I did exactly that. Lived at home, attended college, and also worked nearly full time to pay for school. I graduated with nearly no debt, and the the day after graduating college moved out with a good job.

Not sure how that makes someone a coward or afraid to go outside their small circle. Some of the people I went to HS with all went to the same big state school so they could actually stay in the their small circle. Once done, they moved back to where we grew up, are still in the same small circle, and have/had large college debt to go along with it.

I haven't seen anyone from HS in over 15 years, and have lived and traveled all over. I would be cautious to paint people making financially prudent decisions with such a broad brush.

Like the person playing in a local band, telling me "I moved out" - me: "nice, but how can you afford that" - "I work as a tutor" - "that 400€ is not supporting your apartment" - "oh, no, my father is paying for that". yessss.

I would really liked to have moved out too for the aforementioned reasons (lived in a small city next to uni-town, where there's basically nothing happening and except for my small circle, I didn't find HS people very interesting...), but basically all the great experiences cost money and/or time of which there is none, if you really do it in a financially sound way while studying something MINTy... (and I doubt that feeling like a slave is the glorious experience).

Note: probably I was a coward in the beginning for not moving away, because then I could have gotten state-assistance and cheap student dorms... Though that's kind of a though choice, when your uni of choice is basically the academically best around in your country... (and frankly, at this point I didn't have a lot of people telling me, that this not necessarily is, what you want in a bachelors degree...)

I think many of the people who weren’t well off only afforded this experience by taking on debt.

Besides, there’s more ways than just college to have that “real” growth experience. Military, mission work, peace corps. Hell, I’d even argue these are more of an experience because they aren’t built on the somewhat artificial backdrop of universities that can insulate you from the “real” world without all the debt downside

Military has actual big price in people who join it. Veterans do have issues to adjust back to civilian society. Which is basically euphemism for whole host of serious issues. Military families divorce often and their famillies do have actual issues due to frequent moving or partner long term away. Domestic violence rates are high.

The whole growth experience is leaving quite a few people in difficult situations after.

And it rubs me wrong when it is framed as "less insulated the 'real' world. It is as insulated as it gets. Or as "real life" or "real growth" as opposed to "not real life" in quite common experience of either college or job or having familly that functions in more normal way.

It is called sacrifice for a reason.

This is true. It’s not a cakewalk for everybody. But the dichotomy of some of those difficult situations is they can both foster growth and simultaneously stress is an individual. I think some would say that stress/sacrifice is a necessary precursor for that growth. Unfortunately, sometimes the stress exceeds the individuals coping mechanisms.

The book Tribe gives an interesting perspective on military service. The author wrote it after his personal growth (and stress) from creating the documentary Restrepo about the outpost of the same name in Afghanistan.

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2020/02...

And it is not in your individual controll to engage with experiences or not. Being soldier is opposite of making individual choices. You do a lot in groups, group conformity and group cohesion are bug things, you get told what to do.

I don’t know your age or experience, but what you said doesn’t ring true to me. If you’re deployed to a non-combat zone you don’t just get a day off every couple weeks. You have liberty most nights and weekends, at least if you’re not actually stationed on a ship.

It’s no different than college. You can be the person who just holes up and plays video games, or just go out in the same groups without exposing yourself to different ideas, or you can get out of your comfort zone. I’ve known people who made the most of their free time by regularly volunteering in local clinics/emergency rooms, lived outside of base in the city with locals, exposed themselves to local culture etc. There’s more freedom than many think. And this is coming from lower enlisted ranks of one of the branches with a reputation of being more disciplined and strict.

I think that if you have good relationships with parents, do your part in the house chores, the school nearby is actually good, there is absolutely nothing wrong with staying at home. If you cant wait till you leave the family home, then maybe it is not that you are super mature, maybe simply relationships in your family sux. Which is not a badge of honor.

To add, living outside of campus have one big advantage - freaking uninterrupted sleep time.

How dare you place judgement on other people's circumstances. Moving away from your family to immerse yourself in your studies is certainly one way to grow as a person, but far from the only way.

Maybe someone has to take care of a family member and can't realistically do that, even if they wanted to. However, taking classes while also taking care of a family member, is that a coward or someone strong?

Maybe someone already knows the path they want to take in life and they see the cost of room and board as an unnecessary expense they can instead save to buy a condo elsewhere. Is that person a coward for being focused or strong?

Maybe someone needs a familiar support network such as a strong family to thrive academically. Is that person a coward for being self aware or strong?

How many people did you meet your freshman year who you thought in the back of your mind, wow they really should have taken a gap year. All they did was waste money on tuition and room and board while they partied and failed courses. Are all these people strong for making lifelong friendships against their better judgement or cowards?

So many reasons why people chose the path they do, I could keep going on here. I would have thought someone getting a liberal arts education would be open minded to other experiences. It sounds like you judge people who not follow in your footsteps, and for that, how dare you!

this might be true of the people you know, but I hope you don't think it holds in general. at the state school I went to, room and board cost the same amount as the in-state tuition itself. for a lot of families, this is not "minimal". if your parents have a spare room and already cook dinner every night, this almost doubles the cost of your education.

if your parents treat you like an adult (ie, you control your schedule, no curfew, etc.), there's no reason why you can't get the full college experience as a commuter.

I agree that the spending time immersed in the university environment is one of the most important parts of the college experience, but you don't have to get expensively kenneled on campus to do that, just spend time on campus with interesting people and interesting organizations.

I would only suggest most people deal with on-campus housing if it is being primarily paid for by a scholarship or grant they won't have to pay back and/or their circumstances don't offer a good alternative. If you're attending a school where there is an option for family (or whatever) that can provide you with a non-distracting environment and a _short_ commute for cheap, do that for a year. Once you establish a cohort of known-reliable friends with similar needs, rent with them, or pick up a modest apartment. I will say, IMO, renting with unknown quantity randos from a campus-predator slumlord _is_ a worse option to university housing, it includes both sets of disadvantages.

I'm also of the opinion that you have a substantial number of gen-eds you still have to take (not covered by APs, etc.), and they won't be paid for by a scholarship, do a year or so at a community college. It will be cheaper and better than the university service courses - gigantic sections taught from materials outsourced to ed-tech carpetbaggers, supervised by disinterested graduate students with alarming English skills, optimized to extract tuition from kids who statistically won't make it. I say this after years of discovering my students who took their early calculus sequence at community college, embarrassingly, tend to be more mathematically literate than the ones who did it at the university. I'm not yet convinced if that is because the ones that had the maturity to do it that way are predisposed and/or usually a little older, or the quality of the early sequence at [intentionally unnamed university] are really that poor.

I suspect room and board costs what it does compared to tuition simply because putting undergrads in a big lecture just doesn’t cost all that much. In addition, the tuition for resident students gets subsidized, while the room and board generally doesn’t.

My husband and I both worked our way through college. I didn't get the social experience at school. There is nothing like working for your degree to keep you laser focused on the reason why you are going to college.

We were both reasonably paid for working class jobs as he was a machinist and I was an electronic technician. Post graduate was so much better - he in mechanical engineering and I in software engineering.

Most of our socialization came on the job. We were both lucky enough to work for great companies with wonderful people.

I went to a top-tier 4-year university, and did develop several life-long friendships, many of which have led to introductions to other people, which have further increased my social and professional circles. It'd be easy to say if I hadn't gone to college, I wouldn't have that now, and, well, that's actually true... but it's missing the point. I'd still be me, and I'd still have the same drive to meet people and take advantage of opportunities. My life would be different, certainly, but I doubt it'd be less socially fulfilling.

The one exception was they knew about me even though I didn't know about them. Halfway through one of my interviews I realized that I knew the interviewer by reputation.

Such strong words! In many countries, it is totally normal to stay at home with your parents and attend a college in your hometown, especially if it is a big enough city with many colleges.

Exactly. This comment is quite insensitive even if ignoring the tuition costs in America. There are other reasons for living at home with your parents while going to university. I personally had to do this due to severe chronic health problems. I was 100% capable of going to university full time while working part time. I just needed to be able to live at home.

In reality, required room and board (usually for freshmen) is merely a way for colleges to make money. The whole "experience" angle is a pretext, but not the real reason. I'm glad my undergrad did not require it.[1] I don't doubt some people benefit from it, but I'm sure most don't. Anecdotally, those who stayed in dorms were more likely to party a lot more and be less focused on studies - lots of distractions. I personally knew quite a few who eventually moved off campus for the sole purpose of eliminating those distractions because their grades were dropping.

[1] I did not stay with family, I paid rent in an apartment. Definitely cheaper. The amusing thing is we folks who had our own apartment generally perceived those who stayed on campus as being less mature. They had meal plans, etc, whereas we were responsible for cooking, etc. I forget what else those who lived on campus had spoon fed to them, but it went beyond just meals.

Small state schools are closer to that, but any of the bigger schools seem to think that because students get easy access to excessive amounts of cheap loans, they can be extravagant in budgeting- sports facilities, gyms, administration, etc.

I guess you could say the same for a publicly-funded system, but at least there the funding is limited and controlled. A lot of people sadly won't blink twice at taking out a larger college loan, even if it'll saddle them with crippling debt later on.

1. Anecdotal evidence that you know a few people that didn't grow up for whatever reason does not mean everyone is like that.

2. In most asian culture, people live with their parents for the entirety of life. Somehow according to you more than half the world's population is cowards. I digress because we're talking about american colleges and living in America but it still baffles me that someone educated like you would think there is nothing wrong with a stupid argument using selection bias.

As a non Asian (with an admittedly fictional Asian pseudonym) I happen to be a member of a Facebook group called Subtle Asian Traits. It’s an extremely popular group, largely made up of young high school to late-20s Asian-Americans (and expats living in other western countries). The most common and persistent theme is the tension between westernized Asian kids and their traditional parents. These kids are desperate to get away from this controlling influence. They find temporary relief and camaraderie by joking about how extremely strict their parents are.

I dunno honestly. Maybe it is different elsewhere, but the college was the most uniform place I have been at. I am not complaining, I liked the experience and did fit in. But it was not diversity in literally any sense of the word.

While the other was a generic and bland sadness that suck the life out of the room and "binge drinking" is the closest form to a local culture and even things which should be a source of culture like the arts are just another box to be checked on somebody's list for posturing's sake.

Was it religious school which went secular in practice or offically? I know some who suspect that the number one reason for that blandness is former religious school that lost the fundamentalist character which drove out the heterodox and was then left with a despeciated monocultural void.

I think for better or for worse what actually drives the selection of people determines the resulting culture and diversity.

But pretty much everyone around you was, well, college student of roughly same age. And plus everyone was focused on math, computer science or something similar. The university itself had other fields of study, obviously, but they had own building so practically you rarely really interacted with each other.

The city it was in obviously had sports clubs, entertainment and whatnot where you could meet non-college students or people of different age or people who study something different. You was not forced to close yourself into some kind university bubble.

But university itself necessary collects similar people at one place. Because everyone there has to be college student and has similar choice of study.

I don't know when the last time you've lived in dorms was, but they're glorified summer camps for adolescents. Having meal plans and an RA aren't exactly badges of courage.

If you don't come from means or have parents that will help pay for you to move out, then taking on living expenses to study is not exactly a good financial choice.

Personally, I wouldn't change it for the world. Student loans covered the expenses (which as you only pay as a small percentage of your wage above a certain amount and are written off after 30 years if you haven't paid them aren't worth worry about too much), and it had both academic and social benefits. Supervisions often started after 18:00 and occasionally ran on til 23:00, and you could have lectures at 9:00 the next morning, which would be a pain with a commute, and you had easier access to resources (libraries, computing facilities).

I threw myself into the social side, having been fairly reclusive during secondary school - I felt much more comfortable doing so living on site, and I got involved in extra curricular activities I wouldn't have done if I had a commute. I had close friends studying law, natural sciences, economics, engineering, medicine, English, anthropology, and music (I studied computer science), and developed a better understanding of and appreciation for these subjects as a result (I remember discussing Roman law somehow becoming a bizarrely frequent subject in first year). I'm still in almost daily contact with the friendship group I formed there, even ten years on. I did a Master's afterwards, and lived at home, and I never felt as connected to either my studies or my peer group.

Still, I certainly wouldn't call anyone who doesn't do that a coward, and think you could get a similar or better experience living off campus at home. It just turned out to be the right step for me[1] - it pushed me enough out of my comfort zone to grow without leaving me feeling lost - and gave me a much better university experience as a result.

[1] And it was effectively required by my university - you have to live within three miles of the city centre, required permission to live outside of college, and you weren't allowed to keep a car within ten miles of the city centre without permission (https://www.proctors.cam.ac.uk/motor-control)

Your experience is true for some and false for others. That's the nature of anecdotes. I moved off campus to save a couple bucks and be "independent" and "spartan" but I missed out on a lot of stuff. I could have been closer to extracurriculars, I could have joined a frat. I get that not everyone has the resources for this stuff, but many do, and we're missing out on something if they can't experience it.

This is part of the reason why I think the level of investment needs to remain high. College performs a complex task. It can't just be replaced by coursera.

I do think that in-person lectures, course design and such need a total overhaul. Modern technology does change the equation. In-person lectures no longer make sense, for example. That doesn't mean in-person college doesn't make sense.

In theory, you could take your college costs and spend them more wisely elsewhere. Internet age gurus like Peter Thiel, Seth Godin & others have been advocating this for 20 years.

Want to learn business? Take $50k out of the $200k price tag of a fancy college and start a business with a few similarly minded people. Pay a seasoned business person to advise you. After 4 years, you will know much more about business. Same for software engineering, etc. Same for side-effects like networking horizon expansion and everything.

In practice, all that money (whether parental savings to student loans) is tied up with college. The social capital which allows anyone to spend 4 years on abstract "betterment" is tied to college. The safety nets keeping you on course to graduate aren't there.

It's theoretically possible, easy even. In practice, this level of determined heterodoxy is a 1-in-a-thousand thing. Very unlikely to be chosen and very unlikely to bee seen through by a 20-year old.

People operate within structure. We are orders of magnitude less independent than we imagine.

(Also I think the parent meant that the 20-year-old would take $50k from their parents, not $200k. But agree that $50k is likely out of reach for most people in that situation as well.)

Life works this way because life works this way. Social structures exist to reinforce the status quo, and these are only changed incrementally, over a long period of time. Potential college-goers who want to jump the queue and do something radical right now, even if it's a much better thing, are going to have a hard time unless they have well-off parents who are willing to take a shot on them.

If you think about yourself at 18... how likely would you have been to seek out social clubs, conferences, or hobby groups on your own?

I think that would be a great strategy! Spending the money on hobby groups, conferences etc could be put on a resume!

Now thinking of all kinds of options that would give better experience...it seems driving to these might be the bottleneck. But surely there are ones that can subject a student to different opinion/people etc without needing to commute. Heck even a good internship could replace dorm life, and would actually PAY the student.

This is also a description of summer camp.