One of the financial advantages I had was that most of my education was free. It was also varied.
I guess you would call my first exposure to college (and what might be called home-schooling today) was that may mother was taking the first of her three masters degrees when I was a small child and, once she had gone through the usual nursery rhyme stuff, started reading her textbooks to me as bed-time stories. She got her homework done and I learned art history, anthropology and a couple of other courses well enough that I could probably still ace a final exam in them today. Later on, my grandmother used to teach Wendy and I how to read financial statements, investment theory etc., but Wendy has already told that story.
In junior high school, besides all the academic stuff, art and music, I had a letter-press printing shop and a wood-working shop.
In high school (OK, admittedly a special place), besides all the academic and advanced placement courses, I took a number of years of machine shop courses, a term of pattern making (for casting), a term of foundry, a term of metallurgy, a term of electrical theory/lab and a term of engineering decision making supported by computer programing on one of the first mainframe time-sharing terminals to be installed in a NYC high school.
Along the way, during elementary school (4th grade, I think) I spent a term of weekends taking the subway to NYU (NY University) to learn astronomy from a bunch of volunteer professors and graduate students, a summer (5th grade, I think) of going to Brooklyn College for a course on ancient Greek culture taught by a college professor. Somewhat later on, between my junior and senior years at high school, the National Science foundation sent me to Carnegie Mellon for the summer to work with a doctoral candidate and his professor/advisor in the electrical engineering department (who enjoyed teaching me electrical theory as well as playing with their project) and to learn computer programing. All of these were free.
My first two years of engineering were at a private school, but heavily subsidized by assorted scholarships (Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, now part of NYU), but I got married and finished my EE degree at night school at City College of New York, a free college (at the time, at least) and then took my MBA at Baruch College - also a part of the City university system and nearly free.
So, in retrospect, I believe that, not only was the base curriculum parallel to the best schools in the US in each category, but in the case of both the graduate and undergraduate night schools, the courses were largely taught by adjunct professors who worked in the field during the day and taught pragmatic approaches to the course material at night.
So, the good news is that the education that puts many into debt was nearly free for me and, because of the substitution of practical approaches, rather than the theoretic approach taught by full professors during the day, providing me with more immediately useful tools. The downside to this approach is that, those who attend an Ivy League school form a network of companions who symbiotically can help each other succeed later in life. In the courses I attended, the students were generally older than during the day, had families, jobs and so on and were concentrating on the courses rather than treating school as a social event. While I still have some friends left from those first two years of day college, I can’t think of a single case when anyone I met during the rest of my night school had any sort of a parallel relationship or use in later life. It was every man/woman for themself and I suppose some did better than others.
If asked for advice today, I would likely suggest that, if nearly free, high quality, institutions are not available in the US, then the student should consider getting educated in Europe where there are some outstanding free (or nearly free) schools (assuming they have the academic ability to qualify).
All that said, I rarely paid much attention to the academic background of job applicants - even for technical positions. I was more interested in what they could do on a practical level than how they learned their skills. I ended up with a very eclectic group of very talented (and frequently very unusual) employees who managed to keep me both entertained and making money. But that’s a story for another time.
Jeff
