bostonbubble.com

[Guest]

I'm a European transplant to US, did my undergrad in Europe and PhD here and emerged completely debt-free and intend to repeat it with my son. If he is amibtious, talented (exceptionally) and an Ivy material he will go there and we will support him if his skills will translate to an adequate job to pay off HIS debts not OURS.
My DH is an MIT graduate, graduated 20 years ago with 7,000 $ debts to his name. MIT does blind recruiting separating $$$ from academic merits and finds money to support those who would probably never got to Harvard.
In our case, the combination of the public schools, European (we're EU citizens) or Canadian universities as an undergraduate will probably do the trick to avaing breaking the bank. We could probably effort it (DS has agenerous 529 plan managed by his grandparents, but the rate at which costs rise up we may be way too short) but my paranoia about saving for my retirenment and not counting on any SS will prevail.

I went through all of this year's Boston HS valedictorians bios and almost ALL of them decided to stay locally going to state or private schools in MA. I was wondering why is this that the creme of the crop do not get scholarships to the schools of their choosing, or is this just the cultural thing eg. being the first in the family to go to college they do not want to venture to far from the nest.

[Boston ITer]

[Guest]

Thanks for the insight. I absolutely agree that it is a very practical way of getting good education, skills and not come out buried in debts. More power to them.
OTOH, middle and high middle class kids often choose to go out of state for "the college experience' which does not necessary translate to educations and skills that could be receiving still leaving with their parents.
Many graduates come back broke, jobless, move back with their parents and... go back to school, go through the career change without starting one. Sad.

[john p]

As I pause when I rag on the Ivies, I do think about how important it is to get a chance to learn from someone that is brilliant. I have a very hard time reading because my mind wanders and gets bored, but if it is Ben Franklin, Lao Tzu, or Marcus Aurelius, I'm pretty engaged. I think for the same reason it was hard for me to pay attention in class when I was younger. I was an adreneline junkie and I liked girls so I was just way too distracted. It was an all-boy's high school and what really got me engaged was actually English poetry because it was a place in which someone with an abstract mind could meet others. I felt less like a total misfit once I saw that people actually valued this sort of thinking. I actually went back and gave one of my early architectural study models that I had a creative breakthrough on to one of my H.S. English Professors.

I say this because since graduating, I have met a lot of resistance and have had to learn a ton the hard way. I am totall spoonfeeding decades of knowledge to some of my staff. On the one hand, I would have been much further ahead had I come in contact with someone like myself, but on the other, these guy's I'm helping don't have to find the answers for themselves and you kind of learn a bit having to do so yourself...

Also, as the growing population becomes more educated, I think that the competitive advantage might give you a total head start on someone who is stuck in the fly paper of working with less talented people. I hear some of you who say being stuck in the fly paper of debt isn't too pretty as well...

[Boston ITer]

[Boston ITer]

[john p]

I never implied that Annapolis was being stuck in fly paper, or I didn't mean to apply that everyone at Harvard was brilliant. Harvard isn't for me because their architecture program isn't very great. In fact the majority of modern buildings that have been voted as Boston's ugliest buildings were designed by Deans at Harvard;s Graduate School of Design.

I remember taking Statics in school and I had real trouble with the book and my professor sucked. I remember doing like 2 all-nighters a week and worked 10-12 hours a day on weekends so I didn't have too much time to waste and it would have been a bit easier if the professor could have explained things more easily.

I decided to retake Statics and I took a summer course and the summer course professor was so much better because he showed a variety of different ways to get at a solution and could explain it abstractly and mechanically so I could get the intent and the execution. I was pretty mad and felt like I had wasted my time and money on the other professor. I'm not saying that this couldn't happen at Harvard, I'm just saying that life is short and competition is steep so getting an edge is important.

[Boston ITer]

[john p]

Oh, the marathons were in the "Design" Classes, which were basically exploring different concepts through drawing/ rendering and model building ... which were time consuming...

Today, I'd have gone on wikipedia and figured it out on my own.

If anything, access to information online has really empowered people.

I did my MBA at Suffolk and the feedback you're talking about I think absolutely sharpened the professors. Maybe because business was a completely new subject and it was presented at a Master's level, I believe that I was more excited about the quality of my education, but even there the essence and critical matter of a subject can be missed and people can get caught up in the chatter. For example, people that have their money on the line behave differently than those that are just rank and file elevator music textbook employees. Having a mixture of dynamic practicioners and high level theorists was the strength of my architecture school. At Harvard, you had practicioners that were so egotistical and full of themselves that that was actually their greatest strength. They were so arrogant they turned off any clients that wouldn't worship them and they only got commissions from those that gave them full reign of the projects. It was a lesson in how to create a "brand" with yourself. I mean how else did they get Boston City Hall passed other than pure ego and b.s.

Suffolk seemed to excell on explaining fundamentals through accessible means. It sounded corny to a friend of mine who went to Stanford MBA when I told him how we went through the math in the financial analysis of the advantages and disadvantages for a company to either issue stock at a certain price or go to the bank for a loan in order to get capital to grow. From these fundmental mechanics I was able to understand a lot of economic activity recently and understand why because credit was cheap why we saw so much growth through acquisition, and the basics of organizational behavior are going full force as they start to merge all these companies together, and then back to the small business start up classes lessons when these newly formed big companies start to get challenged by newly formed smaller companies. Now, I dated a girl that was getting her Doctorate at Harvard in the study of ... get this... French painting of family portraits that had included slave servants. I mean what does this kid do when they get out other than hope to get their M.R.S. degree at Harvard.... I asked her why her study was so lazer focused on such a narrow subject and she said that Harvard Students were pressured to choose a subject that hadn't already been done before.... I'm not saying that I understand a good amount of economics, but I have some pretty good building blocks and logical formulas in my head.

The most important article I've read in the past few months was in today's Wall Street Journal. It was in the Money and Investing Section and it was called Security Blanket Smothers Securitization written by Richard Barley. Do your remember my whole thing about the inverted pyramid of liquidity and the need to reign in derivatives, well the Group of 20 is trying to bang out some regulations to get us on the same song sheet to reduce the regulatory arbitrage (or moving stuff around to different nations to take advantage of favorable regulations).

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125295060688709305.html

read David Eyke's comment

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125295060688709305.html#articleTabs%3Dcomments

What this is guys, in my opinion is the argument over who takes how much of a bite from the shit sandwich. Because US banks have had gross leverage ratios and many European banks haven't so this sort of policy would hurt them more.

I found this to be a good primer.

http://english.martinvarsavsky.net/general/the-credit-crunch-explained.html

Anyway, this drive towards a common international capitalistic set of regulations is going to be the most important news of the year. What I hope happens is that they focus on a balanced and fair approach moving forward versus just an escape route out of this current downturn. No doubt, certain types of regulations will wipe out some so it will be a tough negotiation.

[samz]

As a faculty member in engineering at a private university in Boston, I've thought a bit about this issue. Here are some observations/comments:

- It pains me that private education has come to cost so much. While I shouldn't be biting the hand that feeds me, it really is too expensive. On the other hand, if they paid me a lot less I would probably leave and go to industry. (How else could I afford to live here!)

- At my institution we are acutely aware of the competition from other (read:cheaper) forms of higher education. We make a significant effort to enrich the learning experience for our students -- using hands-on and interactive teaching, involving students in real research projects, using our connections to help them get top internships during the summer. Since we're a small school we can deliver a very high-quality product.

- I'm conflicted about the private/public education dichotomy. On the one hand, it's frustrating for us to be compared directly to public education, since we cannot ask the taxpayers to subsidize our tuition. We have to charge students the "real cost". On the other hand, I do believe that education is so vital to a functioning democracy and market economy that public funding of education (at all levels) is entirely justified. This is the case in most of the countries cited above as likely to surpass us in engineering and technology jobs.

- I went to Harvard as an undergrad and UT Austin for my PhD. The comparison is worth considering. Harvard puts an incredible amount of effort into undergraduate education, in addition to graduate education and research. UT must contend with several problems. First, the bottom 1/2 to 2/3 of students are weak. Second, the school is very focused on big-money research projects run by high-profile researchers. These people are great, but they don't care at all about undergraduate education. Third, UT is enormous (when I was a grad student there were 2600 CS majors!). So, the average UT CS class has 5-10 times as many students, most of whom are pretty mediocre, and is taught by a professor who teaches to the middle and would rather be doing his/her own research.

[balor123]

[Boston ITer]

[Xenos]

[quote="Boston ITer"] This is what happens when a society transitions from a productive economy to a financial one.[/quote]

Without getting into a partisan argument here, but rather from a historical POV, this also happens at the metropole when empires collapse. The masses of middle class people who had been employed by military and mercantile expansion become very underemployed. And unhappy.

[balor123]

[balor123]

Sadly, not only is entrepreneurship and innovation being deemphasized in this country relative to other professions (law, medicine, and finance) but the barriers to entry are becoming higher: higher cost of living, difficulty getting funding, reduced ownership in company, etc. I suppose that's why places like India are quickly catching up in this respect.