Will Your College Go Out of Business Before You Graduate?

http://blogmaverick.com/2013/01/26/will-your-college-go-out-of-business-before-you-graduate/

by fraXis • 13 years ago

111 99 13 years ago

guptaneil2• 13 years ago

I believe every college maintains a backup fund to make sure that the college can survive at least 5-10 years if all else fails.

In such a scenario, the school would prioritize using the money to make sure that current students can graduate and that their degree is worth something for at least a couple years.

EDIT: That was poorly worded. I meant to say that the fund is meant as a buffer to help the school avoid shutting down, so that they have time to get their act together. But it also helps guarantee that their degrees will be worth something for at least a few years, so that students feel safe continuing at the school and so recent graduates are not screwed over by something that wasn't their fault. I'm not sure, but this might even be an accreditation requirement.

sliverstorm3• 13 years ago

Aside from the goodness of their hearts, why would they do that?

guptaneil2• 13 years ago

I edited the post, it was poorly worded. My intention was to say that colleges are at least somewhat protected from just "going out of business" since that would potentially destroy the lives of thousands of recent graduates.

As far as why they would do that, my guess is that is probably a requirement to get accredited.

cmckay• 13 years ago

One data point: I teach at a small liberal arts college. Our endowment is roughly of the same order as our annual budget. Annual draw-down on the endowment is 4.5% or so, which means that the rest of the budget comes from tuition. If enrollment cratered (but didn't go entirely to zero) I suppose the administration could draw the shortfall from the endowment, but the board would pitch a fit, (and likely not approve that kind of move) and it's a sign that the college isn't going to be around long.

The full sticker price (Tuition, Fees, Room and Board) just passed $40k/year last year, and it's having an impact on our ability to recruit students. Since so much of our budget comes from tuition, though, a shortfall of even 30 students from predicted numbers (out of a total student population of about 1400) can cause a serious budget crunch.

HarryHirsch3• 13 years ago

"Why in the world are schools building new buildings? What is required in a business school classroom that is any different than the classroom for psychology or sociology or english or any other number of classes?"

This question is easy to answer. In a time of declining public funds universities are trying to attract students, because tuition is about the only funding source left. Consequently, universities have to look appealing to students, and that means cushy dorms, spiffy libraries, the lot.

Again: these are investments made from the general fund, and the university tries to recover these through increased tuition income. A classic market failure.

dantheman• 13 years ago

How is it a market failure?

If anything it's a direct result of the ease at which students can get loans from the federal government.

TruthElixirX3• 13 years ago

Everything people don't like are market failures.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5098258 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5112837 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4738488 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963251 etc

People keep calling things like city planning a market failure when it is full of regulation.

Or healthcare when the U.S. government spends the most money on healthcare in the U.S.

etc

People throw the term around without knowing what it means.

EDIT:

Changed "is a market failure" to "are market failures".

HarryHirsch3• 13 years ago

For starters, the gratuitous building and renovation does nothing to improve the quality of the degree, and certainly increases cost of tuition. The university isn't better off, and the students undoubtedly are worse off. If that isn't a market failure I wouldn't know what is.

_delirium2• 13 years ago

Another revenue-related reason is that many large donors want their money put towards construction. A lot of donations >$10m are specifically earmarked towards construction of a building named after the donor.

HarryHirsch3• 13 years ago

You especially see this phenomenon at state universities. The university gets a new building, and the politician gets a photoshoot. Renovating an existing building, on the other hand, would save the taxpayer money but doesn't offer opportunities for photo-ops.

Evbn3• 13 years ago

That is easy to solve. The school should price the building inclusive of the cost of classes held in it.

atdrummond• 13 years ago

Typically when this happens another college or set of colleges will step up to take the students. This occurred in the case of Parsons College (whose campus is interestingly now the Maharishi University of Management) and Antioch College.

More aggressively another college might take over the failed institution, as in the case of Compton College's failure in 1995. El Camino College not only accepted Compton's students but took over the facilities and faculty as well.

Claudus• 13 years ago

List of Colleges and Universities that have Closed, Merged, or Changed their Names

http://www2.westminster-mo.edu/wc_users/homepages/staff/brow...

cafard2• 13 years ago

I had a glance at the list, out of curiosity to see whether it included Case Western or Carnegie Mellon, both whose names reflect mergers. It did not. My point, though, is that mergers are not necessarily bad.

ballard• 13 years ago

Many top 100 universities are gleaming with dozens of new buildings:

    - Stanford tore down some donated admin buildings across from Schwab GSB that
      were not even 10 years old.  A good portion of the
      med school is being gradually torn down and rebuilt
      near the hospital.  (Will the roads ever be back to
      normal two-way traffic?)
    - Davis is littered with new buildings.
    - Harvard's 10 year construction schedule and $30,000,000,000.00+ under HMC.

Probably a safer bet. Whether funds begged from donors and liquidated from students are utilized efficiently is another matter.

fawce3• 13 years ago

I love this quote: "Going to a 4 year school is supposed to be the foundation from which you create a future, not the transaction that crushes everything you had hoped to do because you have more debt than you could possibly pay off in 10 years."

I hosted a coursera meetup recently (http://www.meetup.com/Coursera/Boston-MA/829362/) and I met two students who were enrolled as part time off-campus students, taking the required minimum of classes at the university, and only "spending" those classes on requirements for their majors. All of their enrichment beyond the major was through MOOCs like Coursera. They told me it would take 6 years instead of four, but cost way less, and the preferred the MOOCs for the advanced material anyway. The last piece of the puzzle for them was finding internships, so they could lay the groundwork for a job upon graduating.

Compared to my "find yourself" traipse through college, I was blown away by the steel-trap optimization these guys were applying to school. This economic downturn is breeding a whole generation of just-try-to-stop-me kids. It will be awesome 25 years from now when they are in charge.

rogem002• 13 years ago

> This economic downturn is breeding a whole generation of just-try-to-stop-me kids.

I disagree that the economic downturn is the cause of these young peoples motivations. I would argue that due to a large amount of people achieving a high level of education, degrees are not a foot in the door. As a result personal investments such as attending networking events, doing work experience and building an online presence (Such as a quality GitHub account) will make it a lot easier to stand out from the herd.

javajosh• 13 years ago

Something that I dislike is when people use jargon without defining it. In this case, you used "MOOC" without definition. I didn't have to, but I looked it up and it means Massive Open Online Course. But I am annoyed that I had to look it up, and I'm giving you feedback that, in the future, you should define your terms.

fawce3• 13 years ago

noted, thanks.

eksith• 13 years ago

The college I went to, nearly went out of business several times. I think now, attendance is rising as people who're out of work are going back to school. I have two jobs for now, but I'm thinking of quitting one and going back to school myself.

Although it's awkward majoring in something that has nothing to do with your current line of work.

What's really annyoing is that no one asks for your GPA (well at least, they didn't ask me) no matter where I applied; just the school and what courses I took. The more I see people who don't have a college degree getting things done, the more I feel college, while you do learn, is still a scam as far as jobs are concerned. And I'd rather learn for the sake of learning than learn just to get a job.

danielford• 13 years ago

One reason for new buildings on college campuses is that donors and the government are much more willing to give funds for that purpose than they are for salaries and benefits, which make up the bulk of most college budgets. So, I understand your frustration if you're angry about tuition rising while your college is erecting a new building every three years, but those are usually two separate piles of money, and there's not much your college can do to change that.

That said, I still flinch every time I hear about a new building on our campus. I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the perception that colleges are living large while tuition rates climb, and I feel we should be more conspicuously frugal to combat it.

akadien3• 13 years ago

This is quite true. For state schools, new buildings may be a "gift" from the political class to show the public their support for higher education. The stupid irony is those buildings typically don't come with operations and maintenance funds. At the same time, state appropriations are decreasing, putting the pinch on O&M and department support. The university (or publicly supported research institute) has a shiny new building in which they can put neither equipment nor people.

jobu• 13 years ago

It's too bad the donor money comes with so many strings attached. I wonder if the universities could get away with renting out some of the space in some of these buildings. That could at least cover some of the operating costs.

snomad• 13 years ago

The political class frequently uses college buildings to help fund re-election campaigns. The construction is done by a union or company that then donates to the political actor.

wisty2• 13 years ago

The Hollowmen (an Australian political sitcom, somewhere between Yes, Minister and The Thick of it) had something like this. The Prime Minister wanted a building, so he could get his name on it. The problem is, Canberra (the capitol) was already full of buildings with Prime Minister's names on them, and there wasn't any space to put anything new.

It's a great photo-op. "This $x million building will teach a new generation of students".

There's also the scope for corruption, when they pick the builders, but that's another story.

hkmurakami4• 13 years ago

So I guess a more productive donor gift would be to endow a chair or professorship.

edit: Donors can actually set up scholarships in their name too (and you can even restrict the students who can apply if you so choose -- say, only engineering majors, etc.). Many of my friends in college were given generous need based scholarships from alumni who had set up scholarship funds for future students.

patio112• 13 years ago

Yep. That's the oldest shuffle in the business, too, since the college will simply decrease their existing scholarship budget by $1 for every $1 of a restricted gift. They're literally as good as cash.

When I was signing my docs at Wash U they gave me an eight question sheet. "You don't have to answer anything that would make you feel uncomfortable, but some of our alumni have restrictions on which scholarships they fund. Check any which apply. Don't worry, your aid package is the same either way."

The two which I remember several years later are a) widow or orphan of a US military veteran and/or b) Methodist St. Louisian desiring to study engineering. They were sort of a fascinating time capsule into what really motivated the ~1945 graduating class.

Evbn3• 13 years ago

Actually, colleges build buildings because USNews gives points for new construction in its annual ratings, whereas educational quality is too hard to measure.

ErikAugust• 13 years ago

Well, either way, one could skip school and the debt, and just get into construction.

mitchty• 13 years ago

It's already starting.

http://www.cva.edu/ This college in St Paul last year just got some art accreditation that purportedly takes into account future financial viability. They just announced they can't remain financially solvent. So much for accreditation.

At this point I think education will have a rather interesting next few years.

chaostheory3• 13 years ago

I find it interesting that the art focused universities tend to be the ones going under first.

littlegiantcap• 13 years ago

It's interesting, but not particularly surprising. There's only so much that can be done with a fine arts degree. My girlfriend started off school as a Art history major because she loved art, but quickly changed once she realized there was essentially no future in the field unless you wanted to stay in academia.

Crake3• 13 years ago

I mostly find it hilarious.

Crake3• 13 years ago

Whoah, wasn't expecting to see CVA mentioned on HN. I know someone who decided to go there thinking they'd get paid $60,000 a year after graduating with their fine arts degree. Of course, I'm pretty sure they thought the same thing about their first undergraduate degree, too, which was a liberal arts degree from a similarly overpriced private college. Interesting that CVA wasn't accredited until 2011.

vincefutr23• 13 years ago

does anyone know where to look to find out how much debt a college has or what their financials are?

barake• 13 years ago

Any non-profit school has to file a form 990 with the IRS. Debt isn't always included in the filing, but Moody's usually includes a pretty accurate debt estimate along with credit ratings.

Here is Stanford's 990 from 2011: http://bondholder-information.stanford.edu/pdf/Stanford_990_...

tstactplsignore• 13 years ago

As much as online degree may be the future, this is really out of touch. An online degree is still considered absolutely useless in academia, law, and medicine. Literally none of the students currently graduating in the top 5% of their classes will pursue an online degree as opposed to a traditional school.

cszy• 13 years ago

I think you missed the point of the article, which is that a number of schools simply do not have a sustainable business model and may not exist in 4 years unless they make major changes. Entry level classes in particular could be taught online, since the contents of many of the lectures never change. Likewise, if the credits transferred (unfortunately they frequently do not), a smart student would take those introductory classes from another institution.

Schools pay professors huge salaries, tuition rises, meanwhile the quality of the education is the same. Of course, specialized degrees like law and medicine that require special training and licensing will always be around. But I'd expect many colleges to start hosting introductory classes entirely online to save money and probably dropping entire degree programs within the next several years.

jrs235• 13 years ago

In order to stay afloat how many larger universities will no longer allow transfer credits to prevent people going to cheaper schools for gen Eds?

protomyth• 13 years ago

That might run them into hot water with the accreditation folks.

Bramble• 13 years ago

Thankfully, there is regulation in this area for any school that gets state funding. If state-subsidized 4-years don't accept X number of transfer students from that state's community colleges every year, they can say goodbye to a chunk of their state funding.

I can't speak for private universities, however.

Crake3• 13 years ago

Oh, they'll accept them. They just won't count towards your major. They're sneaky like that.

justin_vanw• 13 years ago

I'm not saying this is what you should do, but it's probably what I would do if my college went under:

Put on my resume that I graduated. From a school that was good, not the shitty one that went out of business.

Actually, as someone who didn't graduate, I find that just not mentioning whether or not I graduated works fine. I just say 'University of X, 200X - 200X, Mathematics' on my resume. At this point in my career it doesn't matter, and back when it might have mattered almost nobody has the balls to say to you "I see that you attended University of X for n years, did you graduate?".

chaostheory3• 13 years ago

> Put on my resume that I graduated. From a school that was good, not the shitty one that went out of business.

Not counting the ethical part, I don't think this is very smart. All of the jobs that I have worked for do background checks on both your employment history and education.

rjbond3rd2• 13 years ago

Plus, who wants to go to a job where they think you're somebody else? Being who you really are is the ultimate perk.

patmcguire• 13 years ago

Ethical issues aside (and I've never done any of this) - who checks your education? I've never had anyone ask for transcripts, and I've never seen a database of what they're supposed to look like. You could send in anything with a watermark-y looking thing and 99% of people would take it.

rjbond3rd2• 13 years ago

Don't put anything false or ambiguous on your resume. It's a disservice to yourself. I hate to phrase it this way, but your integrity is your brand.

Being able to accomplish things is so rare -- if you have that ability, the simple truth will suffice.

matwood• 13 years ago

I hate to phrase it this way, but your integrity is your brand.

This is absolutely true. Most employers will look past all sorts of lapse of judgement in your past (especially if done in your early 20s), but lying is inexcusable.

saraid216• 13 years ago

Once you have some work experience, people stop looking at your degrees. I was actually once told by an employer, "We don't hire people from [the department I graduated from]," ...a full year after I'd been working for them.

Bottom line: do whatever it takes to get solid time at companies with coworkers who'll vouch for your quality. That is the bedrock of your resume: bachelor degrees are just placeholders until you have that.

rglover4• 13 years ago

I graduated a little over a year ago and am now faced with at least $50k in debt (not accounting for interest). The school I attended was a state university and sadly, the education I received may have amounted to ~$20k. I say this because the majority of my instructors were recent hires out of the university's own graduate programs and (IMHO) lacked the experience to teach certain topics.

The remaining cost I assume, was for "campus enhancements" like swapping out printed cafeteria menus with flat screen tv's (you must understand, this was an eco friendly initiative).

Universities are a trap. The future they're selling kids is non-existent and they know it. Instead of uni-hopping, students should start picking up topics/trades of interest early, studying on nights and weekends leading up to their hs graduation. The obvious suggestion is learn code, but it could include a lot more. Don't send your kids to school. Be proactive and find out what they're interested in early and nurture it. It may rob them partially of a childhood, but at least their adulthood won't be a depressing, seemingly pointless adventure.

jmduke• 13 years ago

Have you ever considered that your advice to parents should have been applied to your college experience?

A college education in which you go to class, study, and do assignments is not worth $50K. College lets you do a lot more than that, and it sounds like you robbed yourself of a great four years.

redegg• 13 years ago

> "College lets you do a lot more than that

Let me guess, thats an euphemism for "getting laid".

rglover4• 13 years ago

I do, but unfortunately, coming from Northwest Ohio and two parents who didn't attend college in its entirety themselves (my mom had an associates), the need to groom me early (assuming, here) wasn't immediately apparent.

Moreover, sitting in a tiny box, having sex, getting loaded (proof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuJ60dAHyc4 -- a party house my roommates and I ran) and joining campus orgs (I ran the campus radio station as the General Manager my Sophomore year and was an active member throughout my stint at the school -- I was even awarded a years worth of paid tuition) was still not worth the skull crushing debt I now have to dig through.

If I skipped college, I still would have gotten laid, smoked pot, and learned how to program.

Edit: I taught myself how to program in my spare time. My degree is in broadcast management.

lmg643• 13 years ago

I find it pretty interesting that universities can charge large sums of money to attend, but then go ahead and give away the content for free on the internet.

Parents and students, who may be going into significant debt to pay for their education, are also funding the widespread distribution of the same. Do they have a say in the matter? Perhaps it should be put up to vote.

The only reason I can think that universities would really get behind this is the vanity of professors who want their ideas out there, or they're trying to create demand over the internet so they can charge for it later.

"Knowledge wants to be free but room, board and our test proctoring system is certainly not." Strikes me as bizarre, something has to give in this system - either the fees to US schools, or giving away courses for free.

gems• 13 years ago

"Universities are a trap."

Why do you think your experience allows you to make a general conclusion? There are at least a few universities which teach truly valuable things: work ethic, overcoming difficult problems, and using practical (and modern) tools.

rglover4• 13 years ago

The reason I allow myself to make my claim as such is due to a combination of things, including personal experience: experience of friends and family (intelligent people with excellent marks in popular fields, unemployed or barely getting by), $1 trillion plus debt that doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon (you'd think that students receiving a good education would be able to land good jobs to help them pay their bills), and albeit anecdotal, Ivy League students who are singing in the rain.

Which universities are you referencing? And more specifically, are they state or public universities that the average family can afford to send their child to?

Despite a narrow scope, I thoroughly believe that universities in general have evolved into a means for subduing the general public. It's an immaculately designed mouse trap that masquerades as a positive future. A great parallel would be diet pills. Just pay three installments of 49.99 and you'll be thin (read: drowning in employment opportunities) in no time.

caseysoftware• 13 years ago

So here's what I don't get: If you realized that you weren't getting value out of the classes, why did you keep going?

Why not quit and go do something else?

rglover4• 13 years ago

Great question. While I was in school, I dealt with the shitty experience of my mom passing away. She worked extremely hard to make sure we had what we did and completing my degree was something I knew would make her proud. A bit Hallmarky, but serious. Of note, I'd openly discussed dropping out with my parents several times.

Again, coming from a burned out industrial town, going to college was a big deal (if not the deal) for my parent's generation.

timr5• 13 years ago

I was honestly expecting a different sort of rant from Mark Cuban. It's nice to see someone taking on the business of college, without dismissing the need for a college education. Bravo to someone who gets it.

That said, while I agree with his premise, I'll admit to being a little sad about the consequences: people in power rarely talk about it, but the kids who go to the "name schools" have a huge career advantage over the kids who go to Podunk University. I should know -- I went to a tiny school, and somehow managed to end up in silicon valley, where the leaders and power brokers are (wait for it)...almost exclusively graduates of the Ivy League. And this isn't the only industry where that's true.

It's disheartening. A hard-working, smart graduate from Oklahoma State with a degree in computer science degree will be at a substantial disadvantage when it comes to getting the best jobs -- the big boys (Google, Facebook, etc.) might send a recruiter to the campus career fair once a year, but they aren't hosting hackathons, sponsoring scholarships, or setting up permanent shop in the career center, like they'll do for Stanford or Berkeley or MIT. And when it comes time to reach for the management fast-track, those Ivy contacts go a long way.

So, who wins when the ability to pay for college out-of-pocket determines the economic winners and losers? Not the poor. We're rapidly heading to a country with a rigid and unyielding class structure, thanks to the brutal realities of unfettered market capitalism.

hkmurakami4• 13 years ago

Most of the "elite" schools offer fairly generous need based aid. Yes, there are problems like some middle class families getting caught in the gaps -- but the financial divide is a bigger problem in the younger years of a student, all the way from elementary school to high school, where the family's financial means makes a massive difference in the extra attention, extracurricular pursuits, and the quality of instruction at the school.

I can only speak for Silicon Valley where I grew up, but there's a strong correlation between a school's quality and the income level of the school district. Your family's financial status impacts where you live, which impacts the quality of your education, which in turn deeply affects your odds of being accepted to an "elite" school in the first place.

timr5• 13 years ago

"Most of the "elite" schools offer fairly generous need based aid. Yes, there are problems like some middle class families getting caught in the gaps."

That's a huge problem. The "need" calculation takes into account things like your parents' savings for retirement, as if they're going to cash out their 401k to put you through school. The effect is to lock out the vast majority of students whose parents were responsible, but not rich.

"but there's a strong correlation between a school's quality and the income level of the school district."

Absolutely. That's probably the biggest source of institutionalized classism (and racism) in our society.

rdouble2• 13 years ago

Facebook, Apple and Google campus recruitment is about half and half state schools and half private schools. They don't even bother with some of the Ivies like Yale and Dartmouth. There are quite a few Harvard MBAs at VCs like Sequoia but largely most people working in the valley are not Ivy League. Especially in engineering.

If a kid was already a scion of the upper eschelons of the rigid class structure you're suggesting, why on earth would they squander their birthright to go work 15 hours a day with a bunch of tech weirdos? Rich kids don't go into engineering.

mahyarm• 13 years ago

vs. 16 hours a day with a bunch of finance & government type-a's with even worse hazing rituals?

timr5• 13 years ago

"Facebook, Apple and Google campus recruitment is about half and half state schools and half private schools. They don't even bother with some of the Ivies like Yale and Dartmouth."

You're wrong. They may spend more time at MIT and Stanford, but they spend plenty of time at Brown and Yale and Harvard and the other top schools with CS programs. I know for a fact that Facebook hires a ton of people from Harvard.

"Rich kids don't go into engineering."

You're thinking Paris Hilton, when you should be thinking Moderately Well-Off Kid From Berkeley. That's more than sufficiently "rich", for the purposes of my argument. There are huge numbers of kids living in the suburban midwest for whom a Berkeley CS degree is a financial pipe dream. Dad might be an insurance salesman, and mom a teacher, and they barely have enough money to send junior to State U., let alone a top-tier CS school.

ceras2• 13 years ago

This is only true if you think that the likelihood that an arbitrary student from Podunk University is qualified to work at competitive tech firms is the same as an arbitrary student from MIT. Do you think it's true? I don't, personally.

These companies hire more from MIT because MIT has so many great candidates, but they are not shy about hiring qualified students from all over (as you personally demonstrate). There is some evidence (from Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale's study) to support the claim that where you go to school does not generally matter (with a few important caveats related to class and ethnicity -- poor black and hispanic kids do benefit a bit from brand name schools).

EDIT: I should also add that since the elite schools have such great financial aid, the problem with the rigid class structure starts and ends in the K-12 years, like hkmurakami said. The middle and upper class kids get the best schools and academic support network while growing up, so they're the ones that go to Harvard, even though Harvard will always make sure you can afford to attend. This is very disheartening: I agree.

timr5• 13 years ago

"This is only true if you think that the likelihood that an arbitrary student from Podunk University is qualified to work at competitive tech firms is the same as an arbitrary student from MIT."

A brilliant, hard-working student who goes to Oklahoma State will have fewer opportunities than a brilliant student who goes to MIT. The "average student" is irrelevant to my argument.

eli_gottlieb2• 13 years ago

It's a nice piece of Bayesian reasoning, but it increasingly fails to hold up.

The problem is that while there's a very high probability that a randomly-chosen graduate of MIT is very smart and qualified, there's an extremely low probably (and going further down) that any randomly chosen very-smart-and-qualified graduate went to MIT. So by biasing your hiring towards MIT, you're almost eliminating false positives at the cost of massively increasing false negatives during the hot part of the business cycle when demand for new workers is highest.

I've seen a similar effect in action personally. I went to UMass Amherst for undergrad, and when I finished I did interviews. Some companies wanted to talk, many didn't, I ended up with two offers from BigCos and lots from SmallCos and start-ups (this was 2011, so yeah, during a hot-hiring cycle), but still a noticeable "failure rate".

I get a little bit of real work experience and then come to Technion (which, at least in this country, is not known to be called "Israel Institute of Technology" for nothing) for graduate school. Internship-application season arrives. Now everyone wants to talk, and the only things to which I can rationally attribute the change are the name-brand of Technion and the fact of having had some work experience (which does set me strongly above "pure academics", but many people work between undergrad and grad school).

I didn't change (much). I just acquired a pre-made Bayesian evaluation of my potential from someone whose word is taken more seriously than that of UMass Amherst. And the really neat trick here is that Technion simply is not as selective as MIT, by sheer numbers: I'm told that maybe the top 10% of applicants can get into Technion for undergrad, and another 20% of those (2% total) can do well enough to go on for an advanced degree. These are far more than the percentages of applicants who can get into the CS programs at Stanford, CMU, Berkeley and MIT combined. Technion just doesn't have equally tough competition for entry due to its smaller applicant pool.

zerohp• 13 years ago

I'm back in college now at a top state university. Google, Facebook, etc are doing all of those things short of setting up permanent shop.

I can get a free meal at least once a week for the entire semester just by attending technology company information sessions.

JoeAltmaier• 13 years ago

I went to Iowa State, and have participated in a dozen startups. In my experience the big-name school gets you an interview only. The rest is up to you.

And I'm amused to see listed Standford, Berkely and MIT as 'Ivy'! Big, yes, famous, but Ivy?

yukoncornelius3• 13 years ago

A lot of misinformation in these comments centers around the fact that many universities constructed new buildings from 2008-2012 as construction costs were low due to the high levels of under and unemployed in the construction sector. This factor combined with poor expected returns to their endowments made it appear wise to make capital investments. Whether this was a good or bad idea won't be realized for many years.

rooker• 13 years ago

I was just thinking about this recently. Our generation is so fucked. Tuition rising, fewer jobs, recession, social security not going to be there when we get older, the first true tax increase for every American (payroll tax, we all felt it to the tune of 2% on our first paycheck of January) since the mid-90s, and now the retiring generation is saying "Welp! It's up to you to fix it! Good luck!" Assholes.

rdl• 13 years ago

I would still generally be comfortable with 250k in debt to get a Stanford or Harvard degree, provided I wanted to work in a field where that credential would be a huge benefit.

The better deal is probably to ROTC, though. Especially since the military is downsizing, you could comfortably spend your service commitment doing interesting stuff and then leave debt free and with great experience. USAF or USN, obviously. It also seems like an excellent way to do medical school if that is your goal, too.

Will Your College Go Out of Business Before You Graduate?

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