$80k In Debt Worth It for Ivy Undergrad?

[Anonymous]

Oh, and if you move to a LCOL area make sure you still have access to a good therapist. The most important aspect here is that you stabilize yourself.

[Anonymous]

OP, what is the length and interest rate you are looking at? Would be helpful to understand the monthly payment. My younger sibling and I had Asian tiger parents growing up (got grounded in middle school for A-‘s) and I am well familiar with your background/cultural context..

If you are on leave, what are you doing right now? Are you working a barista job? Have you ever even had a service job? What if you truly hate it? People kind of suck - you couldn’t pay me enough to deal with the general public. I worked in retail the summer after high school and in college and that was enough to make sure I worked hard in school, graduated on time and found a full time job.

The world is not limited to IBB/MBB/Big Law/Medicine. The corporate world exists, as does the government. There are jobs in marketing, accounting, HR that might not be very exciting but will offer ok pay and benefits and 40 hours a week (where people don’t really work that hard). It’s not all or nothing. Have you done the math to see what a monthly payment might be, and what a future salary might be, to see how that looks? It doesn’t seem to me like you HAVE to get a $100k job to be able to pay this off.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You act like the only choices in life career-wise are crazy high stress $$$ finance, big law and medicine careers or low paying non-profit work.
The truth is that there is a whole spectrum. Finance can be a little more chill if you are at a company like PWC rather than Goldman Sachs but you can still make decent money. There are zillions of mid tier companies where work life balance is reasonable but you are not being paid 45-50 k like at a museum. Finish your degree and get a decent job. Or take a year to go into the Peace Corp and then get a decent job. There are students at Columbia who are not interested in working for Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Amazon and Google. They exist. You need to expand your social circle and get out of your bubble

+ 1

My husband has a "medium" finance job. Makes around 800k, works ~ 40 hours a week from home. We live in a MCOL city. You don't have to be Goldman Sachs/Wall Street or bust. There are plenty of jobs in the middle.

I have a humanities degree, a low paying job with a "mission" that supposedly justifies the low pay, and I don't recommend it! lol

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP, what is the length and interest rate you are looking at? Would be helpful to understand the monthly payment. My younger sibling and I had Asian tiger parents growing up (got grounded in middle school for A-‘s) and I am well familiar with your background/cultural context..

If you are on leave, what are you doing right now? Are you working a barista job? Have you ever even had a service job? What if you truly hate it? People kind of suck - you couldn’t pay me enough to deal with the general public. I worked in retail the summer after high school and in college and that was enough to make sure I worked hard in school, graduated on time and found a full time job.

The world is not limited to IBB/MBB/Big Law/Medicine. The corporate world exists, as does the government. There are jobs in marketing, accounting, HR that might not be very exciting but will offer ok pay and benefits and 40 hours a week (where people don’t really work that hard). It’s not all or nothing. Have you done the math to see what a monthly payment might be, and what a future salary might be, to see how that looks? It doesn’t seem to me like you HAVE to get a $100k job to be able to pay this off.

I am the PP who went to state school and endured harassments in professional life. I was a hotel maid once. Now I work @ private equity and my CIO yells me every other day. But there is no way I am going back to being a hotel maid. lol.

[Anonymous]

Didn't read all 16 pages of comments, but if no one has mentioned it, think of what those plus loans look like. The subsidized school loans can be reasonable 3-4% rates. But my parents took out a plus loan in my first year of school - it was mine to pay back. 7.5% interest rate, which build a lot quicker. After doing my time and then Peace Corps, that $7,000 loan turned into $11,000. Taking time off might not be a bad idea for nothing else than to reduce the loan size.

I started at community college and then transferred to Cornell. The early classes use the exact same curriculum. But the ivy league one fails you and then curve you up to get enough people to drop the program. You don't learn anything special there. It's often worse because the professor at the ivy league has never studied teaching, and often wastes a ton of class time going over their niche research interests. All of the value of a good school is the resources. Do you get a cool internship? Did that nobel prize winning professor write you a recommendation? Did that one club provide a good network and let you go on some absurd trip that gave you passion?

If you're too tired and depressed to do those things, you're not going to end up any better off than if you went to cc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Didn't read all 16 pages of comments, but if no one has mentioned it, think of what those plus loans look like. The subsidized school loans can be reasonable 3-4% rates. But my parents took out a plus loan in my first year of school - it was mine to pay back. 7.5% interest rate, which build a lot quicker. After doing my time and then Peace Corps, that $7,000 loan turned into $11,000. Taking time off might not be a bad idea for nothing else than to reduce the loan size.

I started at community college and then transferred to Cornell. The early classes use the exact same curriculum. But the ivy league one fails you and then curve you up to get enough people to drop the program. You don't learn anything special there. It's often worse because the professor at the ivy league has never studied teaching, and often wastes a ton of class time going over their niche research interests. All of the value of a good school is the resources. Do you get a cool internship? Did that nobel prize winning professor write you a recommendation? Did that one club provide a good network and let you go on some absurd trip that gave you passion?

If you're too tired and depressed to do those things, you're not going to end up any better off than if you went to cc.

OP here. I agree, which is why I'm inclined to leave.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You act like the only choices in life career-wise are crazy high stress $$$ finance, big law and medicine careers or low paying non-profit work.
The truth is that there is a whole spectrum. Finance can be a little more chill if you are at a company like PWC rather than Goldman Sachs but you can still make decent money. There are zillions of mid tier companies where work life balance is reasonable but you are not being paid 45-50 k like at a museum. Finish your degree and get a decent job. Or take a year to go into the Peace Corp and then get a decent job. There are students at Columbia who are not interested in working for Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Amazon and Google. They exist. You need to expand your social circle and get out of your bubble

+ 1

My husband has a "medium" finance job. Makes around 800k, works ~ 40 hours a week from home. We live in a MCOL city. You don't have to be Goldman Sachs/Wall Street or bust. There are plenty of jobs in the middle.

I have a humanities degree, a low paying job with a "mission" that supposedly justifies the low pay, and I don't recommend it! lol

Troll

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP, what is the length and interest rate you are looking at? Would be helpful to understand the monthly payment. My younger sibling and I had Asian tiger parents growing up (got grounded in middle school for A-‘s) and I am well familiar with your background/cultural context..

If you are on leave, what are you doing right now? Are you working a barista job? Have you ever even had a service job? What if you truly hate it? People kind of suck - you couldn’t pay me enough to deal with the general public. I worked in retail the summer after high school and in college and that was enough to make sure I worked hard in school, graduated on time and found a full time job.

The world is not limited to IBB/MBB/Big Law/Medicine. The corporate world exists, as does the government. There are jobs in marketing, accounting, HR that might not be very exciting but will offer ok pay and benefits and 40 hours a week (where people don’t really work that hard). It’s not all or nothing. Have you done the math to see what a monthly payment might be, and what a future salary might be, to see how that looks? It doesn’t seem to me like you HAVE to get a $100k job to be able to pay this off.

OP here. The exact interest rate is up in the air because I haven't taken out the loans yet. I'd max out the FAFSA loans (which is around $5k/year) and then take the rest of the $80k all in private loans (ie: Sallie Mae, Discovery). IIRC the private loans have rather high interest rates between 7 to 11%. I would not be taking out Plus loans because those are typically taken out in the parents' name, which my parents are (understandably, given their financial situation) unwilling to do. Length is also up in the air -- probably 10 years? Maybe longer.

I have been on a leave of absence since January. I'm currently in different city from my parents, living on my own (well, technically with roommates) and paying for living expenses through my FAANG internship. I will start working a barista job in August when my internship ends. And yes, I've had service jobs before. I honestly waitressing to my current internship.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Try to stay positive and finish the degree, OP. That Ivy name will open doors for you forever. A high school friend of mine who went to an Ivy (likely yours, based on your description) just bought a $14 million dollar McMansion at age 34! Meanwhile my DH and I will not come close to that amount over our lifetime. Then again, we didn’t go to an Ivy. We all went to the same high school and our friend wasn’t even in the top 10% academically, but he had a special interest/talent and decent grades, and I guess that was enough to be admitted to an Ivy in the 90s.

LMAO. Most Ivy grads will never get to such an accomplishment. Your friend is either an extreme outlier or had rich parents help him buy the McMansion. Absurd to use this one random anecdote as proof OP should stay.

He works for a top financial firm. I personally know a handful of Wall Street people who retired in their late 30s and 40s with $50-100 mill. My friend’s parents are middle class at best. His boss went to the same Ivy and took a chance on him early on. My friend works a ton, but he loves it.

OP here. I would literally rather go to jail than go work at Wall Street (and I was in prison for a day after getting arrested at a protest, so there's that...)

A number of posters have called you spoiled/ungrateful/entitled, and I am sensing some of that too. What separates the people on the top from everyone else is their ability to delay gratification. Grunt it out. Not everyone is cut out for this, but then don’t complain when you cannot afford stuff in life.

OP here. You're right. I guess I'm tired of delaying gratification. My entire life up until this point -- my parents screaming at me to perform academically to their standards, trying a STEM major and failing, trying to tough it out at a notoriously competitive school that I hate -- has been a series of delayed gratification. It's just that achievement seems empty at this point, and I want something more immediately tangible and pleasant. I am tired. I am so, so tired of trying to delay all these awards when fundamentally it seems like meaningless bullshit that I don't care about. I don't see the point of sticking it out in the rat race since it seems like the rewards are too far off for me to enjoy.

Yes, I'm aware that makes me spoiled/self-indulgent/entitled. I think it's because I was raised by Asian immigrant tiger parents to delay gratification for so long that I'm super burnt out and tired of everything.

PS: It's hard to delay gratification during a difficult, trying job when you're actively suicidal as a college student. Idk, I think my mental illness is calling for me to stop delaying and instead search for more immediate and more intrinsically meaningful things.

Ok so then quit, move out, get a job (or more likely two is what will be required to make ends meet) pay your own way (and try not to get into credit card debt) and go back to school when you are older. I mean what do you want us to tell you? There’s no magical third option beyond go back to school or get a job. You have declared it an impossibility for you to go back to Columbia and your parents won’t be moved so the choice is clear. Thousands and thousands of young people every year don’t go to college or enroll in community college because they have parents who can’t or won’t pay for their school. So they get jobs, and make do, and scrape by somehow. Nothing is stopping you from doing this. Literally nothing.

Actually one thing is stopping you. Deep down, you do care about prestige, but just of a different nature than what your classmates care about. I know this because you fixate on prestigious sounding albeit low paid careers. You know where you could really make an impact? Working as a health care aid in an Alzheimer’s facility, or in a drug rehab center, or cleaning cages in an animal shelter, or some equally unglamorous job that actually helps people. You could just quit, get a Starbucks job, and never go back to college. But instead you want an “acceptable” sounding job in publishing” or “helping the environment.” Ok, so do that, but you know what help the environment needs? Scientists and engineers who grind it out in labs to come up with innovative solutions to huge problems, and smart lawyers and policy makers who grind it out in law school or grad school so they can draft and implement legislation and regulations and lobby to get them passed, and IT folks who grind it out over the weekends to keep the Sierra Club’s network up and running so they can do their business, and HR employee benefits folks, who put in overtime to hire and onboard and pay the employees to do all those things, and fundraising folks who are out at events nights and weekends at events to raise money for the research and advocacy, and the list goes on. Do one of those things, or be a waitress, but don’t you dare sit here and lecture us about being prestige obsessed when your immediate solution to dropping out of Columbia is not to get a degree from your local CalPoly or whatever but rather to hoof it to a blue blood Seven Sisters school. I mean come on.

OP here. You're right. And I know that fundamentally I'd get equally jaded with something in publishing or NPO work as I would with MBB/BB IB/FAANG/Big Law.

Just a clarification though -- I'm currently living on my own with roommates on the other side of the country from my parents (easy to do when my current FAANG internship pays pretty well). After my summer internship ends, I'm planning on finding a cheap sublet in a LCOL city and living with roommates while working a barista gig.

Take a leave of absence for a year to do this. Do not quit Columbia!
You may find you hate the barista life. And randomly moving to a LCOL city where you don’t know anyone might not be fun either

I'm one of the PPs encouraging you to break free from your parents and their cycle, but I agree with this. Don't burn a bridge until you really have to. Defer at the very least so you can get your feet back under you before you make irreversible decisions. You can use that year to explore options at other schools and various financial aid vehicles.

Does Columbia offer any online courses? It could be good for you to be off campus someplace with less stress but where you can still finish your degree. Also push back on your parents to split the loans with you. $40k for a working couple and $40k for a college student shouldn't be too bad.

Columbia does not offer any online courses, and my parents aren't willing to take out $40k.

[Anonymous]

I can’t tell if Op is a spoiled idealistic brat or mentally ill.

My brother is bipolar and suffers from depression. He did not finish college. He has a low paying job and lives with my parents. He would be homeless or lonely committed suicide if he did not have family support.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Try to stay positive and finish the degree, OP. That Ivy name will open doors for you forever. A high school friend of mine who went to an Ivy (likely yours, based on your description) just bought a $14 million dollar McMansion at age 34! Meanwhile my DH and I will not come close to that amount over our lifetime. Then again, we didn’t go to an Ivy. We all went to the same high school and our friend wasn’t even in the top 10% academically, but he had a special interest/talent and decent grades, and I guess that was enough to be admitted to an Ivy in the 90s.

LMAO. Most Ivy grads will never get to such an accomplishment. Your friend is either an extreme outlier or had rich parents help him buy the McMansion. Absurd to use this one random anecdote as proof OP should stay.

He works for a top financial firm. I personally know a handful of Wall Street people who retired in their late 30s and 40s with $50-100 mill. My friend’s parents are middle class at best. His boss went to the same Ivy and took a chance on him early on. My friend works a ton, but he loves it.

OP here. I would literally rather go to jail than go work at Wall Street (and I was in prison for a day after getting arrested at a protest, so there's that...)

A number of posters have called you spoiled/ungrateful/entitled, and I am sensing some of that too. What separates the people on the top from everyone else is their ability to delay gratification. Grunt it out. Not everyone is cut out for this, but then don’t complain when you cannot afford stuff in life.

OP here. You're right. I guess I'm tired of delaying gratification. My entire life up until this point -- my parents screaming at me to perform academically to their standards, trying a STEM major and failing, trying to tough it out at a notoriously competitive school that I hate -- has been a series of delayed gratification. It's just that achievement seems empty at this point, and I want something more immediately tangible and pleasant. I am tired. I am so, so tired of trying to delay all these awards when fundamentally it seems like meaningless bullshit that I don't care about. I don't see the point of sticking it out in the rat race since it seems like the rewards are too far off for me to enjoy.

Yes, I'm aware that makes me spoiled/self-indulgent/entitled. I think it's because I was raised by Asian immigrant tiger parents to delay gratification for so long that I'm super burnt out and tired of everything.

PS: It's hard to delay gratification during a difficult, trying job when you're actively suicidal as a college student. Idk, I think my mental illness is calling for me to stop delaying and instead search for more immediate and more intrinsically meaningful things.

Ok so then quit, move out, get a job (or more likely two is what will be required to make ends meet) pay your own way (and try not to get into credit card debt) and go back to school when you are older. I mean what do you want us to tell you? There’s no magical third option beyond go back to school or get a job. You have declared it an impossibility for you to go back to Columbia and your parents won’t be moved so the choice is clear. Thousands and thousands of young people every year don’t go to college or enroll in community college because they have parents who can’t or won’t pay for their school. So they get jobs, and make do, and scrape by somehow. Nothing is stopping you from doing this. Literally nothing.

Actually one thing is stopping you. Deep down, you do care about prestige, but just of a different nature than what your classmates care about. I know this because you fixate on prestigious sounding albeit low paid careers. You know where you could really make an impact? Working as a health care aid in an Alzheimer’s facility, or in a drug rehab center, or cleaning cages in an animal shelter, or some equally unglamorous job that actually helps people. You could just quit, get a Starbucks job, and never go back to college. But instead you want an “acceptable” sounding job in publishing” or “helping the environment.” Ok, so do that, but you know what help the environment needs? Scientists and engineers who grind it out in labs to come up with innovative solutions to huge problems, and smart lawyers and policy makers who grind it out in law school or grad school so they can draft and implement legislation and regulations and lobby to get them passed, and IT folks who grind it out over the weekends to keep the Sierra Club’s network up and running so they can do their business, and HR employee benefits folks, who put in overtime to hire and onboard and pay the employees to do all those things, and fundraising folks who are out at events nights and weekends at events to raise money for the research and advocacy, and the list goes on. Do one of those things, or be a waitress, but don’t you dare sit here and lecture us about being prestige obsessed when your immediate solution to dropping out of Columbia is not to get a degree from your local CalPoly or whatever but rather to hoof it to a blue blood Seven Sisters school. I mean come on.

This. This. 1,000,000x this. Most jobs that truly make a difference aren't anywhere near as exciting as they sound.

Get the darn degree, OP. It will open doors you don't even know about now. Public interest loan forgiveness programs exist for a reason.

-BTDT

OP here. I disagree.

Ivies don't magically open doors for you. There's nothing magical about having Columbia on my resume that will magically net me opportunities if I'm too depressed and tired to really make anything of the opportunities available to me at school. Sure, Ivies open doors that aren't available to grads of other schools -- but that's only if the student really goes after that while they're in college and are a high performing student who takes advantage of the resources Columbia offers. Which I'm not. I'd be better off at a Cal State.

Also, doors can't open if you don't know about them -- you have to be the one to open up the doors yourself. You have to be the one to take advantage of your opportunities and actively work to open these doors, which isn't a possibility if you don't know about these doors or are too depressed to really do anything with them.

There was a study by Dale and Kruger that showed that there is NO difference between students at Ivies and students accepted to Ivies who chose to go to their state school (except for URMs, which I am not). I was completely unsurprised to learn about the study, since going to an Ivy won't magically set up opportunities for the future if the student themselves don't aggressively go after these opportunities.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Try to stay positive and finish the degree, OP. That Ivy name will open doors for you forever. A high school friend of mine who went to an Ivy (likely yours, based on your description) just bought a $14 million dollar McMansion at age 34! Meanwhile my DH and I will not come close to that amount over our lifetime. Then again, we didn’t go to an Ivy. We all went to the same high school and our friend wasn’t even in the top 10% academically, but he had a special interest/talent and decent grades, and I guess that was enough to be admitted to an Ivy in the 90s.

LMAO. Most Ivy grads will never get to such an accomplishment. Your friend is either an extreme outlier or had rich parents help him buy the McMansion. Absurd to use this one random anecdote as proof OP should stay.

He works for a top financial firm. I personally know a handful of Wall Street people who retired in their late 30s and 40s with $50-100 mill. My friend’s parents are middle class at best. His boss went to the same Ivy and took a chance on him early on. My friend works a ton, but he loves it.

OP here. I would literally rather go to jail than go work at Wall Street (and I was in prison for a day after getting arrested at a protest, so there's that...)

A number of posters have called you spoiled/ungrateful/entitled, and I am sensing some of that too. What separates the people on the top from everyone else is their ability to delay gratification. Grunt it out. Not everyone is cut out for this, but then don’t complain when you cannot afford stuff in life.

OP here. You're right. I guess I'm tired of delaying gratification. My entire life up until this point -- my parents screaming at me to perform academically to their standards, trying a STEM major and failing, trying to tough it out at a notoriously competitive school that I hate -- has been a series of delayed gratification. It's just that achievement seems empty at this point, and I want something more immediately tangible and pleasant. I am tired. I am so, so tired of trying to delay all these awards when fundamentally it seems like meaningless bullshit that I don't care about. I don't see the point of sticking it out in the rat race since it seems like the rewards are too far off for me to enjoy.

Yes, I'm aware that makes me spoiled/self-indulgent/entitled. I think it's because I was raised by Asian immigrant tiger parents to delay gratification for so long that I'm super burnt out and tired of everything.

PS: It's hard to delay gratification during a difficult, trying job when you're actively suicidal as a college student. Idk, I think my mental illness is calling for me to stop delaying and instead search for more immediate and more intrinsically meaningful things.

Ok so then quit, move out, get a job (or more likely two is what will be required to make ends meet) pay your own way (and try not to get into credit card debt) and go back to school when you are older. I mean what do you want us to tell you? There’s no magical third option beyond go back to school or get a job. You have declared it an impossibility for you to go back to Columbia and your parents won’t be moved so the choice is clear. Thousands and thousands of young people every year don’t go to college or enroll in community college because they have parents who can’t or won’t pay for their school. So they get jobs, and make do, and scrape by somehow. Nothing is stopping you from doing this. Literally nothing.

Actually one thing is stopping you. Deep down, you do care about prestige, but just of a different nature than what your classmates care about. I know this because you fixate on prestigious sounding albeit low paid careers. You know where you could really make an impact? Working as a health care aid in an Alzheimer’s facility, or in a drug rehab center, or cleaning cages in an animal shelter, or some equally unglamorous job that actually helps people. You could just quit, get a Starbucks job, and never go back to college. But instead you want an “acceptable” sounding job in publishing” or “helping the environment.” Ok, so do that, but you know what help the environment needs? Scientists and engineers who grind it out in labs to come up with innovative solutions to huge problems, and smart lawyers and policy makers who grind it out in law school or grad school so they can draft and implement legislation and regulations and lobby to get them passed, and IT folks who grind it out over the weekends to keep the Sierra Club’s network up and running so they can do their business, and HR employee benefits folks, who put in overtime to hire and onboard and pay the employees to do all those things, and fundraising folks who are out at events nights and weekends at events to raise money for the research and advocacy, and the list goes on. Do one of those things, or be a waitress, but don’t you dare sit here and lecture us about being prestige obsessed when your immediate solution to dropping out of Columbia is not to get a degree from your local CalPoly or whatever but rather to hoof it to a blue blood Seven Sisters school. I mean come on.

This. This. 1,000,000x this. Most jobs that truly make a difference aren't anywhere near as exciting as they sound.

Get the darn degree, OP. It will open doors you don't even know about now. Public interest loan forgiveness programs exist for a reason.

-BTDT

OP here. I disagree.

Ivies don't magically open doors for you. There's nothing magical about having Columbia on my resume that will magically net me opportunities if I'm too depressed and tired to really make anything of the opportunities available to me at school. Sure, Ivies open doors that aren't available to grads of other schools -- but that's only if the student really goes after that while they're in college and are a high performing student who takes advantage of the resources Columbia offers. Which I'm not. I'd be better off at a Cal State.

Also, doors can't open if you don't know about them -- you have to be the one to open up the doors yourself. You have to be the one to take advantage of your opportunities and actively work to open these doors, which isn't a possibility if you don't know about these doors or are too depressed to really do anything with them.

There was a study by Dale and Kruger that showed that there is NO difference between students at Ivies and students accepted to Ivies who chose to go to their state school (except for URMs, which I am not). I was completely unsurprised to learn about the study, since going to an Ivy won't magically set up opportunities for the future if the student themselves don't aggressively go after these opportunities.

Also PSLF has a 1% acceptance rate

[Anonymous]

You people are truly insane.

OP, I'm a mental health professional. I wouldn't recommend taking out $80k in loans to go back to a school that makes you miserable. Your previous thread pointed out how you were forced on a leave of absence since you were suicidal.

I hope you're in an IOP or inpatient program. You need something much more intense than therapy, judging off of your prior thread.

A highly anxious and depressed student should NOT go to a notoriously competitive, intense, cutthroat school where she'll have to take out an enormous amount of loans.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Try to stay positive and finish the degree, OP. That Ivy name will open doors for you forever. A high school friend of mine who went to an Ivy (likely yours, based on your description) just bought a $14 million dollar McMansion at age 34! Meanwhile my DH and I will not come close to that amount over our lifetime. Then again, we didn’t go to an Ivy. We all went to the same high school and our friend wasn’t even in the top 10% academically, but he had a special interest/talent and decent grades, and I guess that was enough to be admitted to an Ivy in the 90s.

LMAO. Most Ivy grads will never get to such an accomplishment. Your friend is either an extreme outlier or had rich parents help him buy the McMansion. Absurd to use this one random anecdote as proof OP should stay.

He works for a top financial firm. I personally know a handful of Wall Street people who retired in their late 30s and 40s with $50-100 mill. My friend’s parents are middle class at best. His boss went to the same Ivy and took a chance on him early on. My friend works a ton, but he loves it.

OP here. I would literally rather go to jail than go work at Wall Street (and I was in prison for a day after getting arrested at a protest, so there's that...)

A number of posters have called you spoiled/ungrateful/entitled, and I am sensing some of that too. What separates the people on the top from everyone else is their ability to delay gratification. Grunt it out. Not everyone is cut out for this, but then don’t complain when you cannot afford stuff in life.

OP here. You're right. I guess I'm tired of delaying gratification. My entire life up until this point -- my parents screaming at me to perform academically to their standards, trying a STEM major and failing, trying to tough it out at a notoriously competitive school that I hate -- has been a series of delayed gratification. It's just that achievement seems empty at this point, and I want something more immediately tangible and pleasant. I am tired. I am so, so tired of trying to delay all these awards when fundamentally it seems like meaningless bullshit that I don't care about. I don't see the point of sticking it out in the rat race since it seems like the rewards are too far off for me to enjoy.

Yes, I'm aware that makes me spoiled/self-indulgent/entitled. I think it's because I was raised by Asian immigrant tiger parents to delay gratification for so long that I'm super burnt out and tired of everything.

PS: It's hard to delay gratification during a difficult, trying job when you're actively suicidal as a college student. Idk, I think my mental illness is calling for me to stop delaying and instead search for more immediate and more intrinsically meaningful things.

Ok so then quit, move out, get a job (or more likely two is what will be required to make ends meet) pay your own way (and try not to get into credit card debt) and go back to school when you are older. I mean what do you want us to tell you? There’s no magical third option beyond go back to school or get a job. You have declared it an impossibility for you to go back to Columbia and your parents won’t be moved so the choice is clear. Thousands and thousands of young people every year don’t go to college or enroll in community college because they have parents who can’t or won’t pay for their school. So they get jobs, and make do, and scrape by somehow. Nothing is stopping you from doing this. Literally nothing.

Actually one thing is stopping you. Deep down, you do care about prestige, but just of a different nature than what your classmates care about. I know this because you fixate on prestigious sounding albeit low paid careers. You know where you could really make an impact? Working as a health care aid in an Alzheimer’s facility, or in a drug rehab center, or cleaning cages in an animal shelter, or some equally unglamorous job that actually helps people. You could just quit, get a Starbucks job, and never go back to college. But instead you want an “acceptable” sounding job in publishing” or “helping the environment.” Ok, so do that, but you know what help the environment needs? Scientists and engineers who grind it out in labs to come up with innovative solutions to huge problems, and smart lawyers and policy makers who grind it out in law school or grad school so they can draft and implement legislation and regulations and lobby to get them passed, and IT folks who grind it out over the weekends to keep the Sierra Club’s network up and running so they can do their business, and HR employee benefits folks, who put in overtime to hire and onboard and pay the employees to do all those things, and fundraising folks who are out at events nights and weekends at events to raise money for the research and advocacy, and the list goes on. Do one of those things, or be a waitress, but don’t you dare sit here and lecture us about being prestige obsessed when your immediate solution to dropping out of Columbia is not to get a degree from your local CalPoly or whatever but rather to hoof it to a blue blood Seven Sisters school. I mean come on.

This. This. 1,000,000x this. Most jobs that truly make a difference aren't anywhere near as exciting as they sound.

Get the darn degree, OP. It will open doors you don't even know about now. Public interest loan forgiveness programs exist for a reason.

-BTDT

OP here. I disagree.

Ivies don't magically open doors for you. There's nothing magical about having Columbia on my resume that will magically net me opportunities if I'm too depressed and tired to really make anything of the opportunities available to me at school. Sure, Ivies open doors that aren't available to grads of other schools -- but that's only if the student really goes after that while they're in college and are a high performing student who takes advantage of the resources Columbia offers. Which I'm not. I'd be better off at a Cal State.

Also, doors can't open if you don't know about them -- you have to be the one to open up the doors yourself. You have to be the one to take advantage of your opportunities and actively work to open these doors, which isn't a possibility if you don't know about these doors or are too depressed to really do anything with them.

There was a study by Dale and Kruger that showed that there is NO difference between students at Ivies and students accepted to Ivies who chose to go to their state school (except for URMs, which I am not). I was completely unsurprised to learn about the study, since going to an Ivy won't magically set up opportunities for the future if the student themselves don't aggressively go after these opportunities.

Whatever job you apply to whether it is nonprofit or finance, you will have the advantage over a no name school. It can be the difference between a job interview or not.

You sound pretty annoying, OP. Go drop out or whatever.

You may find it hard to cover your rent, build credit, buy a car, food, gas by having a job without a college degree with no parental financial support. It is unlikely you will miraculously go back to some amazing college experience after taking a few years off. You will either be much older than your classmates and have a different bad college experience or I would bet on you won’t go back at all. Just suck it up and get the degree.

I have 3 kids and I always tell them to finish what they signed up for.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Try to stay positive and finish the degree, OP. That Ivy name will open doors for you forever. A high school friend of mine who went to an Ivy (likely yours, based on your description) just bought a $14 million dollar McMansion at age 34! Meanwhile my DH and I will not come close to that amount over our lifetime. Then again, we didn’t go to an Ivy. We all went to the same high school and our friend wasn’t even in the top 10% academically, but he had a special interest/talent and decent grades, and I guess that was enough to be admitted to an Ivy in the 90s.

LMAO. Most Ivy grads will never get to such an accomplishment. Your friend is either an extreme outlier or had rich parents help him buy the McMansion. Absurd to use this one random anecdote as proof OP should stay.

He works for a top financial firm. I personally know a handful of Wall Street people who retired in their late 30s and 40s with $50-100 mill. My friend’s parents are middle class at best. His boss went to the same Ivy and took a chance on him early on. My friend works a ton, but he loves it.

OP here. I would literally rather go to jail than go work at Wall Street (and I was in prison for a day after getting arrested at a protest, so there's that...)

A number of posters have called you spoiled/ungrateful/entitled, and I am sensing some of that too. What separates the people on the top from everyone else is their ability to delay gratification. Grunt it out. Not everyone is cut out for this, but then don’t complain when you cannot afford stuff in life.

OP here. You're right. I guess I'm tired of delaying gratification. My entire life up until this point -- my parents screaming at me to perform academically to their standards, trying a STEM major and failing, trying to tough it out at a notoriously competitive school that I hate -- has been a series of delayed gratification. It's just that achievement seems empty at this point, and I want something more immediately tangible and pleasant. I am tired. I am so, so tired of trying to delay all these awards when fundamentally it seems like meaningless bullshit that I don't care about. I don't see the point of sticking it out in the rat race since it seems like the rewards are too far off for me to enjoy.

Yes, I'm aware that makes me spoiled/self-indulgent/entitled. I think it's because I was raised by Asian immigrant tiger parents to delay gratification for so long that I'm super burnt out and tired of everything.

PS: It's hard to delay gratification during a difficult, trying job when you're actively suicidal as a college student. Idk, I think my mental illness is calling for me to stop delaying and instead search for more immediate and more intrinsically meaningful things.

Ok so then quit, move out, get a job (or more likely two is what will be required to make ends meet) pay your own way (and try not to get into credit card debt) and go back to school when you are older. I mean what do you want us to tell you? There’s no magical third option beyond go back to school or get a job. You have declared it an impossibility for you to go back to Columbia and your parents won’t be moved so the choice is clear. Thousands and thousands of young people every year don’t go to college or enroll in community college because they have parents who can’t or won’t pay for their school. So they get jobs, and make do, and scrape by somehow. Nothing is stopping you from doing this. Literally nothing.

Actually one thing is stopping you. Deep down, you do care about prestige, but just of a different nature than what your classmates care about. I know this because you fixate on prestigious sounding albeit low paid careers. You know where you could really make an impact? Working as a health care aid in an Alzheimer’s facility, or in a drug rehab center, or cleaning cages in an animal shelter, or some equally unglamorous job that actually helps people. You could just quit, get a Starbucks job, and never go back to college. But instead you want an “acceptable” sounding job in publishing” or “helping the environment.” Ok, so do that, but you know what help the environment needs? Scientists and engineers who grind it out in labs to come up with innovative solutions to huge problems, and smart lawyers and policy makers who grind it out in law school or grad school so they can draft and implement legislation and regulations and lobby to get them passed, and IT folks who grind it out over the weekends to keep the Sierra Club’s network up and running so they can do their business, and HR employee benefits folks, who put in overtime to hire and onboard and pay the employees to do all those things, and fundraising folks who are out at events nights and weekends at events to raise money for the research and advocacy, and the list goes on. Do one of those things, or be a waitress, but don’t you dare sit here and lecture us about being prestige obsessed when your immediate solution to dropping out of Columbia is not to get a degree from your local CalPoly or whatever but rather to hoof it to a blue blood Seven Sisters school. I mean come on.

This. This. 1,000,000x this. Most jobs that truly make a difference aren't anywhere near as exciting as they sound.

Get the darn degree, OP. It will open doors you don't even know about now. Public interest loan forgiveness programs exist for a reason.

-BTDT

OP here. I disagree.

Ivies don't magically open doors for you. There's nothing magical about having Columbia on my resume that will magically net me opportunities if I'm too depressed and tired to really make anything of the opportunities available to me at school. Sure, Ivies open doors that aren't available to grads of other schools -- but that's only if the student really goes after that while they're in college and are a high performing student who takes advantage of the resources Columbia offers. Which I'm not. I'd be better off at a Cal State.

Also, doors can't open if you don't know about them -- you have to be the one to open up the doors yourself. You have to be the one to take advantage of your opportunities and actively work to open these doors, which isn't a possibility if you don't know about these doors or are too depressed to really do anything with them.

There was a study by Dale and Kruger that showed that there is NO difference between students at Ivies and students accepted to Ivies who chose to go to their state school (except for URMs, which I am not). I was completely unsurprised to learn about the study, since going to an Ivy won't magically set up opportunities for the future if the student themselves don't aggressively go after these opportunities.

Whatever job you apply to whether it is nonprofit or finance, you will have the advantage over a no name school. It can be the difference between a job interview or not.

You sound pretty annoying, OP. Go drop out or whatever.

You may find it hard to cover your rent, build credit, buy a car, food, gas by having a job without a college degree with no parental financial support. It is unlikely you will miraculously go back to some amazing college experience after taking a few years off. You will either be much older than your classmates and have a different bad college experience or I would bet on you won’t go back at all. Just suck it up and get the degree.

I have 3 kids and I always tell them to finish what they signed up for.

PP, the OP is mentally ill and suicidal (check the first thread she posted a couple months ago). Going back probably isn't the best decision.