Even in the US college isn't necessarily expensive if your parents can't afford it. I received extremely generous financial aid at MIT, so it was essentially free.

"if your parents can't afford it" is, unfortunately, a pretty hard statement to make true, at least from what I've heard from friends.

Yep, I'm sure every school is like MIT.

Many of the really good ones have the same policy - I know Harvard definitely does.

Many of the rich ones have the same policy

Consider Harvard, MIT's, and NU's endowments. I attend Northeastern, where the CS college is excellent, particularly the opportunities to do research with programming language rockstars like Matthias Felleisen (The Little Schemer) and Olin Shivers (best known for his SCSH acknowledgements page).

The educational caliber of a school doesn't necessarily translate to deep pockets.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology | $7.982 billion (US dollars) Harvard University | $25.66 billion (US dollars) Northeastern University | $486.9 million (US dollars) (2009 estimates)

Harvard has 52 times more money than NU.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=endowment+of+MIT%2C+Har...

edit: I keep expecting HN comments to turn _foo_ into italics.

I can't find the endowment comparison relavant. Harvard's endowment includes Harvard Medical which needs a relatively big financial backend and have no relevancy to the education of a CS undergrad.

I know little of the way medical schools operate, why and to what degree does Harvard Med require disproportionately large funding from the endowment?

The cost of attendance for all of Northeastern's undergraduate students for one year is 137% of its endowment, while for Harvard, it's cost of attendance for all of its undergraduate students for one year is, rounding up, 2% of its endowment [1].

It's completely unfeasible for NU to give out free tuition, they'd be in the whole for 100s of millions of dollars. Harvard, on the other hand, could take 2% of its endowment to pay for its students and still have 9% [2] of growth (that's nearly 2.5 billion dollars) to spend. Even if we assume the dismal 5 year average return (which includes 2008-2009's economic shitfest) Harvard would still have 3% or about 700 million dollars of growth to spend (which is to say, their growth is equivalent to Northeastern's endowment).

I could not find any figure on the amount of money which disappears into Harvard Medical school, but if you could dig up those statistics, then we'd be able to see what sort of growth Harvard's endowment would need to maintain.

That said, Northeastern's endowment is hopelessly small, while, with Harvard's endowment, it seems feasible to pay for undergrads, unless Harvard Med's net losses are more than 2.5 billion dollars (or, more reasonably 1 billion dollars).

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(harvard+tuition+*+harv...

[2] http://cdn.wds.harvard.edu/hmc/2010_endowment_report_10_15_2...

edit: add "137% of endowment" to 2nd P, remove obviously "It's obviously completely" from 3rd P, note that NU's endowment is about equal to Harvard's growth over a really bad five years, and formatting

The fact that one can even get into Harvard or MIT puts said individual leaps and bounds above the average student.

Saying that some 1% of kids can get an affordable education at top schools is really quite irrelevant.

Among the top-tier CS schools, there's a mix of private and public. Several of those private schools (MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc.) have extremely large endowments that help make college affordable for those that get in.

If you fall in the dreaded "middle-ground" for financial aid, your options for an affordable education are somewhat more limited, but nonetheless existent.

A rough estimate for the United States could be that ~30 states have good to excellent public universities.

The group that seems to be in the toughest spot are the students from states without excellent public universities and in a bad financial position for aid or grant money.

I wasn't just talking about the cream of the crop.

If you can't get into any of the private schools that will satisfy all of your need, and you're not willing to make up the difference on debt, there are many excellent public schools, (Berkeley, UCLA, UMCP, Urbana Champaign, the list goes on), none of which have very high tuition.

Many of the really good ones are also public. In engineering, for example, many of the top 10 schools are public - a lot of which don't have big endowments or are in states with broken policy.

My school is a city college in NYC, pretty great, and costs roughly $5000 yearly. So yeah, I'm pretty happy with it.

I know many great hackers who studied CS too, but almost none of them are great programmers _because_ they studied CS. They had to become great programmers on their own.

I wouldn't say that my CS degree taught me to program, but it gave me a fundamental understanding of things that would otherwise be black boxes, which has helped me to estimate the correct fork in the road on numerous occasions. This understanding also helps me write more performant code than I might otherwise. So I would say that it's still useful. It gave me a good mental framework to build off of.

They also chose to study CS on their own; I don't see the separation. Perhaps these individuals would have been mediocre programmers had they not studied CS.

I'm not trying to say that CS degrees aren't valuable. Just that being a programmer and Computer Scientist are different things. Just because many great hackers are also Computer Scientists doesn't imply that they were great hackers because they studied CS.

Most of the great hackers I know have been hacking since they were kids. This doesn't mean studying CS didn't add anything, just that studying CS alone won't make you a great hacker. Just a Computer Scientist.

A programmer and a computer scientist may not be 1-1 but there is significant overlap. Correlation may not directly imply causation but you can't discount it.

Whereas being a "hacker" has very little overlap with either programming or Computer Science. You can be a "hacker" in any number of disciplines.

If you want to be a great Computer Scientist, learn Computer Science but you'll also most likely have to learn some programming.

If you want to be a great programmer, do a lot of programming but you'll also most likely have to learn computer science.

If you want to be a great hacker, figure out what that means to you.

yep, this is cause and correlation misconception. are good programmers more likely to study computer science? or does studying computer science make you more likely to be a good programmer? my unqualified hunch, and what i think you're suggesting, is the former.

You got it. That's what I was going for.

Here in Argentina, the best colleges are the public ones. And they are free. I study at the National Technology University (UTN) (it's a public university that focuses on Engineering degrees), and we pay an optional fee of 20 pesos argentinos (about 5 dollars) per semester.

I believe college is about opening your mind and adquiring a framework for your life. "Learning to learn" is possibly the best description.

Well, Systems Engineering at the UTN particularly makes you lose a bunch of time teaching you dated ways of solving problems like using the Rational Unified Process, with diagrams, and a whole documentation framework that is completely outdated, instead of teaching you the basics.

They teach you _their way_ of solving problems, and their way is the only way that exists for them. I found this particularly disturbing.

I don't know what year you are attending, but third year left me with a bitter feeling of lost time, that I had to recoup by myself learning outside the uni.

"I believe college is about opening your mind and adquiring a framework for your life.". Totally right.

College isn't a place to learn how to do your work. This you will need to choose and learn on your own, since there is a plenty of options.

College is a place to you see how life works, to see all your options.

> - "College is expensive": Pretty US-centric point. It's very affordable in Canada and most other countries.

Browsing some Canadian universities, they don't seem all that much cheaper than US State Schools. They might be cheaper on average adjusted for quality, but that's a really hard thing to measure. For example SUNY Binghamton tuition and fees total $7,216 for in-state residents. That's cheaper than University of Toronto ($10,903). And many students start with 2 years of community college which is even cheaper and avoids some of the other big expenses (like room and board)

There are a lot of ridiculously expensive school in the US, but there are also a lot of schools in the US, period.

Not to put too much weight on these University "rankings" but I would say that the two schools you cited aren't exactly comparable. The University of Toronto consistently ranks top 40 in the world. Again, not to discount other schools and what students are capable of at any institution, but "quality adjusted" I think Canada is a pretty sweet deal.

As a national student at UofT, it comes out to about $27K over 4 years. About $5K for the first year, then it goes up to about $7K once you choose your specialist or double majors. This is not taking into account any scholarships or grants (which are admittedly harder to get than in the US). International students are more expensive.

Compare this to Stanford, where your base tuition over 4 years is expected to surpass $150K.

> Compare this to Stanford

Why compare it to Stanford? Stanford is an international private university. University of Toronto is a public university, like SUNY at Binghamton. SUNY Binghamton is cheaper.

I chose UofT because that's the school I went to and I know it's in the Top 3 CS schools in Canada. I chose Stanford because that's the data I had on-hand and I know it's in the Top 3 CS schools in the US.

What I mean to say is: Compare the costs of attending the best Computer Science schools in Canada to the best Computer Science schools in the United States.

Or even compare international adjacent ranking schools. Here's a ranking list I found, you're welcome to find another: http://universityreport.net/world-university-rankings-2011-c...

It would make more sense to compare it to UC Berkeley which is tied for #1 in CS in the USA (and maybe the world?) It is about $10K a year if you're in state. Half of the 10 best CS schools in the USA are public universities and cost < $12K a year (in state.)

Fair point, thank you. I'm not familiar with tuition costs at UC Berkeley. At the same time, this points against the "College is expensive" mentality.

The college is expensive mentality is certainly real. "US-centric" just isn't an especially accurate characterization.

The mentality comes from a few places:

1. Discussion of US Private Universities like Harvard, Yale, MIT, Cornell, and Stanford, many of which have international reputations and attract students from all over the world, or the elite Liberal Arts teaching colleges like Williams, Amherst, Colby, Hamilton, and Colgate which attract the wealthiest Americans.

2. The real cost of college, in general, in terms of where the money goes (salaries, technology, infrastructure, etc.) rather than the sticker price, which may be subsidized.

3. People who rule out state schools for spurious reasons, as if failing to go to Stanford or CMU somehow means that you might as well not bother at all. (And many other reasons, high school kids are heavily marketed by universities and the kids often make the decisions themselves without thinking much about the finances.)

Perhaps it's a local bias, but U of T seems to be a fair bit... better... CS school than SUNY Binghamton.

(I'm a grad of another Ontario public university.)

I don't really know. I just picked it because I'm from New York and it was the first good school that popped into my head. You could compare with UC Berkeley instead, which costs about $10,000 to California residents and I hear has a pretty good CS program.

Yes, there are a lot of ridiculously expensive schools in the US, but not all schools are expensive and there are a lot of places where you can learn about computing fundamentals, algorithms, data structures, languages, operating systems, architecture, database theory and networks.

To be fair, Binghamton is cheaper than almost all state schools, and substantially cheaper than most if not all the Big10 schools.

This estimate is accurate. I decided to total my tuition for a computer engineering degree at UBC (started in 2005) and it comes to $26,797 - before tax, without housing, and all other mandatory school fees included. Those who are starting now will probably pay a few more $K in the coming 4 years.

> This is not taking into account any scholarships or grants

Not to mention the time-value of money.

(Sorry for the nit-picking, but in an conversation where not going to university is accepted as a valid option, I feel it's important to measure the costs correctly.)

Canadian schools are expensive, and getting more expensive FAST. I've been a student at four now, and unless you get a scholarship (only really possible at the grad level), they will put any student at least $40k in debt, unless money comes from somewhere else.

"undergrad is more about learning how to learn" I was told that exact thing at a job interview once and it rings pretty true.

I also think that without college, I would be at best a mediocre programmer. I never would have been pushed to the limits that I was in school. I never would get a job to push me to those limits without proving myself first.

I bet there are many undergrads who would like to end up between WordPress "gluer" and JIT programming language author. (Personally, the thought of computer research seems extremely boring, so I'll let someone else have that fun). For these people, a degree in Math could be a good alternative to a CS degree. In my case, I had terrible CS professors but not enough money to move away to a better university. Luckily the Math program at my university is composed of excellent professors with extremely challenging content. Proofs have taught me how to think in different ways, greatly aiding my critical thinking abilities. Additionally, a degree in Math could help you become a more specialized programmer in an area such as finance or biology.

TL;DR If you're a CS undergrad thinking of dropping out, give your math department a chance.

I have to agree about Math as an alternative. While I was not a great Mathematician ( a few classes I barely managed) but the content is very interesting and often mind boggling. Stictly CS would have been maybe more direct for my choosen job but the cool thing about Math degrees is that since a huge chunk of prereqs for comp sci degrees are math courses, you can probably take most course in the CS dept you want. And you get to learn something just for fun (aka advanced math to me was fun).

Agree that Proofs, logical thinking, creative thinking are all things that can be learned in a Math degree. Those skills are what I use the most at work.

or maybe give a math minor a chance! I ended up majoring in both Computer Science and Theoretical Mathematics in my undergraduate institution - and while I feel that Real Analysis did not directly help my programming skills, it's definitely made me a lot more comfortable with proofs and being able to make sense of things like approximation algorithms for NP-Complete problems. I also concur that it's improved my general thinking prowess, since at the end of the day, math is just reasoning about well defined systems, which definitely has many parallels to computer science.

Yeah, on the first point here in England there was outrage recently when it was proposed that universities here could raise their fees from the max of £3,000 (~$5,000) to £9,000 (~$15,000) per year.

I'm rather surprised that there isn't even more outrage in England that the very same universities are free for Scottish students - i.e. they get all their fees paid by the state even if they go to English universities where English students will be paying £9K a year.

[NB I am Scottish - but this strikes me as deeply unfair.]