's not to say STEM courses can't teach critical thinking - they can, and must - nor that educators in Humanities haven't done a piss-poor job of it over the last half-century or so. That is to say that the general decline in critical thinking skills is mostly attributed to the decline in the status of and standards within the Humanities disciplines.

(1) Not entirely a function of bachelor's programs that produce conformant wage workers.

(2) Not worth the high tuition and debt at all.

I can't help but imagine that there have got to exist far better and cheaper ways to learn how to think. I would like to see more entrepreneurship colleges that force people to innovate, also to bootstrap without external investment.