Just How Hard is University to Overcome
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@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@Dashrender said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
An average US BS is $146K? does that include living in the dorms?
It would if that is required. When I was at university in 1994 dorm living was a requirement and that cost was part of the cost of classes. While they broke it out as a line item, it was a required cost so cannot be separated from the cost of the class line item. That it was a separate cost was really a means of hiding the true cost of the degree.
The site that I pulled the averages from stated that costs like that were included in the numbers. But they have to be as it is a major way that universities make their money.
OK that explains why it's so high. Yearly at Univ of Nebraska, Omaha it runs around $20k/yr, so $80 total, and really, it's probably closer to $60K total. No dorms required.
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I'm wondering how the investing figures are figured?
Do they take the HS+ people and device the cost of college by 4 years, then by 52 weeks to make an investment amount per week, then apply the interest, etc?
If yes, this is a savings amount of $701/wk. I know very few people who could save $700/wk when they were 18. So assuming the above is correct, it's incorrect in sure ability to save that amount of money.
When in college, that money is loaned to you - interest free while in school. If not for those loans, that money would never exist, at least not until much later in the person's life.
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@Dashrender said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
OK that explains why it's so high. Yearly at Univ of Nebraska, Omaha it runs around $20k/yr, so $80 total, and really, it's probably closer to $60K total. No dorms required.
It's an average, as are the income levels afterwards. State schools like UN and SUNY are far cheaper than private schools. I mean like often 1/10th the cost per year! And rarely have dorm requirements or whatever. SUNY is even less than that cost, I believe. Possibly far less.
But you have to look at averages to get anything useful. Schools like Harvard cost far more, but their graduates tend to earn far more. So if you want the advantages of "average income increases" you need to work with "average cost of acquiring those increases." If we had the same income differential numbers for just UN, then we could work with only the UN costs, as well.
Individual schools might give us a much better idea into if going there was good or bad. But I don't know how to collect the data on a school by school basis in a consistent way (or at all.)
There is little doubt that good state schools (here it would be SUNY Empire, Binghamton and SUNY IT) outperform basically any other category in ROI. But people almost universally pick expensive private schools because they believe this not to be the case. So either state schools don't provide good enough value OR a ton of people at the "best" colleges aren't very smart.
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@Dashrender said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
I'm wondering how the investing figures are figured?
As basically is they can be......
Take the cost of going to college that they would have to have spent (because there is only a comparison case to be made when someone had the option of college, if college isn't an option, then college can't be better for them because it's impossible.) Then instead of investing that into education, invest it into an S&P 500 Index Fund.
To be as conservative as possible I used the investment date as the graduation date. But this is unfair to the HS+ side of the argument because the university students would be investing that money into education year by year, not holding it interest free until the end and paying all at once. But I wanted to err on the side of giving university every chance to prove its value.
So assuming at the time at with their counterparts are done with college, the HS+ person in this case takes that same average cost and applies it to the index fund and never touches it or invests again until they retire when they cash at (and 65 in this example.)
The interest rate on the Index Fund is based off of the lifetime mean returns on that type of fund with every crash and negative year included (including the entire Great Depression era.) It's a quite conservative interest number for any period of over a decade (and we are way over that here.) 8.8% is the median, ~25% is the mean!
I calculated the returns annually only, again to be very conservative.
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@Dashrender said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
Do they take the HS+ people and device the cost of college by 4 years, then by 52 weeks to make an investment amount per week, then apply the interest, etc?
No, but that would be more indicative of the real world comparison.
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@Dashrender said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
If yes, this is a savings amount of $701/wk. I know very few people who could save $700/wk when they were 18. So assuming the above is correct, it's incorrect in sure ability to save that amount of money.
If you know people who can pay for college, then you know people who can do this. The ability to go to college in America is the ability to make this kind of investment.
If you can't do this and still go to college, then you are taking out loans (on average) and making the situation even worse for the college bound candidate because not only are they spending the money, they are paying interest on it. So making the differential even more dramatic in the favour of the non-college student.
Remember, I made this as ridiculously weighted towards the college student as possible to show how bad it is. If you take into consideration an inability to come up with that amount of money, it makes university worse, not better.
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@Dashrender said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
When in college, that money is loaned to you - interest free while in school. If not for those loans, that money would never exist, at least not until much later in the person's life.
Interest free only for while you are in school. Then you start paying interest. I know people with graduate degrees and professional jobs from those degrees who struggle to make interest payments alone, let alone pay down the debt.
If it was always interest free it would be different (and would only show that the loans are a bad idea for the economy, not that they are bad for the student.) But they are not. Trust me, I've spent most of my adult life paying off someone else's loans. They are far from interest free.
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If yes, this is a savings amount of $701/wk. I know very few people who could save $700/wk when they were 18. So assuming the above is correct, it's incorrect in sure ability to save that amount of money.
Tons of people save for college. Most, I would assume. When I went to college in 1994 I had tens of thousands in savings plus tens of thousands that my parents put in to my education. I dropped out so this was for naught, but the money was still there.
Later when I went to college again, I paid for it out of pocket, both undergrad and grad school. The amount that I was paying for some of that was above the $700/wk range. That I could do it without loans isn't really a factor, had I taken out loans it would have just made it worse, not better.
So those numbers, in my case, are insanely conservative. I could have put something like $50K into an investment on day one of my university experience rather than at the end of it, and many tens of thousands more when I returned and did it again. And this was over twenty years ago. So much more, comparatively, than the numbers show in this example.
Nearly everyone I know in the middle classes save for their kids' college education AND the kids work and save towards it as well. Combined the numbers may not be $50K, but often it is much more and even when it is less, it is still a substantial number.
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One part that you have to look at here is the big picture. Sure, few 18 year olds can save $700/wk. That's a silly number. And yet they spend $700/wk... that's an even sillier number. The more ridiculous you think the ability to pay for college is, the more ridiculous you actually think that college is.
Wherever the money comes from... trust fund, personal savings, working parents, grandparent gifts, doesn't matter. The point is if the same time and money were applied to getting a normal job, some study on your own and putting the same money that would be thrown at college into a simple investment account, the average puts skipping college into the "win" category, financially, by a staggering margin.
And it also puts skipping college into the "low risk" category. University appears to be both bad on average, and risky as it carries a vastly higher chance for total failure as opposed to just "not being quite as affluent as I could have been."
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Another way to cool at college prices... if you can spend it, you can save it. If you can't afford college, that just says that you can't afford it. It's that simple.
I think that it is just a cultural thing in American to think of crippling college debt as somehow different than, say, crippling credit card debt. If we were comparing the benefits of investing versus credit card debt would we be concerned about someone's ability to invest versus pay off the loan that they took out? No. It's only because it is education that we tend to overlook the penalties of that system.
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@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@Dashrender said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
I'm wondering how the investing figures are figured?
As basically is they can be......
Take the cost of going to college that they would have to have spent (because there is only a comparison case to be made when someone had the option of college, if college isn't an option, then college can't be better for them because it's impossible.) Then instead of investing that into education, invest it into an S&P 500 Index Fund.
To be as conservative as possible I used the investment date as the graduation date. But this is unfair to the HS+ side of the argument because the university students would be investing that money into education year by year, not holding it interest free until the end and paying all at once. But I wanted to err on the side of giving university every chance to prove its value.
But what are the chances that someone who could go to college would have $146K in the bank ready to invest on the day the college person graduated? Again, you're talking about them needing to save $700/week. Few 18 yo are making $700/wk, let alone having $700/wk to put into savings. I suppose if they get what I'll call lucky, when they hit 20 or 21, they MIGHT have a job that allows them to save over the $700 to try to recover the missing money from previous months/years, but even that seems very unlikely.
So while this is a good math exercise (maybe), I don't see how it really stands up.
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@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@Dashrender said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
If yes, this is a savings amount of $701/wk. I know very few people who could save $700/wk when they were 18. So assuming the above is correct, it's incorrect in sure ability to save that amount of money.
If you know people who can pay for college, then you know people who can do this. The ability to go to college in America is the ability to make this kind of investment.
If you can't do this and still go to college, then you are taking out loans (on average) and making the situation even worse for the college bound candidate because not only are they spending the money, they are paying interest on it. So making the differential even more dramatic in the favour of the non-college student.
Remember, I made this as ridiculously weighted towards the college student as possible to show how bad it is. If you take into consideration an inability to come up with that amount of money, it makes university worse, not better.
Well now you're just being ridiculous - what percentage go to college and don't come out with student loans? 5%? a number that low isn't even worth considering.
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@Dashrender said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
But what are the chances that someone who could go to college would have $146K in the bank ready to invest on the day the college person graduated?
You are missing my point. The chances are "on average." Because they either are spending this money already (on average) OR worse, they are taking out loans to do this.
So having $146K is exactly what they have to have already by that point. I've made this financially conservative in their favour dramatically already. In the real world they have to have had one quarter of that up front, each year as they want (or maybe at the end of each year.) Or worse, they are taking out loans and have to have that money plus interest later.
So no matter how unlikely you feel this is, it doesn't matter. Having that money at that time or more is the average amount actually spent by students. This is a simple number game. It doesn't matter how unlikely it feels. This is the amount that students are spending in the real world. That it feels outrageous isn't a factor.
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@Dashrender said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@Dashrender said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
If yes, this is a savings amount of $701/wk. I know very few people who could save $700/wk when they were 18. So assuming the above is correct, it's incorrect in sure ability to save that amount of money.
If you know people who can pay for college, then you know people who can do this. The ability to go to college in America is the ability to make this kind of investment.
If you can't do this and still go to college, then you are taking out loans (on average) and making the situation even worse for the college bound candidate because not only are they spending the money, they are paying interest on it. So making the differential even more dramatic in the favour of the non-college student.
Remember, I made this as ridiculously weighted towards the college student as possible to show how bad it is. If you take into consideration an inability to come up with that amount of money, it makes university worse, not better.
Well now you're just being ridiculous - what percentage go to college and don't come out with student loans? 5%? a number that low isn't even worth considering.
In what way am I being ridiculous? I'm showing how NOT ridiculous I am being. Any that come out with student loans make the case even more strongly for skipping university, not the other way around. Loans and interest make it worse, not better.
Think about how credit cards work. Buying things that you can't afford makes you poorer, not richer.
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@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@Dashrender said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
When in college, that money is loaned to you - interest free while in school. If not for those loans, that money would never exist, at least not until much later in the person's life.
Interest free only for while you are in school. Then you start paying interest. I know people with graduate degrees and professional jobs from those degrees who struggle to make interest payments alone, let alone pay down the debt.
If it was always interest free it would be different (and would only show that the loans are a bad idea for the economy, not that they are bad for the student.) But they are not. Trust me, I've spent most of my adult life paying off someone else's loans. They are far from interest free.
OH that one I know. My wife went to a private college, tuition was $60k/y then she had a 50% uhh.. not grant - anyways, when she got out, she had $120K in debt... ug! Took us 20 years to pay it off.
Today she's really pissed about it to - what a complete waste. She wanted to be a teacher, teaching institutions for the most part do not care where you got your teaching degree, as long as you have one. UNO would have cost her half what she paid for private and been every bit as "good" an education.
sigh.
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@Dashrender said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
So while this is a good math exercise (maybe), I don't see how it really stands up.
That's the beauty of math. If the math is right, it stands up. Period. If the doubt isn't a mathematical one, it's just emotions overriding the logic. Show how the math is wrong? Either they have the money and the math is right, OR they have to take out loans and the math has been favouring universities unfairly and my point is made even more dramatically. Correct?
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@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
Another way to cool at college prices... if you can spend it, you can save it. If you can't afford college, that just says that you can't afford it. It's that simple.
I think that it is just a cultural thing in American to think of crippling college debt as somehow different than, say, crippling credit card debt. If we were comparing the benefits of investing versus credit card debt would we be concerned about someone's ability to invest versus pay off the loan that they took out? No. It's only because it is education that we tend to overlook the penalties of that system.
Well, the belief is that your earning potential with a degree is 2-3x that without one. That's proving to be less and less true.
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@Dashrender said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@Dashrender said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
When in college, that money is loaned to you - interest free while in school. If not for those loans, that money would never exist, at least not until much later in the person's life.
Interest free only for while you are in school. Then you start paying interest. I know people with graduate degrees and professional jobs from those degrees who struggle to make interest payments alone, let alone pay down the debt.
If it was always interest free it would be different (and would only show that the loans are a bad idea for the economy, not that they are bad for the student.) But they are not. Trust me, I've spent most of my adult life paying off someone else's loans. They are far from interest free.
OH that one I know. My wife went to a private college, tuition was $60k/y then she had a 50% uhh.. not grant - anyways, when she got out, she had $120K in debt... ug! Took us 20 years to pay it off.
Today she's really pissed about it to - what a complete waste. She wanted to be a teacher, teaching institutions for the most part do not care where you got your teaching degree, as long as you have one. UNO would have cost her half what she paid for private and been every bit as "good" an education.
sigh.
So run some numbers.... think about all of that money spent AND all of the interest. What if you had paid all of that, both what you had up front and what you spent later to pay off the debt and its interest, into investments. And instead of taking years off from working, she was working in another field. Sure, she might earn less per day or week, but she would have had a much longer career that started earlier (time value of money says that early money is worth more than later money.)
Even if all you had was $120K in retirement investments today and nothing else, would you be ahead? But after interest and years of interest accumulation as you put the money aside, it likely would be much higher, maybe $200K or $300K easily.
That's the difference that I am trying to show. AND your wife doesn't even count because she has a career that doesn't use a "no college" option. So she's not in the decision pool here.
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@scottalanmiller said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
@Dashrender said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
But what are the chances that someone who could go to college would have $146K in the bank ready to invest on the day the college person graduated?
You are missing my point. The chances are "on average." Because they either are spending this money already (on average) OR worse, they are taking out loans to do this.
So having $146K is exactly what they have to have already by that point. I've made this financially conservative in their favour dramatically already. In the real world they have to have had one quarter of that up front, each year as they want (or maybe at the end of each year.) Or worse, they are taking out loans and have to have that money plus interest later.
So no matter how unlikely you feel this is, it doesn't matter. Having that money at that time or more is the average amount actually spent by students. This is a simple number game. It doesn't matter how unlikely it feels. This is the amount that students are spending in the real world. That it feels outrageous isn't a factor.
Right, this is exactly like the home loan crisis - the creditors are lending money that is a bad bet. Sadly, as you mentioned our culture says that going to College is a requirement to get a head in life..
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@Dashrender said in Just How Hard is University to Overcome:
Well, the belief is that your earning potential with a degree is 2-3x that without one. That's proving to be less and less true.
Right... and that belief is just an artefact of lacking critical thinking. Which is an additional complaint about colleges. As they are shown to be less and less valuable and more and more risky, people with critical thinking are increasingly avoiding them. Making remaining candidates a worse pool than before.
But based on the US BLS numbers, there is no 200% income increase. It's a sizeable increase (but not a real one, it's VERY misleading) but nowhere near 200% over a career.
