Posted on 05/07/2013 7:08:26 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The U.S. is home to some of the greatest colleges and universities in the world. But with the student debt load at more than $1 trillion and youth unemployment elevated, when assessing the value of a college education, that’s only one part of the story.
Former Secretary of Education William Bennett, author of Is College Worth It, sat down with The Daily Ticker on the sidelines of the Milken Institute's 2013 Global Conference to talk about whether college is worth it.
“We have about 21 million people in higher education, and about half the people who start four year colleges don’t finish,” Bennett tells The Daily Ticker. “Those who do finish, who graduated in 2011 - half were either unemployed or radically underemployed and in debt.”
That average student loan balance for a 25-year-old is $20,326, according to the Federal Reserve of New York. Student debt is second largest source of U.S. household debt, after only mortgages.
Bennett assessed the “return on investment” for the 3500 colleges and universities in the country. He found that returns were positive for only 150 institutions.
He found college is “worth it” if you get into a top tier university like Stanford, or study an in-demand field like nuclear engineering at even a lower tier school.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
I think it matters more what you study than where you study. To an extent, of course. When I went back to school later in life, my wife and I did a cost/benefit and ROI analysis. My lost wages while I was in school and the cost of school were somewhere in the $90k range. When I got out of school, I made about $20k more than when I went in, and that quickly increased. It paid for itself within about 3 or 4 years. But, that was an accounting degree and the resultant CPA license. The other option I considered was education, but the ROI was not worth it.
RE: Harvard, Yale and Stanford charge zero tuition for any student whose parents make less than 100k.
So, how much does the student pay when his/her parents make $102,000?
If you want an app that runs almost as fast as assembly language then C is the way to go. If an app is handling extremely high volume and throughput C is the best.
Employers are NOT ALLOWED TO.
Since some Supreme Court decisions back in the 1970's (a decade full of bad SC decisions), notably the Duke Power decision, employers are not allowed to use written tests in their hiring decisions, where such tests have "disparate impact" (more blacks getting low scores than whites).
Prior to that point, employers would take people out of high school, give them some tests, and assign them in the company accordingly.
Congrats. You did it about as well as it can be done; like Clint Eastwood said, "You adapted, you improvised, and you overcame." You are a rare one indeed, and exemplary. Even if you made a few missteps along the way (and who doesn't?), you had great foresight and could probably write a useful article on thriving and hustling in a legitimate field of endeavor. Blessings.
And THERE is the invalid assumption that I'm driving at. Many optimizing compilers can get to that "almost as fast as assembler" -- in fact, Ada has achieved that as well (source), and you get things like array range-checking and compile-time error-checking in addition if you're using Ada. (And no, not all range-checks need to propagate to runtime: consider indexing into an array(character) with a variable of a subtype ranged 'a'..'z'.)
If an app is handling extremely high volume and throughput C is the best.
C makes you dependent on way too many assumptions & limitations -- the reason that "parallel computing" is such a big deal is because C & C++ don't handle it at all (Ada has the task construct, and so the problem has been solved for over 30-years) without some sort of library support, which is derived from the OS, which [in many cases] is developed to POSIX compliance (which is specifically a UNIX-ism, and also heavily dependent on the C-philosophies). The whole mess in the industry is because of that very mentality.
Furthermore, it must be asked why the insurance and banking (esp the banking, with the volume of electronic transaction throughput) still use COBOL (link1, link2) if C is so great for throughput. The answer is partly that saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", the other part being that C lacks one of the abilities that COBOL has: a 30 year old non-trivial program-text can correctly compile on a vastly different system.
Can’t quite get the knack of C programming? I get it....
They won't.
I can hack it, it's just that ALL of my professional work has involved primarily maintenance -- therefore I absolutely loathe the "write-only nature"* of C-style languages (and RegExes, but that's another rant).
Moreover, I'm quire interested in systems-level programming (compilers and OSes especially) and rather disappointed to see how "the C mentality" has impacted these fields for the worse. (Take a look at re-hosting compilers, there's a surprising number that are dependent on C for no good reason other than the historical [i.e. it was originally implemented in C].)
* -- Meaning the philosophy that is only just not actively hostile towards maintenance.
I didn’t get my degree until I was 46, and that’s an Associates. I’ve never been unemployed more than 30 days my entire life and I make 6 figures.
College is a waste of time and money unless you’re studying a hard science.
That simply isn’t true.
My education is one of my accomplishments and it opens doors.
bttt
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