Playing devil's advocate for a second, what if the teachers and guidance counselors still believe it to be true? They're likely from a previous generation or two, where simply having a college degree opened up most doors.

Then again, what if having a college degree really is still better than not? You don't have to spend $300K on undergrad to get a degree- and I think that is what we should be pounding into kids' heads. That's great that you want to go to a private school for undergrad and two more years to get your masters so you can be a teacher, but paying 5-10% on $300-400K and topping out at $65K/year is a shitty economic deal. Go in-state and work while you study. Search for the grants, so many random grants go relatively unclaimed.

It's like buying a car- when you focus on the prospect of a low monthly payment and not the fact you're paying for 95 years, it's easy to hide how much money you're flushing down the toilet.

EDIT: I took on about $50K in school loans and worked a minimum 20 hours a week through uni. I worked as a motorcycle mechanic, farm hand on a dairy farm, tech support for the college, hardware testing for a lab, and all kinds of contract development work. Sometimes in the same week.

Some days it sucked, most of the time it was tolerable, and it was often pretty fun. I also learned something about my own intestinal fortitude that school never would've taught me.

I think it is difficult for someone from my parent's generation, who had so many benefits (no offshore competition, defined benefits pensions, lifetime pensions, etc) to understand how tough life is now. You hear about it, but until you struggle with it it is difficult to know.

1. Work while you study: why work a part time job for $X and go to school part time, when you could finish school in half the time by going full time and spend the remaining time working for $2X? Work study is generally counterproductive.

2. $65K is still a lot of debt. Lots of my peers have that and $20K/yr jobs.

The truth is, there simply aren't many good options for today's young adults. There are a handful of fields that can pay well with a degree, but then you have the risk that you won't be able to finish. And there are fewer fields where you can work without a degree and get paid well. Even in CS, a field where you usually can get jobs without a degree, I've roughly capped out my pay without a degree at age 29.

So I didn't give up any potential salary earnings I didn't already give up by going in the first place.

My point is that college can still be a good option for lots of people, they just need to focus on the cost/ROI. The horrors stories that we hear about are typically from a dumb kid who went to an out of state or private school, got a a 'general' degree and had no job qualifications. Then they were shocked people were t just handing them money.

I've yet to hear a story about a kid that did two years at a community college, finished up their BS in engineering, and then had life crippling problems with their debt.

Is this not the case anymore?

Although the classes themselves took half a day (started at 7:30, finished at 13:00) the coursework we had to do was incredibly high, teachers never coordinated, they just assumed that you had all free time of the world.

In one semester I had to quit my job, and slept to little that I got incredibly sick, my apartment reeked sugar, because I was drinking coca-cola and energy drinks so fast that empty bottles were piling up near my computer, I slept on average 4 hours per day, and went from 110kg to 125kg

And mind you, this was to do coursework, NOT any kind of paying work, when I finished university my net worth was incredibly negative, right now it STILL is negative, I am living with my parents right now to dedicate 100% of my income to debt paying, and still don't see any perspective of actually paying it (specially because when I consider the past year or two, the average INTEREST I had to pay, was higher than my average income).

But in Brazil you can't ask for bankruptcy, ever... In US Student Loans can't be rid of with bankruptcy, but you CAN make another loan, pay the student loans, and THEN go bankrupt... in Brazil this loophole doesn't exist.

And Brazil has a incredibly high interest rate, credit card interest is 400% year, overdraft and personal credit interest in a bank is 300+% a year, special credit for business with government subsidies are still around 100% per year. (and I never saw anyone that qualified for it).

The effect is that if you are in debt, you are screwed... and if you HAVE money, investing in any business is stupid idea, specially with our high inflation (currently about 11% per year), it makes much more sense to loan to the government (that currently will happily absorb it, and pay interest that is usually at least 14.25% year + inflation), so noone invest in creating business anyway, so you never find jobs, startups are non-existing, creating a startup is bad idea, and so on...

At the institution I attended, FT was 12-18 credit hours in a semester. You could take up to 21 with permission from the administration and your professors, and up to 24 with permission + paying additionally for the 3 credits.

The difference between 12 credits and 18 in terms of work load and scheduling hassles is astronomical yet both are full time. Our professions always said 1 hour in class = 3 hours outside of class. Assuming that held true (it rarely did on an individual class level but on a semester level it was pretty close), 12 credits = 48 hours a week and 18 = 72.

If you're only taking 12-15 credits you probably should have a 10-15 hour/week job. If you're taking 18 I wouldn't even do work study on campus for gas money, you just won't have the time unless you want no social life.

My engineering classes all preached 4 hours of study for every hour of class- I don't think I averaged two for most classes and graduated above a 3.2 GPA. Except EE courses and physics. I had to buckle down for those.

Challenging programs have relatively little to do with it. It's almost 100% about the prestigious schools and the networks that come along with them: the old "it's not what you know; it's who you know," deal.

> All that said, I wish someone would have shown me the value of a really high-end education and helped me attain one.

Education is always valuable. It's schooling that's not always worthwhile.

I didn't go to a particularly prestigious school. I didn't know anybody at the job I got as a new grad. I individually made more money in my first year out of university than most families did mid-career. I was not unusual among those in my program.

A degree in engineering pays off in part because it's a challenging program.

The degree is worthless. The wretched right-wing connections are even more worthless.

If you aren't going to meet that bar, then it's probably not worth it to go to college because you're probably not going to learn much.