Gyroscopic Investing

I wonder if you've seen the same side that I have.  Yes I am in the sciences which is more challenging, but has less of the issues you're pointing out.  Comments and clarifications below....ok really long post but I just want to make sure that no one is dissuading their kids or neighbors from this particular career path, without knowing what it really involves.

Pointedstick wrote: I grew up in the world of tenured full professors. They get four months of paid vacation every year, have very flexible schedules, great pay, gold-plated benefits and retirement packages, and are actually paid and expected to work on commercially dead-end side projects (aka publishing), not to mention other schools will occasionally pay to have them flown around the world to give one-hour talks and panels to a handful of people. They can apply for and receive grants to do all kinds of fun side projects that basically amount to money thrown away or spent on themselves and their family members with a thin academic veneer. Think free plane tickets to a conference in an exotic location that turns into a family vacation.

Paid vacation:  5 weeks, but no one ever takes that much.  I haven't had any real vacation in years, combination of being too busy and having the parental care situation.  However - see below comment about conferences.

Flexible schedules:  YES.  I'm my own boss.  I can work from home when it suits me.  Truly wonderful.

Great pay & benefits:  Huh???  Not sure where you got that idea, but academia is famous for low pay.  You only do this when you wouldn't be happy anywhere else.

Commercially dead-end side projects:  Do you mean writing papers & book chapters?  That all comes with the territory.  The activities are not directly paid but they are not dead-end, they pay off in very important ways, i.e. grants & industry consulting positions.

Grants for "fun side projects amounting to money thrown away":  That's quite a statement!  Do you really believe that all federal scientific funding is money thrown away, or that all federally funded research amounts to "fun side projects"?  Undoubtedly you can find examples of poorly conceived projects, but there's an awful lot of good work being done that really couldn't be funded any other way.  In any case, grants are the bread and butter of academic research.  It's how you stay employed.  If you don't get grants, you get asked to either leave or find some other way to pay your salary.  This is a serious amount of pressure that is one of the downsides of this career, in that it can keep you awake at night wondering if your job is sustainable.  It's a big reason why I got interested in becoming financially independent.

Conferences in exotic locations, being paid to fly around the world:  This is absolutely a perk of the job, although there are limits to "exotic".  I give several invited talks each year, most in the US but on average 1-2x/year in Europe, and have to turn some down.  Conferences provide you with "mini-vacations" and also intellectual stimulation, exchange of ideas, reunions, meeting people etc.

Pointedstick wrote: Sound great? Well it sure is, for people who are now 60. Are you younger than that? The farther you are from 60, the less chance you have of entering that life... it'll look a lot more like no chance of tenure, no chance of making full professor, no pension, teaching 6 classes a year at $5k each, and no political power in the vicious game of inter-departmental politics.

Job security:  Yes, younger than 60.  I am going up for tenure next year with very enthusiastic backing from my dept chair.  Job security is definitely a function of your accomplishments primarily, which is turn is a function of your own hard work, intelligence and creativity - which sounds reasonable to me!  Yes teaching is a lot of work but I would never want to give that up.  I often hear back from residents and fellows who have graduated and moved on, with questions on things like scientific issues, clinical management, and career advice.  6 courses a year sounds nasty though...I do clinical teaching rather than courses but I think standard course load here is only 2-3/year.

Academic politics:  There are always people who have nothing better to do than engage in vicious little power games.  Is any job truly safe from this?  I've noticed that there is an inverse relationship of this behavior with productivity, so one way to minimize it is to make sure you're in a place with lots of highly accomplished people - which means, a very high quality institution where the jobs are competitive, and where you have to work hard to establish yourself.  Ignore the game-players except to be extra nice to them when you do have to interact - a very effective technique I learned years ago from a friend.  Otherwise focus on your own work, and spend your time with colleagues who are successful, intelligent, and fun to work with.

PS hope this answered your questions!  It sounds like your parents were in a suboptimal location and not in a science/engineering discipline.  I can see why you might have come away with a negative impression.  I hope the above helps give you another perspective.  Further questions cheerfully answered by PM.

sophie wrote: I wonder if you've seen the same side that I have.  Yes I am in the sciences which is more challenging, but has less of the issues you're pointing out.  Comments and clarifications below....ok really long post but I just want to make sure that no one is dissuading their kids or neighbors from this particular career path, without knowing what it really involves.

Paid vacation:  5 weeks, but no one ever takes that much.  I haven't had any real vacation in years, combination of being too busy and having the parental care situation.  However - see below comment about conferences.

Oh I wasn't even including paid vacation days; I was just talking about the combination of summer vacation, winter break, and spring break. Yes, I know in theory those aren't technically vacations for the professors, since they're preparing for next year's classes, attending committees, etc, but these are low-intensity activities, and once you've got tenure, you can more or less blow them off with no consequences!

sophie wrote: Great pay & benefits:  Huh???  Not sure where you got that idea, but academia is famous for low pay.  You only do this when you wouldn't be happy anywhere else.

You must not be 60. Apparently the median college professor salary is $86k (citation) and the mean is $117k (citation)

Tenured full professors make a lot of money. You don't have tenure yet; wait and see. If medicine and the sciences are anything like the humanities, your salary will rise dramatically in the first few years after you get tenure.

I expect these figures to drop over the coming decades, though. Professor salaries and benefits constitute a crazy bubble that is contributing to bankrupting public university systems all over the country, which is why administrators are clamping down on tenure-track positions and hiring more adjuncts.

sophie wrote: Commercially dead-end side projects:  Do you mean writing papers & book chapters?  That all comes with the territory.  The activities are not directly paid but they are not dead-end, they pay off in very important ways, i.e. grants & industry consulting positions.

Grants for "fun side projects amounting to money thrown away":  That's quite a statement!  Do you really believe that all federal scientific funding is money thrown away, or that all federally funded research amounts to "fun side projects"?  Undoubtedly you can find examples of poorly conceived projects, but there's an awful lot of good work being done that really couldn't be funded any other way.  In any case, grants are the bread and butter of academic research.  It's how you stay employed.  If you don't get grants, you get asked to either leave or find some other way to pay your salary.  This is a serious amount of pressure that is one of the downsides of this career, in that it can keep you awake at night wondering if your job is sustainable.  It's a big reason why I got interested in becoming financially independent.

I must stress that I have the most experience with the humanities, not the sciences or medicine. I firmly believe that scientific and medical research have the potential to be orders of magnitude more useful than any of the tripe that humanities professors publish. It can be used to create new materials, new products, new medical procedures, etc. It makes humanity aware of interesting technical things that were not known before, and it is this knowledge that I believe is most directly responsible for the advancement of humanity from barbarism to civilization.

A lot of this research is personally fulfilling to the researchers, and as you point out, there's a lot of pressure to supplement your salary with phony research money, which leads to a lot of marginal projects that serve as the veneer for a windfall, especially in the humanities. On that side, an enormous amount of the publications consist of "critical analysis" that is either completely obvious or completely pointless, research on a topic that is of no use to anyone, or advocacy for the author's far-left political agenda. The results are reams of pages that nobody will ever read except for the poor saps that the author gets to peer-review them or write generic blurbs for them.

IMHO there is a huge disconnect between the output and the value to society in the humanities: dissertations that nobody reads, papers published in journals nobody reads, books published that nobody reads--all of this stuff is created for the single selfish purpose of advancing one's career, not expanding the boundaries of humanity's collective store of useful knowledge. Once written, this stuff is ignored forever because it is un-useful, un-commercializable, uninteresting to anyone except the writer and their half-dozen academic peers; it's pure make-work. It could cease with no real negative impact to anybody but the people whose careers have been built on churning it out. It's a giant circle jerk where people write useless nonsense in order to impress other people with political power over their careers who pretend to care because they themselves only write useless nonsense and know they must go through the same process. It is insular, self-serving, and it hurts the country for so many resources and so much time to be wasted on the academic equivalent of digging ditches and filling them back in again.

sophie wrote: Job security:  Yes, younger than 60.  I am going up for tenure next year with very enthusiastic backing from my dept chair.

Good for you for your tenure prospects! Believe me, the world of academia changes dramatically once you have tenure. You start to realize that you really don't have to do anything you don't want to do. Some people let this get to their heads and they become horrible ogres. I've personally seen it happen on multiple occasions. I don't imagine this will be you, but academia looks very different from the different sides of the "tenure" line.

sophie wrote: Job security is definitely a function of your accomplishments primarily, which is turn is a function of your own hard work, intelligence and creativity - which sounds reasonable to me!  Yes teaching is a lot of work but I would never want to give that up.  I often hear back from residents and fellows who have graduated and moved on, with questions on things like scientific issues, clinical management, and career advice.  6 courses a year sounds nasty though...I do clinical teaching rather than courses but I think standard course load here is only 2-3/year.

Academic politics:  There are always people who have nothing better to do than engage in vicious little power games.  Is any job truly safe from this?  I've noticed that there is an inverse relationship of this behavior with productivity, so one way to minimize it is to make sure you're in a place with lots of highly accomplished people - which means, a very high quality institution where the jobs are competitive, and where you have to work hard to establish yourself.  Ignore the game-players except to be extra nice to them when you do have to interact - a very effective technique I learned years ago from a friend.  Otherwise focus on your own work, and spend your time with colleagues who are successful, intelligent, and fun to work with.

In my experience--which seems to be largely mirrored by your own--institutional politics are most attractive to those who produce the least amount of value. This is why there's less politics in the sciences (and medicine apparently)--these fields produce value for society! Your academic credentials get to sit alongside all the cool things you've published, your students who have gone on to change the world, all your collaborations with NASA and Pfizer and 3M that led to cool new products, etc.

In the humanities, very little value gets produced. On average, you publish things that nobody reads or cares about. You teach students who go on to become starving artists, broke unemployed washouts, neurotic far left political agitators, and occasionally bitter humanities professors themselves. Your work is not used to do anything interesting, create anything interesting, or really advance humanity in any meaningful manner. It gets lost among the scads of people doing the exact same thing, desperate for a little money by writing pointless gobbledygook to appease the masters of the perverse system they find themselves in.

The less value is being produced, the more people engage in politics to paper over it and look important and busy.

In conclusion, if you want to go into academia, don't enter the humanities! Go hang out with Sophie and save people's lives, or invent some cool new ways for people to do things they couldn't do before. Just don't make a career out of writing things like this:

Wendy Brown, PhD PoliSci, UC Berkley wrote: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8306.html

These aims require an appreciation of tolerance as not only protean in meaning but also historically and politically discursive in character. They require surrendering an understanding of tolerance as a transcendent or universal concept, principle, doctrine, or virtue so that it can be considered instead as a political discourse and practice of governmentality that is historically and geographically variable in purpose, content, agents, and objects. As a consortium of para-legal and para-statist practices in modern constitutional liberalism—practices that are associated with the liberal state and liberal legalism but are not precisely codified by it—tolerance is exemplary of Foucault’s account of governmentality as that which organizes “the conduct of conduct”? at a variety of sites and through rationalities not limited to those formally countenanced as political. Absent the precise dictates, articulations, and prohibitions associated with the force of law, tolerance nevertheless produces and positions subjects, orchestrates meanings and practices of identity, marks bodies, and conditions political subjectivities.

This is probably negative value since I'm sure more than one student has been driven to suicide after being forced to read a whole book of this toxic waste (she has written seven of them). Here, have some more of her!

[img width=550]https://i.imgur.com/n7Pcj5i.jpg[/img]

This is the kind of stuff you encounter on a daily basis in the humanities.

For what it's worth, my prof friend and his wife are both tenured and are making ~ $95,000/yr each. We haven't talked about it since Obamacare but they've had health coverage that made me green with envy. (And my coverage is so bare-bones that I decided to just leave my skin green).

They're at a Community College.

My guess is where PS and Sophie diverge is research vs classroom teacher.

Desert wrote: Wow, $95K salary at a community college??  That sounds really high.

I thought so, too. It took them a long, long time to get up there, of course. I also learned from them that there are people who didn't work there for nearly as long who have massive pensions. Different rules back then.

MangoMan wrote:

Desert wrote:

MangoMan wrote: "And take the Cubs and Bears with you."
UIUC Class of '80 BS Biology here.

Illinois is a sad state for sports these days.  What happened to the '85 Bearsss, the Jordan Bulls and the Mackovic/Lou Illini!?!  Oh, how the mighty have fallen.  I'm thinking it's all Obama's fault. 

Pugchief, at least most of your classes were on the side of Green St where all the girls were.  Cortopassi and I were over there sweltering in the TAM building with a bunch of dudes. 

It surely is Obama's fault. And I lived in Bromley Hall for 2 years, which was air conditioned! 
Your timing was just off. The engineering campus is now the nice part of town. Not sure if the girl situation has improved up there though.

I have some hope at least one of my daughters will go there, if for nothing else so that I can get some Papa Del's every now and then.

I did not take advantage of all the extracurricular activities down there when I went.  Not one b-ball game, only one football game.  Did see U2 and Peter Gabriel.  I could kick myself looking back but it was all in the name of conserving money.  I did meet my future wife there which was the highpoint!

I was in Forbes first two years and then roach infested apartments after.

IMHO there is a huge disconnect between the output and the value to society in the humanities: dissertations that nobody reads, papers published in journals nobody reads, books published that nobody reads--all of this stuff is created for the single selfish purpose of advancing one's career, not expanding the boundaries of humanity's collective store of useful knowledge. Once written, this stuff is ignored forever because it is un-useful, un-commercializable, uninteresting to anyone except the writer and their half-dozen academic peers; it's pure make-work. It could cease with no real negative impact to anybody but the people whose careers have been built on churning it out. It's a giant circle jerk where people write useless nonsense in order to impress other people with political power over their careers who pretend to care because they themselves only write useless nonsense and know they must go through the same process. It is insular, self-serving, and it hurts the country for so many resources and so much time to be wasted on the academic equivalent of digging ditches and filling them back in again.

I understand exactly what you mean, PS!!  I actually started out with a math sciences undergraduate degree, and got off that track after I realized the goal was a constant circle of making up problems and solving them, with the solutions so intricate and opaque that they'd never, ever see actual use.  So it's not precisely the same as humanities...there are some in the humanities who do useful work like translating the Book of Judas.  Political science, however, is the world's biggest headache.  I took a poli sci course freshman year and almost failed it, I thought it was so ridiculous.  Thank heavens for freshman pass/fail...

Not all scientists are productive, and many rely on obfuscation to impress other people into thinking they're saying something with great significance.  If I read a paper and can't understand it, I know the author is just trying to snow me, and I move on.

As far as pay and quality of life improving after tenure:  I will let you know once the rubicon is crossed, and hope you're right!!  I suspect that's the case although not sure the actual impact in a clinical department.  One thing I did hear about is that tenured faculty get a private "tenure fund" that the university kicks $100K into every year.  You can spend it on whatever you want, but my chair advised banking it for lean times when grant funding runs dry.  Having that backup is going to be a big confidence booster. 

Small correction - grants are not for supplementing salary, but for funding part of it so you can spend your time on research - otherwise you have to spend your time earning money in other ways to justify your salary, like seeing patients.  So there are a lot of people working as hard as a private practice physician for half the pay, which I think is just plain stupid.  Not surprising that these people are bitter, and consequently these are the ones playing the petty political games.

However, provided you heed PS's and my words of warning...jump in, the water's fine.  And now I remember why I started going off on this tangent in the first place:  an academic career does greatly benefit from attending high quality (Ivy or equivalent) schools.  You can get away with a state school as an undergrad, but for graduate and/or professional school you need to aim high. To avoid getting killed with student loans, a prospective physician scientist should consider an MD/PhD program, where you get full funding to get both degrees from one institution - usually 2 years MD, then PhD, then finish MD.  Long haul and the programs are tough to get into, but the rewards are great.

Pointedstick wrote:

Wendy Brown, PhD PoliSci, UC Berkley wrote: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8306.html

These aims require an appreciation of tolerance as not only protean in meaning but also historically and politically discursive in character. They require surrendering an understanding of tolerance as a transcendent or universal concept, principle, doctrine, or virtue so that it can be considered instead as a political discourse and practice of governmentality that is historically and geographically variable in purpose, content, agents, and objects. As a consortium of para-legal and para-statist practices in modern constitutional liberalism—practices that are associated with the liberal state and liberal legalism but are not precisely codified by it—tolerance is exemplary of Foucault’s account of governmentality as that which organizes “the conduct of conduct”? at a variety of sites and through rationalities not limited to those formally countenanced as political. Absent the precise dictates, articulations, and prohibitions associated with the force of law, tolerance nevertheless produces and positions subjects, orchestrates meanings and practices of identity, marks bodies, and conditions political subjectivities.

Holy shit I just committed suicide.  Tolerance good mkay?

sophie wrote: Good for you Mike.  I think a lot of us have these stories.  example:  I made a stupid stock purchase in my Roth IRA, following the advice of my uncle the Wall Street broker.  It's now a penny stock and I leave it in the Roth as a constant reminder to myself not to ever, ever do something so idiotic again.

Brokers are trained salesman, not registered investment advisors with a fiduciary duty.  I would never take advice from one (and never have).  It sounds like he must have thought way too much of his non-existent abilities to think he had any trading or investment acumen after retirement.  Ignorance is more bottomless than stupidity!

barrett wrote: What balance of assets will grow enough going forward? If the world economy becomes even more deflationary in the next 5-10 years, that could be terrible for stocks.

Well, stocks are not the economy.  Stocks can stink while the economy is roaring.  You wouldn't get much by investing in Japanese small caps last couple of decades even though they're making gobs of money servicing domestic demand in their "Deflation".  So that would have to leave diversifying beyond the public equity monoculture which I've already advocated on here many times.

ochotona wrote:

Pointedstick wrote: Don't have a college fund. Every dollar you put in there is a dollar that the colleges will simply take. The less you have saved, the more financial aid and scholarships your daughters will get, and in any event IMHO any college that's so expensive that you have to save up to afford it is a bad deal. The best colleges (Harvard, Yale, etc) offer more or less free tuition to the children of non-rich parents, and the cheap state schools and 4th and 5th tier schools offer an education nearly as good, only lacking the elite student body, and for very little money. If you want to bankroll tuition at those places for your kids, it won't be hard at all. The big trap is 2nd and 3rd tier schools (especially the liberal arts varieties) that bill themselves as offering a Harvard-quality education, but for kids who can't get into Harvard (not said in those words of course )--these institutions are more or less scams in my opinion. You can tell them because they are all in the northeast, the buildings look new, they ooze elitism, their marketing literature implies that your child is a precious flower who they will take very good care of and expose to lots of interesting experiences rather than a mind to be molded and filled with useful information, and the yearly cost is $40k or higher.

OMG, that could be possible the worst advice given on college financing. One size does not fit all. I have sent two children through college debt free. My second is not going until Fall 2015, but 100% funded already, so I consider her college project "done".

Yes, if you put assets in the student's name, the FAFSA computation will grab most of it. So don't put it in the student's name. The 529 should be in the parent's name FBO the student ("For Benefit Of"). No Custodial accounts. I'm not sure about Education IRAs (Coverdells), have a small one, after the 529 came out I didn't see the point of the Coverdell any longer.

The real trick is, the FAFSA really only "works" for what I call poor and low middle class people. If you are a smart person, and have a good income, the FAFSA will compute your EFC, your Expected Family Contribution, way higher than you would ever imagine it should be. FAFSA thinks you should put a second mortgage on your home, take out college loans, burn all of your kid's money, and a bunch of yours, to pay for their college.

My son got $14,000 a year in merit-based, not need-based scholarships. Those enabled him to go to the non-Ivy, 2nd tier private college of his choice. But the majority was me writing checks out of the 529 account. If I hadn't had the 529, he'd be $100,000 in debt with student loans, and he's still in grad school, and the family will get him to his Master's degree debt-free, too. Because our EFC was $55,000 at the time!!!

My daughter is getting $8,000 a year in merit-based aid, but she's going to a State school, so I have to write checks out of the 529 FBO Daughter and also out of another bank account set aside specially for her. If I hadn't saved her entire life for college, she'd be $75,000 in debt with student loans by 2019. Because our EFC this year was $97,000 !!! (see, too much PP success). Oh yrs, did I mention I'm currently unemployed? That won't factor into the FAFSA until early 2016 when I do my 2015 taxes.

If you're truly a poor family, and you have a very gifted child who is highly sought after because he/she is a vegan homosexual Native Whatever, then yes, don't save a dime, and let your student throw him/herself at the feet of the scholarship granting body. But don't be surprised if the "aid" ends up being a subsidized Stafford loan, and you don't see grandkids for 10 or 12 extra years because the noose of student debt strangles their ability to launch into life.

There is a very simple way to ensure that the noose of student debt doesn't strangle your child's life: explain to him that student loans are a scam, as are most college degrees. If he or she can get a scholarship or work-study, for a useful degree, fine; otherwise, just give him or her the money you were going to waste on college so that he or she can start a business or otherwise get started in life. College degrees are unnecessary.

And I say this as someone with a rather expensive degree for its time, but still far cheaper in real terms than the ridiculous prices of today, which are due entirely to the student loan scam.

Libertarian666 wrote: ↑Sun May 17, 2015 12:17 pm

ochotona wrote:

Pointedstick wrote: Don't have a college fund. Every dollar you put in there is a dollar that the colleges will simply take. The less you have saved, the more financial aid and scholarships your daughters will get, and in any event IMHO any college that's so expensive that you have to save up to afford it is a bad deal. The best colleges (Harvard, Yale, etc) offer more or less free tuition to the children of non-rich parents, and the cheap state schools and 4th and 5th tier schools offer an education nearly as good, only lacking the elite student body, and for very little money. If you want to bankroll tuition at those places for your kids, it won't be hard at all. The big trap is 2nd and 3rd tier schools (especially the liberal arts varieties) that bill themselves as offering a Harvard-quality education, but for kids who can't get into Harvard (not said in those words of course )--these institutions are more or less scams in my opinion. You can tell them because they are all in the northeast, the buildings look new, they ooze elitism, their marketing literature implies that your child is a precious flower who they will take very good care of and expose to lots of interesting experiences rather than a mind to be molded and filled with useful information, and the yearly cost is $40k or higher.

OMG, that could be possible the worst advice given on college financing. One size does not fit all. I have sent two children through college debt free. My second is not going until Fall 2015, but 100% funded already, so I consider her college project "done".

Yes, if you put assets in the student's name, the FAFSA computation will grab most of it. So don't put it in the student's name. The 529 should be in the parent's name FBO the student ("For Benefit Of"). No Custodial accounts. I'm not sure about Education IRAs (Coverdells), have a small one, after the 529 came out I didn't see the point of the Coverdell any longer.

The real trick is, the FAFSA really only "works" for what I call poor and low middle class people. If you are a smart person, and have a good income, the FAFSA will compute your EFC, your Expected Family Contribution, way higher than you would ever imagine it should be. FAFSA thinks you should put a second mortgage on your home, take out college loans, burn all of your kid's money, and a bunch of yours, to pay for their college.

My son got $14,000 a year in merit-based, not need-based scholarships. Those enabled him to go to the non-Ivy, 2nd tier private college of his choice. But the majority was me writing checks out of the 529 account. If I hadn't had the 529, he'd be $100,000 in debt with student loans, and he's still in grad school, and the family will get him to his Master's degree debt-free, too. Because our EFC was $55,000 at the time!!!

My daughter is getting $8,000 a year in merit-based aid, but she's going to a State school, so I have to write checks out of the 529 FBO Daughter and also out of another bank account set aside specially for her. If I hadn't saved her entire life for college, she'd be $75,000 in debt with student loans by 2019. Because our EFC this year was $97,000 !!! (see, too much PP success). Oh yrs, did I mention I'm currently unemployed? That won't factor into the FAFSA until early 2016 when I do my 2015 taxes.

If you're truly a poor family, and you have a very gifted child who is highly sought after because he/she is a vegan homosexual Native Whatever, then yes, don't save a dime, and let your student throw him/herself at the feet of the scholarship granting body. But don't be surprised if the "aid" ends up being a subsidized Stafford loan, and you don't see grandkids for 10 or 12 extra years because the noose of student debt strangles their ability to launch into life.

There is a very simple way to ensure that the noose of student debt doesn't strangle your child's life: explain to him that student loans are a scam, as are most college degrees. If he or she can get a scholarship or work-study, for a useful degree, fine; otherwise, just give him or her the money you were going to waste on college so that he or she can start a business or otherwise get started in life. College degrees are unnecessary.

And I say this as someone with a rather expensive degree for its time, but still far cheaper in real terms than the ridiculous prices of today, which are due entirely to the student loan scam.

Or, do what is advocated in this book: https://smile.amazon.com/Debt-Free-Outs ... l_huc_item Debt-Free U: How I Paid for an Outstanding College Education Without Loans, Scholarships, or Mooching off My Parents

I read it straight through in one night. It all boils down to:

1) Go to local community college for 2 years
2) Go to state university for the last 2 years
3) Live at home as much as possible (alternatively have your parents buy a house to live in which you live with others and then sell it for a profit at the end of the four years)
4) Work as much as possible. 20 hours a week while in school. During ALL school vacations, work 40 hours.

VInny