[HN Gopher] How America's universities became debt factories
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How America's universities became debt factories
Author : car
Score : 302 points
Date : 2024-09-14 16:25 UTC (6 hours ago)
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| pelagicAustral wrote:
| I was lucky enough to get a grant, 100% of cost, with two
| caveats, you have to finish, and once you finish you HAVE to work
| in the country for 2 years. Overall an amazing compromise for
| government.
| wood_spirit wrote:
| Guessing from your username that this was Australia? Is this
| normal? And was this for specific courses and entry grades etc?
| chii wrote:
| It's not normal to have this in australia - these are
| probably scholarships.
|
| Australia has similar loan system for tertiary education.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| Falkland Islands. It is normal, only requirement is to have
| permanent residence. It is wide open, any type of study...
| refulgentis wrote:
| I agree entirely, made my college decision based on these factors
| at 18. However, these analyses miss the mark by stressing the
| map, instead of the territory.
|
| Ex. The graph about graduates being underemployed goes back to
| 1990, and there's no meaningful difference in the difference in
| the rate between then, and now.
|
| Ex. 41% graduating after 4 years doesn't mean it is necessary
| colleges need to Find A Better Way: that would affect ex. the
| complain around graduates being not prepared with no discernible
| skills
| roywiggins wrote:
| > The graph about graduates being underemployed goes back to
| 1990, and there's no meaningful difference in the difference in
| the rate between then, and now.
|
| this probably mattered less when the debt load was much lower
| johng wrote:
| Even saying this a decade ago would have been labeled
| misinformation.
| lordfrito wrote:
| Not true... people were talking about this in the late 90's as
| being a bad idea because of misaligned incentives.
|
| Loans are supposed to be inherently risky to the bank issuing
| the loan. Managing that risk is their business, and the reward
| for doing it right is the interest payments.
|
| I remember people back then talking about "if the loans are
| non-dischargeable, then the bank is pretty much guaranteed it's
| money back, making it a no risk proposition to them. What's
| stopping them from becoming student loan mills? What's stopping
| colleges from asking for more and more money if the banks just
| lend it no risk?"
|
| These ideas were out there, but get drowned out by the voices
| of the big pocket companies that are proposing the legislation.
| Tons of articles talking about the risk being overblown, the
| results are wonderful, etc. Think about the kids, good for
| 'murica, etc.
|
| The big messages you hear over and over again in the media are
| being payed for by groups that aren't particularly interested
| in benefiting you. This is not a new problem, it's been this
| way for a long while.
|
| And here we are 25 years later. Wondering how we got here. When
| anyone with a brain at the time knew this was coming.
|
| The problem is only getting worse because of media
| consolidation and the vast reach of the internet into
| everyone's eyeballs. Be skeptical very of what you read.
| michelsedgh wrote:
| I agree, and another way out is educating people who are about to
| enter university properly so they make an informed decision about
| the major they wanna choose more than their feelings and more on
| facts to see the outcome.
| squidgedcricket wrote:
| That's not a one-size-fits-all solution. Many 18 year olds will
| not be willing or capable of making a good financial long term
| decision regardless of education.
|
| Mortgaging yourself into decades of indentured servitude
| shouldn't be an option that's available to young adults.
| michelsedgh wrote:
| I actually beg to differ, most people who go into STEM for
| example have a pretty good understanding of their path and
| they are very smart 18 year olds who make really good
| decisions, but I agree that mortgages shouldn't be like
| candies giving them to any kid. I agree that If banks were
| worried of not getting payed back, then maybe they would
| screen better, but still the issue of universities with bad
| incentives still remains there.
| advael wrote:
| We should be way more willing to straight up kill multi-billion
| dollar industries. Without that willingness, most modern problems
| are impossible for governments to solve, and such industries and
| even their potential competitors are incentivised mostly to
| exacerbate the problem. I love a good market as much as anyone
| but there really are problems markets will never solve
| WorkerBee28474 wrote:
| That's too disruptive, and there's too high a chance of
| unintended consequences. Instead of that what you'll see is a
| 'we'll kill this multi-billion dollar industry over the course
| of the next 30 years'
| mrfox321 wrote:
| China does this, for better or for worse.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Not really.
|
| Entrenched and connected types tend to exit industries
| before the gavel hits, and enforcement from the CCDI isn't
| impartial, with plenty of bribery to remain off their
| radar.
|
| Truly Schumpterian creative destruction is good in a
| vacuum, but reality isn't a vacuum.
| daedrdev wrote:
| They are not a supportive example, their one child policy
| doomed their demographics and future economic growth.
| ben_w wrote:
| They stopped the one child policy nine years ago; they
| had it in the first place because demographic projections
| had them severely overpopulated if they didn't.
|
| During the period in which it was active, their GDP
| increased by a factor of about 62. Not percentage,
| multiple.
| advael wrote:
| With all due respect, fuck that. We do disruptive stuff with
| unintended consequences for millions of people as a matter of
| policy all the time, and the idea that it'll disrupt some
| finance goons' ponzi scheme does not bother me
| halfcat wrote:
| > _some finance goons ' ponzi scheme_
|
| If you mean banks, there's the problem that _"let it die"_
| often translates to _"shift the obligation"_ , which
| typically gets shifted to the tax payers, either in plain
| sight after a bailout, or under the table by devaluing the
| currency (basically taxation without having to say it).
| freshtake wrote:
| This is the problem with a ton of policy thinking. The idea
| that we can solve a problem of this magnitude with
| disruption, and somehow prevent market forces from
| reacting, is incredibly short sighted.
|
| It's incredibly expensive to run a university, and many
| people feel entitled to attend any university they can get
| into (not a bad thing, btw), but you can't suddenly erase
| the bill without drastically cutting costs, changing
| supply/demand, or otherwise altering the economics first.
|
| The college level education system in the US employs almost
| 3.8 million people. Decisions here absolutely affect their
| employment, tax rates, employment rates, bank loans,
| financial industry solvency, etc.
|
| This problem is incredibly far away from the space of YOLO
| tactics.
| WorkerBee28474 wrote:
| > We do disruptive stuff with unintended consequences for
| millions of people as a matter of policy all the time
|
| And many, many of the outcomes of that are bad
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Multi-billion dollar industries represent jobs, stocks, and
| campaign contributions. The US government is not designed to
| beat those forces. It's the same reason we'll never see
| universal healthcare unfortunately.
| advael wrote:
| It isn't set up to now, but it has been before and it can be
| again
| radpanda wrote:
| Same reason we have TurboTax instead of a government website
| to type our taxable income numbers into.
| anovikov wrote:
| We shouldn't see the government as solution to too many
| problems. If we overdo on it, we get socialism. And we know how
| it always ends.
|
| Let the market forces decide. Eventually people will realise
| college doesn't work and will stop going there. Seriously
| problem is that too many people think they are smart and can
| benefit from a degree, when most can't. If 10% top graders go
| to college from school as it was in the boomers' era, ROI of
| higher education will be enormous (as there won't be an
| oversupply of useless graduates), and costs will be low (as low
| demand always reduces prices).
|
| We shouldn't punish people who take the money because people
| are willing to pay it. Who's fault it is that they are dumb? Do
| we see much say, annoying advertisement to the tune of "go
| study X with us, you'll be rich and women will love you"? No.
| People are doing it because they are dumb. If we try to build a
| system that prevents smart people from taking money put on the
| table by dumb people, we will make the whole system dumber by
| incentivising dumbness.
| BoxedEmpathy wrote:
| I question utility of that reduction. When you reduce complex
| situations to simple words like 'socialism' you lose nuance
| and predictive power. It's not binary. It's more or less.
| Canada is more socialist than USA. Norway is more socialist
| than Canada.
|
| Reducing to "is" or "isn't" doesn't help understand the
| problem or come up with viable solutions.
| anovikov wrote:
| If we go along the route of "asking the government to ban
| every line of business where people waste money getting no
| value for it or even getting harmed, being driven by
| systematic delusion", as it is with the higher education -
| we will shoot ourselves in the foot in a massive massive
| way as this will kill almost all web startups as this is
| what they are - use manipulative tactics, knowingly false
| expectation and social effects to force people to spend
| money on... well nothing really. And the lower your chance
| of getting something in return, the more you pay (classic
| example are dating apps). I go to startup events
| frequently. Took me a few years to accept the truth that
| speaking about any industry (their slang for it is
| "vertical") - well, any except porn - like dating, pharma,
| so-called "nutra", etc. they actually mean "scam in the
| field of X", and the main idea of every successful one is
| "a genius way to obscure it is a scam".
|
| For God's sake, it will even kill custom software
| development which most people sitting here, do for a living
| - because it is the same exact thing - vast majority of
| clients never get what they want and even if they did they
| won't be able to make the money on the useless "products"
| they invented, because this is nothing but a systematic
| delusion that's moving them. Almost all of them see
| themselves as genius inventors of the next world-changing
| thing but they are in fact random nobodies who raised cash
| from other random nobodies, to waste it on something that
| makes their contractors laugh so badly they even refrain
| from doing video calls. It's even worse than higher
| education. I seen multiple software dev companies throwing
| lavish parties on the April Fool's day as "professional
| holiday of our clients".
|
| Should we first look at ourselves in the mirror before
| blaming the college cabal for doing the same as we do
| ourselves, just more successfully?
| BoxedEmpathy wrote:
| I said is I don't see the utility in reducing the concept
| from a continuum to a binary "is/isn't"
|
| You seem to have doubled down on the is/isn't perspective
| and demonstrated what I was referring to. The more you
| reduce the less useful your reasoning becomes.
| greensh wrote:
| No, with high student loans, you are not supporting high
| talents; you are supporting the rich only. You are
| obstructing a lot of potential that poor students might
| have realized if they could have afforded it. It's not
| about banning universities; it's about broadening
| accessibility. Schools are state-funded for the same
| reason.
| advael wrote:
| Socialism is a term too broad to mean anything. When we say
| socialism, do we include states that provide healthcare
| systems as infrastructure, as is common across the world? Do
| we include the vast amounts of market interference
| represented by decisions about what crimes can be hidden
| behind a corporate veil, what companies win lucrative
| government contracts to have decades of non-competitive
| profits?
|
| The attitude that the government shouldn't intervene against
| companies on the behalf of human rights has been tried for
| fifty years, and it is an unprecedented failure even in
| financial terms for at least roughly 80% of the population of
| one of the largest and wealthiest countries in the world in
| terms of real purchasing power. Even for many of us in higher
| income brackets, the resulting crumbling infrastructure and
| drastic wealth disparities leave much to be desired as a
| society to live in. Many of these problems have solutions,
| and calling them "socialism" is meaningless as an argument
| against them
| candiddevmike wrote:
| > We shouldn't see the government as solution to too many
| problems. If we overdo on it, we get socialism. And we know
| how it always ends.
|
| With a place in the top 10 happiest countries?
| https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-
| rankings/happiest-...
| ben_w wrote:
| > If we overdo on it, we get socialism. And we know how it
| always ends.
|
| First, no, we have some high-visibility examples of
| _dictators claiming to be socialists_ , several of whom had
| purges of other internal opponents who said socialism was a
| different thing to what they were doing.
|
| We don't point to the "Democratic People's Republic of
| Korea"* or "The Democratic Republic of Congo" then say of
| Democracy (or of republics) "And we know how it always ends".
|
| Second, there's a huge gap between what the USA considers
| "dangerously lefty" and what is seen in northern Europe
| today, let alone states today which are or were explicitly
| socialist such as the USSR.
|
| * AKA North Korea, AKA Naughty Korea
| anovikov wrote:
| No, i mean EU socialist countries. To the tune of Sweden,
| Netherlands, etc. That are little but sleepy retirement
| community with no ways to make money. Why would anyone with
| any ambition want to live there? So they don't. They go to
| America in spite of all it's horrors and sins. Live there
| once they made they money? Also no, because taxes, they go
| to the likes of Cyprus or Malta, or since recently, Spain
| [1]. These countries are good only if you are a taker, or a
| tourist.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beckham_law
| ben_w wrote:
| *points at my own profile*
|
| I moved from the UK to Germany, I actively decided
| against the USA. Why? Consider what was going on
| politically in the US right after the UK voted for
| Brexit.
|
| Skephtomoun ten Kupro, alla oi Aggloi lene otan kati
| einai duskolo na diabastei: "It's all greek to me"
| huuhee3 wrote:
| European social democracies may not be the best if you
| want to get rich, but for average Joe they offer superior
| quality of life compared to the US. IMO too much
| capitalism and socialism both suck, and certain EU
| countries have the best balance between them.
| sofixa wrote:
| Sweden? The country with one of the highest amounts of
| startups per capita? The Netherlands???
|
| Are you sure you know what you're talking about?
| ivewonyoung wrote:
| There have been a lot of socialist countries that were
| proper and strong democracies, notably India. The result?
| Hundreds of millions in abject poverty in India until
| socialism was given up in the 90s, and is slowly
| recovering.
| sofixa wrote:
| Funny you say that, Karnataka is an outlier beating its
| peers in all quality of life metrics and has been run by
| communist for decades.
|
| Also, modern day India has a very strong government
| intervention bias, especially regarding lifting people
| out of poverty. Be it investments in infrastructure (such
| as running water), or downright giving food to people.
| Good luck explaining how that isn't "socialism" to an
| American.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > Funny you say that, Karnataka is an outlier beating its
| peers in all quality of life metrics and has been run by
| communist for decades.
|
| You mean Kerala, not Karnataka.
|
| And conversely, West Bengal was ruled by the Communists
| since the 1970s to the early 2010s, yet it's
| developmental indicators have regressed to those
| comparable to some of the poorest states of India.
|
| Conversely, right leaning and nativist Himachal Pradesh
| (if you ain't Pahadi or Pahadi-adjacent we will give you
| the cold shoulder, and both the state chapters of the HP
| INC and BJP trace their origins to the RSS and Arya
| Samaj) has developmental indicators that can match Kerala
| and other traditionally richer states in India.
|
| At the end of the day, all that matters is administrative
| capacity, not ideology.
|
| If local government is held accountable, it will work
| hard to deliver.
| thayne wrote:
| In this case, government intervention is what caused the
| problem, and removing that intervention is what would disrupt
| the multi-million dollar industry.
|
| Specifically, the government made it so college loans can't
| be discharged in bankruptcy, and backs many student loans.
|
| The solution is to remove the exception for student debt in
| bankruptcy, and either have the government stop backing
| student loans, or make stricter requirements for colleges to
| quailify for its students qualifying for federal loans. Like
| say, require that a certain percentage of students graduate,
| and get jobs within a year of graduating, having reasonable
| tuition, etc.
| penguin1029 wrote:
| Agree, but the result will be that far fewer kids get to go
| to college, or get to go to the best college that they can
| get into.
|
| Loans will only be granted to students who have a track
| record of high achievement, parents willing to co-sign, and
| going into majors that make economic sense.
|
| Enrollment will drop, universities will stop offering
| passion majors, mass layoffs in library science, academia,
| and college administrations (likely to the tune of 1M+
| people).
|
| In the end, students will be told by federal examination
| which school and major they get to pursue, or whether they
| get to go to college at all.
|
| That's assuming the government is both effective and
| efficient in this process.
|
| This is essentially how most consumer economics work.
| amelius wrote:
| > Who's fault it is that they are dumb?
|
| They are young. And therefore there is an asymmetry in
| information.
| anovikov wrote:
| That, probably can and should be fixed. Set a minimum age
| for someone to take a college loan to say 21. Otherwise, a
| parent takes it and it's subtracted from a parents' social
| security check before it does from kid's. Then people will
| think twice. Maybe that's fair.
| huuhee3 wrote:
| Good idea. I think kids in high school should also be
| shown some real stats about monetary outcomes from
| different degrees. Not BS marketing material from
| educational institutions, but actual statistics. The
| whole society would benefit if number of students in
| different fields would roughly match labor market demand.
| penguin1029 wrote:
| Yep, and kids also smoke, vape, do drugs, gamble, assault
| people, play too many video games, etc.
|
| The answers lie in educating them to make good decisions,
| and be there to help when good decisions happen to turn out
| poorly. The current dilemma is largely due to provably bad
| decisions (by students, banks, universities, government).
|
| Are student loans the most pressing "bad decision" we have
| as a society? Definitely not. Is it a very electable topic?
| Yep
| mchusma wrote:
| But...the whole point is that it is NOT a market. If student
| debt is dischargeable and the government guarantee is removed
| or dramatically reduced, pretty much all problems are "solved".
|
| Universities will have to start focusing on ROI. Universities
| that provide a poor ROI will shut down. Universities will need
| to reduce costs for traditional coursework, cut courses with
| poor returns, add courses with higher returns.
|
| The inflation in higher education that has run rampant due to
| subsidized demand being removed.
| tway_GdBRwW wrote:
| > Universities will have to start focusing on ROI.
|
| In Europe, they have a simpler system. Education is paid for
| from taxes. If a student does well, they pay for it via
| taxes. If they don't, then they aren't crippled by debt.
|
| The problem with the ROI approach is it still places too much
| burden on the student, and, well, life happens. Say you major
| in comp sci (or some other high-paying field) but shortly
| after graduation something happens which prevents you from
| working in the field. Sucks to be you.
|
| And likewise it sets up universities to, as you say, "cut
| courses with poor returns." Like for example "teaching",
| because school teacher pay is crap, so it has a poor ROI.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Say you major in comp sci (or some other high-paying
| field) but shortly after graduation something happens which
| prevents you from working in the field. Sucks to be you.
|
| That's why the article's saying you should be able to
| declare bankruptcy.
|
| > And likewise it sets up universities to, as you say, "cut
| courses with poor returns." Like for example "teaching",
| because school teacher pay is crap, so it has a poor ROI.
|
| Teaching is relatively well paid and there are huge numbers
| of jobs. It's highly likely that a teacher could repay
| loans. There are plenty of degrees far less capable of
| providing employment than teaching.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Teaching as in school teachers? In the US? Not even close
| to being well paid.
| magnoliakobus wrote:
| I think most people would agree with me in saying the
| European model sounds pretty swell compared to forcing
| people into declaring bankruptcy because of
| economic/personal factors potentially out of their
| control, while also inserting an incredible amount of
| volatility into the entire university system that would
| make long term institutional planning much less possible.
| kraussvonespy wrote:
| And in the US, bankruptcy doesn't help with the student
| debt, so if the majority of your debt is student loans,
| there's really nothing that can be done other than die to
| get rid of them. And I'm 100% certain that if the student
| loan - industrial complex could saddle relatives and kids
| with that debt after death, they'd sure go after that
| too.
| luckylion wrote:
| Many will agree, but that's part of the reason why the US
| has a 50% higher GDP with 30% lower population. Focusing
| on well-beeing, fun and experience comes at a price.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| > "Teaching is relatively well paid"
|
| Compared to what? In the US, teachers are absolutely
| underpaid relative to their similarly-educated and
| -skilled peers in other professions.
| gruez wrote:
| >In Europe, they have a simpler system. Education is paid
| for from taxes. If a student does well, they pay for it via
| taxes. If they don't, then they aren't crippled by debt.
|
| That's all well and good for the student, but what about
| for taxpayers/governments who's funding that education?
|
| >And likewise it sets up universities to, as you say, "cut
| courses with poor returns." Like for example "teaching",
| because school teacher pay is crap, so it has a poor ROI.
|
| Sounds like the solution is to raise teacher pay, which
| would also have the added benefit of retaining teachers
| after they graduate. Giving teachers cheap training but
| paying them poorly seems worse than the status quo because
| you end up shoveling money into training teachers that'd
| end up dropping out anyways.
| tough wrote:
| A country's which population is educated, usually bodes
| well, unless it's an authoritative govt one, in which
| case dumbing down the population is the way (from the
| govt POV, at least)
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _That 's all well and good for the student, but what
| about for taxpayers/governments who's funding that
| education?_
|
| We can say the same thing about K-12 education -- it's
| just something we choose to fund collectively, because
| that's the kind of society we want to be.
|
| But also, progressive taxation means that the rich fund
| it more than the poor. So the general idea is that if law
| school and medical school are expensive to provide but
| result in vastly higher salaries, then it gets paid for
| in the end out of those lawyers' and doctors' taxes. Not
| the taxes from average Americans.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| Progressive taxation isn't even necessary. If someone
| makes $10,000 and is taxed 10%, they give up $1,000. And
| if someone makes $10,000,000 then they give up
| $1,000,000.
| oldprogrammer2 wrote:
| But it's not the same as K-12. I can't send my kids to an
| expensive private boarding school and expect taxes to pay
| for it.
| sofixa wrote:
| And absolutely the same logic can and should apply for
| universities - there can be private exclusive
| institutions, but the majority should be affordable and
| mostly paid for by taxes.
| penguin1029 wrote:
| This already is the case. 75% of student debt is private
| universities and colleges.
|
| If you get into Stanford but can't afford it, a loan
| seems like a good idea, but in reality the loan
| eligibility should consider the degree and future earning
| potential (along the same lines of how banks qualify
| other types of loans).
|
| If we simply cancel student debt or remove private
| colleges' ability to charge a market rate the result will
| be no more private colleges (similar to other countries
| with fully publicly funded education). In these countries
| you typically have a national exam that determines where
| you go, or you have to lottery in to a school if it isn't
| in your district.
| gruez wrote:
| >We can say the same thing about K-12 education -- it's
| just something we choose to fund collectively, because
| that's the kind of society we want to be.
|
| But in K-12 education, the taxpayer/state has strong
| control over what's taught. In the last few years there's
| some latitude by the students, but nothing close the
| panoply of programs offered by universities. If education
| is state funded, but only for programs with proven ROI
| (eg. STEM), I'd be fine with that.
| jltsiren wrote:
| When the state pays, what matters is the ROI to the
| state. There is a need for teachers, social workers, and
| people familiar with various cultures, but the market
| will never pay them well.
|
| Public funding models often have incentives for
| delivering the degrees the state wants. For example,
| there could be field-specific quotas for degrees. The
| university gets paid for each degree up to the quota, but
| not for exceeding the quota. That can have interesting
| effects in fields that are popular but in low demand. For
| example, the acceptance rate to psychology can be as low
| as 2-3%.
| fardo wrote:
| Simpler isn't always preferable: note that the key feature
| from the consumer perspective in that system is
|
| > you pay no matter what
|
| Meaning if it's assumed "despite learning little, you still
| will be able to pay for it", there's no longer any motive
| force towards quality, as your payment is assured.
| Incentives on taxpayers thereafter who want to minimize
| their tax burden would therefore be optimizing primarily
| toward cheapness of the educational process, rather than
| efficacy and quality of the education which outbound
| students received.
|
| A vigorous market for education, would suggest you would
| likely get a variety of nodes along a "costliness to
| quality" options frontier.
| eesmith wrote:
| > there's no longer any motive force towards quality, as
| your payment is assured
|
| There are many excellent European universities, including
| ones which have been around for centuries, telling me
| there are ways to handle your concerns.
|
| > A vigorous market for education
|
| How's that Corinthian Colleges degree working out? Costly
| and no quality. And exactly the life-crippling outcome we
| should expect in a 'vigorous market'.
| fardo wrote:
| This is non-responsive to my point. Pointing out that
| paid universities like Corinthian in a grossly distorted
| market predictably are not very competitive offerings, or
| that good offerings can nevertheless still exist in
| heavily distorted markets, both fail to address that
|
| > Current educational incentives caused by how payment is
| handled in these all-pay systems mean there is very
| little or no pressure exerted towards promoting an
| educational arms race towards quality, rather than
| minimizing cost to service that education.
|
| In a more competitive market, yes, I believe you'd both
| likely see better European offerings, as well as
| substantially more compelling American paid offerings
| than the current batch of cash grab for-profit
| universities. They exist in their current form almost
| exclusively because financial lenders in the US have no
| incentive not to issue loans to students - even if the
| program is bogus, they are guaranteed re-payment.
|
| This is a commonality shared between both current
| European offerings (via taxation guaranteeing repayment),
| and American alternatives (via guaranteed load
| repayment).
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| In the USA, the government also pays for education. That's
| part of the problem, in fact. Since the loan to the college
| is always paid for by the government, the college is
| effectively handed a blank check. Said check, now filled in
| with an arbitrarily high amount, is handed to the student
| as a bill to pay back to the government. The same is done
| in your system, in fact, except that the _entire country_
| suffers that burden, regardless of if that degree actually
| amounts to any meaningful contribution.
| vondur wrote:
| I would imagine in Europe they select more carefully the
| students whom will go to College. Here in the US we've told
| students that _everyone_ must go to College. We now have
| too many people in College and many of them aren 't going
| to be successful once they are in. It's not sustainable. In
| many of our public universities, the graduation rate is
| well below 50%
| sofixa wrote:
| > I would imagine in Europe they select more carefully
| the students whom will go to College. Here in the US
| we've told students that everyone must go to College
|
| You imagine wrong. Pretty much everyone goes to
| university in most and European countries. Even in wildly
| tourist dependent places, a degree in tourism is a normal
| thing for a young person to pursue before going to work
| at hotels/restaurants.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| It's actually less than half for the EU as a whole -
| https://erudera.com/news/statistics-show-41-of-eu-
| youngsters...
| sofixa wrote:
| The absurdly low numbers for Romania and Hungary make me
| think that people leaving to study abroad fall through
| the cracks in these stats.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| If those students/graduates move to other European
| countries (which they mostly do), they'll be counted in
| their destination country, evening things out.
|
| Where did you get the idea most Europeans get a degree?
| Lukas_Skywalker wrote:
| In Switzerland, it's only about 15%. The others most
| often do an apprenticeship:
| https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/apprenticeship-
| system/...
|
| It's a pretty efficient (and quite unique) system. People
| learn to do their job at a normal company and attend
| school for usually two days a week. And they can still
| switch to the university track later without starting
| from the beginning.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| _Say you major in comp sci (or some other high-paying
| field) but shortly after graduation something happens which
| prevents you from working in the field. Sucks to be you._
|
| And if you're a nurse or a police officer or a teacher or a
| lawyer and you lose your license under specious
| circumstances, it _really_ sucks to be you.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > _In Europe, they have a simpler system_
|
| Europe does NOT have an education system!
|
| The ~50 different European countries all have their own
| systems, with huge differences between them.
| jancsika wrote:
| > If student debt is dischargeable and the government
| guarantee is removed or dramatically reduced, pretty much all
| problems are "solved".
|
| Chesterton's fence definitely applies here.
|
| If you don't understand what that law attempted to prevent in
| the first place, you're just going to get your pocket picked
| by a different group of people.
| freshtake wrote:
| Yep, exactly. Current situation is clearly bad, but most of
| the solutions seem to focus around the idea that dismissing
| trillions of dollars in debt through bankruptcy is a great
| idea (it isn't)
| closeparen wrote:
| Trade schools should definitely focus on ROI, and a lot more
| people should attend them. The idea of the public university
| is to bring a traditionally aristocratic practice - the
| devotion of several years of one's young life to not-
| necessarily-practical intellectual pursuits - to the middle
| class. I think our civilization would lose something
| worthwhile by returning this practice to the exclusive domain
| of rich families. Much the same as if we sold off all our
| public parks for development.
|
| The issue is that we have democratized not only the class
| background part but also the "intellectual pursuits" part.
| College should be a lot more selective and a lot more
| rigorous; only a small minority of students have any business
| attending. The rest can get their credentialing and coming-
| of-age ceremony in an ROI focused trade school.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| See also the excellent book "Shop Class as Soulcraft" for a
| thorough examination of skilled trades as an under-
| appreciated and vital aspect of our economy and culture.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| > The idea of the public university is to bring a
| traditionally aristocratic practice - the devotion of
| several years of one's young life to not-necessarily-
| practical intellectual pursuits - to the middle class
|
| The entire idea that spending 4 years learning useless
| knowledge is somehow valuable is completely mistaken
| bullshit.
|
| Aristocrats could get away with it because they were rich
| but there is 0 evidence this practice brought fundamental
| value to them or society other than serving as an expensive
| status signal.
| thatcat wrote:
| They already focus on ROI, the problem is it's ROI for them
| not the student. In most states the biggest or second biggest
| company is a university because they run for profit sports
| programs with no pay to players, make money off commercial
| research grants and classes using pHd students making
| 34k/year, use the students as both low wage workers for
| campus jobs in high value retail space leased to franchises
| and as a captive populace to price gouge with required meal
| plans using the student loans, capitalize again off the real
| estate that is often land granted to them by the state by
| offering overpriced student housing that is often mandatory
| for freshmen. You basically have to accept getting scammed to
| get a degree.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Yes, but this is also the preferred solution of the people
| who _caused_ the current crisis with university cost
| inflation.
|
| Universities used to be expensive schools for rich people's
| failsons to "find themselves". That's why there's a lot of
| focus on "well-rounded" educations even today. Then western
| governments started offering taxpayer-funded tuition, which
| resulted in a new wave of educated kids who refused to
| believe government narratives regarding wars and refused to
| comply with conscription and drafts. This came to a head
| during the Vietnam War, where the US found that it's usual
| ability to start wars against labor in other countries had
| been stymied by them educating the enemy (their own workers).
|
| While the draft has been relegated to a vestigial function in
| the US today, the people in power were able to shut the
| people down. Saudi Arabia, a theocratic dictatorship that
| belongs in the 10th century, not the 20th, did the American
| ruling class a solid by embargoing the US and shutting down
| our economy for a decade. This gave cover for the complete
| overturning of Progressive Era policies. Most importantly for
| this subject, public state universities were stripped of
| their government funding. Instead, they would charge ever-
| increasing tuition which students would pay for with loans.
| This ensured that the poor could not access education and
| that the educated middle class would be in permanent debt
| slavery.
|
| Public universities went along with this because they were
| promised more money than they could get from public funding.
| This is why you see massive amounts of money being wasted by
| universities on bullshit. The ruling class gave universities
| a seat at the table of lavish excess in exchange for, y'know,
| letting the cops shoot their students with rubber bullets any
| time they get antsy. Your student debt is a bribe from the
| military-industrial complex to the university system that
| _you pay for_.
|
| However, this gambit did not fully succeed. For one,
| _students are still protesting_ , despite the debt noose
| around their necks, and university officials' best efforts to
| rubber-bullet their students into compliance. So there's a
| lot of politicians who want to get rid of university
| education altogether and replace it with trade schools. I may
| have harshed the concept of a "well-rounded" education
| before, but it does mean universities still have to teach
| things like history and economics, which is the sort of thing
| that makes the lower classes resist their social programming.
|
| So a lot of people in power want to get rid of universities
| and replace them with trade schools. Now, I actually don't
| have a problem with trade schools; a lot of good paying jobs
| are going undone because they don't confer the kinds of
| status middle-class families want. But there's a lot of
| right-wingers who want kids in trade schools solely because
| trade schools generally do not teach all the problematic
| subjects and forbidden knowledge (aka "traditional
| coursework") that makes tools of society start asking
| questions.
|
| If you want an actual way to fix universities (without just
| turning them into trade schools):
|
| - Have a ONE TIME student debt forgiveness event, contingent
| on shutting down the student loan system, so this shit
| doesn't happen twice.
|
| - Restore public university funding sufficient to allow
| tuition-free education for all poor and middle class
| students.
|
| - Purge the university administrative class, they've grown
| overbloated and turned universities into their own personal
| hedge funds.
|
| Once this is done, then we can start talking about what
| classes and degrees actually have good ROI on the public
| money the universities will be getting again. The thing is,
| though, the existing "low ROI" degrees mainly existed so the
| university administrative class could pump up admissions
| numbers. Remember, that was part of the deal they made with
| the devil. Taking away the student loan system means there's
| less incentive to admit students to prop up numbers, but if
| that becomes an issue again, we can further require minimum
| standards for students or courses through the university
| funding mechanism.
| davidgay wrote:
| > Universities used to be expensive schools for rich
| people's failsons to "find themselves". That's why there's
| a lot of focus on "well-rounded" educations even today.
| Then western governments started offering taxpayer-funded
| tuition
|
| Replace western by "US" for "well-rounded". AFAIK, all
| European university degrees are focused on a single topic,
| and its requirement (so, lots of math if you're studying
| physics). No literature classes required (or even available
| in some cases) if you're, e.g., getting a computer science
| degree.
| AndyKelley wrote:
| You seem to imply that a general willingness is what would
| allow this to happen when the article spells it out pretty
| clearly: it's powerful organizations clinging to power. Your
| sentiment amounts to nothing more than wishful thinking.
|
| It's tempting to just agree with your sentiment, but I think
| that day dreaming about an unrealistic solution sucks energy
| away from more effective actions. The main challenge of solving
| a difficult puzzle is to avoid dead ends and red herrings.
|
| A more promising plan involves explicitly strategizing against
| the agents who have the opposite agenda.
| d0mine wrote:
| A viral meme/tiktok/xkcd/etc could educate many 18 years old
| on how bad the deal is.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| > I love a good market as much as anyone but there really are
| problems markets will never solve
|
| The problem with student loans is that they are not driven by
| markets. If they were, absolutely nobody would give a loan to
| an 18 yo to spend 4 years and $160k to study psychology.
| jmyeet wrote:
| We should do (at least) three things:
|
| 1. Provide a counterbalance to private industries by having the
| government player to be a significant player in that market.
| That means a free or near-free high-quality state higher
| education system like the California system used to be until it
| was made an explicit political goal to avoid an "educated
| proletariat" [1]. It also goes for housing, hospitals, banks,
| ISPs and so on;
|
| 2. Nationalize failing industries rather than providing them
| loans for no reason. Banks fail in 2008? Well, you belong to
| the state now. Just like the FDIC does with failing banks.
|
| 3. Federal dollars for pharma research should come with an
| equity stake in the private corporations that monetize it. Most
| drugs are developed with Federal grants.
|
| > I love a good market as much as anyone
|
| Just curious: where do you see markets actually working?
|
| [1]: https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/analysis/threat-of-
| educate...
| ryandrake wrote:
| > 2. Nationalize failing industries rather than providing
| them loans for no reason. Banks fail in 2008? Well, you
| belong to the state now. Just like the FDIC does with failing
| banks.
|
| I kind of agree with this, but as a taxpayer, I don't
| necessarily want the government to have an equity stake in a
| failing or horribly-run business.
|
| We need the government to grow a backbone and allow large
| businesses and even entire sectors of the economy to FAIL
| when they suck. I hate the narrative "We have to keep
| ShittyCo alive because it _provides 10,000 jobs_!! " as if
| those jobs would just disappear if ShittyCo got flushed down
| the toilet like it should be.
|
| Taxpayers should not bail out GM and Chrysler and AIG and US
| Airways and these shit companies. We should have let them
| fail, let their careless shareholders eat it, and created a
| regulatory environment that allowed better-run competitors to
| spring up.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Can you imagine if we could kill MLMs, pay day loan sharks,
| bail-bondsmen (My state fully banned this lunacy),
| Psudoscientific medicine (chiropractors), Scientology and other
| useless trash from society?
|
| God going after just one is liable to get you a fate worse than
| Daphne Caruana Galizia
| alephnerd wrote:
| It depends on the type of university tbh.
|
| Getting a BA in Underwater Basketweaving from your local commuter
| state university is much less financially damaging than at Duke
| or UChicago.
|
| I'm not a fan of the idea of "useful" and "useless" degrees (ime,
| the best predictor for success is critical thinking skills, not
| major), but I do find private universities don't make as much
| financial sense, especially given that well paying industries
| like Engineering, Accounting, etc don't place much weight on your
| initial Alma mater beyond your first job.
|
| Anecdotally, I had an alumni interview with a successful tech
| IB/PE/HF alum from CS@CMU years ago while I was applying to
| colleges, and he was very insistent about how he felt the RoI at
| SJSU or CalPoly is superior to CS@CMU. I didn't end up attended
| CMU (I was lured to a more "prestigious" LAC) but he was
| absolutely right.
| jackdaniel wrote:
| I wonder why there's no mention of a free education as an
| alternative solution to the broken system
| dwighttk wrote:
| how does that help?
| jackdaniel wrote:
| You don't have "an industry" that hikes prices, and there is
| a central authority without ulterior motive that has an
| influence over what is funded. Not to mention that you don't
| put young people into debt from get go.
| firejake308 wrote:
| My understanding of a free education is one that is 100%
| paid for by the government, since someone still has to pay
| the professor's salary. In that case, you still have an
| issue of an industry that can demand increased prices (from
| the government, of course) if university enrollment
| suddenly increases (and I think it would if students didnt
| have to pay tuition). So I think you still have to figure
| out how to handle the market forces, but you're right that
| shifting the burden from the students to the government
| lets people start off their lives with less debt, which is
| a benefit of its own.
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| I think in part because on the "buyer" side, there's often a
| problem of how to sort through 100 resumes for a position.
| Given that in any given pile of resumes, probably 70% are
| unqualified, filtering for "degree" is an _easy_ way (though
| naturally not great, though how not great it is is hard to
| measure, which of course means we do it) to cut the work
| required in half or more.
| jackdaniel wrote:
| Free education does not mean "no degrees", it means "funded
| from taxes/ by goverment".
| patrickmay wrote:
| That's still not "free." Taxpayers are footing the bill,
| with the government taking its cut.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| Yeah I don't get why this isn't talked about more. It feels
| like one of those things in the 80s/90s during the free market
| fad where people decided that private loans would fix education
| and it ended up just disastrous.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Many states do operate tuition-free programs for residents at
| their public colleges. But students with good grades often
| prefer to take a large amount of debt rather than go to the
| local state school, and it's not clear how you would go about
| changing that.
| penguin1029 wrote:
| This. If you want education to be cheaper or free, you'll
| need to give up some amount of choice.
|
| Most states in the US already have public university systems,
| but that isn't where most of the debt comes from.
|
| Everyone wants to go to Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, etc.
| somerandomqaguy wrote:
| Dunno if it's any better.
|
| The competition then switches from spending direct financial
| resources to the university to spending financial resources to
| out compete other students vying for the same university. In
| China there's usually 1 seat per 50 candidates for good
| university spots, and the only thing that matters is your
| ranking in the entrance exams. It's not exactly uncommon for
| high school students to be spending 14 to 19 hours a day 7 days
| a week for 3 to 4 years preparing academically to win a spot.
|
| Trading one bad situation for another one really.
| advael wrote:
| I think it's really sad that we so reflexively consider
| universities vocational training that criticism of universities
| so often includes "offering degrees that won't get you a job"
|
| Actually academia predates the push to gate jobs behind
| undergraduate degrees, and trying to repurpose these institutions
| that mainly exist to train and employ researchers to be fully
| general vocational schools has been a disaster in every respect
| for everyone but the parasitic class of administrators it's
| spawned
| hiddencost wrote:
| At that time they were also incredibly exclusive and mostly the
| rich.
| advael wrote:
| Yea, and jobs that selected by university degree wanted to
| implicitly select for class
|
| Making the path to go to a university more accessible is
| admirable. Entrenching this hiring practice with policy
| designed to enforce its implications on universities was
| always ill-conceived and the consequences have mostly been
| negative, creating a class of permanent debtors, turning
| universities into dysfunctional and corrupt quasi-businesses,
| and not really causing a significant de-stratification of job
| opportunities on balance at all
| ghaff wrote:
| And some jobs do. As I've noted elsewhere if you want to go
| into Big Law, you go to a relative handful of law schools,
| which are heavily fed by undergrad Ivies, and clerk at a
| high federal level.
| advael wrote:
| Yes, like I said before, this hasn't de-stratified the
| job market. Jobs that want to select applicants by class
| can find plenty of ways to do so easily
|
| E.G.: More expensive vocational programs that haven't
| been subsidized, selecting among universities for
| especially "prestigious" (read "class-signaling") ones,
| baking cultural assumptions of the upper classes into the
| expectations surrounding "professionalism" in the
| interview process, etc
| ghaff wrote:
| I think that's effectively what a lot of people here are
| arguing they should be. You're not going to have cheap and
| quality research institutions (except via financial
| aid/loans). You can imagine different systems--and they exist
| to some degree in Europe. It's presumably not a terrible
| system but it probably does tend to be more exclusive.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Well people aren't paying them $30,000 for the love of the game
| Ekaros wrote:
| And then on other side universities started as vocational
| schools for clergy. Who then also had time on the side to do at
| least some research or muse about things.
| fallingknife wrote:
| If you would like to study something economically useless I
| have no problem with that. If you ask me to pay for it, I do.
| It isn't the business of society at large to fund anyone who
| wants to study whatever they want.
|
| Academia does predate its role as employment gatekeeper, but it
| was privately funded then.
| andreyk wrote:
| Seems like a good overview, but I do find this bit unclear: "But
| why don't market forces correct these issues?
|
| The answer lies in the unique shield that non-dischargeable
| student loans provide to educational institutions and lenders.
|
| In a normal market, if a product consistently fails to deliver
| value, consumers stop buying it. Producers either improve or go
| out of business. But in the world of higher education, this
| feedback loop is broken.
|
| Colleges and universities, shielded by the guarantee of student
| loan money, have no real incentive to improve their product or
| direct students to majors that have an ability to pay back their
| loans.
|
| They can raise tuition year after year, even as the value of
| their degrees stagnates or declines. "
|
| Sure, colleges can charge a lot due to loans, but they are still
| competing with each other and differences in tuition could make a
| big difference. I went to Georgia Tech over other universities
| because it was in-state and Georgia has generous scholarships for
| students with good grades. So why does competition among schools
| not lower costs?
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I don't know about nationally but my local universities are
| having year over year enrollment decreases. I think there are
| some market forces in play, but they aren't reducing tuition,
| just making the universities ask for more state or local tax
| money.
| tway_GdBRwW wrote:
| > But why don't market forces correct these issues?
|
| Another theory: The value creation is not linked to the value
| capture. So market forces make a bad feedback loop.
|
| Look, I'm totally pro business, but business is only "good" at
| allocating capital when value capture and creation are linked.
| Education isn't like that. The closest we have are the bootcamp
| schools, where they take a cut out of your first 2 year's
| salary if you find a job or nothing if you don't.
|
| When capture/creation are not linked, you need a different
| social organization method. "Government" or "Religion/non-
| profit" come to mind. Perhaps others have additional
| suggestions.
| MarketingJason wrote:
| I ran a coding bootcamp school that had both your typical
| pay-upfront and later added an option like you outline. I
| can't speak for all programs, but schools use an affiliate
| third party lender for those "free" loan programs.
|
| It was relatively new for us when I left, so I never saw the
| aftermath. I know it worked out well for some students, but
| my biggest concern was ensuring payments only kicked in if
| the job was "in-industry or field". My logic was the value
| isn't there if you go to a coding bootcamp only to not use
| the skills.
|
| I was still worried they'd basically ask "do you use a
| computer?" and consider it in-field.
|
| Another issue here is we had folks just looking to up-skill
| and the value return was harder to gauge if they were
| returning or continuing to work their job. This was mostly
| limited to our part-time program so we didn't offer the
| delayed-loan for it.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| Apparently yeah at least arguably the most prominent boot
| camp takes a verry broad stance on 'related' occupations
| for income sharing: https://www.sandofsky.com/lambda-
| school/
| imtringued wrote:
| The fundamental problem in job education is that it needs to
| be linked to the needs of future employers, but those
| employers do not have an incentive to hire workers and train
| them, thereby aligning the education program with the needs
| of the employers. Employers do not want to pay for training,
| because employees can leave at any point, so they decided to
| let employees go to university and pay for their own
| education. This then leads to a misalignment between what
| people elect to receive an education in and what employers
| want, because people aren't mind readers and know exactly
| what will make their boss five years into the future happy.
| So what happens instead is that higher education becomes
| purely about standardising worker skills, so that each worker
| is a replaceable cog according to their degree. This means
| you can just hire X amount of Y degree holders instead of
| caring about their individual skills.
| hinkley wrote:
| Also people get their first loan when they've just been legally
| considered adults. Nobody knows for sure they'll be able to
| start paying these back in five years.
|
| You buy a car so you can work and eat. These are very
| straightforward causes and effects. No car no job. Buy car that
| costs << than job. Done. Buy an education and you get more
| bills, not more income, for years. You might not even finish.
| spencerchubb wrote:
| Sure there may competition among suppliers. When you
| artificially inflate demand, the price will still go up. One
| does not negate the other
| agosz wrote:
| > I went to Georgia Tech over other universities because it was
| in-state and Georgia has generous scholarships for students
| with good grades. So why does competition among schools not
| lower costs?
|
| All the schools have access to loans that are guaranteed to be
| repaid. We still have the mindset that degrees are required for
| employment (I'm not commenting on whether that's good or bad;
| that's just the current cultural mindset). Because of this,
| schools have no incentives to control costs. The students will
| go regardless because they have access to money that will pay
| for the tuition, no matter how much it costs. There's no
| penalty for the universities to raise costs because they will
| get students anyways.
| jampekka wrote:
| The profit motive at work.
| ehvatum wrote:
| The profit motive reliably exposes brokenness. What changed to
| make loans for useless activity profitable? Normally, a loan
| for useless activity wouldn't be issued, because of the
| expectation that it wouldn't be repaid.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| The vast majority of universities are _not for profit_. As we
| clearly observe with all government guaranteed demand
| subsidies, prices sky rocket.
| oldpersonintx wrote:
| but it makes a nice opportunity for Democrats to buy votes later
| with selective debt forgiveness
|
| debt forgiveness was a hot topic exactly one month before the
| midterms and it is already becoming a hot topic as we head in to
| the general election
|
| if these students were not in debt, there would be no debt to
| forgive and no votes to buy
| jmyeet wrote:
| > a nice opportunity for Democrats to buy votes
|
| That's exactly what political parties in a democracy should do.
|
| You know who never says no to handouts from the government?
| Wealthy people. In fact, they don't just say no, they _demand_
| handouts. It 's only when the government gives money to poor
| people that it suddenly becomes a moral hazard.
|
| > debt forgiveness was a hot topic
|
| ... until a politicized Supreme Court killed it because it was
| giving money to poor people.
| pj808 wrote:
| Human capital contracts are another partial solution that flips
| the incentives: instead of using loans to pay tuition up front,
| institutions are paid a % of your income for a fixed period of
| time, after which any remaining amount is forgiven. Typically
| this only applies to income over a base amount (such as 10% of
| income above a 40,000 base). Naturally this works great in fields
| with strong employment outcomes and terribly everywhere else.
| chii wrote:
| > a % of your income for a fixed period of time
|
| why not a % until the cost of the degree is paid back? Why does
| there have to be a forgiveness component?
| clcaev wrote:
| The return window should be time limited so that the uni
| shoulders some of the risk - that their degree has market
| value. Masters programs can be particularly egregious, they
| are profit centers where only a small fraction of those
| getting the degree advance to a PhD program or some position
| where the degree matters. If the time is limited and one only
| need to pay a % over a threshold pay, the uni has some skin
| in the game and can lose on the gamble. In this market design
| they may be more careful about the promises they make and
| better guide our population towards programs that have better
| market value (and less personal debt).
| d0mine wrote:
| So there would be an incentive for a university to actually
| teach marketable skills.
|
| Of cause it is all wishful thinking: big corrupt institutions
| exist not as if nobody can come up with better solutions
| esafak wrote:
| A bootcamp called Lambda School had an income sharing agreement
| (ISA) to that effect. They did not do well.
| wizerno wrote:
| John Oliver discusses how so many people have come to take on
| student loan debt, why it's so hard to pay off, and what we can
| do about it [1].
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/zN2_0WC7UfU
| honksillet wrote:
| - the government should not be guaranteeing these loans - they
| should be dischargeable in bankruptcy That's it.
| jmoak wrote:
| and if nobody is willing to lend to these students any longer
| because their field of study won't yield enough income to pay
| back a loan... well, mission accomplished
| dachworker wrote:
| Meanwhile, I know of German and Dutch peers of mine who upon
| completing their masters in Europe, enrolled in California to do
| a second Masters ( at the time I believe they paid in the range
| of $100k) for the VISA and internship opportunities. And IIRC,
| the bet paid off because they all found employment in California,
| with salaries 3x to 4x what they could get here.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| Masters in the US are essentially diploma mills for OPT work
| authorizations
| dvh wrote:
| Let me guess, it wasn't Egyptology degree
| esafak wrote:
| That just means they needed the degree to get an opportunity to
| work in the US. This is really a tax.
| baq wrote:
| This is also very unfair towards the Dutch and German taxpayer.
| These countries ended up donating their money and educator time
| to the US.
|
| If your constitution includes provisions for free education, it
| might also be super hard to fix. (E.g. Poland.)
| dachworker wrote:
| Their parents paid taxes like everyone else. If anything I
| would say it is unfair, that they are forced to move to the
| US, because the imbeciles in power mismanaged the economy so
| much that there are few adequate jobs for them, and the local
| Germany/Dutch economy is not competitive on the world stage.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| All other unsecured debt disappears after what seven years but
| this university debt is somehow guaranteed?? That's why this
| happened.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| Absent a government guarantee, what lender is going to lend to
| people with no job, assets, or income?
|
| Students' parents would need to co-sign, and if the parents
| were poor, the student would be out of luck.
| sweeter wrote:
| It is genuinely insane that US Colleges are basically holdings
| companies at this point. They priority is investments. It seems
| hostile to the goal of students
| Yaina wrote:
| It's somewhat besides the point of the piece and might be unfair,
| but I can't help to feel an immediate sense of distrust for any
| piece of writing that uses AI images.
|
| Anyways, tying lending terms to the value of the degree sounds
| like a horrible idea, because how do you even determine that?
|
| Seems to me the big issue is A) that the loans are managed b
| private companies with ridiculous terms and that even public
| state universities can basically behave like private companies by
| increasing prices this much.
|
| Why can't the government not just radioactive prices for their
| own universities
| csa wrote:
| > It's somewhat besides the point of the piece and might be
| unfair, but I can't help to feel an immediate sense of distrust
| for any piece of writing that uses AI images.
|
| Im guessing that you're probably not representative of the
| target audience, or the author doesn't know his audience well.
|
| The image is thematically appropriate. I don't think the author
| is trying to bamboozle anyone with that image.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| I think this is about intellectual power more then money.
| Academics, who benefit from this system, have an outsized
| influence on political discourse.
| jmyeet wrote:
| It's bizarre to me how accepting we are of the idea that higher
| education should cost _anything_ let alone be mind-bogglingly
| expensive. This is wildly successful propaganda. Student loan
| debt was an explicit political goal [1]:
|
| > "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat,"
| announced Reagan advisor Roger A. Freeman during a press
| conference on Oct. 29, 1970. Freeman, an economics professor at
| Stanford, was also an advisor to President Richard Nixon.
|
| > "We have to be selective on who we allow to go through [higher
| education]," Freeman added.
|
| Poverty is intentional and a necessary condition for capitalism.
| It creates a malleable and compliant labor force. Student debt,
| medical debt, housing debt. All of it only exists to make a
| handful of extremely wealthy people slightly more wealthy.
|
| Modern universities aren't really about education at all. They're
| simply hedge funds in a trenchcoat.
|
| Harvard, for example, makes what? Half a billion in tuition per
| year? But they have upwards of $50 billion in their endowment.
| The interest alone could fund the entire university.
|
| [1]: https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/analysis/threat-of-
| educate...
| chii wrote:
| > the idea that higher education should cost anything
|
| somebody has to pay it - whether it's the students themselves
| via loans, or via tax payers.
|
| > Harvard, for example
|
| so may be harvard, if they should so feel charitable, could pay
| for their student's costs via their endowment funds. But what
| about _every other uni_?
|
| Not to mention that the endownment's a private source of funds
| - you're just as well be asking why don't billionairs just fund
| more public costs?
| blackhawkC17 wrote:
| Harvard's endowment is $50 billion, and its expenses in 2023
| were $6.25 billion [1]. To fund that, the endowment will need
| 12.5% annual interest, which is impossible. Tuition revenue is
| not remotely suitable enough for Harvard's operational
| expenses.
|
| Again, people don't understand how endowments work. When endows
| a specific program at Harvard, their money must be used for
| that program alone. The funds can't be sent to the general pool
| for the entire university.
|
| There are many ways to criticize wealthy educational
| institutions, but calling them "hedge funds" makes no sense.
| Which hedge fund subsidizes their clients' expenses with
| donations?
|
| 1-
| https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/421...
| freshtake wrote:
| In-state University of California, Riverside tuition is roughly
| $13k/year. This isn't mind-bogglingly expensive IMO. Less than
| 25% of student debt is from public colleges, with the majority
| due to expensive private schools. Most of my friends also
| worked part-time during undergrad, to further lower their loan
| burden.
|
| You aren't making this point directly, but I think it's worth
| pointing out: not everyone is entitled to attend Harvard,
| Princeton, (etc.) any more than they are entitled to a
| Maserati.
|
| There are, and should always be, affordable public options, so
| that anyone who wants a college degree can get one. We need to
| stop romanticizing elite universities, and acknowledge that you
| can get a great education, with hard work, at almost any
| university.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I don't know if this is some kind of heresy, but here we go.
|
| I don't think universities provide much value at all to the
| common student who is not going to be a PhD.
|
| I went to a very well-known institution known for putting the
| students in a room with the professors, maybe two or three
| students, to one professor. My economics professor taught me one
| on one.
|
| I still think, in the end, the work is mostly done alone, in a
| pile of books, on your own time.
|
| Not with other students, and not in lectures, and not in
| tutorials.
|
| This is a bit different from school where you can actually learn
| the material in class because, let's face it, school doesn't have
| a very deep curriculum.
|
| So at university my impression is that they mainly tell you what
| to go and read about, and then you read about it yourself. The
| tutor is there to course correct you a bit, but they aren't going
| to do much other than save you a bit of time learning the
| orthodoxy of your subject. The lectures are a table of contents.
| At most, it's really just a guy telling you that you should know
| what an eigenvalue is, or you should have read about the ISLM
| model, and so on. For you to actually understand something, well,
| you have to have spent a lot of time in the books rearranging
| your mind.
|
| Given that this is what you actually do at university, why have
| it this way?
|
| Make an examination authority. "Here is the national linear
| algebra test. Anyone who wants to try it, sign up, and come to
| this hall on this date." Everyone who passes, whether they
| studied at home or went to fancy U, gets a paper that says they
| passed it. Do it as a 12 year old prodigy or a 75 year old
| grandma, you get a diploma.
|
| Now, maybe there is already an authority that does this, I don't
| know. But it isn't very well known or authoritative.
|
| The current incumbents are gatekeepers. Everybody thinks that
| smart kids go to the most prestigious universities, and that
| includes employers. It's a Schelling point that doesn't need to
| be there, and it allows the universities to extract a great deal
| of value from the kids.
|
| If you made this authority of examinations, many people could
| learn the material and show their competence without incurring
| huge costs.
|
| People could start working earlier. You could separate the
| coming-of-age experience from academic learning. Poor people
| could participate more.
| dgfitz wrote:
| > I still think, in the end, the work is mostly done alone, in
| a pile of books, on your own time.
|
| I feel compelled to link the quote from Good Will Hunting here,
| I will refrain. However I agree completely. I also went to a
| "great" school, and I learned everything from overpriced books
| on my own time. In fact, in my entire tenure of undergrad I
| never attended a full week of class, not even the first week.
| firejake308 wrote:
| I mean, a lot of trades do have standardized tests. The LSAT
| for law school, the MCAT for medical school, and the CPA exams
| for accounting come to mind. I don't know why computer science
| hasn't organized in this manner, maybe because it's a younger
| field or maybe because there are simply too many people and
| employers don't care enough about having certified employees.
| lispisok wrote:
| It's a younger field. A lot of self-taught people think they
| will be excluded (they wouldnt be). There is a deliberate
| effort by execs to lower the salaries of software developers
| by ensuring there are no barriers to entry and flooding the
| market which the vast majority of the workforce has been
| tricked into going along with.
| jcranmer wrote:
| CS does have a lot of certifications, which are generally
| regarded as crap by most university-educated CS people. Part
| of the reason is that a lot of certifications test you
| knowledge with specific tooling, and that tooling may become
| obsolete rather quickly in the field.
|
| It's also worth noting that a lot of the tests you talk about
| aren't valued particularly higher by their own fields. Most
| lawyers I know have commented that the bar exam [1] primarily
| tests material that is largely irrelevant to the actual
| practice of law, to a degree that scoring too highly on the
| exam tends to be seen as "you wasted too much time preparing
| for the exam."
|
| [1] The LSAT isn't a test of whether or not you've mastered
| law school material, it's a test of whether or not you are
| allowed to be admitted _to_ law school in the first place.
| The bar exam is the actual necessary certification to be a
| lawyer.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Except for medical students, who require a teaching hospital
| and all its equipment.for their education
|
| Except for EE and other engineering students, who require lab
| and other equipment for their education
|
| Except for chemistry, biology, and other science students, who
| require chemistry equipment, etc. for their education. You get
| the idea.
|
| Even for fields that require no specialized facilities,
| frankly, I don't see any Fields Medal or Turing Award winners
| that are self-taught nor do I have any reason to expect to see
| any in my lifetime.
| lordnacho wrote:
| > Except for medical students, who require a teaching
| hospital and all its equipment.for their education
|
| They're not really students in the normal sense, they fit
| more into the PhD category that I mentioned, since they need
| actual personal help.
|
| > Except for EE and other engineering students, who require
| lab and other equipment for their education
|
| I have an engineering master's from a world famous university
| where the lab work was pretty pointless. It didn't count for
| much if at all, and was more or less just entertainment.
|
| If you were doing a PhD, you would do experiments where the
| outcomes were not a foregone conclusion. In undergrad, it's
| not any different from baking a cake, it ain't gonna go any
| differently than expected.
|
| I suspect you'll learn more watching a video of someone doing
| the experiment, that way you are not concerned with
| trivialities like converting units and wearing safety
| goggles. Something like what NileRed does for chemistry.
|
| > Even for fields that require no specialized facilities,
| frankly, I don't see any Fields Medal or Turing Award winners
| that are self-taught nor do I have any reason to expect to
| see any in my lifetime.
|
| Well, that level of work requires a personal contact, like a
| PhD advisor. I am addressing undergrad work, which is fairly
| ordinary material that has already been well digested.
| plandis wrote:
| > I have an engineering master's from a world famous
| university where the lab work was pretty pointless. It
| didn't count for much if at all, and was more or less just
| entertainment.
|
| For me personally, having a maker space and access to
| expensive equipment was how I learned to do useful things
| as an electrical engineer. Was it entertaining? Absolutely,
| but that doesn't mean it's not valuable. In fact, the
| things I've had the easiest time learning were things I've
| done because they were inherently enjoyable.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Most received the Fields Medal or Turing Award are not "the
| common student who is not going to be a PhD" so you and GP
| agree on the importance of universities in that regard. In
| general I read what they say as solely relating to what I'd
| categorize as "undergrad or non-specialized track students".
|
| I agree with you there is a lot universities have to offer
| students though. Your examples of equipment are a great
| highlight. On the other hand I think when you weight the ever
| growing cost of attendance with the amount of unique values
| provided it has been shrinking quite a bit, in favor of the
| "not providing much value" side. This is especially true for
| the relative lack of unique values brought for the vast
| majority of students during the first ~2 years of general
| education. It's difficult or impossible to get many of these
| organizations to let you just jump in at that point though.
|
| Overall I think, for many at least, the biggest value is an
| environment which helps guide them to doing the self
| learning. Many (most?) can't just sit down to write and then
| follow their own multi year study plan and end up with
| something comparable to what they'd get out of going to a
| university, even if they end up spending the majority of
| their time there self learning. GP may well not be part of
| that group but I'm not sure their conclusions apply to those
| who are.
| dachworker wrote:
| University is too rushed. That's why you feel like the work is
| done on your own. Cause of course you have to acquaint yourself
| with the subject at your own pace. Once you become acquainted,
| that's when it becomes useful to have access to a leader in the
| field. But by that time you are writing your finals and
| preparing for the next semester.
| freshtake wrote:
| Online education ftw?
|
| If you can drop 90% of administrators and real estate by moving
| online, student loans become a thing of the past. College
| becomes a halfway house commune for young people to who want to
| leave their parents nest.
|
| So the way you fix a broken system is to replace it with
| something cheaper and better. The issue of course is that 99%
| of people who start online courses don't finish them.
| Universities provide motivation for learning, which is required
| for many learners.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > Make an examination authority. "Here is the national linear
| algebra test. Anyone who wants to try it, sign up, and come to
| this hall on this date." Everyone who passes, whether they
| studied at home or went to fancy U, gets a paper that says they
| passed it. Do it as a 12 year old prodigy or a 75 year old
| grandma, you get a diploma.
|
| > Now, maybe there is already an authority that does this, I
| don't know. But it isn't very well known or authoritative.
|
| Western Governors University operates this way. You can get a
| full, recognized degree that way (in a limited set of topics).
| NemoNobody wrote:
| That's the truest sounding heresy I've ever heard.
| oramit wrote:
| I don't think this is heresy at all. I read this and just think
| you have a giant blind spot because you seem to be assuming
| that the way you learn is universally applicable.
|
| I went to an unremarkable state school where I had classes with
| a hundred other students. Even my senior level courses were
| about a dozen to one teacher ratio. I still remember my
| professors and specific moments during their lectures when I
| was able to ask a follow up question which triggered that
| Eureka moment we're all looking for.
|
| I wish I was able to just sit down with a textbook and learn a
| meaty subject but that doesn't work for me. I, and many others,
| need (or at least it helps a lot) the academic structure to
| learn effectively. The academic calendar, lectures, textbooks,
| homework, and other students you can study with all work in
| concert. The way you're dismissing all of that strikes me as
| really myopic.
|
| There are many examination authorities but employers basically
| ignore all of them and have gone all in on college degrees as
| the signal for employment. In that way colleges are gatekeepers
| to higher level jobs, but they're hardly the only actor here.
| ryandv wrote:
| I also attended a well-known institution and this was precisely
| my experience of university. I stayed home and read the
| textbook, supplementing with materials online, hardly attending
| lectures at all.
|
| I had paid for university almost entirely out-of-pocket with
| earnings from co-operative internships in software; when "real-
| life" problems started to rear their ugly head, the choice came
| down to incurring debt or working in a (still to this day)
| lucrative industry.
|
| What was the point? Why join the rat race of my peers who would
| rush through the material, only for it to be forgotten amidst
| the torrent of next semester's information? Does this style of
| studying actually produce a level of erudition equal to or
| greater than one who obsessively pores over the literature at
| their own pace, taking their time to slowly digest and process
| and crystallize the information in their mind? Or have they
| just found the most expedient route past the gatekeepers of
| higher education and diplomas?
|
| I would much rather do exactly what I did in university - read
| through the material on my own terms and take time to digest it
| at my own pace, but without the crippling debt. That said, I
| still very much view education as a privilege, open to those of
| financial means, who have the opportunity to put aside several
| years' worth of earnings and time to pursue academic studies,
| irrespective of practical application. I am reminded of a
| second-year philosophy professor who took half a lecture to
| explain how the purpose of higher education is not as a
| vocational school to bring one wealth and employment (taking
| shots perhaps at the career focus of the institution's co-
| operative program), but rather to give one a more fulsome
| perspective of the world and enrich their intellectual life -
| not in hopes of some mundane, worldly reward, but _for its own
| sake._
|
| Had I the wealth, I would love to go back to complete a degree,
| not for practical employment prospects or even prestige, but to
| (at least attempt to) _feel intellectually whole_. A merit
| based system of standardized testing that awards degrees based
| on examination performance would be right up my alley, for I
| could prepare myself to meet its demands at my own pace and
| according to my terms; I consider the hacker spirit of
| measuring the quality of a software solution not according to
| the attributes of its author (wealth, status, degree, or
| otherwise), but on _whether or not the code works correctly and
| efficiently_ adjacent to this sentiment. For everyone else,
| there 's debt - and I can't justify making that decision.
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| Not a heresy at all. I went to two of the top 5 CS schools in
| the US and I barely recall anything I learned in there, almost
| everything I know ended up being self-taught later in a much
| more efficient manner than being student n.200 in a class
| taught by a researcher who barely speaks English and doesn't
| want to be teaching. The main upside was associating myself
| with those two brand names which later got me jobs and
| cofounders, but that's about it.
| DataDive wrote:
| The author forgets to mention yet another dimension of the
| problem - a direct political one.
|
| Loan forgiveness ... in essence, a form of vote-buying ... vote
| for me, and we'll forgive your loan (aka someone else will pay
| the loan).
|
| If there is a chance that, at some point, we forgive loans - why
| would the cost of education ever decrease?
| ndgold wrote:
| I think that a student debt could be replaced by dischargeable
| debt if you churned $100,000 of credit card cash advances in the
| same month, paid down your student debts, and then after the one
| year zero interest period expires, declare bankruptcy on your
| credit card debts that replaced your student loan debts. Can
| anyone confirm?
| tway_GdBRwW wrote:
| Clever! with the challenge being getting a 100K credit limit
| and assuming your student debt is < 100K.
| oarla wrote:
| As with other industries, there is a steady increase in demand
| but not enough supply. Make it easier for accredited universities
| to be setup and let the free market forces drive the cost of an
| undergraduate degree down.
| firejake308 wrote:
| I actually think we should be decreasing demand rather than
| increasing supply. Not every job needs a college degree, and
| allowing more people to avoid college altogether would
| naturally drive prices down from the demand side. The hard part
| is that I don't know how to make employers accept non-degreed
| applicants, outside of having Peter Thiel shout at them to do
| so.
| huuhee3 wrote:
| I agree. At least in my country degrees are commonly used to
| filter applicants for jobs that could easily be done by
| someone with way lower level of education. That's not a
| healthy system. A degree should teach you skills that you
| need and can actually utilize in the work you will do.
| bilater wrote:
| The education-politician complex as we know it will face a
| dramatic reckoning in the next few years. Many mid-tier
| universities are likely to go under.
|
| Perhaps, as a society, we will rethink how education is attained.
| In a world shaped by AI, maybe kids will take MOOCs just for fun.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| Or maybe kids will have AI generate minecraft levels and porn
| of their classmates just for fun...
| wood_spirit wrote:
| Many years ago I went to university in the uk. Entry required
| good grades but tuition was free and there was a reasonable grant
| to live on.
|
| Twenty or so years ago the grant became a loan and, more
| recently, tuition fees were introduced.
|
| Nowadays way more people go to uni but come out saddled with
| debt.
|
| Presumably the incentives are the same as described in the
| article for the US: the uni wants as many students as possible
| because they get tuition fees and short term the administrators
| don't care about graduation rate or job outcomes because it will
| be on some future administrators watch when the feedback loop
| stops new undergrads joining?
| hrnnnnnn wrote:
| When I graduated in the UK in 2006, I had to pay an extra
| PS3000 because I graduated.
| freshtake wrote:
| Agreed with the overall consensus that we should let this market
| be guided by true market forces, but I also think people often
| assume the wrong outcome of this.
|
| Universities give students a ton of control over their education.
| Where do you live, what classes do you take, when can you
| unenroll, etc.
|
| Want higher graduation rates without lowering the grading bar?
| Simple, do not permit part time enrollment, even for one term.
| Sounds harsh.
|
| Want better job prospects on graduation? Simple, kill off 90% of
| majors (dance, sociology, etc.)
|
| The reality is that people generally think of college was a
| guarantee of success (it isn't). Many people would do better
| going to trade schools.
|
| Attending an elite university will always be expensive (in HCOL
| cities, high demand for students and professors, etc.)
|
| We need to stop treating college like a basic right, or a place
| for people to chase their dreams. Dream chasing is great, but if
| someone else has to pay for it, incentives will never align.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| 1) Move most good careers that do not require a college degree
| out of the country for the benefit of shareholders
|
| 2) Tell everyone born between 1980 and 1995 that they'll be
| unable to compete in the global marketplace if they don't get at
| least _some_ post-high school education, and imply that the mere
| presence of a degree will help instead of having a specific type
| of degree
|
| 3) Have next-to-zero standards for public funds used in grant and
| loan programs for college education, meaning people can take out
| loans for any sort of degree program at almost any sort of
| institution
|
| 4) Hold these debtors to standards that aren't applied to other
| types of debtors. You cannot discharge them through bankruptcy,
| it's very difficult to renegotiate, and SCOTUS has said that the
| chief executive of the note-holding institution (in this case,
| the President of the United States) cannot use discretion in
| deciding who he gets to forgive for loans.
| scoofy wrote:
| You forgot the most important part. The people agreeing to
| these debts, _by definition_ , do not have an education in
| complex debt instruments that cannot be discharged.
|
| Taking our a vast loan to study English literature might seem
| unwise, but it's something I could definitely see a starry eyed
| 17 year old deciding to do.
| paulcole wrote:
| I took out around $20k in loans to study literature starting
| in 2001. Graduated in 2005. Rent was $150 a month. Played a
| lot of poker and disc golf. Studied and learned a bit. Had a
| 75% scholarship to help with tuition. Had a $300/semester
| book stipend as part of that and just bought penny books off
| Amazon (one of the benefits of an English degree) and
| pocketed the difference.
|
| Basically for 5-8% or so of my (estimated) lifetime I was
| completely free to goof around. Great value for someone who
| dislikes working.
|
| Consolidated the loans after I graduated at 1.5% interest.
| Finished paying them off in 2021 with the Biden Bucks.
|
| Pretty sure that kind of deal doesn't exist anymore.
| Avicebron wrote:
| I'm trying to figure out if you missed a 0 at the end of
| your rent...
| paulcole wrote:
| Lol no it was $150. This was Gainesville, Florida and I
| split a horrible studio apartment with a friend of mine.
|
| It was located in a low lying area and once after a
| tropical storm we had to wade through hip-deep water to
| get to class (the apartment itself was miraculously high
| and dry). Coming home one night I saw a little gator
| swimming along near me as I trudged through it.
|
| After we graduated my roommate moved to Manhattan for an
| engineering job. His month's rent up there was
| significantly more than he paid for a year in college.
|
| I ended up moving to Portland, Oregon in 2007 and my
| first rent here was $550. Now in 2024, I've finally
| tacked on that missing 0 and my rent is now around $1500.
| downut wrote:
| 1985-87 my partner and I rented a just fine spacious 1
| bdrm with a 10 min walk to the Math building on the East
| side of Gville for $200/month. We both had graduate
| school stipends. The 4 apartments all had cool tenants.
| Geckos in the stairwell. It was glorious, even w/o AC.
|
| I ended up finishing at ASU. This highly educated
| ChE/Math imbecile took out a $12K student loan near the
| end because it was "free"[1]. Got to silicon valley and
| started learning the maths about house loans and income
| tax interactions and took a glance at the student loan
| interest payments (something like 6%? I don't remember)
| and freaked out. Paid it down immediately. Needless to
| say we advised the daughter different.
|
| [1] The application was like: name, address, and school.
| Less than a page.
| gfs wrote:
| I don't think $150 is out of the question over twenty
| years ago with roommates and a LCOL region.
| sevensor wrote:
| Big state U is in the middle of nowhere, and in those
| years I was paying closer to $250, but I could see if you
| were willing to compromise on quality or quantity of
| personal space, getting that down to $150 without even
| hitting bottom.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I remember rent was $1800 per semester for my friends,
| and they split that 3 ways. So about $600 for 4 months,
| or $150/month. To be fair, it was a bit of a dump. But
| that's less you have to worry about when having parties.
| I had a slightly nicer single room and closer to campus
| with parking and it was $1200 per semester, or $300
| month. This was slightly over a decade ago. I was curious
| and did a quick check - seems the single rooms are about
| $600/mo and I saw a 3 bed for $800/mo. Still really cheap
| considering all the inflation that happened over the past
| decade.
| saltylicorice wrote:
| In 2001-2005, my rent was $120-$160/mo in a low cost area
| of the US. The places weren't fancy but they were good
| enough and safe.
|
| Tuition started around 4k/yr, but had worked its way up
| to 8k/yr by the time I graduated (which I thought was
| unaffordable).
| wheels wrote:
| My apartment shared with three other roommates in that
| era was $750 (four bedrooms and a giant living room in a
| trendy neighborhood of a decent sized city). So $150
| checks out.
| grecy wrote:
| Woah, you were paying off that debt with interest from 2005
| to 2021?
|
| Damn I'm happy to live in a country with free university.
| paulcole wrote:
| 1.5% interest is well under the rate of return I got in
| the market over that period. I was making minimum
| payments the whole time.
|
| The payments were tiered somehow. I think I was paying
| around $50 a month when I graduated and that ended up at
| like $140 by the time I paid it off.
| dagw wrote:
| I too live in country with free university, and yet I'm
| also paying off student loans. Tuition may have been
| free, but rent and food wasn't.
| linotype wrote:
| Now do wages and taxes.
| airstrike wrote:
| > Had a 75% scholarship to help with tuition.
| paulcole wrote:
| State school was hella cheap (it was back when Florida's
| lotto money mostly went to scholarships for in-state
| students). I think full sticker price would've been
| around $2500/year for tuition+fees at the time?
|
| I also started with enough credits to be nearly to (the
| equivalent of being in) junior year and took the bare
| minimum credits to keep the scholarship.
| pc86 wrote:
| I'm sorry the match doesn't even remotely work.
|
| $20k in loans over 4 years, when full sticker price was
| about $10k for the same 4 years _and_ you had a 75%
| scholarship, and started as a junior?
|
| That plus it somehow taking you 20 years to pay $20k in
| loans makes this smell pretty fishy. The real question is
| why make something like this up?
| paulcole wrote:
| Impressive work, detective.
|
| 1. I took more in loans than I technically needed for
| school and spent it on living expenses like video games,
| gambling, fun stuff, etc.
|
| 2. I signed up for 4 classes a semester, often in things
| unrelated to my degree. Figured since I had 4 years of
| scholarship (and 4 years of loans available), I may as
| well just hang around and have fun.
|
| 3. By my math, (feel free to double check) 2021 minus
| 2005 is not 20. Loan payments didn't start until after
| graduation. It was about $50 a month for minimum payments
| when I started paying and around $150 at the end. Don't
| remember the exact way the payments increased over time.
| It was just steps, but not related to income.
|
| Any follow ups?
| mlsu wrote:
| At 1.5%, you should strive to make the absolute minimum
| payment on your loan. That is pretty much free money.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| 20 years to pay 20k$?
| pc86 wrote:
| Probably income-based repayment, based on the income of a
| job you could get in 2005 with a literature degree.
| paulcole wrote:
| Not 20 years. Payment doesn't start until graduation.
|
| Also, why not take as long as possible to pay it off at
| 1.5%?
| NemoNobody wrote:
| Exactly - 12 years of education to get children ready to be
| citizens and not single class on how to manage a bank
| account, or even the most basic education about investments
| or actual wealth building.
|
| Instead, all I was told was to go to college.
|
| So... the people that made me woefully sheep like and
| "financially innocent" then sent me to the wolves because
| they believed in me.
|
| Seriously, they made huge changes to the way people were
| accepted into college - created High School "career
| counseling" (college/University recruiters) to tell everyone
| kid they were smart enough to go, and the dumber down tests
| convinced enough to convince the rest.
|
| The loans went up each year - the costs more than doubled
| between my Freshman and Sophomore year and just never stopped
| going up - the more you owe the more you HAVE to finish to
| get the job to pay the loans.
|
| Before all this, when less than 1% of all student loans had
| been defaulted on, the loan debt was made unforgivable by 6
| people - a committee of bankers created by the people in
| Congress they bought.
|
| It was setup so that of a millennial "Wins" it means they can
| afford to pay their loans - so the bank wins. If we lose we
| still have to pay/often must pay more with all the fees and
| added interest - bank still wins.
|
| During the time I lived thru all this I was reading shit
| about how lazy all f are bc we don't own as many houses as we
| are supposed at our age - this is still true to this day
| actually.
|
| This is an intolerable and disgusting thing for a society to
| do to an entire generation - any group is wrong but to plan
| out the demise of a generation of, at the time all this was
| first set in motion, we were literal Elementary Students.
|
| These loans destroyed lives, relationships, sets parents
| against their children, divided families.
|
| - All just part of the plan.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > not single class on how to manage a bank account, or even
| the most basic education about investments or actual wealth
| building.
|
| Not everything can be, or is supposed to be, taught by
| schools. Your parents should've taught you those things,
| and if they didn't do that they failed you.
| elashri wrote:
| What if I lost my parents before they got the chance to
| teach me that?
|
| What if I was raised in a foster care and I never knew
| who my parents were?
|
| And what if my parents don't know these things
| themselves?
|
| There are many ways that this logic goes wrong. The
| school should teach that because it is very important
| lesson to engage in a society and be a good citizen.
|
| Edit: Sorry I meant people raised in orphanages not
| foster care. I wasn't in focus enough while writing this.
| Sorry if this caused hard feelinga for anyone
| pc86 wrote:
| This kind of argument might hold water if there were an
| epidemic of 12 year olds aimlessly drifting across the
| countryside with no adults taking care of them. But
| there's not, and you're not really making any point.
|
| If you are assuming a guardianship role over a child,
| however temporary, you have a responsibility to teach
| them things, full stop.
|
| I've known several foster parents over my life who would
| be outraged at the implicated that they are somehow
| lesser to the children they raised and are raising.
| elashri wrote:
| I think I mistyped what I mean. I meant people who were
| raised without parents in orphanages not foster care.
| Excuse my mistake and sorry if anyone felt anything
| negative from my comment.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| And yet kids from foster families tend to have massively
| worse outcomes than others.
|
| The US is obsessed with racial inequality, but from your
| life's perspective, it is better being black than being a
| foster kid, and no one bats an eye on the latter. Harvard
| won't certainly introduce any pseudoquotas on foster kids
| anytime soon.
| ayewo wrote:
| > Your parents should've taught you those things, and if
| they didn't do that they failed you.
|
| Please be charitable. Your comment is unnecessarily mean.
| Unless you know the commenter personally, I don't think
| anyone can diagnose the commenter's upbringing from a
| single Internet comment.
| pc86 wrote:
| I don't think they're referring to GP and his/her parents
| specifically. Until very, very recently, it was well
| accepted that there were a lot of things it your parents'
| responsibility to teach you. Expecting parents to teach
| their children things is not even remotely mean or
| unreasonable.
| ayewo wrote:
| I hear you.
|
| In a situation where the person's parents are hoping
| their child will be the first to be university educated
| with the hope that their education would help them break
| the cycle of poverty (i.e. they are not university
| educated themselves or that they don't have enough high
| school education to be able to teach their child about
| the pitfalls of taking an interest-bearing loan), what
| happens?
|
| There's this famous saying that: "You cannot teach what
| you do not know".
| rainsford wrote:
| But objecting to schools teaching things in the event
| that parents don't _is_ unreasonable because it punishes
| the child for their parents not living up to
| expectations. And on the particular topic of this thread,
| it punishes all of us because it 's generally detrimental
| to society for people to take on massive un-serviceable
| debt due to a lack of financial education.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| Plenty of parents do not know how to manage their
| finances any more than any other things that they do not
| know, which a school is supposed to be responsible for
| teaching. Financial literacy is one of the most important
| things that a person can learn. Society would surely
| benefit if classes were taught on the subject in high
| school.
| Amezarak wrote:
| Financial literacy for the average person consists of two
| things: do not buy things you don't really need / don't
| spend more than you have, and compound interest. I can't
| speak for anyone else but I did learn what compounding
| interest was in school.
|
| I can't imagine a whole class being dedicated to these
| topics, but then people who only need to fill out a 1040
| also complain they "weren't taught how to do taxes";
| i.e., fill out a form with simple instructions provided.
|
| At some point we have to recognize the bar is already
| pretty low. There is no wizardry involved in "financial
| literacy" unless you start getting into advanced
| investment / retirement topics. It just takes a very
| simple attitude shift. The problem is not that most
| people are too uneducated to figure out that a 40k/year
| job doesn't pay for a 100k degree: they learned that in
| elementary school. The problem is they never even think
| about it, and if they do, they don't _care_. I don 't
| even mean this in a negative way: it's a lifestyle that
| would stress me right into the psych ward, but millions
| of Americans never worry themselves about how they're
| going to pay for something so long as they can keep the
| lights on and eat this month.
|
| If they _did_ care, they would go to cheaper schools to
| get the degrees; look how many of these degrees come from
| outrageously priced private schools when cheaper options
| are readily available. Look at how many people drive
| around 50-80k SUVs. Americans complain a lot about prices
| but they are not actually that price sensitive. They just
| assume they can do whatever they want and the system at
| large will just work everything out.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > Financial literacy for the average person consists of
| two things: do not buy things you don't really need /
| don't spend more than you have
|
| Great, now take out a mortgage at a good time, predict
| interest rate and house prices manage your savings and
| plan your retirement, be self-employed for a year and
| correctly identify what is tax deductible and what isn't,
| recognise when you are being sold a bad financial
| product.
|
| There are all things a middle class person needs to deal
| with.
| rainsford wrote:
| > Your parents should've taught you those things, and if
| they didn't do that they failed you.
|
| The problem of financially illiterate people doesn't go
| away when we find someone to blame for not teaching them.
| Parents "should" teach a lot of things they often don't,
| and one of the values of schools is that they plug some
| of those gaps to help produce better educated members of
| society. Whether or not schools are the right place to
| teach those things is irrelevant if the end goal is for
| people to actually have the right knowledge to be
| successful.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > Not everything can be, or is supposed to be, taught by
| schools. Your parents should've taught you those things
|
| Who is the genius that decided that you need a school and
| government neurotics to teach a kid to play basketball,
| but post gold-standard factional reserve banking is best
| taught by parents?
|
| And who taught your parents, and their parents before? Do
| we go all the way back to cavemen for investment wisdom?
| You've got a bootstrap paradox.
|
| Also in 1970's we dropped the gold standard and the whole
| game has changed, did someone issue free adult education
| to being all the parents at the time up to speed?
|
| The system is complete nonsense, you've got to be on
| copium.m to defend it.
|
| If we taught money properly maybe voters would not elect
| fools and frauds to run things
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| You are a good writer. Like the original post.
| techjamie wrote:
| It's a tough problem that reenforces itself. The high
| availability of loans allows colleges to charge exorbitant
| rates, and for most, the exorbitant tuition rates
| necessitate the use of loans, which allows the tuition
| rates to go even higher.
|
| Fresh High School grads are a terrible demographic where
| good credit is concerned, there aren't many 18 year olds
| you could loan 6 figures to and expect to see that money
| again.
|
| But now we're so deep in this rabbit hole that neither side
| has incentive to back down. Nothing shy of government
| intervention, or mass protest of the system, is likely to
| change it in my opinion.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| > Exactly - 12 years of education to get children ready to
| be citizens and not single class on how to manage a bank
| account, or even the most basic education about investments
| or actual wealth building.
|
| I kind of disagree with this. At least in my high school
| this was definitely taught, but at the time we were all
| dumb 14-17 year olds who didn't care about any of that
| stuff we just wanted to know what is needed to get an A and
| then forget about it, and that was the good students!
|
| A problem about teaching life stuff in schools is that I
| don't think many of the teenagers in high school are in a
| place where they can absorb that stuff long enough for it
| to be relevant many years later.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > at the time we were all dumb 14-17 year olds who didn't
| care
|
| This is not teaching, it's a fabrication
|
| Can you teach swimming to a guy who has never left Sahara
| desert and has never seen water?
|
| Can you teach teaching driving to a guy who's never
| touched a car?
|
| Then how do we teach finance/banking to a kid who has
| never earned a salary, paid bills, and probably never
| even held more than $100 at all?
| jancsika wrote:
| > The people agreeing to these debts, by definition, do not
| have an education in complex debt instruments that cannot be
| discharged.
|
| I guarantee you that law/med school students have an
| education in "complex debt instruments that cannot be
| discharged."
|
| Because before the current law was passed, they were the ones
| abusing the old "complex debt instruments" to discharge debt
| they knew they'd be able to pay back once they started making
| bank. The law was passed because they were doing this in
| large numbers. For these serious med/law students, the old
| system was free money. The new system is a reasonable risk.
|
| Did you know this? If so, why did you write "by definition?"
| And why go off on a tangent about English literature
| students?
| mbrumlow wrote:
| You flew too close to the sun. You can't argue with a bunch
| of people who are in debt and learned that playing the
| victim pays.
|
| It's funny. That everybody is mad at the banks and schools.
| But the politicians and do good laws passed are what caused
| all of this.
|
| Banks did it want to give loans out for shitty degrees to
| people who would probably not pay them back. So laws were
| passed to force banks they had to give out loans.
|
| Schools did not want to accept everybody, but only the top
| of class. But laws were passed forcing them to widen their
| acceptance criteria.
|
| This creates the perfect storm we are in.
|
| Before the system was self limiting. Banks only gave out
| loans for degrees and to people who had high probability to
| pay back. Schools accepted only the best students who had a
| high probability of succeeding.
|
| The loans were low risk, high reward, and the schools were
| able to provide a higher level of overall education to
| those who did go.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| > banks did it
|
| Banks didn't?
| slaw3 wrote:
| What was the law that was passed? and what was the "old"
| method for discharging debt? Asking as someone interested
| in discharging some debt
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The bulk of education debt in the U.S. is not about undergrad
| degrees in English literature or the like. By and large, it
| gets incurred either for lucrative postgrad degrees (MBA,
| law, medical etc.) or for earning degrees at "non-
| traditional" for-profit colleges.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| Almost 60% of U.S. undergraduate students take out either
| federal or private loans and there are 5x as many
| undergraduate students as graduate students in the U.S.
|
| For those downvoting: 54% of US graduate students take out
| student loans, while around 55% of US undergraduate
| students take out loans. The average undergraduate student
| loan debt is around $29000, while the average debt for
| graduate school borrowers is $71000. Given that there are
| five times as many undergraduate students as graduate
| students and given that a greater number of undergraduate
| students take out loans, the average graduate school debt
| would have to be nearly $150k to be greater than the
| undergraduate debt.
|
| https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-
| loans/avera...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/advisor/student-loans/average-
| student...
|
| https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/money/average-student-
| lo...
|
| https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-
| loans/avera...
| lapcat wrote:
| I think the OP is referring to the number of dollars
| rather than the number of students.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| Of course it was based on the number of dollars, but
| based on which figures? It was an assertion conjured out
| of thin air. If there are five times as many undergrad
| students as grad students and a similar percentage of
| grad students had to take out student loans, then this
| would mean that students are incurring on average five
| times more debt for graduate school. This is without
| taking into consideration that a far higher percentage of
| US graduate students are international students.
| lapcat wrote:
| It looks like graduate debt was approaching the majority
| and could in fact be a majority in 2024: "If these trends
| continue, graduate loan disbursements may exceed
| undergraduate disbursements in the next few years." https
| ://sites.ed.gov/ous/files/2023/08/OCE_GraduateDebtRepor..
| .
| TeaBrain wrote:
| You're conflating current disbursements with the
| outstanding debt, which is what the original assertion
| was on. Either way it is looked at though, their
| assertion is wrong.
| lapcat wrote:
| > You're conflating current disbursements with the
| outstanding debt
|
| No, I was just googling for stats, and that's what I was
| able to find. Here's something else though: "46% of
| federal student loan debt belonged to graduate student
| borrowers in 2017." https://educationdata.org/average-
| graduate-student-loan-debt
| lapcat wrote:
| You're correct except for one word: "lucrative".
|
| To this day, almost two decades after I left my philosophy
| PhD program (without a PhD), I still have massive student
| loan debt.
|
| Even if I had completed my degree, though, philosophy PhDs
| aren't particularly lucrative. Tenured professors at major
| universities do ok, but the road to getting tenure-track
| jobs and then tenure is littered with the bodies of grad
| students.
|
| I don't think starry-eyed 21 year olds deciding what to do
| are much different from starry-eyed 17 year olds deciding
| what to do.
|
| It's worth noting, by the way, that the United States has a
| shortage of medical doctors.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > It's worth noting, by the way, that the United States
| has a shortage of medical doctors.
|
| That's a pipeline problem. What the U.S. actually has is
| a severe bottleneck in available places at medical
| schools and for residency training.
| xrd wrote:
| Let's do note that on that graph which mapped a variety
| of increased costs, the only thing that increased faster
| than college costs was the cost of medical. That's
| connected to the shortage of doctors. Regulatory capture
| isn't just an issue with higher ed.
| BJones12 wrote:
| What the U.S. actually has is a group of people intent on
| keeping their doctor wages high by limiting supply
| through regulation and bottleneck creation.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| As a med school dropout (best decision of _my_ life),
| were I to "go back" to early college: I would have
| instead pursued a BSN (which my college offered!), to set
| myself up into eventually becoming a nurse practitioner.
| That way, if I decided to not complete graduate school,
| I'd still have an applicable role/job within medicine.
| Were I to have graduated that program, I also would have
| been able to practice much earlier (albeit limited scope,
| per US State).
|
| Instead, what does an uncredentialled Chemistry Bachelor
| do after dropping out of medical school? ...I became an
| electrician, which allowed me to help people without
| sacrificing my lifestyle.
|
| If your goal also includes "make substantial sums of
| money," I always recommend to preMeds they consider all
| the different ways someone can make money helping people
| _without having to sacrifice your entire early
| adulthood_.
|
| The majority of my medschool classmates refer to me as
| "the dumbest smart guy they know," but in confidence
| several have expressed jealousy at not having to work so
| much (for IMHO so little, as physicians). Just cogs in an
| overly-complex, wealth-extracting machine...
| labcomputer wrote:
| That's only because doctors collude to limit the number
| of available residency places.
|
| I programmers were smart, they would:
|
| 1. Lobby the government to prohibit anyone from
| practicing programming without a license.
|
| 2. Limit the number of licenses granted each year
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Fortunately, we don't have the social skills to make that
| happen.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Also, the vast majority of software bugs are annoying at
| worst, with no death potential. Powers that be would
| react a lot more aggressively if stack overflows
| routinely led to bodies on the pavement.
| cheese_van wrote:
| <That's only because doctors collude to limit the number
| of available residency places.>
|
| Available residency slots are dictated by the funding
| made available through the Medicare program and
| ultimately Congress.
| adharmad wrote:
| Out of curiosity, why cannot hospitals fund residency
| slots on their own with some riders (the resident should
| work in the same hospital for x years)? It seems odd that
| the medical profession is not willing to invest in the
| training of the next generation of professionals without
| government help.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Not a bad idea, actually, especially with all these new
| tools
| downrightmike wrote:
| It isn't a problem, it is a feature the AMA wants to
| have.
| fny wrote:
| In addition, you must complete a four year degree in
| whatever before going to medical school.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| This is really a weird requirement and most other places
| in the world don't have it, without suffering any
| setbacks when it comes to outcomes of treatments.
|
| Imagine that every programmer would have to study, say,
| Latin for 4 years before being allowed to code.
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| You self-funded a philosophy PhD with loans at age 21?
| lapcat wrote:
| I'm talking about deciding at age 21 to go to grad
| school, like deciding at age 17 to go to undergrad.
| zamfi wrote:
| Well, the OP did say "the bulk of" -- some people, like
| you, are surely carrying debt for non-lucrative degrees.
|
| But the pipeline of lawyers, doctors, MBAs, etc. is quite
| a bit larger than self-pay philosophy PhDs, and a large
| fraction of those professional degrees are full-freight,
| $70k/year (plus living expenses!) of pure debt.
| lapcat wrote:
| Not all lawyers and doctors are the same. Consider public
| defenders. And physician compensation can vary
| dramatically depending on whether they're a general
| practitioner or specialist, rural or urban, etc.
|
| Ironically, the ones we need the most are paid the least.
|
| Of course, that's assuming students finish their degrees
| and get jobs. Plenty of people drop out of school, and
| they don't get refunds! Law students fail to pass the
| bar, etc.
| zamfi wrote:
| Yes, and indeed, this is exactly the argument used by the
| Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, in which public
| defenders / nonprofit lawyers / rural nonprofit doctors'
| loans are written forgiven after 10 years of public
| service so they are not saddled with a lifetime of debt
| they can't pay off due to choosing careers in public
| service. You're in a supposedly "lucrative" career with a
| high debt load, but choosing not to pursue the typical
| high-income pathway.
|
| That program has many gotchas, but at least this reflects
| a recognition that debt creates incentives that society
| may not want.
| ghaff wrote:
| For Law, it's not just about not passing the bar. It's
| about getting into a top 10 law school and getting a top
| clerkship. And then getting into a top firm. Yeah, some
| people don't end up on that train and do OK but it's
| probably not a great ROI even if they pass the
| checkmarks.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| > I left my philosophy PhD program (without a PhD), I
| still have massive student loan debt
|
| In humanities fields, if the department thinks you belong
| in the program, they pay you to attend. They'll give you
| fellowships, TAships, and RAships. If they don't give you
| those, they're telling you not to attend. This is a harsh
| truth.
| lapcat wrote:
| That's not generally true. I attended a state university,
| and the department simply didn't have the funding to pay
| for its graduate students.
|
| However, I did in fact receive some TAships and
| lectureships while I was there, and even a dissertation
| fellowship. They didn't pay well though.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| >That's not generally true. I attended a state
| university, and the department simply didn't have the
| funding to pay for its graduate students.
|
| I mean, maybe? I know a number of state schools,
| certainly not all of them, but plenty that can afford
| paid spots for PhD students in the humanities that are
| certainly enough for someone to support themselves on. It
| doesn't pay as well, nearly as well, as jobs that
| humanities student with a good GPA from a good university
| can get in the private sector, but its not bad at all.
| lapcat wrote:
| Some departments have money, and some don't. Simple as
| that.
|
| I find it very odd that people are trying to deny my
| experience here.
| slt2021 wrote:
| there is a difference in prospects of payback/ROI between
| Harvard MBA and University of South Podunk MBA.
|
| they are the same though for the federal student loan
| program.
|
| same with law degrees
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| My Harvardlaw Lawyerbro literally ended a family dinner
| argument by telling Littlelawyerbro "which law school did
| you attend? UT? So then _not_ Harvard? "
|
| In this particular conversation Harvardbro was obviously
| and factually incorrect, but his pompous rhetoric usually
| gets everybody else to silence themselves (not in awe).
|
| Interestingly, Harvardbro only got accepted into the two
| schooltypes you mentioned (and no 2nd tiers).
| ghaff wrote:
| Plenty of smart people who get liberal arts degrees from top
| schools do just fine. I know plenty of them even though I
| have engineering degrees myself. They may not get FAANG
| salaries in general--unless they end up in management--but
| plenty of people I know are just fine.
| adityamwagh wrote:
| I see a problem here. Why are English majors in Management
| positions? With LLMs, I don't see a value on an English
| degree anymore. So I personally believe it's just a money
| sink at this point. I don't believe art can be taught in
| universities as a degree program. Universities should only
| be for domains that have tangible value.
| ghaff wrote:
| What the hell do LLMs have to do with anything on this
| topic? If anything, they commodify low-level tech folks
| just like past tools have. I'll mostly hire a smart
| liberal arts major so long as they're respectful of tech
| and other domain expertise over someone who thinks it's
| only about (probably narrow) technical smarts.
| saagarjha wrote:
| LLMs are the exact antithesis of what an English degree
| teaches you: how to communicate effectively and with
| context, and to understand nuance in what other people
| say. LLMs make things that sound good but have no real
| depth to them.
| adityamwagh wrote:
| You might understand this but I would like to believe and
| employer won't.
|
| Anyways, my main point is universities should focus more
| on tangible skills - accounting, engineering etc and
| should not have random useless degrees of little value.
| Maybe English major is still valuable, but I personally
| don't see the tangible value in it - other than being an
| English teacher.
| w4 wrote:
| English is the global lingua franca. It's how we transmit
| knowledge, including ideas about accounting, engineering,
| etc.
|
| It's very fair to argue about the ROI of an undergraduate
| English degree given the outrageous prices that
| universities are charging for them. But if you cannot see
| the tangible value in English language expertise, I don't
| really know what to tell you.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| You don't think about things from the perspective of
| someone who actually owns or starts a business, you think
| about things as someone who is an employee and wants to
| promote skills that help others get employed: accountant,
| engineer. Something great about engineers and accountants
| is that they don't ask too many questions, because many
| have bad social skills: many of them would never, on
| their own, be able to run a business or make deals or do
| the most important things involved in managing relations
| between large groups of people and making sure a product
| and/or service is delivered to happy customers and
| shareholders get paid off. Therefore, they don't
| constitute a threat to a business owner.
|
| A student who studies English, on the other hand, is
| given skills specifically to critically engage with a
| text in such a way that they can ask these kinds of
| questions about _why_ they are doing what they are doing,
| why they are talking to certain people and not others,
| why, even, they _ought_ to study one thing or another,
| why one guy runs the show and they do all the work. None
| of this is very helpful if you want to be a good worker
| bee who meets all their deadlines and collects a pay
| check and goes home at the end of the day and never
| thinks about doing anything more with their life, but, if
| you want to have more in the world, you need to know how
| to question it.
|
| I hate to use an example, but look at Alex Karp, CEO of
| Palantir. He has a PhD from the Institut fur
| Sozialforschung, also known as the Frankfurt school,
| which is a research center whose members feature quite
| prominently on the syllabus of many English classes at
| the university level. Not _exactly_ the same, but his
| education bears a remarkable resemblance at an advanced
| level to what many students with undergraduate degrees in
| English would have. But you wouldn 't know that as an
| engineer; you would just be some _employee_ , entirely
| replaceable.
| slaw3 wrote:
| English major eh?
| ghaff wrote:
| There are many many universities and colleges and
| students/parents can make decisions about the curricula
| they choose, Which will in turn, over time, lead those
| schools to focus on what the market wants. Obviously you
| disagree about those choices but there you go.
| bumby wrote:
| > _Plenty of smart people who get liberal arts degrees from
| top schools do just fine._
|
| There's research that also shows smart people who get
| degrees from "non" top schools do just fine as well. They
| studies those who got accepted to top schools but went to
| "lesser" ones. Implying top schools select people who will
| be successful regardless, rather than helping make people
| successful. It's important to not confuse the causal
| relationship.
|
| * It's also worth noting the authors of those studies found
| a caveat with people on the lowest ends of the
| socioeconomic strata getting more benefit from the top
| schools.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I could definitely see a starry eyed 17 year old deciding
| to do.
|
| That's the addendum to the "most important part." These
| people without an education in complex debt instruments are
| the vast majority of the time either children, or were
| children quite recently. Even when it comes to the ones in
| grad school, I have jeans older than their legal ability to
| sign contracts.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Sorry, I feel no sympathy for them.
|
| I went to college before I had internet access and my
| decision on what college degree to get and where to go to get
| it was based upon the salary I would receive upon graduation
| and my ability to repay my loans. I went to the library to
| figure these things out for myself.
|
| Nowadays, you don't even have to get up out of your chair. If
| you are a young person and you make stupid decisions on your
| college education and student loans, that's a YOU thing.
|
| I personally think college should be free because education
| is a worthwhile endeavor for everyone. But since it isn't,
| I'm not willing to make excuses for those who attend without
| weighing the costs and benefits. It's one of the easiest
| things in the world to do.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > debt instruments that cannot be discharged
|
| Your regular reminder that debt bondage is a form of slavery,
| and is illegal in most countries.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_bondage
|
| There are only two options with debt: bad debt are written
| off, lender takes a hit and the lender must be careful who
| they lend money to.
|
| Or bad debt lingers forever and accrues lucrative interest,
| in which case giving out bad debt is the whole point for the
| lender's operation. The only risk is that the debtor might
| die. If the debt also passes to the next of kin, you have
| full-on, real slavery.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > The people agreeing to these debts, by definition, do not
| have an education in complex debt instruments that cannot be
| discharged.
|
| I mean it's a pretty simple concept that you borrow money and
| you must pay it back.
|
| However we agree that the failure is that we do not educate
| them enough already in the first 12 years we force upon them.
| For that I blame a lack of options, government "standards"
| which become ceilings instead of floors, and the unions that
| protect bad teachers, also I'll note as a foreigner in the
| US. The US Schools i've seen (and i'm extrapolating here to
| most public schools) are ran like social clubs and have far
| too much time devoted to bs that does not help the kids. I'm
| talking about extracurriculars that impede with a quality
| education. Football is not a subject we should be
| prioritizing as a nation... Formals, homecoming, spirit days
| etc are such a distraction from what highschool kids should
| be focused on -- Growing up and making a viable future for
| themselves.
|
| People note that Highschool rankings in Canada are excellent,
| well guess what? None of that happens in Canadian highschools
| (that I'm aware of), there might be a school dance or two,
| and "Prom" is very low key, relatively. High school football
| is small time...
| freshtake wrote:
| 5) Do nothing about the problem until the debt becomes too
| large, then attempt to blanket cancel the debt without
| expecting any fallout. All the while doing nothing to fix the
| underlying issues.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| i.e.: transfer the wealth from the taxpayer to the creditors
| anyways, just in a different way
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| I would also add
|
| 5) Don't educate young people on what their degree would earn
| them.
|
| So many young people think their hobby can become their career
| and pay for a nice life style. Unfortunately, it's not the case
| for many majors.
| kraussvonespy wrote:
| Which is bad too because if you turn your hobby into your
| career, you end up not having a hobby anymore. In order to
| have a happy life, you have to have a vocation and an
| avocation that are separate from each other.
| foobazgt wrote:
| > In order to have a happy life, you have to have a
| vocation and an avocation that are separate from each
| other.
|
| This reads to me as your career shouldn't involve doing
| something you enjoy. I think this mostly happens in
| situations where people are doing _exactly_ at work what
| they 'd do at home, and they don't like their job for any
| vast number of reasons. Usually that's only a problem if
| you don't have the security to find another job.
|
| My personal experience is that it really helps to be able
| to be passionate about your work. It's fulfilling. You will
| perform better at your job, because you will be multiplying
| your experience from work with your experience at home.
| Sometimes my hobbies and my work have been literally
| exactly the same, e.g. I've been able to open source
| projects from work (which I then work on as a hobby).
|
| The advice I'd give people instead:
|
| Like your job. Get a degree in a field that you both enjoy
| and that pays well. That sounds glib, but so many people
| don't think about this at all (part of the focus of the
| article). You probably won't be able to align your career
| and the exact activity you enjoy the most, but you should
| shoot for them being in the same ballpark. Where they don't
| align? Sure, that's opportunity for a hobby.
| pixodaros wrote:
| The problem is finding that intersection. If you are
| really suited to journalism you will have a hard time
| financially in 2024. And the experience of studying a
| thing and doing it for a living are different, and in
| 2024 its hard to try different careers out because most
| employers want credentials and experience. There are
| still jobs where you can walk into the office and talk
| someone into giving you an internship but many
| organizations force all hiring through online
| applications and the HR bureaucracy (and the 'talk
| yourself up' approach works better for extroverts from
| the hiring manger's culture).
| ghaff wrote:
| To your specific example, there are a lot of jobs that
| involve content marketing and other types of writing that
| aren't exactly hitting the pavement journalism but
| probably pay a lot better, are more reliable employment,
| and may be close enough. As you say, it's about finding
| the intersection.
|
| If I were looking for a writing job today--which I did a
| lot of over the past 10 years--I wouldn't be looking to
| the New York Times or certainly a small city paper, I'd
| find an opportunity with a company that would doubtless
| have some guardrails but would also have other
| opportunities.
| pixodaros wrote:
| There are no guarantees in education. Lots of people have
| degrees in engineering, finance, software engineering, etc.
| but are not working in that field, either because they find
| they don't like the work or because that field is not hiring
| in the years after they graduate. Incomes of people with any
| academic bachelor's degree are similar in the country I live
| in, because if you are bright enough and diligent enough to
| get a degree in something reasonably rigorous, you generally
| eventually pick up the skills and connections to find a good
| niche. But 'get a degree in this, it pays well' is risky.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > So many young people think their hobby can become their
| career and pay for a nice life style. Unfortunately, it's not
| the case for many majors.
|
| We (as a society) tell kids _all the time_ that their hobby
| can 't be a viable career. Kids are just headstrong and don't
| want to listen to their parents/other adults telling them
| unpleasant truths.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| > _We (as a society) tell kids all the time that their
| hobby can 't be a viable career_
|
| That's absolutely 100% not true.
|
| The bs message I see everywhere pushed on young people is
| "You can be anything you want to be".
|
| We have a whole generation of kids who think they can be
| youtube stars, influencers, rap stars, etc.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| I mean for fucks sake we were pushing 18 year old teenagers
| into tens of thousands of dollars of debt! I dunno about most
| people but at 18 I had absolutely no clue about anything,
| especially the concept of money nor career. How the fuck does
| an 18 year old comprehend why taking $60,000 to get a degree in
| "Latin Dance" is not a good idea (and we all know many people
| who fall into this bucket too!). And yet parents, councilors,
| teachers, and "the whole system" pushed this onto every kid in
| high school.
|
| And then society turns around and mocks them later on for being
| "stupid" and "lazy" or whatever... fuck that shit. Society
| strongly told kids that college, _any college_ , was the only
| way to have a future.
| lispisok wrote:
| You are being downvoted but that was exactly my experience.
| It wasnt hyperbole. I was told my entire time in k-12 you
| need to get a college degree by everybody. Parents, teachers,
| counselors. Additionally they said, with no exaggeration, to
| get any degree, at any school, and take out as many loans as
| you need. So yes an entire generation of kids were told the
| $60,000 in debt for a latin dance degree at a no-name school
| was better than no degree at all.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I don't know when that narrative started, but it was not
| what I heard (high school in the 90s). I at one point
| thought out loud about majoring in Art in university, and
| everyone, parents, teachers, guidance counsellors said,
| "Buddy, not if you want an actual career! Major in
| engineering or something." Maybe the later generations got
| the bad "Major in anything" advice but I sure as heck
| didn't.
| jajko wrote:
| Where were parents? Don't tell me they were absent in such a
| massive decision that absolutely defines rest of their kids
| lives.
|
| Yes its horrible to force 17-18 year old to make such an
| important decisions and also schools should have known better
| and counsel heavily beforehand. But lets not forget that for
| the state you are 100% responsible for your actions at that
| point including any crime, state will happily draft you and
| send you to get killed if the need arises. Loan management
| pales in comparison with this.
|
| Truth is harsh, society is harsh and unfair in many aspects.
| I don't see this improving unfortunately anytime soon.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Of course for many the parents were present! They were
| being told the same thing by the education system. They
| were told that unless their kid got a college education
| their kid would not be successful. And while I wasn't
| parent then but am now, I'm positive their peer group was
| pressuring them into helping kiddo out by co-signing on
| crazy large loans for degrees that their kid might never
| really use. I've seen it happen.
|
| I get that there is a lot of societal bias toward blaming
| the person who got the loan for being a pile of shit
| deadbeat who was stupid enough to get a $70,000 "art
| history" degree... but dude. These people are basically
| kids. Or at best adults with very, very little life
| experience being given strong thumbs up by "the elders" who
| are supposed to know better...
|
| The student does take some responsibility but society at
| large should take most of it.
|
| I mean for Christ sake you had 18 year olds getting into
| huge amounts of debt that you cannot discharge in
| bankruptcy. There are very few financial tools in life that
| are so "iron clad" as a student loan and we handed them out
| like candy to the least experienced adults out there. What
| a shit thing to hand to somebody who just started out in
| the real world. Feed them lies and convince them to saddle
| up with a lifetime of debt that has absolutely no undo
| button besides death. We let total deadbeats rack up tons
| of unsecured debt and let them discharge it but somehow an
| 18 year old is allowed to basically take on perma-debt.
| It's complete bullshit that makes the rich richer and the
| poor worse off.
| skrebbel wrote:
| I don't like this type of comment because it's makes it seem
| like that this was all planned like this on purpose (by some
| cabal of evil schemers, I suppose?), but without the need to
| provide any evidence that that's indeed how it went, because
| nothing of the kind of is explicitly claimed.
|
| Things can go wrong without people scheming to do evil. It's
| not helpful to twist "these and these circumstances combined to
| produce a bad outcome" into a plan description unless you bring
| at least some evidence that it was, in fact, planned to go like
| that.
| carapace wrote:
| It would actually be worse if we _accidentally_ built this
| machine to trap and drain a generation of their productive
| capacity?
|
| And of course there is a cabal of evil schemers, they have
| hardly bothered to hide themselves, e.g.:
|
| > Mudsill theory is the proposition that there must be, and
| always has been, a lower class or underclass for the upper
| classes and the rest of society to rest upon.
|
| > The theory was first articulated by James H. Hammond, a
| Democratic United States senator from South Carolina and a
| wealthy Southern plantation owner, in a speech on March 4,
| 1858. Hammond argued that every society must find a class of
| people to do menial labor, whether called slaves or not ...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudsill_theory
|
| It gets worse from there.
|
| You can go look up the people who passed these laws and the
| arguments they used to promote them, but in the end it hardly
| matters.
|
| What matters is disassembling the mudsill machine.
| Aunche wrote:
| This is barely relevant to college debt. If anything, it
| contradicts the parent comment because it would be the
| white collar middle class resting on the "mudsill" of cheap
| global labor. The Internet also underestimates how hard
| labor jobs are on your body. It would have been even worse
| during the golden age of American manufacturing, when there
| were 10 times as many work related deaths.
|
| When people imagine a world of we didn't outsource factory
| work, they assume it will be exactly like ours but where
| all unemployed English majors become unionized factory
| workers. In reality, any policy comes with trade offs.
| People like Steve Jobs would have entered blue collared
| work, like their parents. Consumer electronics would be
| significantly more expensive when made by domestic labor,
| and that means there would be less competition and
| innovation in this space.
| spencerchubb wrote:
| Unless I missed it in the article, I don't think the author
| mentioned one of the biggest factors. The big lenders in
| America are effectively extensions of the US government, and
| the government guarantees over 90% of loans.
|
| That means there is no risk (for the lender) to give out
| student loans. The taxpayers take on the risk
| brigadier132 wrote:
| In your 4 step process where do you blame the _not for profit_
| schools for raising tuition by completely absurd and
| unsustainable amounts?
|
| If we are going to forgive student loans, _tax payers_ should
| not be on the hook. The loan originators _and_ most importantly
| the schools should pay since they are both the primary
| beneficiaries of this disastrous policy.
| JoBrad wrote:
| The cost of student loans is nothing compared to the value
| that those degree holders will provide. In my opinion, your
| first degree at a public university or community college
| should be paid for by the Federal government as long as you
| keep a certain grade average, and stick to a reasonable
| timeline.
|
| If it matters to anyone, I paid off my loans entirely, but
| also received Pell grants.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| If your opinion were correct the degrees would pay for
| themselves and we wouldn't be having these discussions. We
| have people paying $160k a year to study in fields that are
| increasingly having their fundamental research completely
| debunked and exposed as fraudulent (see Political Science
| and Pyschology).
|
| There is also absolutely 0 reason these degrees should cost
| so much. If we want to keep a guaranteed student loan
| program it should be restricted in the amount that can be
| borrowed and it should only be usable at local community
| colleges that cost under $5k a year. Nothing about
| education necessitates spending more than that.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The degrees do pay for themselves on average. Bachelor's
| degreeholders have median earnings $525/week higher than
| high school graduates
| (https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2022/data-on-
| display/educa...), which over the course of a career
| would cover even the most egregious student debt loads.
| That's precisely why it's a hard problem; we could just
| warn kids not to jump into the debt trap if it weren't
| genuinely worth the cost.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| I heard an interesting fact a couple of days ago,
|
| The median student that graduated from college starting
| in 2009 had more debt than what they started with after
| 12 years and it's only gotten worse.
|
| So your belief that it will cover the most egregious is
| not true for the median student. Given that, I'm also
| interested in how those lifetime earnings increases are
| distributed across degrees.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| This kind of "fact" always raises alarm bells for me. Did
| you hear it because it's true, or because it sounds
| compelling while being impractical to disprove?
| brigadier132 wrote:
| Here is a source I found and repayment rates tanked after
| 2009
|
| https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/education/our-
| insights/t...
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| This source strongly suggests that the original claim is
| not true. I don't understand exactly what the X axis is
| meant to be, but if we assume the 2012 number is meant to
| represent 2009 graduates, it seems incredibly unlikely
| that the median graduate has made no progress after 12
| years if ~62% of them began making progress after 3
| years.
|
| (Can you come up with a story where the two numbers might
| be consistent? Probably, yeah. Thus the impracticality of
| disproving weird conditional statistics like this.)
| brigadier132 wrote:
| I can't find the source for the stat I mentioned
| originally but the data I did find doesn't paint the rosy
| picture of a getting college degree with debt being an
| unambiguously +EV decision.
| api wrote:
| You forgot:
|
| 5) Systematically under-build housing so that future
| generations will be unable to simultaneously repay these loans
| and afford a place to live.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Also:
|
| 6) Intentionally train too few doctors for the explicit,
| stated, out-in-the-open purpose of pumping doctor wages.
| Continue this policy until it is too late to train enough
| doctors for the coming wave of Boomers.
| spamizbad wrote:
| I feel like the key thing missing from this discussion are the
| employers who still demand these degrees. Let's say we reformed
| both higher education and student loans - does that have any
| meaningful impact on the demand side beyond pushing the
| salaries of degree holders up (thus increasing the value of a
| degree, thus making larger loan values easier to justify,
| thus...)
| fallingknife wrote:
| If we stopped subsidizing the degrees less people would have
| them, but employers would still need the same number of
| employees. They would be forced to drop necessary degree
| requirements or go understaffed.
| ghaff wrote:
| Who knows what would happen?
|
| Maybe they'd do their own educational curricula with
| requirements that would require minimum tenures with
| payback requirements. (Not sure of all the US laws in this
| regard. There used to at least be relocation payback
| requirements.)
|
| But I suspect a lot of people here wouldn't like 1 year
| bootcamps for jobs that included an extended employment
| commitment.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Most good employers, especially in tech, don't require
| degrees these days.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| ?
|
| In general they do, it might not be a guarantee, but a
| degree helps pass hr filters. The only way to bypass that
| is having years of experience in a big company or a
| recommendation, for junior positions a degree is very
| necessary.
| Shekelphile wrote:
| the vast majority of employers will not work with you
| without a degree, its viewed almost equivalently to being a
| felon.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| I have never had issues getting interviews with every
| FAANG along with other large F500 companies.
|
| I've gotten offers as well.
| abnry wrote:
| Re: 4), isn't forgiving loans awfully close to having power of
| the purse? That is explicitly congress's role.
|
| You have some really perverse incentives too if you allow loan
| forgiveness by the executive branch, something close to buying
| votes.
| mbostleman wrote:
| For number 2, how did you come up with the very narrow 15 year
| window of birth from 1980 to 1995? I was born in 1963 and for
| the entirety of my upbringing it was a forgone conclusion that
| the lack of post high school education had a dire and
| inescapable consequence in future earning and socioeconomic
| status.
| kungito wrote:
| Because at that time an engineering degree still had some
| weight because not everyone can get it. This inflation 9f
| degrees caused the degrees to have way less value only for
| the next generation
| ryandrake wrote:
| I was born in the mid-70s, and _nobody_ told me "Just go to
| college, any college, and major in anything." That was never
| the narrative.
|
| It was "Go to a top-N college, major in one of these very
| carefully enumerated majors that tend to result in good
| career trajectory (business, engineering, medicine, and so
| on), and maintain a very good GPA throughout." The messaging
| was very clear, from parents, teachers, and guidance
| counselors: Don't go to film school or a Tier-2 university
| and major in history, if you want a career.
|
| I'm not sure when the "Go to any school, and do whatever"
| messaging started but it was not happening in the 90s when I
| was in high school.
| User23 wrote:
| > cannot use discretion in deciding who he gets to forgive for
| loans
|
| You present this as though it doesn't make sense, but as far as
| the federal government is concerned forgiving a debt is
| spending (which is why the IRS will tax you for forgiven debts,
| income is the other side of spending). And spending is
| explicitly under Congress's authority.
| diob wrote:
| 5) Don't forget the massive rise in tuition. My brother went to
| college a few years before me, and by the time I got there
| (born before 1990), the price was double what it was his first
| year. It was only 2 years of increases.
|
| 6) Only allow help for families making under a certain amount,
| so those from abusive homes are shit out of luck.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| >>> 1) move most careers...out of the country....to the benefit
| of shareholders.
|
| You've hidden very carefully the causality in this sentence.
| Who moved them? Why? Its perhaps implied that since
| shareholders benefited, that they did it. Yet a careful
| examination reveals quickly the elephant in the room in that
| thesis: why did outsourcing now, and not before, if the benefit
| to shareholders has always been there? why did this happen
| mostly in the US, and not other countries?
|
| Of course, the reality is far more complex and reveals that the
| road for manufacture hollowing in the US was a road paved with
| good intentions. History is there for anyone who wants to read
| it.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| There is outsourcing in places like the EU but it looks
| different and takes place within it, because the wealth
| disparities between EU countries are so much greater and US
| GDP per capita is so high. The state with lowest GDP per
| capita, Mississippi, is on par with Belgium.
| huuhee3 wrote:
| While the US system is particularly messed up, it's not that
| great in Europe either.
|
| In my country universities get paid by the government based on
| number of graduates. Things like quality of education and
| employability matter very little. So, the end result is a system
| where many young people spend 5 years of their life on a masters
| degree that doesn't give them any monetary benefit. The
| university gets their money, the government gets fancy stats
| about level of education, but many students end up just misled
| and wasting their time.
|
| Obviously this is better than graduating with massive debt, but
| it's still a major financial loss compared to working full time,
| or studying something employable. In my opinion, what we need is
| a change in mentality. People shouldn't tell their kids that it's
| okay to study just whatever you enjoy, at least not until you
| have some other means of earning a living you're happy with.
| fredgrott wrote:
| What is missing from the debate....
|
| The rise of Education Grants on Fed level and the decrease of
| state funds per student...classic economic game-ship gone
| wrong...
|
| What might have worked better is higher Fed grants per student
| handed over to states as match grant where it matches state funds
| in the same student.
|
| Anything else delves into false narratives around false facts....
|
| And we do in fact have an example of said cure
| working...elementary education where no student has a
| debt...everyone forgets the 1-12th grade school system that works
| with no debt transferred to students....
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| > Make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy again.
|
| I would like to see the author back this up with more
| considerations.
|
| Bankruptcy disappears from all credit reports after seven years.
| The average age of first time home buyers is 35.
|
| So if a new grad's credit is trashed from the age of 23-30, it
| makes no difference to them - they are not planning on using
| credit for anything substantial anyways.
|
| What is going to stop every single student from declaring
| bankruptcy immediately after graduation?
| hypeatei wrote:
| > What is going to stop every single student from declaring
| bankruptcy immediately after graduation?
|
| The long and arduous process of going through bankruptcy
| proceedings. Have you or do you know someone who has gone
| through that? It's not fun nor is it a guaranteed ticket out of
| your debt.
| Cerium wrote:
| I would rather see us switch to an income based repayment
| schedule with discharge at 30 years, seems fair to the student
| and society.
| imtringued wrote:
| Yeah just make it dischargeable after X years. It would be
| fair even to current holders of student loans.
| imtringued wrote:
| What's going to stop young people from declaring bankruptcy
| immediately after doing anything?
| mezzie2 wrote:
| I feel like allowing bankruptcy in certain situations would
| make sense.
|
| For example, I took out undergraduate and graduate loans to
| train for a career that, due to a freak health event (I got MS)
| in my last semester of grad school, I couldn't actually _do_.
| Currently, the disability discharge works in a way where if you
| can do _any_ work at all you 're on the hook for the full
| amount.
|
| So someone who went to school to become an
| actuary/doctor/lawyer/etc, suffered a severe head injury and
| afterwards can only work a retail or fast food job is still on
| the hook for all their loans and has to pay them off on poverty
| wages.
|
| Another case is people for whom the economic landscape changed
| so drastically so quickly that the decisions they made when
| entering school might not be relevant when they leave school.
| Think people who started undergrad in 2005/2006/2007 - they
| might have made perfectly reasonable decisions about what
| college to go to and how much debt to take out based on
| expected future return, and then that return _tanked_ while
| they were in school + there were several years of scraping by
| during which interest accumulated due to no fault of their own.
| pixodaros wrote:
| Think of people who started a Computer Science degree in 2019
| or 2020 (yes, individuals can maximize their chances of
| getting a software development job after university, but as a
| collective many of them will have to do something else for
| the foreseeable future).
| downrightmike wrote:
| At this point, all students should on principals alone default
| and bankrupt. The system is rigged and is actively hurting
| people.
| hinkley wrote:
| <search page for "Reagan">: 0 matches.
|
| They didn't go far enough back or broad enough.
|
| "We" decided that cheap college was too socialist and his people
| cooked up a scheme to make it more expensive and push the
| underclass and PoC into the GI bill. "You people" only get an
| education once you survive the military. But it made things worse
| for the middle class as well, as almost every5ing from
| Reaganomics has, and things have only snowballed from there.
| peterweyand38 wrote:
| The problem here is the time value of money. If the world is
| based on a production function of compound interest then in a
| world of finite resources what becomes cheaper over time are cell
| phones and what becomes more expensive are people's time, because
| the per unit cost of clean water and housing goes up and
| technology makes virtualizable goods cheaper.
|
| This also has the added benefit of screwing with the Gini
| coefficient as returns to capital are always compounded where
| worker productivity at best goes up linearly.
|
| So people mortgage their future in a bad Nash equilibrium in a
| competition to increase their productivity at a slightly faster
| linear rate than other workers, by taking money from financiers.
| The same financiers that see an exponential return and are
| incentivized to shrink labor costs to keep maximizing compound
| returns. So students are stuck in a system in which they're
| borrowing from their ideological competition.
|
| It's not that universities are inherently evil or administrators
| are bad. It's a natural extension of how returns to investment
| work.
|
| Now I'm not a Marxist, but that's the way the math works. The
| only solution I can see is a social system in which the wealthy
| form investment vehicles that run as cooperatives owned by the
| workers and flatten the Gini coefficient as much as possible. If
| students bought shares in a university that they then owned for
| life similar to bonds, then the university system itself would
| self correct.
|
| Say you go to graduate school or had tenure - then you would have
| a higher share of bonds. You would no longer be paid in a linear
| way, but a compound one. If the returns didn't align with
| expected earnings the university would fail. Linear payments are
| essentially just an admittance of failure to believe that
| inflation won't destroy someone's earning potential unless
| they're able to become a shareholder faster than someone else.
| Which causes intergenerational disequilibria as we've seen where
| the old are incredibly wealthy and the young are too poor to
| start families.
|
| Unless economics is willing to confront the social problem of
| compound interest in a finite world accelerationist capitalism
| will end up destroying society.
|
| No, the solution is not to burn down academia. Ask the Cambodians
| how killing everyone with glasses worked out for them.
| imtringued wrote:
| Silvio Gesell essentially makes the argument that the return on
| mere ownership of real capital is negative in the real world.
| Positive interest can only exist in a world where demand for
| capital exceeds supply. Since capital produces capital, we
| reach the excess capital "regime" eventually. The holding costs
| of excess capital are negatively therefore people destroy the
| excess capital. In the positive interest range there is a
| tendency for the interest rate to drop. In the negative
| interest rate range there is a tendency for the interest rate
| to rise. Both lead to the equilibrium real interest rate being
| exactly 0% in the long run.
|
| But a 0% interest rate has some quite significant implications.
| The value of non-extracted rock in earth's crust and the mild
| steel it eventually becomes are equivalent, despite being
| separated in time. Capital requires energy to operate, which
| also comes from the earth's crust. In other words, everything
| that exists today is just a long winded transformation of one
| chunk of the universe into another. Nothing is ever "produced".
| All wealth is based on the direct or indirect ownership of land
| and its resources playing out over the ages. Mind you, in this
| framework, owning an expensive machine is equivalent to having
| the mining rights to dig out the materials and energy sources.
| It is not literal ownership of land that is important, but the
| access to its benefits.
|
| Basically, we will never escape feudalism.
| peterweyand38 wrote:
| My position is that global GDP is a compounding function on
| interest. So you if you take the sum total of the world's GDP
| you can take out (x - m). You can simplify the equation
| further to goods produced today and investment, which is
| similar to your argument.
|
| So you have a total stock of raw resources, the current
| production function based on technological transformation,
| and computed interest in the future (which is a compound
| function). The resource stock is finite no matter its size
| (like all resources on earth), and the future expected return
| to transform those resources is expected to go up
| exponentially.
|
| Competition doesn't matter under these circumstances. So long
| as investment has a compound function you run out of
| resources quite quickly or reach a point where whoever owns
| the most raw resources is the person that wins under the
| condition of a complicated game of musical chairs.
|
| At 3.5 percent GDP growth rate at a compounded return you
| have to double the real return of goods in twenty years. Or
| you have inflation. In a generation the system collapses.
|
| You have to massively redistribute wealth and flatten the
| gini coefficient almost immediately while assuming that GDP
| can no longer increase. Or you don't believe in math. There
| isn't a middle ground. Giving people bonds based on what they
| do that are nontradeable would be a start, although how you
| forbid resale is legally difficult. Forming investment
| vehicles that do what Benjamin Franklin did with the college
| in philedelphia might help. But the math doesn't work if you
| have a finite set of resources and a compound function of
| return. Technological transformation of raw resources into
| goods isn't a guaranteed exponential function.
|
| Or we'll see more of what's come before. We can afford fancy
| computers but not homes because cell phones are cheap to
| produce and land is expensive to own.
|
| Compound interest is a massive problem.
| whatever1 wrote:
| I mean you are given a blank check to change your future for ever
| and the debt will be paid by your future, better self.
|
| Who would not take this lucrative deal, regardless of the number
| on that check?
| osigurdson wrote:
| I think we are going to have an era of entrepreneurial maximalism
| coming soon. For a lot of young people, the employment deal is
| rather broken. Also, AI will benefit smaller companies far more
| than larger ones.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| One thing that really annoys me about universities is being
| forced to take random classes under the dubious banner of being
| well rounded. The incentives for the university are to make us
| spend more time and money on them. So of course, they want us to
| waste time in arbitrary forced requirements. My observation is
| that people are not actually well-rounded just because they went
| to a university. And I don't think they're even studying the
| fields that we need as a society. There are too many random
| fields that just seem like activism rather than something
| rigorous. Taxpayers should not be subsidizing those, and the
| government needs to be much smarter about managing the bad
| incentives for administration.
| big-green-man wrote:
| I've been saying this to anyone who would listen for years. All
| the problems with higher education in the US are the direct
| result of student loans being unable to be discharged in
| bankruptcy. Usually complex problems have complex causes, usually
| if someone says "simple, just do this" it means they probably
| don't understand the problem. Not this one. This is one of those
| rare problems with a singular cause and a "simple" solution:
| allow student debt to be discharged in bankruptcy. I put quotes
| on simple because, while the solution is simple, it's easier said
| than done as the author points out, the regulation of the
| industry is captured and making it actually happen is very
| difficult due to incumbent institutions benefitting from the
| status quo. But we have to set the bone, it's going to hurt but
| there's no way around it. We are very fortunate that the solution
| is so simple.
| graycat wrote:
| Simple facts of life about education and (OP) student loans:
|
| (1) Liberal Arts and Sciences. If you have the money/smarts, can
| go for a Bachelor's degree at an _Ivy League_ university, maybe
| also join a fraternity, and, thus, get some more understanding of
| history, civilization, and people and meet some people likely
| good to know for a good career /marriage.
|
| The Ivy professors are expected to publish a lot of _research_
| and, hopefully, get that research funded. The university may take
| 60% of the research funding for _overhead_.
|
| I'm shocked, shocked to find US National politics going on here.
| Here is your 60%, Sir.
|
| The universities like getting the 60%, e.g., for the white table
| cloth restaurant or the the President's limo. US politicians like
| funding education.
|
| Due to WWII with radar, sonar, the _Bomb_ , the US government
| liked to fund research in the STEM fields and, soon, medicine,
| agriculture, etc. Due to the research, the profs stay bright,
| with brains active, but otherwise their research has not much to
| do with what is in the Bachelor's degree courses.
|
| (2) State Colleges. Could get a Bachelor's degree and also a
| _Teaching Certificate_ which would enable a career in K-12
| teaching that could be good for wives and mothers. Low tuition.
|
| (3) State Universities. Could continue and get a Ph.D. Could use
| that (A) as a _union card_ for a career in college teaching that
| did not require research, (B) a career in research, maybe as an
| Assistant Professor trying to publish enough and build reputation
| enough to get promoted to _tenure_ , (C) whatever else could use
| the work for. Can regard (C) as _speculative_ with best results
| quite good for career, wealth, US national security.
|
| One academic direction: Get a good background in math
| (probability, statistics), physics, and chemistry, and then do
| research in some other field, e.g., what is happening on the
| floor of the Gulf of Maine.
|
| (4) Broadly, children need to _grow up_ , and that can involve
| lots of inputs and experiences. Then they can go fourth into the
| great US society, lands, and economy and try to be successful.
| Some Bachelor's degrees might help.
|
| Bachelor's, ..., Ph.D. as _job training_ -- has not been very
| popular, respected, or successful in the US.
|
| Broadly one effect for young people in the US economy is the
| economy might continue to grow and develop with new directions;
| so, ..., a young person can try to select a direction that is or
| promises growth, get a first job, and go ahead and grow.
|
| E.g., my education concentrated on math and physics. Early career
| was in US national security which liked math and physics. Soon
| there was also a lot of interest in computing, so got into that
| -- right, quick sort, heap sort, AVL trees, numerical issues in
| matrix inversion and curve fitting, .... At one point, the US
| Navy was HIGHLY concerned about the US _labor force_ in
| computing, especially for work in math and physics, and I got
| well paid to sit, learn about computing, and do some on some Navy
| sonar data, the FFT (fast Fourier transform), power spectral
| estimation, etc. As US computing grew rapidly, so did my career.
| Now, doing a startup in computing using some original math --
| that is, combining what I 'd gotten like the novel ingredients
| for a popular new pizza.
|
| So, if _job training_ , _trade school_ , education with good
| "ROI" for good careers does not work well DIRECTLY, maybe (A)
| pick some of the best of what is in the libraries and (B) make
| what can with it -- yup, it's risky, speculative, etc.
|
| My recommendations:
|
| (A) If you can afford (1), fine. Otherwise, don't spend a lot of
| money on that Bachelor's ... Ph.D. education. I.e., for the OP
| here, don't take out student loans, and if go to state schools
| might not need the loans (might not apply to careers in law or
| medicine). By the way, for grad school, Master's and Ph.D., I
| never paid anything and did get paid for doing ugrad math
| teaching.
|
| (B) For a Ph.D., at some schools, courses are optional, the main
| point is the _dissertation_ , the definition is "an original
| contribution to knowledge worth of publication", the main
| criteria for publication is "new, correct, and significant", a
| cheap way to get the background for such research is independent
| study, and might do enough of that on evenings and weekends
| before going for a Ph.D. E.g., not a lot of need for "student
| loans".
|
| (C) Get some basics, e.g., in the STEM fields, and then look for
| opportunities in the US economy.
|
| (D) Meet people, especially the _right_ people: It can be better
| who you know than what you know.
|
| (E) If you are doing really good work as an employee, then maybe
| see if can do much the same work but for much more money as an
| owner.
| haberman wrote:
| I agree with the article's diagnosis: the system is out of
| control, with no market forces are in place to keep costs in
| check. It's unsustainable for students to take on this level of
| debt.
|
| I'm not sure I agree with the solutions though. Making student
| loan debt dischargeable doesn't make a lot of economic sense.
| We're talking about 17-year-olds with no income and no
| collateral. Why would any lender want to be in this business? Who
| will lend to students if the debt is dischargeable?
|
| The article's solution is to essentially make the school the co-
| guarantor of the loan, such that the school absorbs part of the
| financial impact of student default. Ok, but now the school has a
| direct financial stake in the student's overall finances. Do you
| really want to have that kind of relationship with your school?
| Do you want an admissions process that is partially trying to
| decide if you're financially responsible? Do you want your school
| pressuring you to choose a more lucrative major? Do you want
| communications from your school reminding you that it's important
| to be making good financial decisions? If your school is co-
| guarantor of your loan, it's their business to make sure you're
| going to repay on time.
|
| There has to be an element of responsibility that falls to the
| borrowers themselves. It's true that a 17-year-old does not have
| the experience to know for themselves how much debt is
| reasonable, especially when they cannot necessarily predict their
| future earnings. But there has to be some incentive to borrow
| less. I don't think it's healthy if student can borrow with
| abandon, safe in knowing that they can just discharge the debt in
| a few years if it doesn't work out.
|
| Ideally students would be voting with their feet, and would make
| it clear to colleges that the cost of tuition is a significant
| factor in their decision. But I guess prestige and tradition are
| so powerful that people will want to go to name-brand colleges no
| matter the cost.
| robswc wrote:
| > Do you want an admissions process that is partially trying to
| decide if you're financially responsible? Do you want your
| school pressuring you to choose a more lucrative major? Do you
| want communications from your school reminding you that it's
| important to be making good financial decisions? If your school
| is co-guarantor of your loan, it's their business to make sure
| you're going to repay on time.
|
| I wouldn't particularly enjoy this... but at the same time, the
| alternative seems to be students that "don't know what they're
| doing" taking out loans over $100k to get degrees that are not
| in demand. These people will then claim they were ignorant of
| the true cost, job prospects, potential salary, etc.
|
| The elephant in the room is that many degrees simply don't
| leave students with a lot of earning potential. I never
| understand why the discussion seems to trend (not implying your
| comment did this) towards how we can pay for these degrees or
| make them affordable. It sounds harsh but I don't know how to
| see it any other way.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| > Do you really want to have that kind of relationship with
| your school? Do you want an admissions process that is
| partially trying to decide if you're financially responsible?
| Do you want your school pressuring you to choose a more
| lucrative major?
|
| Yes. These schools need to eliminate or drastically reduce the
| economically useless degrees that they have produced in such
| grotesque surplus for the past 40 years. They should absolutely
| have an incentive to produce an education that is useful to
| society. They've miseducated Americans for generations on the
| lie that all education is inherently good.
| freshtake wrote:
| FWIW, most of my friends in undergrad would openly flaunt the
| way they were spending their student loan money (weed, video
| games, new spoiler for their car, etc.). This was not the
| exception, as far as I could tell.
|
| So the age thing goes both ways - 17 year olds are too young to
| make smart financial decisions, both about whether to get a
| loan, and how to spend it.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Why do brands market to young people? Why do people buy stocks
| that make no profit and never have?
|
| It's never about today.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| I've said it before on HN and I'll say it again: I don't support
| any reform with respect to student loans that doesn't see the
| academic institutions participate in the pain. I'd like to see a
| large number of universities get bankrupted by assuming some
| portion of the student loan liabilities of their alums, then
| allow the alums to file bankruptcy if they can't pay off any
| remaining balances.
|
| Did you know that federal student loans cannot be discharged via
| bankruptcy AND if you carry federal student loans into
| retirement, your social security income can be garnished?
| seizethecheese wrote:
| 1) I do not agree with applying this retroactively. You
| shouldn't change the rules in the middle of the game.
|
| 2) it would be unfair to make universities participate in the
| downside but not the upside. Perhaps the federal government
| should also turn the interest earned over to universities. This
| could actually go some way towards lessening resistance.
| mbostleman wrote:
| I'm not sure that the impact on the debtors is even the worse
| part. The removal of any apparent consequence for the cost of
| education also seemed to remove an incentive for the university
| to provide a quality product.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| When will the Stanford and Ivy leaguers making $400K at FANGMAs
| lead by example and burn their diplomas?
| CaffeinatedDev wrote:
| I like the system that some coding bootcamps employ where they
| take a percentage of the first years of working wages. This would
| be a way to discern the value of your degree quite accurately. It
| would align the universities' and students' interests.
|
| Besides this, I also agree to the 200+ upvotes, system is broken
| y'all!
| seizethecheese wrote:
| The premise that 17 year olds cannot make this kind of decision
| seems widely accepted here. Yet, I remember clearly understanding
| that since I was paying for college with debt, I must study
| engineering.
|
| Perhaps college has expanded to select too many people? I wonder
| if this could be solve by simply restricting college admissions
| to 20% of graduating seniors.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| This is how "cultural revolutions" begin
| rr808 wrote:
| I'm not convinced American universities are unusually expensive.
| Its an costly business. Does anyone have good figures for what
| the cost/student is globally?
|
| I can see:
| https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
| looks like the US is 20-30% more expensive than other developed
| countries but that isn't a huge difference.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| A quarter isn't a huge difference?
|
| When I think not huge, I think low single digits. Not "most of
| the way to a third"
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