Hacker Cinema
Orange County
2002 · Film · 82 min
Directed by Jake Kasdan
Shaun Brumder is a local surfer kid from Orange County who dreams of going to Stanford to become a writer and to get away from his dysfunctional family household. Except Shaun runs into one complication after another, starting when his application is rejected after his dim-witted guidance counselor sends in the wrong form.
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4 comments on Hacker News
Orange County lol. Love that movie!
> Meanwhile, some people are more than happy to spend $100,000 on a graphic design degree that may get them a job paying roughly $40,000 a year
> A lot of that has to do with what Goldfarb likes to call the narrative—one that convinced kids that the only route to middle-class respectability was to get a college degree and that suggested failing to do so meant having failed at the American dream of upward mobility. To keep using the economist's terms, I would also say that 18-year-old high school seniors definitely qualify as "novice investors." Their philosophy can be summarized by Colin Hanks in the 2002 movie Orange County. When asked why he's so obsessed with getting into Stanford University and college more generally, he snaps back, "Because that's what you do after high school!"
Too often I see articles about student debt make a comment about how students have been tricked or misled into pursuing a degree. Why does no one talk about the alternative?
Let's talk about the alternative: You don't get a degree and now you're resume gets automatically thrown out of most applications. Only a small fraction of those without degrees manage to get well-paying jobs; they're the outliers. Albeit unrelated to employment rate, look at the salary differences: https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2018/data-on-display/education-pays.htm
Some might say it's worth making $X/yr and debt-free than making $Y/yr with $Z debt but this only holds true when Y > (P*Z + X) where P is the percentage of the total initial debt being paid off per year (e.g. P = 0.2 if you're paying $10k/yr to get rid of a $50k debt). And these values are hard to predict.
Also reminds me of the movie Orange County, where main character Shaun Brumder does not get admitted to Stanford because they mistakenly admit classmate and stoner Shane Brainard instead. Hilarity ensues.
NONE of those theories are the reason. And frankly, I find it worrisome none of these guys can even come close. Studying methods becoming more efficient? C'mon, dude.
There's a great scene in the movie Orange County (Colin Hanks, Jack Black, others) where the main character, a high school senior, is arguing with his mother, who's worried about the prospect of him leaving home. Shaun: "But I have to go to college." His mother: "Why?!" Shaun: "BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT YOU DO AFTER HIGH SCHOOL."
These days, most of us are not going to college to learn anything. We're going because that's what you do after high school.