Mazduh

The biggest reason I left community college was just because the only one local to me it would have taken me 4 years just to finish my associates because of their class availability being so shitty.

When I got to RMU I did finish my associates in about a year and that was only with a handful of credits that transferred. Basically all of the cisco stuff I did at CC was forfeit because all of that **** expires after 3 years anyways. So I had to take it all over again.

For sure I was def spoon fed and could sleep my way through all my classes and get A's-B's. I'm into my 400 level classes now for CIS and I have to admit they are challenging now atleast. Not much time is spent in class, pretty much just check in once a week and spend the quarter working on bigger projects to turn in for a grade.

Currently my senior project I just finished a 50 page paper and had to design and implement my own theoretical IT business.

So I can't say my classes feel like a waist of money, I'm definitely being challenged in this last leg of school. I for sure put my education over ITT and Devry Graduates. I'm friends with quite a few guy's that went and it sounds like their programs were a complete joke.

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

you didnt build that.

buffon01

iTrader: (9)

But isn't that inherently the problem? The people that do not want to own up to the responsibility?

Phil, I was in a similar position when I went to school... in my 20's and paying little by little. My first two years were the longest due to that. I was at a crossroad at a point wherein I could have gone to a highly ranked engineering school and decided not to when I saw the tag price. Do you think in your case there was no option other than the one you took? As in attending another school with a lower price tag?.

bahurd

iTrader: (8)

<p></p><p>Now that was too obvious...</p>

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

^ This.

You don't need to attend a private university and pay $60k a year. If you WANT to, and can AFFORD to, then by all means, do it. Otherwise, do two years at the local CC and then transfer to a public university.

(Or, even better, study a skilled trade like welding or diesel mechanics. Your job prospects will be much greater after graduation, and you'll have less debt.)


By the same token, if you can afford to buy a new Porsche 2016 911 ($160-$180k), then by all means do it. But if you can't afford it, buy a used Miata. Nobody would take seriously a person who takes out a huge loan to buy a $100,000 car, then realizes they can't pay for it, blames the TV ads for making the car look too attractive and affordable, and pleads for auto-loan reform.





People cheat on their taxes, too. Doesn't mean that we should codify tax-cheating as law.

aidandj

iTrader: (5)

<p>Also in my mind there are 2 reasons for going to college.</p><p>1. Investment in your future.</p><p>2. To get an education</p><p>Number 1. Don't pick a major in hispanic transgender history if you consider college an investment in your future. Pick business, engineering, etc.</p><p>Number 2. Understand that you are going to school to receive an education and learn ****, not always to get a job. Have fun in hispanic transgender history, but don't expect a job when you get out.</p><p>Pick #1 if you don't have unlimited fund, pick #2 if you are a trust fund baby.</p>

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Yeah, that's a whole different area of insanity...

I personally know a few people (who I went to high school with), who studied things like philosophy and psychology. Mind you, we're all now in our late 30s. The philosophy grad works as a bartender and teaches philosophy at the local public college. One of the psych majors went on to get her masters and Ph.D and works as a psychologist, the other has worked a bunch of secretarial / retail jobs and is still without a "career."



Never mind crap like Art History, Religious Studies, English Literature, Anthropology, and so on. I can only assume that people who graduate with degrees like this go into college with absolutely no clear idea whatsoever what they want to study, and wind up in those departments by default (or because they flunked calculus and organic chem too many times.)

aidandj

iTrader: (5)

<p>I have a friend who did philosophy, but also a bunch of pre-law stuff. Now in law school and doing great.</p><p>There are definitely reasons for those degrees to exist. And the top .0001% of those grads will do great things with their degrees. But the career for an average engineering graduate vs the average art history graduate are very different.</p>

fooger03

iTrader: (2)

My economics professor would have said
"The demand for a prestigious college experience is outpacing the supply of prestigious colleges"

He also would have noted that the increase in demand has a lot to do with the relative ease of coming up with the money, which creates a perception of the affordability of said "prestigious college experience".

Finally he would have finished by saying that the only monetary policy that the government could enforce to lower college prices would be to make borrowing money less affordable (Higher interest rates).

He would probably be right on all counts.

I love my 2% perkins loans. I had about $8k in student loan debt upon graduating a state college; my parents spent about $800 total on my college education. My business degree has made me some bank since.

Almost every university will oppose "free" college because it's a financial loss to them.

rleete

iTrader: (21)

I worked like a slave through high school and college. Had a paper route and after school dishwasher job. Shoveled driveways and raked leaves over school breaks. No car, no spring break trips. I saved every dime.

Went to a state school, and got student loans, even though I didn't need them. But interest rates were high (16-18%?), and I put the money in bank CDs. When I got out of school (4.5 years later), I used the still untouched money to by a Corvette. 2-3 years later, I sold that car to buy my house.

That's how you get ahead; not by going to expensive schools. Nobody wants to hear that the American dream is working your *** off for dividends later in life.

Mazduh

In retrospect I could for sure have spent more time researching a more affordable school to attend. I partly went the route I did because of a good friend whom was an alumni and said his overall experience was good. I had also just been fired from a tech job I had been at for about 6 months that I took to get out of my comfort zone of a cushy IT position in a gradeschool. Basically falling flat on my *** as a failure it was pretty solid motivation to get my butt back in school and make something of myself. Spending 2 months or so searching for work really opened my eyes to the possibilities I could have with a degree vs. just good job experience and some certs. I realize in IT you can make it by fine without a degree but I literally missed out on a handful of jobs simply because I was on the same level with another guy but didn't have the degree and they did.

When it came down to school choice, I mean there's the common choices. ITT, Devry, Phoenix, etc. All ******* terrible rated schools and I've worked with their grads and they were complete dipshits. I was attracted to RMU because it was something different and I thought it stuck out to potential employer's over the common school choices. I could have gone the route of University of Chicago or Columbia or Roosevelt but at the time I looked their adult education evening classes took longer and were more expensive. I didn't really realize the difference between for-profit and public schools. I just wanted to get in somewhere and get done asap so I could move on with my career. I basically took a not entirely ideal job where I currently am at. Not making the money I want but it works with my schedule and doesn't stress me out so I can concentrate on school. I've basically put my life on hold while in school, I'm not making the money I want to be but that's ok. I'll be extremely set up once I graduate and there will be no reason I shouldn't find a much higher paying position that I will enjoy and have room to improve.

I basically went with my choice because the program seemed to work best with my schedule and the recommendation of my close friend. I didn't look hard enough at overall school cost since I figured I'd be up to my eyeballs in debt anywhere I went so what was the difference? Just go where I wanted.

Don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying my experience at school and would probably go the same route again if I went back in time. There's just a few things I know now, that I would have done differently. The sucky part is, you just really don't know until your financially invested and stuck. I generally don't understand people who go to college and drop out. This **** is costing me so much money the idea of not finishing kills my soul.

AlwaysBroken

Some words of warning for this route (which I have gone (and left)):

Patent law is a subset of law practice, not a subset of engineering. At the beginning, there is a huge emphasis on credentials and on having a resume that looks a certain way. It is vitally important to have the right degrees from the right schools or you're going to have a bad time. Your chances of scoring biglaw in general are not good. This isn't the 80s.

0) The legal profession has been deeply in the ******* since summer 2008 and it hasn't gotten much better. In 99 percent of circumstances, you're better off becoming an engineer than a patent attorney. You'll be out tons less money for tuition and you'll have better employment opportunities. Yes, there are special snowflakes who defy the odds and are swimming around in a scrooge mcduck money bin filled with billable hours, but don't count on it being you. This whole thing is a long shot unless you do everything exactly right and even then it's a very fickle industry.

1) You need to pick your undergrad degree very carefully (ie, you need to anticipate what sort of patent practitioners will be in high demand 8 years from now). Keep in mind a lot of patent work will only accept bachelors for a handful of fields like EE/CS/CE. The rest want doctorates. Good luck becoming a patent practitioner in biology or chemistry unless you are a published phd.

2) You absolutely need to go to a top 10-20 law school if you want this to work with any degree of reliability. Employment prospects outside of the top 10 are really shitty. You can't go to some 100+ ranked school and graduate in the top 5 percent anymore.

3) Age discrimination is rampant. Forget about doing this unless you're going straight through from high school to bar exam. Employers are looking for 25 year olds at the entry level. As soon as you start missing years (because you did something else for a few years, had a career, practiced some other type of law, etc), it counts against you. 25 and no experience is fine. 30 and no experience is odd. 35 and no experience is leper. Obviously this doesn't apply to people who are 45 because they are nobel prize winning geneticists who went to stanford law school to do patent work after discovering the cure for cancer, but you aren't one of these people.

4) You absolutely have to want to practice in NY, CA or MA. There is patent work elsewhere, but not nearly as much of it. Sure, there are patent attorneys in Nowhere County, AL, but we're talking like one practitioner with 30 years of experience in a 50 mile radius who eats all of the tiny amount of work that comes through.

5) Once you pick an area, you're pretty much stuck. Lawyering in general has awful mobility. Moving from one state to another is a pain in the *** because of per-state licensing. This isn't mitigated by the patent bar being a federal thing- every firm wants locally licensed practitioners. Also, if you do any sort of litigation, your knowledge of judges and the jury pool is a local thing that you can't take with you.

Conclusion: don't ******* do it.

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

thanks, obama.






I know plenty of people that didn't graduate college and got decent jobs. I know a few that make much more money than me. Get skillz.

i went to a cheap school and make 6 figures...

AlwaysBroken

IMO, the main problem with student loans is that they aren't dischargeable in bankruptcy and the feds will give unlimited amounts of them... which produces the two main problems- unlimited growth of educational costs combined with unlimited slavery for the 18 year olds that get suckered into taking these loans out with no conception of the consequences.

I think the best thing to do would be to initiate bankruptcy reform:
-allow discharge of student loans starting 5 years after graduation. But instead of wiping them out, leave the school on the hook for the debt. This leaves enough time for students to try and establish themselves and pay off reasonable size debts, but if someone is 250k in debt (plus another 100k in interest) to law school and working at starbucks after 5 years, it's time to let them start over.

Leaving the schools on the hook for the student loan debts that get discharged will annihilate the for-proft schools that are getting rich turning out armies of unemployable idiots carrying a mountain of debt.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

We really ought to do the same for auto loans as well- those are extremely easy to get. And, really, it's Pagani's fault that buying their car didn't transform me into a jet-setting superstar, so I don't see why I should be expected to continue paying the note on a car which didn't bring me fame and fortune.

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

yeah but cars are easily reposessed. when people cant pay a car note, the bank takes the car.

when you cant pay a student loan, what should they take from a basement dwelling troglodyte with no job?


the loans are also on a schedule baes on risk. older cars require a higher APR. a brand new car might be 1% APR where a 10yo car might be 6.99%

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

We're not talking about repossession, we're talking about the use of bankruptcy to avoid repossession. And specifically, I'm proposing that I be allowed to declare bankruptcy and yet be allowed to keep my Pagani Zonda which I can't afford to pay for.



Future wages. It's called garnishment.

The same rules apply to child-support judgements. If I knock a girl up, and the court imposes child-support payments on me, I can't get off the hook just by declaring bankruptcy, even if I am an out-of-work crackhead.




That's exactly my point. Pagani made the 2015 Zonda too attractive to me by enticing me with a low APR. Thus, my fiscal irresponsibility is really their fault.

AlwaysBroken

If the government were subsidizing car loans and the cost of a used corolla with bad ball joints was 250k, I think this would be a legit approach.

The way it is right now, if your car is a worthless pile of **** and you owe a ton of money on it, you can just stop paying and they will come and repossess it and maybe come after you for an unsecured debt. If I go to a third tier law school and end up working in mcdonalds as a fry cook, I can't just stop paying my student loans and let them repossess my worthless law degree. I can't declare bankruptcy and have it discharged either, even if I'm well below the poverty line.

The really sad part is that there are over a trillion dollars in student loans that have been packaged into student loan backed securities. And even though most of those loans are in some sort of non-paying status, the criteria they use to determine "default" mean that 99 percent of these loans count as being "good" debt.

AlwaysBroken

The sort of basic assumption underlying the entire auto lending industry is:
1) the car is worth something to the bank upon repossession
2) the car is worth something to the borrower so long as they pay

If the average car was a worthless pile of **** that exploded into flames the second you drove off the lot (much like your average law degree), every auto lender and dealership would be out of business by the end of the week, no matter how much money anyone owed them. You aren't going to collect payments on a car that is not providing value to the borrower.

Ok, so I'll go ahead and make a big concession- how about you can trade in your debt for degree. You give up the degree and the school has to pay back the federal government instead of you. Given that something like 75 percent of JDs aren't practicing law, this wouldn't be a loss. It would drive the bottom 75 percent of lawschools out of business overnight... but again, this wouldn't be a loss, as they produce virtually nothing of value- it's a scam to soak up billions in federal student loan money in return for producing hundreds of thousands of people who will never find employment as lawyers.

fooger03

iTrader: (2)

There is some merit to this idea, though I would need time to really mill it to determine if it would be successful or not.

You would also need to revoke their licenses and other legal ability to practice law unless they submit a fine equal to the amount of forgiven debt plus interest. By doing this, you would immediately reduce the pool of aspiring lawyers by a considerable amount. The remaining unemployed lawyers would immediately have a greater chance of being hired as a lawyer. Crappy law schools that know their students stand little to no chance of seeing success with their degree would either leave the business of teaching law, or else they would need to dramatically reduce their cost of educating aspiring lawyers. If many reduced their costs, then we might see the price (and quality) of lawyers reduced dramatically in 10-15 years. The more likely alternative is that many schools would just abandon teaching law. Most states would be reduced to 1-3 schools that taught general law, and there would probably be 1-3 national options for any sort of highly specialized law. Getting into any of these schools would be damn near impossible, and the demand for those few seats would probably double or triple the costs of the law degree. In the end, the price of a poor attorney at least doubles, and the price of a "good" attorney probably increases between 5 and 20 fold. You still have a few that are out $500k and can't find a job, but those law schools can afford the 35% degree reimbursement rate because of the overwhelming profits they are raking in based on the demand for their services.