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>I thought that they worked by underpaying people just out of school, but dangling the carrot of big bucks that always seemed just out of reach (maybe next year I will get the big bonus!) and then churning and burning.

How do they work? currently at an IB and unsure about continuing, everyone seems apathetic



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>For example, for unpaid summer internships my college just gave out $5000 in living expenses so undergrads could do any unpaid internship they wanted.

What... the... hell? Nobody gave us anything like that at a state school.


> you will just have to make up for it somehow.

I'm 27 and make ~$300k a year. When or even how can I make up for it? I'm clearly behind the people at Ivy+ schools right now.


>> If you get a full ride scholarship, the $50k/yr is all yours. Would that work? I'm assuming for some it would.

Bitter personal experience taught me using extrinsic motivation destroys intrinsic motivation.

The kid will get that scholarship to pocket the $50k/yr. But then the kid won't be motivated to do much more than that afterwards. Now all he or she's thinking is how fast they can spend the $50k.


>I'm 27 and make ~$300k a year. When or even how can I make up for it? I'm clearly behind the people at Ivy+ schools right now.

I'd like to believe this is sarcasm but it probably isn't.


> so likely your parent could afford some amount of tuition from the govs perspective.

Oh, they absolutely could have, but they didn't. Pretty sure the FAFSA even had a line about money coming from others, and I put $0.

And so I get a little salty when my peers talk about being short on money because they're paying for their kids' college.

Whatever, though. I'm making good money now, and I can accurately say that I'm a self-made man.


> The students are charged 15K for 6 weeks, about the same amount I spent on my entire masters.

Assuming you're going for a job, paying $X to get a job in six weeks sounds like much better value than paying $X to get a job in two years.


> I don't understand how a college survives 75% of their students dropping out like that?

Students pay upfront.


> succumb to transgressive career choices just so they can support themselves through an expensive and horribly faulty notion that education is a business just like trading stocks.

Or, you know, you could borrow the money to study and then get a high-paying job in NYC or SF, pay it all back in less than three years, and enjoy low taxes for the rest of your 40 year career.

The U.S. system is polarizing, for better (if you're lucky / don't fuck up) or for worse.


> Aside: Is this weird income share agreement model common in the US at this point?

No, rather radical, and a key point of this school.

What is common in the US is debilitating levels of student debt upon graduation.

edit: typoos


> As a college student: bold of you to assume I have any money at all.

Personally? Maybe not. Collectively? Maybe:

"College students are an entry-point market with over $593 billion in spending power."

https://www.refuelagency.com/college-marketing/

Part of it could be that many students have summer and/or part-time jobs, and the university isn't always successful in seizing every last dime that you make.


>If someone's parents make $100K/year then they aren't going to pay anywhere near that $80K/year figure.

In my case, using the calculator estimate dropped it from $79k to $70k. And this is just an estimate, I doubt I would even receive 9k from the needs based scholarship. https://npc.collegeboard.org/app/bu?sessionId=N5uYUvK7OuteM4


> figure out just how much money you and/or your parents lost on the deal.

If you consider college tuition to be the money you pay to be educated, you're definitely right. Personally I think of college as something like a licensing or certification.

I learned twice as much at my part time programming job than I did in class (but classes where instrumental in getting me through technical interviews). But, once I had my degree I instantly had multiple 100k+/yr offers in a moderate COL area. For me, that is a good deal (but still a huge hassle).


> So where's the real problem? For every person like my daughter, there are lots of people who spend six months, and end up not making enough money to pay back the ISA.

Isn't that a feature, not a problem? The education institution has a strong incentive to actually improve the earning potential of its graduates. This is in contrast to institutions that get paid upfront, which have no such incentive. Once you've forked over the tuition they're getting paid regardless of how well its graduates do in the workplace.

I think the learning here is that institutions offering ISAs need to be more selective with enrollment.


-> tuition was definitely overpriced + having to pay 150% of the principal loan

So the actual interest is like 100%? Though it's fixed over a 5 year period, so that turns to around 30% yearly interest rate. Hardly zero.

-> Most people that get jobs in tech will have paid the 150% before the 5 year mark

That's even higher interest for these people. But I guess it's an incentive for the program to get people good jobs.


> And no amount of tuition assistance is going to make more than a handful of the kids I grew up with capable of this work.

How do you know that?


>Opportunity cost tends to be more subjective and harder to realize because the success of opportunity is hard to predict.

Sure - in an effort to limit that I chose $18 per hour as a wage, which is lower than the median individual wage in the US ($22). It's a pretty conservative estimate of lost income.

If you didn't want to add that in I would say remove all salaries from the cost of education, generally, and then compare the cost per pupil. So you're comparing like to like - mostly just the cost of supplies, facilities and educational trips.

Your pluses are great, I'm not taking away from that, but they are at least somewhat represented in the increase in overall score, no?


> I will say the folks who come from richer backgrounds do have some advantages over us who grew up poor. For instance I had no idea how much scholarships subsidized learning and went to the state school I could afford to fund on my own.

This a million times. I ended up in a small private university (which was awesome and I still love it) that initially gave me a lot of scholarship money, but didn’t even try to get into top tier. While good at educating, the network and the name recognition were not there at all. Can’t remember how this came up, but at one point I compared notes with someone who attended top 10 university and their grades/scores were slightly worse than mine - live and learn :)


> The university was completely free for you because someone else paid for it.

Exactly, "everyone" did. And I probably already paid it back with my taxes already. And, one can dream, maybe in another way too, through the work I perform.

Had university or my internships been very costly, it's not unfathomable that I would have a lower salary, in addition to performing lower-quality work (in terms of knowledge going into it).


>But I just couldn't understand how tuitions could stay propped up and I felt there had to be some correlation between the salaries/availability of jobs post law school and the high tuitions.

Weren't administrations intentionally masking a lot of their post graduation numbers so that they looked good on the surface to relatively naive applicants?

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