[eropple]

Depends. Can you work? Can you hustle? There's a lot of free money there if you're willing to get it: I will have paid, all told, less than $25,000 for my education, excluding housing because I elected to spend more than really necessary, via scholarships.

A lot of the rest was paid for by working during school--I had the lame little jobs during school, but I also participated in Google Summer of Code and had a pretty healthy consulting company that I started and operated, employing friends of mine when I had more work than I could handle. Like I said--less than $25,000 for the whole kit and kaboodle, thanks to what really amounted to not a lot of work to make that happen. (It also had the nice side effect of giving me a really nice resume.)

[keiferski]

Well, to use my school as an example:

In-state tuition is about 14-15k. Room and board is 5-6k. That's easily 20k a year (I paid north of 22k my first year) leading to 80-100k over four years. Not exactly something you can work through on a <$10/hour job (of which I have had many).

[eropple]

Those numbers sound pretty much like mine. They're also pretty meaningless thanks to the incredible opportunities for scholarships at nearly any school you'll care to look at. After scholarships, between family and myself I'll pay around $33,000 at the end of the day (the discrepancy between the aforementioned $25K being the additional housing and other expenses I chose to incur over the most fiscally responsible decisions).

I left school with $9,800 in debt. Most of the amount paid off before graduation (at least 60%) was mine, the rest my parents'.

No, you can't work through it on a sub-$10/hour job. But I had those jobs, too: they were beer and social money. I set up my own consulting company and I did GSoC and made more than enough to put myself in a really good position coming out of school.

[keiferski]

Scholarships are pretty hard to come by for an above-average, white, middle class guy.

College isn't as affordable for most as it was for you.

[eropple]

I am a white, middle-class guy. I don't know if I'm above-average or not, but I busted my ass to get ahead.

[keiferski]

I don't doubt it. I'm just saying that for your average person, college isn't cheap. It's cool that you made it work, but for the majority of the population, college isn't an affordable option.

[eropple]

I don't think you'll find many people who'd say that college is right for everyone, or affordable for everyone. (I would say that, for any given person, if they're driven and dedicated, it's probably affordable. But that excludes a lot of the population.)

I would, however, say that the majority of people in the startup world who seem to have a clue have had some college at the least, and that it's very valuable in and of itself for those people--which makes me think Thiel very misguided.