Beating the College Bubble

An anonymous reader writes "The real estate bubble is long gone. Oil prices are sliding down. Are we in an education bubble? The author of Beating the College Bubble says so. He's written a short, simple guide to avoiding the crushing college debt that he thinks is about to bankrupt all of us. Just as easy loans encouraged people to dream big and buy a McMansion, big college loans are tempting students with too much Comp Lit and Frat Parties. When they graduate, the debt is so hefty that the students are stuck living in their parents' basement for 10 years until they've paid it all off. I can tell you from personal experience that there's some real truth to the hangover. The beer headache is gone after a week, but the monthly payments just keep going." Read below for the rest of cdog40's review Beating the College Bubble author C. Davis pages 140 publisher Edububble Press rating 9 reviewer cdog40 ISBN 1438235909 summary Don't go to college. Save your money. The author spells out why he wrote the book: his kids are graduating soon and he wants to do the right thing. Should he encourage them to spend big on an impressive, Cadillac-grade education or should he be really cheap so they can be free of loans? Which will help the kids?

Chapter 2 works through a handful of examples of people who spent too much on education. Of course he brings up the fact that all of the big guys in the computer business skipped out on college after a few courses. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates started the trend and now it looks like Mark Zuckerberg is following in the famous footsteps.

The author writes out that some of the people in Chapter 2 really did benefit from their education. The lawyers and the doctors who sell their credentials did very well with fancy diplomas.

Chapter 3 is a largely obvious summary of what we all know: lots of college courses don't have any real use in the world. It's not as bad as jokes like: What do you call an English major? (Waiter!) The problem is that the Internet is very good at exporting bits and most college degrees specialize in manipulating bits. The Internet can and will ship this work to the lowest-wage countries in the world. So if you're interested in making money by manipulating bits, the Internet is going to cut you off at your knees. The real secret to making money he says is getting a career in something like sewer maintenance because that can't be exported despite what that famous Senator says about the Internet just being a bunch of pipes.

Chapter 4 is a great piece that explains where the money is going: into the pockets of the college presidents. Many of them make more than a million dollars a year in salary. Well, that's not all true. Some of it is going into the big, expensive buildings. Apparently long ago, students put on shows without fancy state-of-the-art, high-tech arts complexes. They just used an auditorium. No longer. Schools love to spend money on big-name architects. There's a good mention made of the high price tag, the bar, and the leaky roof at MIT's Stata Center.

Chapter 5 is a kind of a nice guy section added so the author couldn't be accused of being completely cynical and nasty. It points out that most schools aren't just spending the cash on the president's new yacht, but on things the students use like fancy dorms and swanky exercise rooms. I know this is true of my school. The dorms are much better. You can't even see the mortar between the cinder blocks any longer. He's still annoyed by this because all of the fancy features pump up the tuition bill.

Chapter 6 is where the book starts to get useful. He talks about how to negotiate for better terms on the debt or how to avoid picking up too much. You can pretty much skip Chapter 7 and move right on to Chapters 8 and 9 which describe how to save money by getting cut rate degrees or skipping college altogether.

I'm not sure whether I buy all of the techniques. He suggests that internet forums like Slashdot are more informative than a college classroom, something I'm not sure I believe. Yes, there's more discussion and the moderation system does a good job of shutting up that bossy know-it-all in the front row, but it would be nice to have a professor. I guess that's what they mean when we're supposed to read the article before commenting. Hah. No one did at my school either.

There are good ones. He tells of low-cost degree programs at most schools. You can save 80% of the price of going to Harvard, for instance. I think he's pretty honest about this because he does point out that you lose something when you take the cheap route. But freedom is just another word for nothing left to pay on your loans.

The book's website is trying to make the book interactive by posting new news stories and alternative solutions for college. It listed the new School of Everything as an alternative.

This is where the meat of the book lies. The only way to avoid getting hurt by a bursting bubble is to get out early. This book made me think long and hard about college. You can't go back and do a scientific experiment because you can only live life once. But I do think that's how he put it. We're really in love with the idea of college that we'll spend anything. It's like when you fall head over heels over some beautiful girl that you don't even know. Then you run up your credit card on an expensive meal to impress her only to find out that she's kind of snobby or flakey or just not interested in the right things (PS3, BitTorrent, Android, Erlang etc). When the bill comes a month later, you feel kind of dumb. This book is trying to help the next generation avoid that headache.

You can purchase Beating the College Bubble from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Re:Why not?

[kz45]

"No terrorist in Guantanamo (or Afghanistan, for that matter) could ever do this much damage to the country, and yet none of those responsible will ever be executed, waterboarded, or undergo"

This is true. They should have been arrested, but instead, we hire them as new leaders of our country.

Obama received the third highest in campaign contributions.

Barney Frank should also be investigated.

You mean leftist economist

[unassimilatible]

That would explain why college education is less expensive per capita, and of comparable quality, and free across much of Europe. Oh, wait...

Not sure what your point is here. Mine is that when the government tinkers with a market in a capitalist economy, bad results often happen. Social democracies in Europe are different. We actually have a pretense of a free market in the US, or at least we did until recently. Lead weights are good for diving but not hot air balloons.

Any economist worth his salt will also tell you that giving out government loans to private institutions that exist purely to make a profit will always lead to price increases, while service industries like education, health care, local utilities, etc, are almost always better served by a single entity, regionally operated, that has no profit motive.

Nonsense, you mean leftist economists believe this. K-12 public school education costs twice as much as private schools per pupil in the US, and private schools do a lot better. If anything, the US needs more competition in K-12, like Belgium has done. The cost of healthcare in the US involves a lot of factors that are not present in social democracies (no rationing, lawsuits, among others), and for those covered have much better healthcare than in other countries. I wouldn't switch my healthcare for any country's. We have the best mortality rates for cancer and heart disease. UK has among the worst.

The only problem is when the false idea - that free markets solve all problems efficiently - is run up the flag pole, again and again, despite evidence to the contrary.

I never said free markets did solve all problems, but they solve most better than government does.

It's much easier to have an open government institution providing common necessities than it is to try and regulate private institutions that have no public interest, yet receive massive public funds. If you're serious about finding a solution, all you have to do is look around, and see what other countries have been doing successfully for years.

Last time I checked, the US has the most college graduates of any country. Our worst college-educated state, West Virginia, has more college graduates than any country in Western Europe.

Everyone here laughed and laughed that the European governments charged a 100% tax on fuel, until about a year ago. Since those countries foresaw the inevitable, that tax reduced consumption, funded mass transit construction, and made them less dependent on countries like Saudi Arabia for their daily transportation needs. Here it would be called socialism; elsewhere, it's just common sense.

I laugh at a 100% gas tax. In America, we have this thing called freedom, and we like freedom in our daily lives, which includes driving. Freedom, economic, political, and personal, has allowed us in roughly 200 years to build an economy that dwarfs any other. In fact, if California were a country, it would be the fifth biggest economy by some measures. Americans simply want a free lifestyle, not one dictated by central bureaucrats. Our oil dependence has not been utopian, but I don't believe in utopia. You certainly have your own problems in Europe, and most Americans wouldn't trade yours for ours.

Frankly, anyone who would quote a nut like Chomsky is hard to appeal to. But I would submit to you that America did not quickly become the largest economy in the world by employing his ideas - and most Americans really like our country. Even our current "bad" economy tends to be better than most countries' economies on their best day. And frankly, it seems a lot of people are literally dying to come here.