Barrack Obama = Jimmy Carter 2.0

[Chanain]

Fees in the US are crazy.

It does go a bit beyond that. I wouldn't go so far as thrawn in saying it's a scam 'created by the government', but he's not totally off about the tuition increases being indirectly subsidized by a favourable legal infrastructure for lending. The US is a particularly dramatic example of tuition costs being disproportionate to the value added by the degree, where universities and tuition costs are subject to very little regulation, despite these indirect subsidies.

In Canada, it's less dramatic. We have the same kind of indirect subsidies, and more - domestic students have their tuition significantly subsidized by the government directly - but the trade-off is that most universities are public institutions with tuition hikes strictly regulated for most programs. Even so, outside of a handful of programs (most notably, engineering and medicine), new grads even with professional degrees find themselves in oversaturated job markets with tens of thousands (and sometimes over a hundred thousand) in student debt. The problem - in both countries - is a deep disconnection between the education system and the job market - you have schools that manipulate their job placement statistics to make their degrees seem more valuable than they are, trying to increase enrollment into programs with declining job opportunities, thus generating a mismatch between the availability of labour and the available jobs - and charging these students massive amounts of money to do it.

[brandonc204]

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[Palem]

^ on that note, school choice should be based more heavily on total cost of attendance than the name or place.

The one exception to this is if a student gets into a school like MIT or Harvard. Hate them or love them, these types of schools open a lot of doors otherwise unavailable to students. (such as having supreme court justices and senators give lectures on campus to law students, or attending class with students with a lot of political and business connections)

On your top point, that's the biggest reason I attended my university over Ohio state University. It would have been great to attend and have that prestigious university behind my name (I know it's not Harvard or anything, but it's a fairly prestigious school), and I've been a fan of OSU sports my whole life, but the cost just didn't match what I would have been getting.

On your second point, I know that at least a few highly prestigious schools will offer free rides to students that are good enough to be there but live in a household below a certain income. They really want you to be there if it's at all possible

[Chanain]

For instance, without a computer engineering or computer science degree, good luck getting a high paying job with a major computer/tech company in Cupertino, CA. Google has a reputation for hiring people who learned how to code in their basement, but those people are still more of a rarity. For the vast majority of people, standardized training is required.

This is a relatively unique feature of the IT industry, to an extent. The top IT companies are looking for excellence. One of the best ways of showing excellence is to have performed well in a top IT program - and no, an IT degree from the University of Wyoming will probably NOT get you a foot in the door in silicon valley.

My brother - a graduate from inarguably Canada's premier school for computer science - works for Google, and used to work for Research in Motion (BlackBerry) as a manager. He once remarked to me that his team included people with post-doctoral degrees in computers and mathematics, and high school drop-outs, doing essentially the same job. These are the genius types.

But yes, if you're not some kind of genius, then teaching yourself to code in your basement won't only fail to get you a job at Google, but also won't really help you land the less-than-premier IT jobs - which the computer degree from the University of Wyoming might.

^ on that note, school choice should be based more heavily on total cost of attendance than the name or place.

The one exception to this is if a student gets into a school like MIT or Harvard. Hate them or love them, these types of schools open a lot of doors otherwise unavailable to students. (such as having supreme court justices and senators give lectures on campus to law students, or attending class with students with a lot of political and business connections)

Quality of program is important, too, and goes a bit beyond just 'ivy league'. There are certain schools which will garner name recognition within a specific industry, even if they don't have the 'prestige' of the ivy league. Strangely enough, the relationship of cost to quality in the US appears to be parabolic in some cases. If you go to an 'okay' school, you're probably not paying a whole lot. If you go to a top school, you're probably paying through the nose (unless you can get scholarships or bursaries). But if you go to the worst schools, some of them charge tuition close to the scale of the Ivy League. I've seen this in law schools, at least - the schools who take the absolute bottom students (i.e. who can't get in anywhere else) charge a massive amount of money...because hey, we know if you had options, you wouldn't be coming here, so we charge what we want. (I've occasionally come across lawyers from these schools. It shows. Quickly. But then again, there are only two reasons a Canadian goes to the US for law school - because they got into a really great school there, or because they couldn't get into Canadian law schools at all.)

[brandonc204]

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