In the US I waited until I was 24 years old to transfer to a 4 year university, because my parents were somewhat well off and utterly unwilling to help with my student loans when push came to shove - even though my financial aid was calculated based on their income and assets. At 24, I was reclassified as an "independent student", and my financial aid was now calculated solely on my (nonexistent) assets. The dynamic entirely flipped and I got to go full time, and even live in a dorm and stuff.

Between 18 and 24, then, one has roughly six years to get a 2 year community college degree out of the way for relative pennies on the dollar. That's a lot of time! Federal loans can pay for all or nearly all of this, but CCs are generally cheap enough that even on minimum wage one can generally budget the ~$100-200 per month it takes to take one or two classes per semester. (I wouldn't actually recommend paying out of pocket if you can avoid it, because your quality of life suffers far more from a $200 extra per month when you are making minimum wage vs when you are making six figures, but to each their own.)

If you fear you won't be able to transfer to a 4 year university for whatever reason, there are 2 year degrees which provide on-ramps to paid work; my original degree was going to be like that until I switched plans to the transfer approach.

The time I spent in a 4 year university weren't entirely covered by grants of course, but it was many multiples cheaper than it would have been had I insisted on going right out the gate. I don't think I would have been approved for the six figures of loans I would have needed with that plan with such unwilling parents. I walked away with low figures total in debt, which is much more manageable, and has a much higher ROI than e.g. $30,000 of a house mortgage. I actually somehow ended up holding less student debt than most college degree holders I have met here in Finland, where tuition is free and loans are intended to pay for everything else (housing, etc).

The praise here for Direct Instruction is akin in many ways to a lot of the research Caplan draws on, especially his findings that generally, most work related knowledge is built at work, by actually performing the job.

https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/d...

[1] https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/most-2-digit-numbers-not-d...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48221129

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

`cargo add` tip is very helpful, I had a hunch this happened in my own Rust project and I think you just filled in the missing piece for me there.

First Blumer et al., 1983 came up with a "DAWG", but reading the abstract [1] I was left a little confused as to how exactly we get from 'here is how we store all substrings of a string in O(|string|) space, with "is this a substring [yn]" recognition in O(|substring|) time' to the modern DAFSA, as cool and useful as that is. Come to think of it I bet I could use that in some LeetCode problems.

But the structure we actually think of as a DAWG or DAFSA (or FST, I guess, thanks to this Rust crate) is in the paper "The World’s Fastest Scrabble Program". That worked but you had to construct a whole trie first, then compact it down, so build time was a memory hog. Then Dr. Daciuk of 3city sharpened the blade in 2000 by proving that this was as good as it gets in the unsorted case, but on a sorted set you could build the DAFSA incrementally, because an increasingly large part of the graph you were building was already optimized.

And then from there BurntSushi got involved with the implementation and the rest is history.

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0304397585...

(That's what I can glean from ~30 minutes of not particularly focused reading. Forgive me if I have made any mistakes.)