Disclosure: i never went to college, I went to a trade school.
Colleges really only started scaring the heck out of me when I started enjoying my career. After spending a day wrenching in a garage, we'd hit miller time and head down to the Soapbox Bar and Grill. Over the span of a month or two ordering buckets and shooting pool I learned our bartender Javon had a masters in biology and his fiancee Cortisha who bussed the tables had a bachelors in mining science. The both of them came in well below what I earned, had no healthcare and no retirement. I remember having a few too many boilermakers one night and I asked why he was serving grease monkey clowns like us instead of working on flowers. Javon just said theres no work, and the work he would get would pay about as well as a fry cook anyway. He had some massive college bills too and i didnt understand how those worked, but you cant get rid of them like you can a car loan.
That scared the hell out of me. You could waste a hundred grand on something I always thought made people into millionaires and still wind up serving suds to a drunk in a blue jumper covered in soot from a runaway 2 stroke who thinks you "invent flowers." I woke up the next morning with a hangover and anxiety.
> He had some massive college bills too and i didnt understand how those worked, but you cant get rid of them like you can a car loan.
This is the thing that is really the most shameful and outrageous thing about the US system. Our entire K-12 educational system and our culture is set up to paint a college degree as a ticket to "the good life". Then an 18-year-old, potentially with parents who aren't great at math but have great aspirations for their child, is sat down and asked to sign a load of papers, not realizing that this will lock them into decades of unforgiveable debt and wage slavery.
There's a reason many ancient religions forbid loaning money at interest entirely; and it's the same reason we have bankruptcy laws. None of those reasons somehow go away just because it's a student loan -- on the contrary, an 18-year-old thinking they're buying a ticket to a better life is far more vulnerable than the vast majority of people who will ever be seeking a loan.
All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, just like any other loan.
> All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, just like any other loan.
The reason they aren't dischargeable is because what bank in their right mind would give a loan to an 18 year old with no collateral? They only guarantee they get that it will be paid back is the fact that it can't be discharged.
Student loans would dry up overnight if they could be discharged at bankruptcy.
That being said, I actually think that's a good thing, because it would force colleges to charge reasonable tuition rates and also offer scholarships if they want to get the best students.
But barring shifting to a European model of college funding, I don't see the US allowing dischargeable loans, nor do I think they should, because the reality of it is that colleges won't reduce their rates nor increase their scholarships, they would just be completely out of reach of poor and middle class students.
> The reason they aren't dischargeable is because what bank in their right mind would give a loan to an 18 year old with no collateral?
If it's a bad bet for the bank, it must be far worse of a bet for young adults. That's the point -- right now we're essentially suckering millions of naive young adults into a life of wage slavery by giving them a "bet" which they are completely unequipped to evaluate; and many of them are making a bet when they shouldn't.
What you're essentially arguing is, "We have to enslave these people or society wouldn't function". On the contrary: we must not enslave these people; if stop doing it, society will figure out some other way to get things done.
To be clear, I don't think college should be paid for with loans. I agree with you that we shouldn't be enslaving people.
But I also don't think allowing these loans to be discharged in bankruptcy will solve anything (and will arguably make things worse) without systemic changes in the way college is paid for.
I think that they help universities raise tuition as long as the projected lifetime income increase from going to college exceeds the cost of tuition. Which will just allow our unsustainable "tuition rises faster than inflation" trend to last a few more years before it falls apart.
Note that "projected lifetime income increase" is generally overestimated. What we do is compare average income of a college graduate with a high school graduate and attribute the difference to college. However people who could get through college likely would have made more than people who couldn't, even if they hadn't gone to college!
Its also backwards looking, obviously. In the boomer working years, colleges were very selective and a degree was a stealth IQ test along with socioeconomic group membership.
At this point the average IQ of a college grad is very close to 100. I guarantee that within the next 30 to 40 years someone will make the shocking discovery that the presence or absence of a degree has no influence on income, success, or happiness.
At that point the ponzi scheme of higher ed can collapse.
There's nothing wrong with designing and implementing an education system for the top 5% of society and the jobs that top 5% will likely have. There is a big problem with a marketing scam along the lines of every American is a temporarily inconvenienced millionaire.
Surely, my favorite waitress at Dennys is making more money as a waitress than she would as a K12 educator, if she could get hired, which she cannot. The degree does not make her a better person nor a better waitress. It does signal that she's in maybe the top 50% of humanity WRT the skills required to get a degree. She's a somewhat better than average person because of who she is, not a meaningless piece of paper for training she will never use. The point of discussing my favorite waitress is we need "something" to signal in the job market who is in the upper half of potential employees, and $100K of debt and four years of labor seem a huge waste on a civilizational level.
Ironically, income share agreements are increasingly being challenged on the grounds that they violate the 14th amendment (being rather close to the indentured servitude model).
I think the (optics) problem is that it's a "more obvious voluntary fractional slavery program". So it's easy to criticize. Of course, because it's a less obvious voluntary fractional slavery program, non-dischargeable loans are simultaneously harder to criticize and harder for people to see the trap they're walking in to.
I could be okay with income share agreements if they had a (short) time and percentage cap. Otherwise I feel like we'll have the same problem, students will sign agreements that they don't understand, and then end up paying for it for a large part of their life.
Is 10 years short? 20% for 10 years is what it would take for many computer science majors to pay for their degree. And that's ignoring the time value of the money.
I fail to see how an ISA is better than an unforgivable loan, and to be honest, this seems a lot more like indentured servitude/wage slavery without the pretense of a loan. If the investor (Purdue in the article) has to step in and say we won't make more than 2.5x our investment on you, you know the student is being taken advantage of. The problem is that the ISA model is still bound to the private market by virtue of the fact that the investors are private and not public entities. The carrots and sticks that are in place are not there to benefit the student.
I wonder how society would react by making student loans forgivable. Would banks stop giving out loans because there is no collateral? Or would they require a cosigner to rope in an adult with collateral to lose? Would schools get cheaper as a result of people not being able to afford the already high tuition, would they become a status symbol for the mid-upper class who can afford it? It is definitely an interesting thought experiment.
To me, fundamentally the issue is one of alignment of incentives.
Right now, there are students who can come to Perdue who are looking for university as an "investment" in their own future: they want to spend $100k to get more than $100k back over their lifetime. But the fact is, some of those students are studying subjects which will never pay them back for their investment; and others will never make that money back no matter what subjects they study.
So the question is, what incentive does Perdue have with regard to these students, under the "unforgivable student loan" system?
1. From a pure short-term financial perspective, it has an incentive to get as many students in the program as possible.
2. From a reputational point of view, there may be some damage to having lots of students graduate without getting jobs
3. Perdue is made of human beings, many of whom actually have feelings and morals; those people feel much happier when their students' investment pays off, and feel much worse when their students' investments don't pay off.
And the point is, at the moment, for students in the category of people we're talking about, you have #1 fighting #2 and #3. That's always going to be an unstable system where things fluctuate between "terrible" and "not quite so terrible".
Consider the incentives in an ISA system. The incentives are now aligned: Perdue would have a vested interest in the success of their students after graduation: the more money their students make, the higher return they get (up to a point). If a student wants to come in and major in Underwater Basket Weaving, they can say, "Perhaps a degree in in Accounting or Education might be a better choice." And if they do offer Underwater Basket Weaving, they'll be sure to add in classes on the Economics of Underwater Basket Weaving, Advanced Basket Weaving Management, and so on, to make sure that those students are actually prepared to make money after they graduate.
So what you‘re proposing is that a fairer way to paying back tuition is making it essentially free when taking it and then, IF you end up making a lot of money, paying it back with a share of your income?
I can‘t resist the feeling this sounds surprisingly related to the concept of free higher education and a higher, progressive income tax, a pretty revolutionary approach we‘ve been doing with limited success over here in Germany.
Then again, that might just be my naïve European perspective on things and since taxes are theft and free education is just for those commies wanting free things, it‘s surely inappropriate for a free country.
I realize you're being somewhat facetious, but a key difference with ISA is that you don't actually pay the "tax" if you don't go to college. this doesn't make much difference for successful people, since most of them probably went to college anyway. but if you're a lower/middle income person who didn't go to college, it seems sort of unfair to have to pay towards other people gaining an advantage over you in the job market.
What makes you think that "profit motive" or "regulatory capture" will be kinder and more gentle with this approach?
For hundreds and thousands of years Indian farmers had a version of "income sharing". You should research how it went. And please don't respond with "Sure they fucked up but WE will build a better system this time around"
In my mind the problem is the system itself was designed for a world that doesn't exist. When the supply of college degrees was low 50 years ago, sure, it paid to have a degree. But now that it has become commoditized, it's not that valuable. There's no supply / demand pricing mechanism to influence a student's major. The cost of tuition is mainly based on an arbitrary credit hour. No matter how worthless a course is for your future, the price of the class is still the same.
I've read this about socialist countries that have free education. You'll have folks with law degrees driving taxi cabs. It's a waste of resources.
> There's no supply / demand pricing mechanism to influence a student's major.
This is really the most important issue. People are spending tons of money on worthless degrees. If they were getting degrees worth something, we wouldn't even be having these discussions.
Why would having someone who knows the law and drives a taxi make it a waste of resources? Taxi drivers should be uneducated in your view. Why? How does that help society?
Many lawyers need to drive taxis to get by. Being a lawyer doesn't mean instant riches unless you land at a high profile firm directly out of school.
"I never let schooling get in the way of my education."
The problem with your view is you assume the only way to get educated is via academia. There is a lot of education when you become a mechanic, an electrician, a factory worker, a firefighter, etc. That is not academic. You learn on the job. There are also many certification courses for these fields that run outside of traditional college system.
I believe in free schooling to teach basic, essential skills like reading, computing, math, etc. I'd even argue for a greater emphasis on financial education in K-12. But college is different.
The college system is very expensive, it's heavily subsidized by the state even in the U.S. If it is not teaching people valuable skills that they will be using in their profession, then it is not serving it's purpose. It costs people resources in the form of taxes.
In the meantime, we live in the information age. Teaching people to teach themselves is probably the most valuable skill we can teach.
> The college system is very expensive, it's heavily subsidized by the state even in the U.S. If it is not teaching people valuable skills that they will be using in their profession, then it is not serving it's purpose.
Education allows one to lead a richer life regardless of ones circumstance. Consider the janitor who took 8 years to get a bachelors degree in classics (after learning English). He admits that now with a degree he’ll probably try to become a janitorial supervisor.
But two things stand out, first there is no shame in a job as a janitor, and second to him the education was an end in itself, not a means to an end.
Since we're on anecdotes, my father was a firefighter who never got a degree at all. Never went into debt. Worked his way up to become Battalion Chief. It's cool the janitor had a passion for classics and wanted to learn about literature. As long as he did that with no expectation that there would be a writing job for him on the other end of that, all's fair in my mind. The guy worked for Columbia, so he probably got free classes as an employee. That being said, these anecdotes aren't sufficient to capture the broad trend which is students going to school to get a degree because they're told that's the thing to do. And for a significant portion of the population, the myth of a degree leading to automatic prosperity persists.
Higher education was never designed for getting a job. Rich families sent kids to be educated. Lately it is a degree factory. But it doesn't mean your father should have been barred if that is how he choose to spend it.
> If it is not teaching people valuable skills that they will be using in their profession
The problem with your view is that it makes the assumption this was, and always has been, the purpose of college. That wasn’t the historical purpose, in particular before the Morrill Act during the Industrial Revolution
> There is a lot of education when you become a mechanic, an electrician, a factory worker, a firefighter, etc. That is not academic. You learn on the job.
This is true for every profession. Is there any job where you pop out of school ready to perform like an expert? Lawyers, doctors, scientists, etc. — all these folks learn to do their jobs on the job, despite their years or decades of training in academia.
> The college system is very expensive, it's heavily subsidized by the state even in the U.S. If it is not teaching people valuable skills that they will be using in their profession, then it is not serving it's purpose.
There is more to life, and to work, than preparing for a profession by learning profession-specific skills.
> Many lawyers need to drive taxis to get by. Being a lawyer doesn't mean instant riches unless you land at a high profile firm directly out of school.
Was once driven by a chap who had a very in depth knowledge of Turkish literature; I spent a good 25min listening to him talk about Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak, two writers I had recently read (and liked). Turns out the guy had been a lit professor at tertiary level back in Turkey. And here he was, driving a taxi on a rainy evening in a godforsaken town in the Midlands (UK).
"Society" doesn't figure anything out. If "Society" wanted people to go to college then it would it give it to everybody for free.
People are incentivized to act one way or the other. Less-wealthy people cannot afford college tuition, and the government cannot mandate that banks give away money to extremely risky but ambitious people.
This same problem exists with extending loans in general to risky, low-income individuals. Yes their rates are insanely high, bordering on predatory, but they also have sky high default rates so the alternative is they simply cannot get a loan at all.
This argument is missing one important part. The prevalence of student loans has caused the cost of education to skyrocket, pushing it even further out of reach. So now even people who previously afforded higher education need to get loans. It’s a self-fulfilling system.
They shouldn't get the loan then. Certain types of loans just shouldn't exist. If you know that certain people have a high chance to default then giving them a loan is irresponsible.
> If it's a bad bet for the bank, it must be far worse of a bet for young adults.
That doesn't follow: you could graduate, get your degree, and declare bankruptcy. You're fine, your loan is gone, and the bank regrets their investment.
The bank doesn't want the bet because "bankruptcy" means very different things to the bank and to the student. To the bank it means they lose all their money. For a just-graduated person with minimal assets it's not that bad -- sure you can't get a mortgage to buy a house for a while, but you probably couldn't have afforded that anyway with student loans. You still have the degree, they can't take that (well, https://www.jefftk.com/p/repossessing-degrees).
I would not underestimate the impact bankruptcy plays in someone's life. You would be getting a bankruptcy on your record in the prime of your life (mid-twenties), making it very very difficult to borrow for the next 10 years. You end up starting building credit in your mid to late thirties, and maybe you are able to participate in the modern economy in your forties. It sucks. I lived it.
However, in a world in which it is common for college students to declare bankruptcy immediately after graduating, financial institutions might take advantage of that information and realize that their creditworthiness is much higher than the bankruptcy would predict. Kind of like how the stock price many companies go up after they cut retirement benefits.
This of course will be to the spiral and collapse of the college loan system.
How high is the creditworthyness of someone who is on a repayment plan to service another debt? It is practically zero. Declaring bankruptcy just limits the duration of the mortgage to 7 years. You still have to pay as much back as you can unless you are literally an unemployed hobo on the street for 7 years.
I'm talking about declaring bankruptcy immediately on graduating, at age 21 (not mid-twenties), and it's off your record seven (not ten) years later, at 28.
> For a just-graduated person with minimal assets it's not that bad
It is in fact bad.
You can’t just declare bankruptcy and get a high paying job a year later and have no student debt....
When I looked into personal bankruptcy I was told by my lawyer that it would only make financial sense if there was no way I could pay back the amount owed in the next 7-10 years.
Making a deal and then breaking it can dissuade employers from putting a person in a high trust position. Most business operates on trust, handshakes, and one's word. Contracts are a backup.
Trust is like glass - easy to break, very hard to put back together.
It still doesn’t follow that the bet is bad for the student if it is bad for the bank. As the student you have some degree of control over the result. If you have reason to think you can make it work it might be a good bet. The bank OTOH only sees that X percent of students fail to pay back.
Right, but there's no feedback. Increasing school prices makes loans harder to pay off, not to discharge in bankruptcy. They can either be discharged or not in bankruptcy.
> That doesn't follow: you could graduate, get your degree, and declare bankruptcy. You're fine, your loan is gone, and the bank regrets their investment.
In my early days in Motorsports (late HS?) we had a anesthesiologist in our group, he was the wise elder who had accrued enough money and flexibility in his practice to play around with the young punks and 'show us how its done.'
One day after a tech day before a track event we working and wrenching in his garage and someone asked him how he got into the trade; turns out he was drafted in Vietnam and chose a medic role out of professional interest but also to ensure not being sent into the suicidal combat zones and come back home alive.
He said that it was incredibly typical to do what you just said in the 60-80s and declare bankruptcy like that when you got your MD, mind you this is at a time when it cost a fraction of what it costs today.
But you could also have your entire medical career subsidized by the State and expedited if you're sent on tour faster than anything offered in the civilian World and choose whatever medical school because of the GI bill and do your residency anywhere you wanted due to your status as a veteran.
And then stiff the Bank for any loans you may have accrued and it was accepted and common practice and save while your credit score was fixed.
He was one of the few boomers who openly spoke about how his generation wasn't anymore responsible then the 'entitled' millennial trope and tried to lecture us about it as that was becoming wide-spread by that time. He actually gave advice about the optics of this route that were being skewed to the detriment of his Industry and profession.
Now seeing the shortage of medical workers during COVID are being perilous overworked all over the World turns out he was, reluctantly, right.
Do you know what bankruptcy does? One does not simply declare bankruptcy unless they're willing to have their lives suddenly become much harder and stay that way for a while.
Let's say I've just graduated from college with a degree. I have minimal assets (clothes, computer) and lots of debt (100k in student loan debt). How does bankruptcy work out poorly for me?
On graduation, unless someone has incredible job prospects, wiping out 100k of debt in exchange for not being able to get a mortgage for 7y is a great deal. At 20k it's not great but still pretty good. I bought a house 7y after graduating from college, and I think this was earlier than most of my cohort.
Additionally, I wouldn't even expect a college bankruptcy to fully preclude getting a home mortgage. With a large down payment the bank isn't actually taking that much risk.
(Except that really I expect that if this law changed loans would require cosigners with good credit)
Correct, the entire market for such loans would pretty much collapse - current yields are comparable to those of commercial real estate or high-yield corporate bonds, with none of the downside protections.
Unsecured personal loans (that are subject to bankruptcy) are a valid asset class, coveted by LendingClub and some banks, but they require solid credit history and carry a higher interest rate, more aggressive repayment schedule, or both.
It’s like this entire thread is from another planet and has no knowledge of the college loan program (student loans used to be dischargeable in bankruptcy like any other loan), its origin or even presidents Obama’s attempts to overhaul it and concerns that it was actually driving up the cost of college.
> “ If it's a bad bet for the bank, it must be far worse of a bet for young adults.“
That’s not a valid implication at all. 18 year olds change their mind all the time, base decisions on impulsive reasons, etc., that comes with immaturity, lack of experience and indecision.
The loan being a bad risk for the bank is a function of youthful impulsiveness and a person without the means to pay it back yet.
It’s not risky to the bank because college itself is risky or fails to deliver wage opportunities. Not saying college cost-benefit is always favorable, just that your implication is wrong.
If it's a bad bet for the bank, that just means it is a bad bet on average and right now. The thing is, a student can know a lot more about themselves than the bank can. A student can make a bet with an extremely high expected return, that the bank would be unable to appropriately risk-price.
The problem with the current system, is we don't force the students to understand the price of the risk. The problem with making them normal loans is that the bank is unable to accurately price the risk. There are middle grounds, but arguments from the extremes seem to carry better.
I once read a setting resource for an RPG system set in a multidimensional university which cut out the middleman and offered its own student loans. Predatory as Illuminati University was, it seems like a better system than what we have now.
The “bank” is us. Almost all student loans are originated by the federal government. It’s a program the government offers to allow disadvantaged people to access higher education.
I agree with what you are saying, except that we shouldn't say students are unequipped to evaluate the "bet" merely for being young and inexperienced. If we wanted to, we could train students to be much better at evaluating such a bet.
But the reason interest-bearing loans were considered immoral for so long, and the reason that nearly every other kind of loan can be discharged through bankruptcy, is that it is too dangerous to allow anyone to offer such a loan. There's nothing magical about student loans that somehow makes them safe, and no amount of training will change that.
This is probably what's going to happen, but only if we take a LOT of human labor out of it. Either that, or accept that every class will be huge (200-500 students) with minimal attention given to students, no office hours, and low-paid labor doing all the grunt work (grading, answering questions)
I see a lot of parallels to medicine here. Both are highly regulated and seen as a "right" we ought to fund. Maybe, but until we achieve greater labor leverage (made even harder by professional credentialing in medicine), there just won't be a way to drive costs down much, so we're stuck with what we have.
College at $60k a semester while an adjunct earns $28k a year and somehow this doesn't result in a 1:1 student:teacher ratio means someone's skimming off a ton of money.
Part of the problem with universities IMO is the accounting for revenue<->expenses isn't at all straightforward. Athletics generate a ton more money than they cost, most people seem fine with that. Research generates no revenue but costs a ton, for some hard-to-quantify but (hopefully?) real benefit to society at large. Tuition is nominally for teaching, which is a big cost center for a university. And, at least in the US, all the costs are split between the national government, the state government (who has the pleasure of educating people who may not live in that state long-term?) and tuition, and various donors and grants.
A system ripe for disruption, if ever there was one.
I have no idea why anyone would say "research generates no revenues" when most universities have systems to spin out viable research and profit from it. Universities quite literally profit financially from patented research funded by taxpayers. The government gets no direct return on this, and the usual argument is that it increases economic activity and raises the tax take - which may be true, but it's still a uniquely privileged position.
But most universities are more about property speculation and bequest farming than they are about education or R&D.
The system is entirely corporatised and often predatory. Professors are only as valuable as the grant income they generate, adjuncts are gig economy labour, students are a barely-tolerated annoyance, and property speculation and "administration" are considered the central mission.
Exactly, why are young students footing a disproportionate load for “society-benefiting research” as part of their tuition? And paying interest for it. That’s amazingly unfair.
For the university, research in the sciences brings in way more money than it costs, and subsidizes a lot of other things. Most professors in physics, chemistry, etc. largely pay their own salaries out of grants.
The kind of knowledge you need to evaluate this is something that is normally taught in college. What high school teaches decision making under uncertainty, along with economic history and statistics?
I mean sure we could try to teach kids this stuff, and I certainly aim to tech my kids, but it's not what's been done in the past at secondary school.
There is no "free market system" here. There's an organised debt slavery racket run for the benefit of parasitic rent-seekers who operate with federal sanction.
College loans have taken point on this for the aspiring middle classes. In a very literal sense this system is the exact opposite of genuine freedom and opportunity.
In high school I took economics, precalculus (which taught exponential growth), and history (which talked about financial crises of the past). The information was taught, but the problem is that there was no class to tie this information into life practice.
Isn't that then a gigantic failure of high school then? If there is one thing we need to prepare students for, isn't it how to start making career decisions?
If that's a goal of high school, then yes, it's a huge failing. There's also a bunch of other useful stuff they don't teach you, like cooking and how to wash your clothes. There's no coherent idea of what school is supposed to be, though. Is it a place to learn a bunch of practical skills? Or a place to read about some interesting ideas? All those things take time and money, and we end up with a school that does a bunch of different stuff with no real plan.
Our town used to have the Mechanics' Academy. A 12-week study program to learn enough math to balance, books, amortize a loan, calculate weights and measures, figure load limits. Graduates were very employable. My Mom's Grandfather was one.
Long ago demolished and turned into a Mall during Urban Renewal.
"If it's a bad bet for the bank, it must be far worse of a bet for young adults."
Not necessarily. Even if it's a good bet for the student, what's to stop them from declaring bankruptcy just after graduation, and before they start their lucrative career? They would then get all the upside, whilst the bank gets zero payments.
Trashing your credit score, with unfortunate consequences for your ability to buy a car, rent accommodation, apply for a mortgage, and avoid predatory debt collectors, sounds like a superbly practical debt management plan.
And if you have a job with decent money, obviously it wouldn't count as outright fraud at all.
But even that is missing the point. These loans are an economic time bomb. They rely entirely on a functioning economy with adequate middle class job opportunities.
If those disappear - if, for example, an unexpected black swan event happens to leaves a smoking crater where GDP growth used to be - banks lose a giant pile of money anyway.
The debt will be sold at cents to the dollar to collection agencies who will hound the victims, and anyone else who gets in the way by sharing an address, or having any form of financial connection - for the rest of their natural lives.
> But barring shifting to a European model of college funding, I don't see the US allowing dischargeable loans, nor do I think they should, because the reality of it is that colleges won't reduce their rates nor increase their scholarships, they would just be completely out of reach of poor and middle class students.
The reality is that the they should be out of reach to poor or middle class students TODAY. They are not serving those people and are actively making their lives worse by saddling them with outrageous debt and no prospect of meaningful employment.
If the US changed bankruptcy it would force the colleges to change as well. Lenders are not going to be sending children into the workforce with zero chance to recoup that loan, and they are not going to want to bloat the college stay to ridiculous proportions.
> The reality is that the they should be out of reach to poor or middle class students TODAY.
That varies so much by student and to bar a whole class of people out of these things is not going to improve their outcomes. While some students are not served with better employment opportunities by going to college and earning a degree - there are many others who are.
Outlawing things to a group of people isn't going to serve them better. It will mean that the entire middle class will be unable to educate into jobs. Educating them about the effort college requires to be successful once you leave would be better.
> Outlawing things to a group of people isn't going to serve them better. It will mean that the entire middle class will be unable to educate into jobs. Educating them about the effort college requires to be successful once you leave would be better.
Making it harder to get a student loan is hardly "outlawing" anyone from going to college. Schools would still give scholarships. Plus, tuition would almost certainly go down. Right now they can charge as much as they want because banks are will to lend whatever colleges charge. If all of a sudden people stopped buying their product when they raised the price too high then tuition would come back down to what it was only a few decades ago.
Even if fewer people ended up going to college it wouldn't limit opportunity. If anything it would likely make it easier to get ahead. Fewer jobs would require a college degree - there wouldn't be enough applicants who have one - and we'd likely see alternatives to college become more popular and widely respected, which would give high school grads more options for how to get started with a career.
If you're saying that someone who is below a certain income cannot get a loan - how are they going to go to college? Pull-up them bootstraps and find some more money under the couch cushions? You do know that scholarships are not like a dime-a-dozen, right? It's not like every university waives tuition at middle class incomes.
If you want to limit the cost of college then doing it by putting caps on how much a university can charge could be a more straight forward option than hoping costs come down by limiting loans to those who can't afford the cash option. (e.g. If a university wants state funding then they need to cap their student costs) Even then - loans would still need to happen for people who can't afford much more than their basic housing expenses (if even that - think about kids who get kicked out at 18).
You're speaking in a lot of "if market forces behave the way we all think they should thanks to basic econ like supply and demand" but that's not how things always work in the real world.
Considering ~50% families don't have any retirement savings and don't have an emergency fund, do you really their kids are gonna be able to afford all the expense things associated with college? (Remember - these people just got out of high school! They have likely never had a job and have no money at all)
Do you think colleges wouldn't change if they were going to receive far far fewer applicants at their current sticker prices? I don't mean that to come across as snarky. I'm genuinely curious because your comment seems to be based on an assumption that colleges would not make changes to their operations or tuition if they suddenly had a hard time filling their freshman class.
I think of it as being similar to healthcare. People need education to get jobs in the current economy. (In the same way they need healthcare to stay alive) You might make it so expensive they can't pay it back in any reasonable amount of time but if the choice is job vs no job - people gonna take it. If you remove the ability to even get an education (or healthcare) by saying you can only get it with cash then you're just screwing people over.
Regardless if job requirements change (they only will for a subset that no one cares about and no one is trying to get), you're going to screw people over. The lag time between no-loans and job-requirements dropping is going to be too long. There will be a lot of people who fall into the cracks and will be stuck with the lowest tier jobs because they couldn't afford a cash-only education until it was much less expensive.
Regardless of this - I feel like this is the wrong approach to debate lower costs vs no loans vs whatever-where-a-student-pays-in-the-end. I think 4 year college should be free (no tuition, books paid, stipend or special housing, etc.) given how the world works. I went to college for free due to CH 35 of the VA and it was really the only reason I was able to do it and fully commit to it. I have no problem with having a more educated populace - regardless of what they study. I did study something that came with very gainful employment but that wasn't obvious in the beginning of my studies. I think 4 year college would be less necessary if we had better education from the start - but we're never going to get there in this country.
It depends entirely on the school. Harvard could pretty reasonably jack up their tuition well over $100,000/yr without any real resistance or fall in applications. We wouldn't get cheaper colleges, we'd merely watch as all the 2nd and 3rd tier schools shut down.
Here is an idea: let’s have colleges themselves act as the guarantor for a student loan. This way the incentives are aligned; if the colleges are poor judge of a students talent (and admit too many low performers), or having teaching standards are too weak will stand to lose money when a student cannot secure a job and repay their loans.
You only need to look at historical examples to know that cannot be the case.
Take for example, cars. That's how cars started. Look where we are today.
If tuition stays sky high, it will be because of regulatory requirements (and enabling subsidies) to stay sky high, not because theres no market for education for working class folk
The reason they aren't dischargeable is because what bank in their right mind would give a loan to an 18 year old with no collateral? They only guarantee they get that it will be paid back is the fact that it can't be discharged.
And yet somehow banks were happy to do so until 2005.
Student loans would dry up overnight if they could be discharged at bankruptcy.
That being said, I actually think that's a good thing, because it would force colleges to charge reasonable tuition rates and also offer scholarships if they want to get the best students.
Both of these statements I agree with. The larger the loan, the better the guarantee that banks want.
Every measure that we take to make it easier for students to pay tuition without imposing cost controls results in increases in tuition. The result is that tuition has been growing faster than inflation for many decades, and the trend is unsustainable.
But barring shifting to a European model of college funding, I don't see the US allowing dischargeable loans, nor do I think they should, because the reality of it is that colleges won't reduce their rates nor increase their scholarships, they would just be completely out of reach of poor and middle class students.
This I disagree with. Universities are businesses. The bulk of their customers are able to pay thanks to loan guarantees backed by special government rules. Take away those loan guarantees and the universities will have to figure out how to live without customers, or without charging so much.
That said, you can't get there without creating a crisis that forces universities to make hard choices that they have been avoiding for decades.
> The bulk of their customers are able to pay thanks to loan guarantees backed by special government rules.
Universities are not businesses. Students are not customers. Student tuition was much more heavily subsidized by states, but funding from states to universities has declined in the past few decades. This is the reason for tuition hikes.
In the past, there was an agreement between states and universities: The states will provide a certain level of funding for students, and in exchange the universities will be barred from raising tuition above a very small rate annually. Then some states decided that having a "balanced budget" during all years, including recessions, was better policy than keeping education well-funded. Now recessions cause huge drops in education funding, which are accompanied by removing the limits on yearly tuition hikes.
Because it's generally better to have a more educated population, the federal government picks up some of the slack with grant and loan aid, and banks pick up more slack with private loans to students who otherwise couldn't afford it. Then funding never returns to prior levels.
Stop blaming universities. The blame very clearly lies with states and their asinine balanced budget policies.
Yours is a narrative that universities themselves like to put forth. However it doesn't make sense.
Tuition rises are a long-term trend. As https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/education_spending points out, from the 1950s to the present, the share of GDP spent by government on universities went from 0.4% to 1.7%. With sometimes progress, and sometimes a loss. But the long-term trend is that spending by states has gone up relative to both enrollment and inflation.
Yes, there are recession years where universities blame tuition hikes on cutbacks in state spending. But tuition has outpaced inflation in good years as well. Which suggests that the long-term trend has other causes.
How bad is it? At present average college tuition at a private school is $45k/year. Salaries for the people teaching vary from $40k for a postdoc to an average of $95k for a full professor. Which means that in an average classroom, a handful of students could hire the teacher as a private tutor, give the teacher a pay raise, and themselves save money! This basic fact suggests that it should be possible to teach students for a lot less than we consider normal today.
Now why have caused risen? It turns out that a lot of causes have been proposed, from the cost of buildings going up to an increase in bureaucracy to deal with government regulation. But attempts to quantify all the different factors, such as https://www.nber.org/papers/w21967, find that the biggest single factor is the combination of restricted supply and artificially increased demand (thanks to the availability of loans and financial aid).
You're not even thinking low enough -- I was a math grad student with a $22k stipend at a well-respected engineering school, and I was the lead instructor for three auditorium-sized sections of Calculus and Diff EQ a year (fall, spring, summer).
I'm far from understanding the financials of running a school but something always seemed off to me there. I guess technically our grad student tuition was being paid too, but after the first year that basically amounted to a spot in a cubicle farm and a bi-weekly meeting with my advisor.
"State officials used to brag about the affordability of college, but the costs have ballooned since 2003, even when inflation is factored in.
Less money from state
That year, to help close a budget cap without raising taxes, lawmakers cut the amount of taxpayer money the state sent to universities — an overall 11 percent decrease per student — but removed ceilings placed on tuition so campuses could make up for the lost revenue."
> But tuition has outpaced inflation in good years as well. Which suggests that the long-term trend has other causes.
Yes, that state funding doesn't return to prior levels (See my first source)
> Salaries for the people teaching vary from $40k for a postdoc to an average of $95k for a full professor. Which means that in an average classroom, a handful of students could hire the teacher as a private tutor, give the teacher a pay raise, and themselves save money! This basic fact suggests that it should be possible to teach students for a lot less than we consider normal today.
A university is more than its teaching staff. There's research, buildings to maintain, academic support staff and programs, and plenty of other things as well.
> But attempts to quantify all the different factors, such as https://www.nber.org/papers/w21967, find that the biggest single factor is the combination of restricted supply and artificially increased demand (thanks to the availability of loans and financial aid).
One source which happens to ignore many of the factors I mentioned above does not prove your point true. Most importantly, tuition ceilings imposed on universities by state governments. Luckily the paper discusses its shortcomings:
"Given that our model effectively lumps private and public colleges together, it appears that changes in state funding support and changes in other sources of non-tuition revenue largely offset each other. In future work, we plan to disaggregate the model along the public/private dimension."
The source groups private and public colleges together. Private colleges do not receive state funding and therefore would not have to hike tuition in response to lower stand funding. This noise averages out the effect that state funding cuts have on public school tuition rates.
First, you say that figures I gave from the 1950s to the present should be disregarded based on figures from 2008 to the present. Those are not necessarily in contradiction. Particularly not given that the period of fastest rising state funding was the 1950s through the late 1970s.
Second, your argument is absurd on the absolute size of the numbers involved. For example from page 2 of https://www.mhec.org/sites/default/files/resources/mhec_affo... we see that per FTE enrollment from 1992 to 2017 that inflation adjusted state spending went from $8,301 to $7,642 and net tuition per FTE (tuition - financial aid etc) went from $3,361 to $6,572. The in real dollars decrease of $659 per FTE in state spending is only 20% of the real increase for students. Where is the other 80% coming from?
Even in the difficult 2008-2017 period, changes in state spending explains less than 50% of the change.
Furthermore the explanation that you are focused on explains changes in public university tuition only. It does not address why private universities have likewise seen skyrocketing tuition. Given that the trends in private and public tuition have been similar, it is more likely that they have a common explanation rather than unrelated ones.
Next, you're dismissing the source that I gave that looked at a variety of possible explanations and tried to quantify the relative impact at each. And yet you've failed to give sources that examine the possibility of any explanation other than your preferred one. (Which still only explains a small fraction of the rise in cost to students.)
And finally it is obvious that a university is more than just teaching staff. But when the fraction of revenues spent on what is supposed to be a core educational mission is so absurdly small, there is a problem. (In the meantime there are more bureaucrats per student, nicer dorms, and much nicer athletic facilities.)
Yours is a true statement that doesn't contradict what I said. Namely that until 2005, banks were lending to students without protection from non-payment during bankruptcy.
In fact the fact that banks insisted on mitigating their risks with a co-signer is actually supporting evidence FOR what I said.
Is that bad? Humanities departments are already shrinking without any changes because there's just no demand. It doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to me that if you are determined to get a degree in philosophy, which has virtually no job prospects outside of teaching the next generation of philosophy students, you have to go do that at one of a handful of schools that carve out a niche for themselves with a philosophy department.
==philosophy, which has virtually no job prospects outside of teaching the next generation of philosophy students==
Is this true? It seems some tech companies disagree: CA Technologies [1], Y Combinator [2], Google [3]. Is it possible that you are not well versed in what philosophy majors actually study and how well that might translate to a working environment?
If that's the case then the philosophy department should have no trouble bankrolling their program with accessibility for all on a combination of some wealthy kids and some majors who snag a job at well-paying tech companies. Or did you miss the class on inductive reasoning?
Yeah, philosophy was a bad example of a "non-high-earnings" degree.
Sure, there are plenty of whack philosophy programs that lead nowhere. But if you go to a school with a rigorous philosophy program (which doesn't mean only Ivies/Stanford/etc.), you can easily go for a law degree or a finance job afterwards. Rigorous philosophy programs usually involve tons of discrete math and logic classes, and mastering that opens a lot of doors. I only took up reading philosophy material after graduating, but it is very obvious to me that knowing that in school would have helped me with my more theoretical/math-y CompSci classes tremendously.
Not even talking about some other good applications of that degree that I might not be aware of due to not being a philosophy major myself.
As someone who majored in English, I assert that the emphasis on STEM and shift away from the humanities is causing serious problems in our society.
Specifically, having a population lacking in critical reading skills makes everyone more susceptible to propaganda, and less able to critique and assess flawed arguments in writing.
If you want to know why, for example, our political “debates” are shallow circuses of misdirection and name calling, look at the state of the humanities.
Your argument assumes that taking humanities is required to develop critical reading skills.
However attempts to measure critical reading skills, for example in standardized tests such as the GREs, consistently find that STEM majors are better at critical reading than humanities majors!
Secondly, critical reading is not the only required skill for critiquing and assessing potentially flawed arguments. Quantitative reasoning is also needed. For example you can't assess public policy questions about COVID-19 without quantitative reasoning. However STEM courses are far more likely to teach quantitative reasoning than humanities courses.
This critique of your argument is brought to you by someone with a STEM degree.
I think one of the major reasons you see this is that if you're going to go to college and come out with debt that takes you 20 years to repay, crippling you financially while you do [1], any reasonably smart person is going to ensure that they come out with skills that will justify that. If you want people to feel like they have the resources to spend on humanities, it needs to be cheap enough to justify it.
And the truth is, there's no effing reason for a humanities course to put you into that kind of debt. Cheap (often free!) books, a room to meet in, and some small groups for slightly-focused discussion among the students shouldn't be costing on the order of a thousand-dollars per credit hour (per student!) over the course of your compounding-interest loan. It's a terrible value for the money; if it wasn't for the credential nobody would be doing it because if you just want the knowledge/wisdom there are far cheaper ways to get it.
The meat of the below quote: you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin’ education you coulda got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the Public Library.
Quoting the whole thing:
"""
CLARK: There's no problem. I was just hoping you could give me some insight into the evolution of the market economy in the southern colonies. My contention is that prior to the Revolutionary War, the economic modalities—especially in the southern colonies—could most aptly be characterized as agrarian pre-capital—
WILL: [interrupting] Of course that's your contention. You're a first year grad student. You just got finished reading some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison probably, you’re gonna be convinced of that until next month when you get to James Lemon, then you’re gonna be talking about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740. That's gonna last until next year, you’re gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin’ about, you know, the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.
CLARK: [taken aback] Well as a matter of fact I won't, because Wood drastically underestimates the impact of —
WILL: "Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth..." You got that from Vickers, Work in Essex County, Page 98, right? Yeah I read that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us—you have any thoughts of—of your own on this matter? Or do—is that your thing, you come into a bar, you read some obscure passage and then you pretend, you pawn it off as your own—your own idea just to impress some girls, embarrass my friend?
[Clark is stunned]
WILL: See the sad thing about a guy like you is in about 50 years you’re gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you’re gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One, don't do that. And two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin’ education you coulda got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the Public Library.
"""
The point is to demonstrate that if a fictional character in a work of fiction does X and it works out, that does not serve as evidence that a real person doing X will work out in reality.
Do you understand the distinction between "does not serve as evidence" and "serves as evidence against"?
Now in fact it is possible to learn from self-directed study. But your odds of learning are massively better when you get to ask questions, test your understanding by talking with others, and have your ability to explain your understanding graded.
Which means that, on average, people get more value out of going through a book in a classroom setting than they get by reading it on their own.
Whether that is enough value to justify tuition is another story entirely...
Well, that just because it's in a movie doesn't mean it's true.
Few people would get to any sort of level of understanding of that sort of material just by reading it, and just because a movie genius can do it doesn't mean it's easy.
If we replaced all those examples with engineering textbooks, wouldn't it be the exact same, if it not, why? We learn he's an untrained math prodigy later on in the movie, so he doesn't need any education. It would appear a STEM education is a waste as well.
So in order to understand something, you need to a.) and then b.) have someone tell you how to think about what you read? While paying them? You can't wrestle with deep and complex topics unless someone tells you how to think?
Not at all, but having someone who can provide context sure helps with a lot of works - often these works are building on centuries or millennia of thought that they may assume you're aware of and that help place the arguments.
Again I ask, given that textbooks exist, can you make the argument that STEM is any different?
As a STEM major at a large public university, my classmates and I decided that at a meta-level, STEM majors learned how to learn new and complicated things quickly in order to get good grades in classes. Also, as a STEM major, I found attending class less than helpful most of the time. I do remember spending quite a lot of time in either a computer lab or in the library fighting my way through problems. Math, physics, chem, programming. Attending lectures was largely someone regurgitating either slides or a textbook.
I assumed this was true for most people in STEM majors in college, no?
I didn't realize we were in violent agreement. I posted a fun quote from a movie I like that was relevant to the parent. You replied with a touch of snark and I felt compelled to defend myself from your comment. And now here we are. Heh.
>Specifically, having a population lacking in critical reading skills makes everyone more susceptible to propaganda, and less able to critique and assess flawed arguments in writing.
1. Humanities does not teach any sort of critical thinking more than other classes, and if anything I found my STEM classes to teach more critical thinking because of more formal systems of proof or statistics needed to back a point.
2. A very large percentage of the population doesn't go to college. If we wait to teach the basic skills in college, it is already too late. This type of thinking needs to be taught in grade school.
>If you want to know why, for example, our political “debates” are shallow circuses of misdirection and name calling, look at the state of the humanities.
Why wouldn't this be a symptom of the market? There is money to be made in controversy and click bait, and that applies just as well in politics.
I am not following your argument, is your first and second sentence connected?
why is a mathematican less likely to be able to critique and assess a flawed argument compared to an English major? why is an English major less likely to fall for propaganda compared to a computer science major?
Are universities in the US being used as an expensive stand-in for the failing k-12 education system? At least the basics of that kind of critical reading is something that the english classes in high school should teach.
You don't have to look very hard at all to find people who are participants in and cheerleaders for those debates who have degrees in the humanities. Most journalists, for example.
Funny, I was exposed to more propaganda in university than anywhere else. Are you saying that only humanities majors are educated enough to recognize propaganda?
> Specifically, having a population lacking in critical reading skills makes everyone more susceptible to propaganda, and less able to critique and assess flawed arguments in writing.
Do I need to point out all the flaws in this sentence or can you critically read your own writing?
> If you want to know why, for example, our political “debates” are shallow circuses of misdirection and name calling, look at the state of the humanities.
Would you agree that the majority of politicians are lawyers, or at the very least non-STEM majors? What you're claiming then, is that humanities majors create and participate in "shallow circuses of misdirection and name calling"
Is it not the case that most people still do not go to university? Then what is having a few humanities majors going to change?
Political debates are a circus because the political system was designed in a different era that didn't have reality shows and endless mind melting entertainment.
Psychology and the social sciences have another explanation: Politics is mostly about how people feel and has little to do with how or what people think.
Considering that humanities majors tend to believe in socialism does not burnish their critical reading skills and resistance to propaganda.
The reality of the history of socialism is one of failure.
And yes, I do understand that everyone thinks that those who disagree with them are ill-informed and susceptible to propaganda, and those who prefer socialism will think that of me :-)
20% of Norway's GDP comes from oil pumped out of the ground and flows to the government. It's enough to cover the deficits of socialism. The others keep enough of a free market to keep things afloat, but are not known for being economic powerhouses. None have tried communal food production yet, for good reason.
> Should college be a trade school or should it stick to it's roots of broadening one's horizons?
The term "liberal arts" means "free arts". The root of this term is that Athenian society was composed of a small class of free families and everyone else was a slave owned by those families. The free families were wealthy enough to afford a liberal education for their free sons.
We have robots instead of slaves now. We, as a society, can afford to provide a liberal arts education to everyone. In fact, we already do, for grades 1-12. I think the main issue is that that education fails people who could progress through it faster (and those who need more time in certain areas).
The problem is that universities are neither trade schools nor a place to broaden your horizons. It is a way to get a credential that you can use to signal your worth on the job market.
If testing your skills was done outside of school GRE-style, would all these people who pay many thousands of dollars to get a diploma pay so much? I really doubt it.
It brings up the old joke about being a philosophy major:
"Two things to do with a Phd in Philosophy: 1. Teach. 2. Pose the question: ‘But do you know why you want fries with that?’"
College is an investment that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. When you invest that much money, you should expect a ROI. If you can't even put roof over your head or eat with that investment, then it is really hard to say it was a good idea.
Philsophy majors are a common target for ridicule, but the fact of the matter is that corporations go out of their way to hire Philosophy majors to be problem-solvers of various types because they essentially have a degree in critical thinking.
You realize that there are different kinds of applied critical thinking, yes?
Someone that's good at critically analyzing software doesn't make them good at being able to understand why users might be drawn to a product. Nor does it make them able to design UI that won't frustrate the average user.
Humanities doesn't have a monopoly on critical thinking, but you'd be a fool to believe that it doesn't aid critical thinking. The best software engineers I've worked with were those that came from other professions whom could apply other ways of approaching a problem compared to others.
To put it bluntly, if you hire a bunch of engineers they will design a lightbulb that no one can figure out how to screw in.
I meant that if employers were looking for people who were adept at critical thinking and software developers didn't fit the bill (the original posters implication) that there was a category of people who would be even more adept at it than philosophers. Sorry if I was unclear.
As a Philosophy major who has succeeded in tech, I think tech would be better off with more humanities people involved. Writing code isn't the hard part, when you are solving big problems.
> If my school didn't have a philosophy major, it wouldn't have a philosophy department, and I would never have had those classes.
I went to an engineering school, the only majors were X Engineering, Business, and Nursing. Somehow, we had professors for the humanities classes, so I don't think a major is a requirement.
Philosophy is great, but it's not something you need to go into debt for. Did you learn anything in those classes that you couldn't have learned on your own via books and free lectures on YouTube, etc?
Anything you learn in college can be learned from a book or YouTube. The value of college is the curation the professor provides and the people you are doing it with.
>>Anything you learn in college can be learned from a book or YouTube.
That which can be learned by one-way communication from a book or video are not all that can be learned. Through dialogue and practice one may learn techniques of proofs in math classes, lab techniques in science classes, how to write and edit papers in humanities classes. All the practice that drama, art, or music majors do amplifies what they learn from their books. And so on.
The NFL wouldn't hire college football players who got all their learning from books or YouTube.
This is the basic idea behind an Income Share Agreement, or ISA, where the student pays for the education out of their future. Don't make money == school doesn't get paid! This would be a nice solution to the current educational mess we are in.
Student loans should absolutely be dischargeable. It will force tuition to drop to something affordable. It's advertised as a ticket to a good job and that's just false.
Clearly both would happen, right? Harvard doesn't set their prices based on loans, they wouldn't care. Some mid-rank colleges would disappear, and some would adapt to serve the new market.
Well perhaps I should have said, they don't have to. Right now they need not bother to charge at all. And how they set the sticker price is only a small part of the picture anyway, since they gather near-perfect information about your parents ability to pay (or to donate!) before anything gets agreed.
This source does not have any information related to loans availability correlating with tuition prices. Are you making the assumption that tuition hikes can only be caused by loan availability?
I disagree a bit. The big name schools can get away with charging their current prices, but small schools would radically re-think. No more football stadiums, fancy dorms, etc. People still need to get educated. The rest of the world has universities with sensible pricing - only the US is an anomaly.
It’s not really a choice. Those schools tend to have very expensive, high maintenance campuses. I suppose they could also let all the buildings deteriorate but then they risk being closed against their well due to safety concerns.
In truth, the costs of these schools results from a ratchet effect. Wealthy donors buy the fancy buildings which the schools are then stuck maintaining. It’s a classic case of a white elephant [1].
It's not uncommon for organizations to have to downsize due to changing economic conditions.
In fact, when people ask why colleges are paying administrators 6-7 figure salaries while classes are taught by lecturers making a fraction of that, they say they need to compete with private industry for top talent. I would hope that an administrator making $300,000+ can come up with a more creative plan for what to do with high maintenance buildings than just "let them deteriorate".
or the small schools find a way to make education more cost effective. i'm sure there are tons of businesses that would be happy to give you an online education for cheap if it were legally allowable.
Universities don't hike prices for the sake of extracting more money from students. They do so because it's the only way to make up for the enormous cuts in funding from states, which have historically provided the bulk of revenue that universities see.
>The reason they aren't dischargeable is because what bank in their right mind would give a loan to an 18 year old with no collateral?
Why is that a bad thing? This pushes choosing a good degree from something entirely on the 18 year old to something the market is deciding, by calculating the risk of a default, and removes much of the penalty from making a bad call from the 18 year old. Yes, not everyone will qualify for a loan, but if the bank who is interested in making money off loans decides your plan isn't worth a loan (and this bank has plenty of money to loan, so it can invest in many and aim at averages) thinks you are too likely to not get a good job and will default... maybe you should consider what that means.
And it puts downward pressure on college prices, like you mention.
>they would just be completely out of reach of poor and middle class students.
There aren't enough colleges to survive on just upper class students. So either the colleges will go out of business or they will have to learn how to be in reach of the rest of the population.
The fact of the matter is that by making the loans non-dischargeable, lenders loosen their purse strings since risk of default is much lower. And colleges being on the receiving end of these loans are naturally going to move their prices upward to capture the increase.
Going back to the way things were in 1998 would go far in bringing down the astronomical tuition increases we see year after year.
I've always thought it would make sense to have all the involved parties take a hit if a student loan can't be repaid.
For example, the loan could be split four ways. To qualify for discharging the remaining balance in bankruptcy, we could require that you've already paid at least 25%, the bank can eat 25%, the university can eat 25%, and Uncle Sam can cover the rest.
If we don't force all the parties to share some of the consequences, we're basically pushing universities to charge as much as possible, banks to lend as much as possible, and 18 year old kids to enter into lifetime contracts of potentially crippling debt.
>colleges won't reduce their rates nor increase their scholarships, they would just be completely out of reach of poor and middle class students.
If you let that run its course for a couple years then either the employers will have to relax their degree requirements or colleges will have to relax their price requirements. It'll be a game of chicken.
Do employers have degree requirements? A 1970 SCOTUS case put strong constraints on what employers could require, at least with respect to high school diplomas. The same logic would apply to college degrees. Unless a direct link to a job (not just a general linkage) could be demonstrated, if there is a de facto racial discriminatory effect (and there would be, just from different rates of graduation from college) then the requirement would be illegal.
I've been waiting for someone with a bone to pick against higher education to file a lawsuit over this. It could devalue college degrees.
Or maybe they won't. Chronic underemployment has been a thing since at least 2008. Given a reality where there are simply more people than jobs that need doing, shutting the poor out of the education system seems like just another way to increase wealth inequality.
Think of all of the bureaucrats in the colleges that will lose their jobs.
Also think of all of those low and middle class students who we'll turn down since we're not willing to do wealth redistribution with our endowment (<scoff>, that's the government's job).
I find this attitude disturbing. The only things stopping real change in America are people who don't want it to happen and people who have been tricked into believing it can't.
I want real change, I just don't believe this is the change that makes sense.
Changing the way colleges are paid for would make sense. Capping tuition would make sense. Making you pay a portion of your income back to the college for the rest of your life (or maybe just 20 years) would make sense.
But allowing student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy would do more harm than good without other systemic changes.
If you are getting a degree that doesn't have good job prospects then you should pay for it out of pocket, only the rich should try for it (rich can mean middle class with a good job taking a second degree for fun). If you take a loan that means you expect the value of the degree is worth more than the loan amount over time. If you can't find such a job paying enough to make it worth it, then you should declare bankruptcy.
If the only value of the degree is it makes you well rounded, then universities should ensure that only enough people start down the path using loans as their are tenured positions expected to be open in 10 years. If there is industry demand elsewhere then meet it.
I don't know how to solve the problems of someone declaring bankruptcy as soon as they finish their degree though.
What you're essentially asking for is to create two separate classes of people. Your idea would result in us regressing back to the idea of 'philosopher kings' and I would hope I shouldn't need to argue why that's a bad idea.
People should be able to get an education no matter their social standing. It shouldn't be tied to this idea of job prospects because commodification of education is a sham.
If educacation doesn't have some sort of monetary value what is the point? Entertainment is a valid answer, but it should be in different bucket.
I did not not in any way say that some people shouldn't be able to get an education. I said if the education isn't valuable they shouldn't get one, but there are many valuable education paths to take.
Why does everything need a monetary value? If someone wants to be an artist, that doesn't necessarily come from a world of wanting to make money from their art.
And who defines whether or not an education is valuable? Teachers don't have very good job prospects (low pay means they're less valuable), do you think it would be a really good idea to restrict who can become a teacher to only the reasonably well off?
Teachers should not be paying full price at Harvard (I don't know if Havard even offers a teaching degree), there is value in a teaching degree but only enough for the much cheaper state schools.
I have no problem with people wanting to be artists. The world needs art. However I have a problem with someone spending more than they can afford on anything. Want an art degree, first get a job and save up as art will never pay the bills (there are exceptions that prove this rule). Once you can afford to live (that is eat and a tiny home: the minimums) go ahead and get whatever luxury you can afford. Some get an art degree, some a nice car, some collect stamps, you can have a family. I don't care much what you choose so long as you are not beyond your means.
To put it a different way, if you are making an investment then it needs to be a good investment with a return on investment. If you are not making an investment that is fine but then you need to be careful not to destroy your future on bad choices.
I got a liberal arts degree that by all accounts should have left me with terrible job prospects but I ended up going straight into a lucrative career path with just my BA. I know music majors who went into consulting and English majors who went to work for Goldman Sachs. Yes, they were exceptional people. None of us were rich.
Would you have gotten that great job without the education? If no, then it was valuable and you should pay for it. (we can perhaps question if it was worth the cost, but that is a different analysis and much more complex). I'm referring to those who get an education that doesn't help them get a better job.
We treat education as a public good. Employers don't have to pay for their employees' educations, and employees can take their skills around with them.
Given that banks know their customers need employees they would get around to giving loans out to keep the supply of talent coming.
There would just be far less waste if student loans were dischargeable.
Maybe not the best word to use. Education is not a private good, like that offered by a medieval guild which required the learner to work for some period for the guild like an indentured servant.
> Student loans would dry up overnight if they could be discharged at bankruptcy.
No, more likely they would be priced - both in amount lent and interest rate - according to the value of the "asset" they're purchasing. There's a reason why home mortgage and car loan rates are 3-4% while random credit card rate is 16-25%.
One is used to purchase something that has long term value and may be used to create value or enable you to make money while the other one is used for Netflix and Big Macs.
I'm waiting to see how things shake out in the next couple weeks. Many colleges require freshman deposits on May 1st. We don't know a) how many are coming back into physical session in the fall and b) how many parents will tolerate paying for an online degree. The next 12 months could crash the system.
> Bankruptcy isn't a magic "Get Out Of Jail Free" card.
Except that it is in this case. The order of operations is:
1. Take out student loan
2. Graduate
3. Get a job, spouse, mortgage, and new car
4. Declare bankruptcy to discharge student loans
5. Profit
The order of steps 3 and 4 are critical. Your car and house are collateral for their respective loans, so they don't go away when you declare bankruptcy. Since you have a house and new car, you typically don't need good credit for the 5-7 years it takes before people will start loaning you money at reasonable rates again.
This isn't some theoretical pattern. It's what people actually did. Especially doctors, because they could often qualify for nice mortgages while still in residency ("doctor loans").
The US dug themselves into a hole in the 70s when they disallowed bankruptcies on school loans.
That opened up a flood of money to 18 year olds going to college, which in turn led to the colleges massively expanding their offerings.
Colleges in the US don't just educate. They are also the minor league sports programs for most sports in the US, and they provide luxury benefits like gyms and movie theaters and so on.
They can't go back now. They can't just stop doing all the sports with all the fancy equipment they bought, they can't just get rid of all the luxury housing and movie theaters and so on.
I think the US also did some strange things like giving GIs free tuition (not necessarily a bad thing) then artificially supporting those GIs by requiring a college degree as gatekeeping for bureaucratic jobs. If you look around places where there's lots of bureaucracy (like washington dc) there's tons of strange billboards and the like on public transit advertising graduate school (MA and PhD) targeted at beaurocrats that need to check off that box for a pay/rank/retirement increase. IIRC one of them was called "Graduate School", as in you would go to a graduate school called "Graduate School".
In any case not-in-DC it's more focussed on the BA segment of the population, but artificial gatekeepering is a thing (even in tech! I know many candidates that I wanted to hire but were turned down because they didn't have a BA in CS)
Anecdotally, I think its worse in the public sector. I know several public school teachers who have gotten graduate degrees for the sole purpose of getting a raise. Its not like a private company where you can get a bigger raise by impressing your boss.
Most school districts have what’s known as a “step and lane” salary schedule for teachers. These grids specify how much raises are worth. Teachers earn a “step” increase for each additional year of experience, with many teachers peaking with the highest “step” at around age 55.
Teachers can also earn more by having more education (those are the “lane” increases). Some districts pay teachers holding a master’s or doctoral degree a premium, while others move teachers into a higher pay column when they earn a certain number of credit hours of professional development.
Isn't this why the cosigner exists on student loans? Basically the cosigner is the one with collateral, capable of meeting the terms of the loan. While IANAL, my understanding of reading a master promissory note for student loans is that basically the debt falls to the cosigner should the primary be unable to meet the financial obligations in any way (after wage garnishing, etc).
Surely some kind of middle ground is possible? Something like, "student loans aren't dischargeable for 15 years after you receive them."
That would eliminate the possibility of a quick "tactical bankruptcy" after college, while also allowing students who made an unwise financial deal when they were 18 not to spend their whole lives paying off debt.
But isn't the reason for the sole existence of college loans that there aren't any regulations controlling the private education industry? More availability for loans means the schools can charge more for tuition.
Just like the whole american privatized healthcare; the sky is the limit... to what they'll charge you.
Here’s a lifehack: Attend college in Europe then move to USA for that high paying job.
Works really well. Cheap to free education, better skills because you’re not just living the college life and professors have little incentive to make it easy. It’s great.
Hell you don’t even have to fully graduate to get most of the benefit.
If you're never going to pay European taxes, that seems like an unethical life hack. And if enough people actually do this, I wouldn't be surprised if European universities start raising their foreign students tuition.
Some countries like Germany (which generally costs 500 Euro/semester, except in 1 state) give you an 18(?) month visa post-graduation to allow you to get a job in Germany. This particular visa actually puts you on the same hiring level (at least theoretically) as German citizens.
Of course, knowing German fluently would be critical to be "on the same level" as German citizens.
So, most likely you are not going to be evading the taxes, at least in places like Germany. It is almost always better to get your first job post-graduation in Germany if you have a German diploma anyways.
Some states already require foreign students to pay 500€ each semester and others will follow. On top of that you will have to guarantee that you can support your life in Germany, meaning you are not eligible for any kind of government support if things get tough or you lose your job.
Going there thinking everything will be provided is wrong and the COVID-19 crisis will get a lot of foreign students into deep trouble as they lose their jobs and can't support themselves.
A lot of EU countries are not issuing standard/typical/normal visas at all. You can most likely forget getting a student visa altogether. At this point, you cannot even legally enter the EU (Schengen zone + more) without being an EU citizen or resident, unless you are a third-national humanitarian aid worker or diplomat, basically.
Depends where you go. I know we had some Chinese students in my college, they paid €10000 a year, compared to the Irish students who paid €3000 a year.
As far as I've heard, US colleges are on the order of $10000+ per semester.
There's also a point about sticker price vs. actual price. Anyone actually paying six figures for a Bachelor's degree is not only getting fleeced by an expensive school, but also can probably afford it (no need-based scholarships or grants?) and is also not very smart (no merit-based scholarships or grants?).
It depends on the country and sometimes the institution and program. Here is a price list from a Swedish university with the approx. USD amounts being between $10,000 to $30,000 depending on the program:
I think they should for the same reason you point out. The cost of school has gone up due to the endless supply of loan money mixing with demand.
That cost will go waaaaaaay down if the loan money dries up, potentially back to the point where it was when “working your way through college” was possible.
Most student loans are guaranteed by the Federal govt. There is no risk for the lender. They just operate as a middle man basically. There was legislation to move all loans to the Dept. of Education and do away with Navient etc... but you know elections happened...
Former professor (community college), father of three, two still paying tuition.
Here's my take:
Students should be ineligible for loans until they complete one semester of college. Colleges should make that semester a "boot camp": Varied, challenging, intellectual curriculum, forced work-together times (a study-hall "lab"), and so on. The problem I have is that a helluva lot of students who go to college right out of high school are there for the wrong reasons. They aren't applying themselves intellectually- any growth they get will be, if not despite their behaviors, at least accidental.
I don't want free tuition/subsidized loans/etc. in the current situation. And I totally believe that society should make an investment- hell I've dedicated my life to it- but it's a careful investment. I want those young adults to come away from college with real intellectual growth. At least they should be able to read and think critically.
And making college free in the USofA will make college costs increase (unless you think the US military spending is under control).
Having an onboarding boot camp, where you have to learn to study and take it seriously or you don't get to stay, would help the First Year Experience folks (who would run it), the professors (yay!), the students, the parents who would otherwise be throwing their money away, even high school teachers. It might make enrollment drop-at least initially- but it seems like that's an issue now anyway so it might be a good time for it.
It's a sure thing for the bank. Most of the loans are guaranteed by the federal government.
Student loans only changed to be non-dischargable in the 70s and 80s, driven by certain professions (especially medical) and costs associated with them.
Why even have this as a private thing. In other countries this works fine as a public loan offer by the state (which also helps to keep fees reasonable).
America had dischargeable student loans before the early 2000s, and the education banking system did not implode from that. I think the student loan system would be fine with bankruptcy of student loans too after much gashing of teeth.
Colleges should be shaking in their boots for the next generation, because there's going to be a whole generation of parents that suffered terrible college debt they couldn't pay off and will likely be telling their children it's just not worth it (as opposed to the previous generation that had cheap college and a great economy and pressured all their children to go for that 'guaranteed better life').
I made it through relatively okay because STEM and some scholarships, but I'm not even sure I'll recommend my children go to college. Especially with online courses (not talking about college, just courses) becoming more viable and useful.
I definitely won't for some pursuits, like art. I'd rather they live at home with me for four years, doing self-study and putting their art out there online and developing a following rather than spend $200,000+ on college that will likely not result in anything afterwards (hell, as a semi-professional game designer myself, I'd happily work with them to get their art into published games).
Also a generation of potential parents who won't be having kids because they can't afford to, largely because of student loan and housing costs.
That's already hitting - the incoming class of 2023 (matriculating 2019) is the first cohort born since 9/11, and is tiny. A number of colleges are facing bankruptcy because there just aren't enough students to go around. And it'll only get worse. Birth rates were depressed from 2001-2009, but they fell off a cliff after 2009.
Colleges were counting on foreign students to fill the gap. Now with massive unemployment, immigration may slow to a trickle for a while, and with it the allure of American colleges for students elsewhere.
At full tuition, one foreign student could bring as much revenue as 3 or more domestic students. There's a much larger population of students outside the U.S. than in it, too.
I didn't mention that, but you're right. I also have been putting off having children (and the pandemic didn't help that at all) until my finances are in better shape, and I'm sure there are a lot of people in worse positions than I am.
I was wrong about the start date, BTW. I'd thought that fertility started dropping after 9/11 (which also roughly coincides with the children of the 70s having kids instead of baby boomers, a smaller cohort), but it really didn't peak until 2007-2008. Then there's a double-whammy: there are fewer women of childbearing age (coinciding with Gen-Xers born in the 70s and early Millenials), and the fertility rate among women who are of childbearing age has fallen off a cliff. Births are down about 15% since 2007; when you think about what that means for a typical classroom (where you might've had 24 kids, now you might have 20), that's pretty huge.
Looking at the first chart tells me that the size of the upcoming cohort will be similar to Gen X -- that is it will be smaller than the previous but not unsustainably small.
Although that chart doesn't capture the ratio of women of fertile age in each year, so there may be an unforeseen cliff.
Birth rates where? Just the US? Or globally or just Western powerhouse counties?
Side note: I remember being shocked the first time I found out that baby boomers and ‘the aging population issue’ weren’t actually global issues and only affected the counties who took the spoils post WW2 (aka western powerhouse countries).
Lots of other counties have very different population ages mixes for example Ireland and Turkey.
Developed countries, but it's spreading worldwide. Japan hit their baby bust in the 90s, and then Western Europe in the last 10 years, and now it applies to the U.S. as a whole. China and India have also seen remarkable drops since 1980.
The only continent that still has fertility rates above replacement is Africa:
Wow those are really good points I hadn't heard yet about future outlook for colleges.
There's a lot of parents whom children are in high school now that already went through the student loan debt cycle so we should start seeing the effects of that soon.
Perhaps we'll see a rise in trade/vocational school as a result.
I think the stigma of not going to college is changing a lot (for the better) or at least in the programming world it seems that way.
> All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy,
I thought so too. This always made me so angry. Last time I posted a rant about that here someone urged me to read the REPAYE Act, and it completely changed my mind.
Under REPAYE, students get income based repayment, even down to $0 payments if you're anywhere near poverty level. After a certain number of years of repayment, the government just pays off your entire balance.
This solves the same problems bankruptcy is designed to solve without ruining people's credit. It also prevents doctors from declaring bankruptcy right after medschool -- I'm honestly unsure whether that was a real or just anecdotal problem, but income based repayment for a fixed term seems like a better way to let people escape debt while still expecting them to pay what they can.
This still inflates the cost of university for everyone. Basically the govt is taxing society to funnel the money into student loans which are then ploughed into college facilities and administration staff.
It’s a massive misallocation of societal resources.
And I suspect many people earning a mediocre wage are still stuck repaying, and would have been happier had loans not existed and college have been forced not to be bloated.
Exactly, we need cost pressure. Not to mention the fact you would still have to go into debt and live with that psychological pressure until the government so generously decides to forgive you...
An obvious solution would be a comprehensive tuition cap for public institutions. Financial aid makes college more affordable, but allows colleges to raise tuition. Getting rid of financial aid could lower tuition cost due to market pressure but bring back the problem of affordability that it intends to solve.
I would like someone to point out why a tuition cap would be a bad idea, since regulation often carries unintended consequences.
one immediate unintended consequence I can think of is flattening the distribution of net tuition paid. For example, a 40k sticker price University might cost 40k to a wealthy foreigner, 25k to an upper middle class student, and be practically free to a poor student (after need based grants and scholarships, not loans). Tuition is capped at 20k, so suddenly everyone has to pay 20k, at least if the university wants to maintain the same income.
Of course, the numbers are already flatter than that at most public institutions but the general effect could still occur. Not saying tuition caps are necessarily a bad idea, but I can see potential downsides.
I went to MIT. MIT is corrupt as !@#$. The amount of money flowing into private pockets at the higher levels is insane. Corrupt isn't the same is criminal -- most of the activity goes through networks of lawyers and loop holes (although criminal activity happens too).
My opinion is that to be eligible for federal financial aid, there ought to be some cap on tuition+expenses at a level students can afford. Subsidizing $200k tuition makes no sense to me. Either students are already very rich, or they'll end up with a painful amount of debt.
I'd much rather have an MIT with old, rundown buildings, low-paid professors, few administrators, and a focus on science and learning (rather than a focus on $300 million buildings, yachts, fancy faculty dining clubs, and increasingly creative ways to funnel money into people's pockets).
Be aware REPAYE can be voided if your loan is resold (which you have no control over) and any missed payments or extra payments or any changes to your program (ie, if you apply for lower interest, your REPAYE is reset).... this has occured to people who go through the public service path.
Personally, this right here is the crux of the problem. Debts should not be resaleable. Loans are supposed to be about risk-sharing first, profit-taking second.
However, seeing as that will never happen I would settle for no resale without a meeting of seller, buyer, and borrower, with right of refusal of transfer of service by the borrower. to ensure that any changes/terms associated with the initial debt contract are properly transferred and honored; and no resets of timers as long as your account is in good standing. I.e. your debt holder selling your balance should still qualify as the same fundamental debt you originally entered into.
I don't particularly give a damn if that ruins/misses the point of securitization.
I wish... there are people who have been on the public servant program for 8 years and had their timers reset by a resale... without any missed payments.
Doctors declaring bankruptcy to get out of medical school debt sounds like anecdata. If student loans were dischargeable, that would change nothing for MDs because they're still going to make enough money to service the debt after residency/fellowship.
Even if you're going to be making $200,000 a year after your residency, why not declare bankruptcy as soon as you graduate. It'll save you $200,000 which is totally worth a 10 year hit to your credit
>This is the thing that is really the most shameful and outrageous thing about the US system. Our entire K-12 educational system and our culture is set up to paint a college degree as a ticket to "the good life". Then an 18-year-old, potentially with parents who aren't great at math but have great aspirations for their child, is sat down and asked to sign a load of papers, not realizing that this will lock them into decades of unforgiveable debt and wage slavery.
It's because one generation ago, college was a great way to access a pretty good life for most people, and was affordable on an average person's income.
>All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, just like any other loan.
Why would anyone lend money to someone with zero credit history, zero income, zero collateral, zero prospects of repaying the loan for at least 4+ years, and has the ability to immediately declare bankruptcy as soon as it comes time to start paying you back? What would the free market interest rate be on that type of loan?
Allowing loans to discharged is nothing but a band-aid on a broken system. We need to work to make college cheaper. Building the entire system around loans is the problem, not one specific feature of those loans.
The interest rate would be very very high, as it should be. You can’t on the one hand encourage people to loan money to those who aren’t credit worthy and on the other hand bemoan the fact that people end up with loans they can’t pay back. The former policy is guaranteed to produce the latter outcome. It also artificially inflates the price colleges can (and will) charge. Allowing people to discharge education debts in bankruptcy is one part of making college cheaper.
Reducing the supply for colleges isn't going to make overall college education cheaper while maintaining the same quality of education. There is certainly some waste in college budgets, but it will mostly force colleges to cut the least profitable programs. Education is a social good. We should invest in it like we do with other public services. It shouldn't need to be profited minded.
>Reducing the supply for colleges isn't going to make overall college education cheaper while maintaining the same quality of education. There is certainly some waste in college budgets, but it will mostly force colleges to cut the least profitable programs. Education is a social good. We should invest in it like we do with other public services. It shouldn't need to be profited minded.
We subsidize the shit out of education, and yet it still manages to be such an awful investment people can't pay it off over 30 years with very low interest rates.
A person's ability to pay off a loan is not the true value of the investment. There are positive externalities to getting an education that boost society as a whole. Real wage stagnation, rising income inequality, and compound interest on loans would all serve to make this investment less rewarding for individuals while not decreasing the overall societal value of education.
There definitely are positive externalities to education. But I doubt they are even within an order of magnitude of the benefits of training and signalling which accrue to the individual.
I think we should invest in public colleges (increasing supply) and stop subsidizing loans with special bankruptcy protections and federal money (reducing demand at higher price points).
Sorry, I phrased that last comment incredibly poorly. I was referring to the supply of financing which in turn impacts demand. When the demand curve shifts, they supply being provided by colleges decreases. The overall amount and quality of education is not something we want to be decreasing.
> The interest rate would be very very high, as it should be.
The offered loan amount would be much lower, too.
There would be nothing to distinguish a student loan from any other unsecured personal loan (like a credit card), so the credit line would be similar. For an 18 year-old, that means the total amount over 4 years would certainly be less than $10k at an APR in the 20's to 30's.
Education is not an asset you can take away. Houses and cars can be foreclosed on; you can't take and resell education as a good.
It either needs to be kept as a pure luxury commodity, or it needs to be valued societally and not require an individual to pay for. Even if college is 'cheaper', if it prices some people out, it can't be viewed as a necessity to be able to get a good job (not saying it is, but society certainly tries to push that viewpoint).
Which is why credit card interest rates are so high and why you can't get a credit card with $100,000+ limit as an 18 year old with zero income or credit history.
Lenders stopping lending would be fantastic! Without eager lenders with usurious terms on their loans like no bankruptcy colleges would have to make “tough decisions” like figuring out how to be less expensive.
The government will give out a loan to students for basically any reason, as long as their family doesn't make too much money. Think about the insanity of that kind of investment practice. No "business plan", no estimates of ROI, no collateral, little to no grade submissions. It's a bad way to invest.
If a student is going to get a loan, what I think the government and banks should do is require them to file a proposal explaining how they plan to recoup the cost of their education using real, hard market data. If you want to become a archaeological historian, you need to research what sorts archaeology jobs are in your neighborhood and what they will make.
Sounds good in principal, but would require a very large investment in a bureaucracy to carefully evaluate and vet the load applications of every student in the country.
> There's a reason many ancient religions forbid loaning money at interest entirely
There's also the jubilee[1] concept when it comes to debt, property rights and slavery. It's interesting that even in ancient times, both debt and property were recognized as forms of power and control similar to slavery.
> There's a reason many ancient religions forbid loaning money at interest entirely; and it's the same reason we have bankruptcy laws.
The Catholic Church condemns usury as intrinsically evil because, in the words of Aquinas, usury is to "sell what does not exist". [1]
Aquinas observed that some goods are consumed by their very use, such as food or drink. Allowing someone to use such a good is equivalent to transferring the ownership. You cannot "rent" a sandwich or allow someone to "borrow" a bottle of wine, at least not if they intend to eat or drink it. Once the ownership is transferred, you have no basis to charge for its use.
He argued that money was an example of such a good. The only way to use money is to spend it, and it is consumed by that use. Therefore, loaning money at interest is an attempt to "rent" money that you no longer own, which is unjust.
Today, there is much greater access to profitable investment opportunities. It is even possible to obtain a guaranteed rate of return on money through CDs and GICs. It is therefore licit to reflect this in the "price" of money that is lent, but this is not usury. The Church cannot change her definitive teachings of faith and morals; usury has always been and will always be a grave sin. [2]
In my view, this is a situation where technology changed our understanding of morality.
When Aquinas was alive, there was nothing remotely similar to modern banking. Money was lent at punitive rates of interest (20% or more/year), with very little regulation concerning what rights creditors had if debtors couldn't pay. As an example, look at mortgages today; in many states, these are non-recourse, meaning the law limits the borrower's liability to the mortgaged property (the house), and nothing more. People aren't sold into slavery, there are no debtors prisons, and we have a sophisticated system of personal bankruptcy that lets people start over.
In short, if you can't pay a loan, you aren't getting your kneecaps broken or getting sold into slavery. In my view, that's a game-changer.
This doesn't change the fact that lending with interest is inherently evil and parasitic, even in modern times. It is completely prohibited in Islam, and Jews don't lend each other with interest.
> There's a reason many ancient religions forbid loaning money at interest entirely;
It's sad that most cultures understood the danger and fragility that debt brings, and yet we've all somehow how forgotten it. We even have terms like "good debt".
Debt is good. It's what enables people who don't have the money up front to start businesses or buy houses. It becomes bad when people are relying on it to finance small purchases or when loans have predatory terms (like credit card payments, payday loans, etc.)
> Debt is good. It's what enables people who don't have the money up front to start businesses or buy houses.
The reason people go into debt to buy houses is because everyone is using debt to buy houses, thus driving the prices up.
If mortgages were capped at 5-year terms, the price of houses would be a lot lower, which would be great for society - for the same reason that having cheaper electricity is great for society.
Prices wouldn't significantly change. You still have people/pension funds/governments with lots of money to invest (the people who currently buy mortgage debt). How would you prohibit this money from just buying houses and renting them out?
And even if you could lower prices, how would you compensate the current homeowners for destroying the value of their largest asset?
> Prices wouldn't significantly change. You still have people/pension funds/governments with lots of money to invest (the people who currently buy mortgage debt). How would you prohibit this money from just buying houses and renting them out?
This won't happen - because:
1. Up until the 80s, houses used to cost closer to three years of wages, as opposed to ten. Yet, there was no shortage of people and pension funds in the 80s.
2. Individuals borrowing mountains of money for their first home get tax advantages, compared to institutional investors. It's individuals pulling the price of houses up, not institutions.
> And even if you could lower prices, how would you compensate the current homeowners for destroying the value of their largest asset?
The same way we compensate people who bought pets.com stock in 1999, the same way that we compensate 22 year olds who amassed $200,000 of debt, and an English Literary History degree, and the same way that we compensate someone who invested into a coal plant, when utility solar starts selling electricity for 2 cents/KWH.
I prefer the terms, “productive debt” and “consumptive debt”. Productive debt allows you to produce more things. A business loan, for example. Or even a small loan for an inexpensive car so you can go to work would also be productive debt. Consumptive debt is a large loan for a car that is way more than the minimum, or for most recreational spend.
Debt is simply a way to "materialize" risk. There are certainly good risks and bad risks. Leaving good risks untaken is one way to miss out on experiencing growth.
Good debt is also known as leverage. It’s essential in the real estate business. Incurring a debt for a depreciating asset is dumb (cars, boats,) but for an asset that appreciates, it actually is good.
Housing also depreciates. It just so happens that for much of history, the lands that those houses are attached to have appreciated fast enough to counteract the loss.
That colleges still get to win when their students graduate into economic destitution is a moral hazard of American society that we will inevitably look back upon as a great stain on history. I think a lot of people agree there. While I don't argue it would solve the entirety of the problem, I think a great first step would be to change the financial product itself. The code academy's tuition deferment until employment model seems a lot more sane than what we currently have. If every educational institution had to take this approach, would we still see the same kind of bureaucratic overreach, feudal approach to tenure, and debt slavery that we currently see? I'd love to know.
While I think things could be a lot better, I like how college loans work over here in The Netherlands.
Regardless of whether they're a 'golden ticket' or not (times are changing?), the student loan is something one doesn't have to worry about too much. Not only is/was a big part of it considered a 'gift' (up to half when I was studying, depending on my parents' income), but the entirety of the loan left over is low-interest and has no real demands.
Basically, you're asked to pay off x amount per month based on the total loan, but if x amount exceeds 10% percent of your income, you can ask to pay (potentially much) less. If you don't make any money, you pay off nothing.
My income is rather irregular, but for close to a decade I've been paying off the amount suggested. It's partly laziness, and partly a desire to be a good citizen that makes me not bother to ask to pay less based on my income. Anecdotally I know many people like myself who basically pay more back than they strictly have to.
All in all I suspect the system not only works well, but ultimately is a net benefit to the entire country. A well-educated individual over here makes 10x times that of a low-wage workers, and the taxes are significantly higher too. While it could take 20+ years to pay off the student debt, much of it is probably paid off in increased taxes in the interim.
Also I imagine the student debt not being a sword of damocles has a not insignificant effect on our general state of wellbeing and a reduced number of heart attacks, burnouts, and the like.
American here - The Netherlands is a pretty small country (population wise) but the more I learn about it, the more impressed I am. Low public debt, sophisticated commercial culture, great education system, very cosmopolitan, and sensible.
I appreciate this perspective. So many people have no sympathy towards young people, who have been told their whole life that college is the path success.
> Then an 18-year-old, potentially with parents who aren't great at math but have great aspirations for their child, is sat down and asked to sign a load of papers, not realizing that this will lock them into decades of unforgiveable debt and wage slavery.
Well yeah, because us "adults" don't wanna pay the state and local taxes necessary to keep public universities affordable.
It may be free but fewer people attend university in European countries (apart from wealthy Luxembourg) than in the US. So essentially, the “free” university is a tax on everyone that mostly benefits the rich. I don’t think Americans want that.
Imagine I bake and give you a cake, it's still a "free cake" even though I've put the work into baking it and other people have put the work into harvesting the ingredients and bringing them to me.
No it isn't, presumably that person will graduate and go on to have a career where they are paid a salary and pay taxes on that salary. How is paying higher taxes for one's entire working life different than making payments on a loan with lower taxes?
Good point. The rich need to pay taxes, else there is civilization only for the rich. Consider Alabama, a lowtax state, thanks to the 1901 constitution that the landowners and industrialists wrote to protect their wealth and look what shape the state is in.
> There's a reason many ancient religions forbid loaning money at interest entirely; and it's the same reason we have bankruptcy laws.
I don't think the case has been made for this, unless the reason is "things started that way and developed from there", with "that way" and "there" referring to two different things in the two different examples.
Brotherhood of Kings has an interesting discussion of an ancient Mesopotamian moneylender, whose documents are preserved today. He became very rich by making loans without charging interest.
It worked because if you defaulted on a loan, the moneylender took title to everything you owned. This could be worth more than the value of the loan. (Indeed, for moneylending to be profitable on these terms, you must be able to recover more than the value of the loan.)
So the system at the time didn't charge interest, but it would have completely fallen apart if it had also allowed for bankruptcy.
> This is the thing that is really the most shameful and outrageous thing about the US system. Our entire K-12 educational system and our culture is set up to paint a college degree as a ticket to "the good life".
That's because it is a ticket to the good life if you are of average intelligence, average ability, average connections, and average parents. Or, more specifically, it is a ticket to a less bad life.
Not everyone can go into trades. Not everyone should go into trades. If you are an average person, and you're not working trades, and you don't have a college degree, you're going to be capped out at waiting tables and flipping burgers.
At least these masters-degree holders can apply for crappy low-end office jobs. You actually get evenings and weekends off with most of those, and you're unlikely to get a chef screaming at you while you're holding a pot of hot oil.
Personally still owing some debt(that was pretty much wasted since I didn't finish school, my own fault) debt was handed out easily/same with credit cards. I think it's a great opportunity if you use it right(follow through in my case). I didn't understand money though at that time, wasted it/killed my credit score. I was lucky though I have federal loans and they do a pay as you earn type plan where you can pay nothing if you don't make enough granted it still builds interest. Overall my debts aren't bad since I had some grants/went into engineering/physics not a doctor or lawyer. I at least made it into software so if my life continues to pan out I will get out of debt within two years at best.
But yeah, at that time though(in school) I was really scared because I was not doing well in school and I was like "how will I pay this back"...
I have this evolving metaphor of the US as a financially overextended household or business.
We've lived large since WWII. Bought new cars every few years, built the suburbs, provided quality education to a lot of people, etc. Is it all that surprising that people want to "go back" to this? For many people in the US, it was GREAT.
But it's all been at great cost. The '60s through the '90s were a time of huge debt accumulation at every level of society, from the US Treasury borrowing, to state and local governments underfunding their pensions, even down to households, with ballooning credit card balances and ever-greater levels of mortgage debt.
Now we get to pay for it. Partly that means higher taxes, so we can finally properly fund social security and medicare, and repay the literal trillions of dollars we just borrowed in the past few weeks. Partly taking better care of the environment, which let's be honest, is going to cost a ton of money.
It also means some hard choices about what we aren't going to pay for anymore. An entitlement that one should be able to study pretty much anything, for four years, with world-class experts, as a national birthright -- maybe something we can't afford? In my view, we need to start being a bit -- not a lot, just a little more -- economic and practical in how we think about education. Maybe night school or Khan Academy is a better place to study medieval history, or divinity, or any number of wholesome, life-enhancing subjects, than a four-year liberal arts college. Maybe more people should think a little harder about how their investments -- let's face it, that's what they are -- into education, will transform into marketable skills. And maybe the government should stop subsidizing all this, so that colleges will trim down what it costs so that it's actually affordable.
We can fix this, it's just going to take a while, and a lot of long, slow, not particularly newsworthy or sexy, adjustments.
> Now we get to pay for it. Partly that means higher taxes, so we can finally properly fund social security and medicare, and repay the literal trillions of dollars we just borrowed in the past few weeks.
Sounds like a great deal for those who were alive then. I don't think it's as simple as you suggest.
I'm not saying borrowing for the stimulus was necessarily a bad idea. Only that, unless you think the current level of debt is either sustainable long-term (maybe?) or that it can continue to rise, that the only rational conclusion is that our material standard of living has to decrease. That seems to be the only rational conclusion when you see 25% increases in US national debt in an environment where GDP is growing 1-2%/year.
We've made a lot of "promises" in this country in the past 50 years. Senior healthcare. Education. Old-age pensions. Government worker pensions. Being the world's police force. I'm only saying that if you take a hard look at all this, and we can't or won't continue to afford it, some things have to be cut. Will it be four-year college for everyone? Or will it be granny's healthcare? Anyone who says "we have to continue to do all if it" is just kidding themself. We just don't have the money.
I'm not long-term optimistic about what it means that the US isn't funding NATO as heavily as it used to be, but I do have to give Trump credit for making this a kitchen table issue. Being the world's police force is damned expensive and I wouldn't mind if we cut that back a bit if that's what it takes to balance, e.g. social security.
Or just fix the incredibly high fees. In many European countries (not the UK) public education is incredibly affordable, in some like Germany and Denmark even free. It's a choice to make fees so high, it's not really necessary for the product. What do US universities spend their money on? Admin, sport stadiums and famous professors that then barely teach because what makes them famous is their research.
You'd go cheaper traveling to Europe, studying for three years at a German or Danish university, learning the language as a bonus, and come back afterwards with no debt. Some even have English courses.
I understood that countries with 'free' education, had a high bar for entry. So not really open to the public; open to the top 10% or whatever.
If you pay (in the USA) you can get in somewhere, guaranteed. Because there's a spectrum of institutions, so you can find a place that will take you where you are educationwise, and pull you up from there. Some start at IT college, move to a Community College, then a State or private one, then graduate. Cost-effective and you ultimately get to advertise the place you ended at.
>All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, just like any other loan.
They were at some period of time, which allowed colleges intentionally bankrupt students and get paid by the government.
Universities and colleges are cancer of education, we have opportunity to naturally get rid of them, at least in their current form.
> Our entire K-12 educational system and our culture is set up to paint a college degree as a ticket to "the good life"
It is still true, based on statistics of college graduate vs non-college graduates, that going to college brings much better odds in your favor to get a "good life". As usual, it's about odds, nothing is guaranteed in life.
The thing that gets me, is why can’t that student loan be tax deducted?
If I pay $20k in taxes, then take that money to pay off the student loan first.
I don’t care about tax revenue to the government. And the federal government has the power to just print new money to pay off all their old debts anyways, like they are doing now, so they don’t really need my tax money.
those loans shouldn't be allowed in the first place. There should be some kind of cap on the loans in the first place. Perhaps, create a ceiling of something manageable say 5k. At that point, colleges will have no choice but to start cutting costs and make college more affordable.
> This is the thing that is really the most shameful and outrageous thing about the US system.
I think the shameful thing is how college is such a waste of time for most folks. I think the money would be better spent traveling and learning on your own for a small fraction of the cost.
Why do so many people need to go to college? Especially before they even know what life is really like. Couldn't they work a year or two and then decide to go to college?
This is a 15 year experiment signed by gw jr. and cheerleaded by biden. It is debt slavery to turn college kids into conservatives. On the other eND of the spectrum was no child left behind to makes kids dumber and conservative. Trump is a direct result.
One party stood vehemently, unmoving, in 2005 to change the law in order to make it more difficult for student loans to be subject to bankruptcy, based on false pretences. And quite literally no one cared. There's no political will to make student loans more easily dischargeable, even merely repealing the 2005 law. Just like there's no political will to consider education a right, let alone higher education. In the U.S. education is a product you buy, rich people get more and better versions of it.
But as it turns out, an infinitesimal number of students even try to have these loans discharged.
For the average college graduate, college is still a pretty good investment. I could write lots of comments about people without a college degree that live crappy lives and have trouble finding good paying jobs, and people with college degrees that live well and make a lot of money.
My prediction is that we'll see changes in the US system. The problem you're pointing out is the risk. Universities are the ones that IMO should be taking on the risk. If you graduate 3000 students a year, most will do okay and some won't, and that would be no big deal if college cost $800 a year. I predict that over the next couple decades we'll move to a system where you pay for college out of your earnings.
This would clean up another issue (not pointing any fingers with this). Colleges would nudge students into careers with better prospects. If they'd get paid less from students in certain majors, there'd be fewer of those majors. I could even see a system where "you're on your own" if you major in certain limited prospect fields. Universities that align their interests with those of the students will be the ones that thrive.
>For the average college graduate, college is still a pretty good investment
Evidence doesn't seem to bear this out.
"The college income premium—the extra income earned by a family headed by a college graduate over an otherwise similar family without a bachelor’s degree—remains positive but has declined for recent graduates. The college wealth premium (extra wealth) has declined more noticeably among all cohorts born after 1940. Among non-Hispanic white family heads born in the 1980s, the college wealth premium is at a historic low; among all other races and ethnicities, it is statistically indistinguishable from zero [emphasis added]. Using variables available for the first time in the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances, we find that controlling for the education of one’s parents reduces our estimates of college and postgraduate income and wealth premiums by 8 to 18 percent. Controlling also for measures of a respondent’s financial acumen—which may be partly innate—, our estimates of the value added by college and a postgraduate degree fall by 30 to 60 percent. Taken together, our results suggest that college and post-graduate education may be failing some recent graduates as a financial investment. We explore a variety of explanations and conclude that falling college wealth premiums may be due to the luck of when you were born, financial liberalization and the rising cost of higher education."
particularly noteworthy: "[...]among all other races and ethnicities, it is statistically indistinguishable from zero[...]"
I skimmed the paper. Figures 3, 4, 5, and 6 from the paper you linked seem to show that higher degrees correlate with higher net worth. Could you elaborate on what I am missing?
No college is going to advocate for taking future income from students over government backed loans or a traditional loan. The former translates to less immediate income. Colleges had little reason to raise tuition since 2000 except for money, I don't see them suddenly moving to forward-thinking strategies.
They may if they face competition form Lambda School style ISAs (not necessarily just ISAs generally, but ones that are actually good for the student).
As a bonus this would make universities better at education since the incentives would be aligned with the students.
It would be helped though if the easily available government loans were not available, though with the generally bad politics from both sides on this, I find progress there unlikely.
You're assuming a lot of faith in market forces. In reality, the incentives should already be aligned with student interest: All of the information for it is already available. Retention & graduation rates are public knowledge, and you can easily find out if a school has job placement (and their rates) or merely a "career services" area that will help you write a resume and point you at some other resources.
The fact is, the majority of students don't make their decisions of where to attend based on tangible metrics. They make their decision based primarily on the perceived "experience" they will have in college, and only after that do they filter their options based on other factors (if at all).
The problem is less with the colleges, and more with the fact that attending college has become less about academics and much more about a stage of transition into adulthood (along with a sort of last "hurrah" farewell to the lesser responsibilities of childhood)
> In reality, the incentives should already be aligned with student interest: All of the information for it is already available. Retention & graduation rates are public knowledge
But that information is less useful than one might naively assume. What you actually want to know is the school’s contribution, which the raw rates don't tell you. Like good ratings for primary/secondary schools, the raw rates mostly tell you about the qualities of students that end up going there; pulling out the effect, if any, of the school is much harder.
All of the information for it is already available. Retention & graduation rates are public knowledge, and you can easily find out if a school has job placement
College worked out well for me, but I definitely didn't know you could evaluate a school this way when I was 17 & filing applications. I just applied to public schools with a strong reputation.
It's easy to take for granted as an adult that all this information exists. But for a teenager, the whole thing is all new.
What that would do is put the pressure to analyze and align decision making with the real world in the hand of an institution instead of the hands of a typical 17 year old.
It's not really the same when the school gets the money either way and it's not clear how the placement rates really translate to good outcomes (it puts the rationality burden on the students which is the wrong place for it and less likely to work for the reasons you describe). Schools are incentivized to not have students fail out and to select hard for students already likely to succeed during admissions, but that doesn't mean the students currently learn much from the school or that the schools should even make education their focus (as opposed to increasing their prestige via research or facilities to attract more students).
If student failure to succeed in the market led to university failure we'd see a lot different behavior from universities.
I don't think the universities are currently selling education, they're selling prestige and network access via credentials with some education on the side at inflated rates from easy access to government non-defaultable loans.
This leads to weird behavior like all majors being the same cost and the same length along with lots of people employed by the university that don't know anything (career services where I went to school was a good example of this). There's also a lot of spending on facilities to lure students that is unrelated to education or success afterwards (since they have to compete with other universities for all of the free government loan money).
If this free money was not available there would be a check on people getting loans for majors that are not economically viable. If school's offered ISAs then the school's would provide the check. As it is currently, the student carries the burden of evaluating all of this - it's not a surprise a lot of people fail this at 16.
This incentive alignment issue is why people come out of universities and get destroyed by technical interviews, why a large amount of CS majors can't solve fizzbuzz and why people pay a lot for ultimately worthless degrees. I don't disagree with the cultural problems you describe, but I think if there's an ISA option vs. 100k in debt option more people will take the ISA option if the education actually works (and it will have to for ISA providers to survive).
There's a way to fix the systemic incentive issues and place the burden of evaluating economic viability on systems better able to handle it. This would fix a lot of the problems, but it's hard to change from within the system with the current broken incentive structure. That's why I'm excited about the Lambda School approach - I don't think universities can dig themselves out of this and I don't think the necessary changes to government loans is politically viable.
This is also why I think 'free college' is bad policy, it further prevents Lambda School like ISA approaches and cements in the current broken incentive structure.
I think it's more of a problem that the economy simply doesn't need as many people with college degrees as are produced. Even if companies need to filter candidates for competence, they'd still have to do that, and we'd still be stuck with a glut of people with credentials that will go unused due to over supply. I don't have an answer to that. (except that apart from the massive debt problem, I still think it's a net positive in society to have slightly better educated people even in low-skill jobs.)
As for free college, countries that have it don't just make it free for anyone: there is a significant filtering process that entails tracking students who don't perform academically into paths more suited to specific trades instead of college. If there's a solution to the above problem, it need to include something like that as well.
College degrees generally? Sure, I agree - the market doesn't need a lot of them.
I think there's a lot of market demand for certain capabilities though - specifically capable software developers.
Maybe there's an argument that there's not enough intellectual capacity to meet this demand, but I think it's more an issue of opportunity (Lambda's student success seems to be evidence of this). I guess I'm not convinced there's oversupply generally as much as there is an oversupply of certain non-economically viable majors (because of this incentive problem).
For the free college, even with those restrictions (which are good), I'd argue it doesn't relieve the incentive alignment problem with the colleges themselves (so it harms potential ISA competitors without solving the underlying problem).
For schools in good financial states (they are few in number), I think they will actually trend in this direction.
The most prestigious medical schools, engineering schools, etc. actually make a ton of money from non-tuition-based sources. Income from patent licensing, federal research grants, etc. dominate income from tuition.
Some of these schools also have endowments that are absurd multipliers of their annual expenditures.
For these schools, where the lack of tuition isn't such a near-term threat, they might actually realize that they can make more money in the long-term (and incentivize better education) by making tuition something more like an ISA.
You've seen it already, where some schools are offering "free tuition", because the value of the labor they get from their students is already greater than the tuition they charge. There's also probably some good tax benefits to writing off the expense of education, in these scenarios. https://med.nyu.edu/education/md-degree/md-affordability-fin...
Especially when you include the tax benefits, free tuition might actually be cheaper than an ISA, because enforcing an ISA requires operational overhead.
Actually, some schools do have versions in place already (I believe Purdue's engineering is one example).
My opinion - not my area of research - is that the days of hiking tuition like they did year after year are over. Note that there's no reason this won't bring in money immediately. Students would essentially be doing an IPO and giving shares to the university. Those shares would have value to someone, and they could serve as collateral for a loan. And beyond that, there's no reason it has to be all or nothing. You could pay half tuition now and sign over a percentage of future earnings.
There's no way colleges want to do this. It's unclear to me how long they continue to operate under the current system. They're going to have to innovate.
For this reason, I think instead of trying to force a new system, work within the reality that the federal government has a near-monopoly on student loans. Tie the amount of students that can get student loans at a particular college directly to the amount of money is being paid by students who have graduated. Also, cap the amount of money each student needs to pay back per year to their salary.
The colleges will have no choice but to ensure their students have nice enough jobs to pay back the loans, and will quickly see attendance plummet if they can't get people in the door anymore. Remember that it's the government paying these colleges directly, not the students.
It's hard to pick an economically viable major. There are lots of difficult fields to study that just don't pay well due to competition. People tend to think Science = STEM = Guaranteed Job, but that is not the case. Lots of sciences don't make much money, especially the ones driven by passion. Others are highly geographically dependent, so mining engineers might have a median salary of $80k after five years, but 80% of those people live in a handful of rural states.
Also, a lot can change in the four to seven years it takes to complete school. A recession can drive a large of people into "safe" majors, like accounting, making it more difficult for new graduates to onboard. And other fields can shrink or disappear almost entirely within that time period.
That being said, these people didn't have to settle for serving drinks in a bar. They could have searched employment in tangentially-related fields or learned some more technical skills. They could have also relocated. Maybe those were not options for whatever reason, but in general, those are things successful people do. Because the job market is going to change wildly during the 40+ years you'll be employed.
It gives estimates of salary and future demand for pretty much all occupations. Recommend this to your children to help them understand how their major selection could impact their future career.
I think the difference in pay is because they state Web Dev requires an associates degree, the other two a bachelor's.
Of course, this data is generalized. I am an SWE, with an associates. I make a little more than their "Software Developer" role. Also suggests there may be a lot of devs who don't respond to salary threads.
Good grades and a degree in Math/CS/Statistics/Physics/Engineering (or Business/Finance/Economics in a top uni) = high paying job.
Life sciences pay much less unless you are ready to pursue a PhD or MD, in such case the numbers are somewhat comparable.
A person who pursued biochemistry bachelor as a terminal degree or studied English literature has all information to know the opportunity costs of their decisions.
That being said, these people didn't have to settle for serving drinks in a bar.
I'm familiar with a certain materials science startup in England that lost out on a round of funding in the dotcom bust and went bankrupt soon after. The chief chemist, a very capable man, went back to his native country in the Former Eastern Bloc and worked in a shipyard for a couple of years. It was that bad.
but his similarly skilled native born co-worker, probably found his footing in a decent job. The privileges of citizenship. And I don't say that in a sarcastic way.
Even better would be true market rate pricing for majors.
Why are all majors 4 years? Why does a poetry major cost the same as an engineering major?
The universities say there's value in a liberal arts education beyond actual economic value? Fine, but someone is going to be subsidizing it somewhere - if the schools actually value it beyond the market rate and want to donate funds from more economically viable majors to it then fine, but it shouldn't be the students paying for the overpriced poetry degree.
If degree costs were reflective of their true economic value then there would be less risk. An economically useless degree would at least be cheap in cost (if not in time).
All majors being the same length and cost is a sign that something is broken.
> Colleges should not even offer loans for non-viable majors.
Oddly enough, a couple of the best programmers I have ever work with are now CTOs at their respective companies. One of them had an english degree and the other a music degree.
Just yesterday there was an article here on HN about the importance of writing.
Not at all. In fact the english degree is probably one of the more useful degrees to have. Knowing how to write and communicate effectively is key to many jobs, and is useful over an entire career. I should add, that he told me he even felt this way.
I'm not so sure about the music degree, but I can see the general skills of being detail oriented and working with a team as an IC to create something bigger as key life skills useful in any job.
Meanwhile, I got a CS degree when OO was big and nearly minored in business. I haven't looked at OO in years for programming, but the business courses I took have been key every step of my career. I wish I had taken more writing classes.
>There are lots of difficult fields to study that just don't pay well due to competition
That may be the case, but speaking as a recent young person, the vast majority of college students I met did no actual research regarding the employability of their majors.
It's also a disservice to group soft and hard sciences together under STEM - because you end up with millions of children who can't hack it in math, but they hear that psychology or sociology are STEM and therefore a meal ticket, and end up taking out loans for a worthless degree simply because they had it drilled in their heads that they needed to go to college and major in something "useful".
I graduated in 2007 and your observation is the same as mine. Students go to school without really thinking about what is next. I'm guessing that is a result of a middle/upper middle class upbringing. I noticed international students were a lot more driven, on average. I went to a small, liberal arts college that was not highly selective in admissions.
Even with the talented and studious, very few had any real idea of what was next. Why do we encourage so much debt just for the supposed sake of edification.
I will say, though, that it was a really fun time in my life. So maybe that's worth it?
I think lots of it is due to bad biased advice. True story, on my first day of college, at the convocation, the university president told his true story about how he decided to stay at university for an extra year "to study the classics" and what an amazing decision this was for him. He encouraged everyone to seek erudition.
I wonder how many students accepted that as fact. Because it is indeed a great strategy if you are wealthy and have a social-network safety net waiting to bail you out with a nice job after graduation. But for working class students like myself, it is horrible advice. I couldn't have graduated a moment too soon, I need to help my mom with rent, pay loans, etc.
You have wealthy "successful" academics and others giving advice that is noble but unrealistic and downright harmful in some cases.
It's more complicated, and a deeper problem than that.
For example, I'm one of those former psych majors, and though those majors are full of people who aren't good at math, there's also a lot of them who know more computer science and math than some of the comp sci majors I've worked with. In fact, a common problem for psych majors and other students is to take the first couple of psych courses, think it's a breeze, and then hit advanced courses with cognitive modeling, neuroscience, epidemiology, and genetics, and realize it is basically STEM.
The problem with this is that everyone who took those first couple of classes, or didn't, has this stereotype of psych as all involving people laying around on couches discussing past lives or something. So you might have a psych major who did a thesis involving neural network models and cognition, maybe with some imaging involving a cutting edge system in the imaging center, working with physicists, and they will get looked down on by employers. Meanwhile the comp sci undergrad who barely gets python and did their group final project on some kind of toy webapp is qualified.
I have family who are making significant money in web development who are actually English majors, who just happened to have the right connections at the right time. When I was in undergrad, comp sci was filled with a glut of unmotivated students who just wanted a degree for a job, and we were all being told that there wasn't going to be demand for comp sci degrees because there would be too many grads in it and you could always learn that stuff through different means. My father, who is now in medical administration with an MD, talked me out of biochem and biology degrees because he couldn't find employment with those degrees and had to go on to grad school.
So what do we make of a degree? Does my dad's biochem degree suddenly become more valuable when it's a stepping stone to an MD program? Did that family member with a "worthless" liberal arts degree waste their money when they're making a comfortable income in the tech sector?
The deeper problem is that people are seen one-dimensionally, as equal to some degree, rather than their experiences, like college is some glorified vocational certification program.
Whenever we talk about "worthwhile" versus "worthless" degrees at some level what we're accepting is this idea that someone's skillset is defined by the degree, rather than the degree being an indicator of part of a skillset.
Society used to see things in the latter way, and at some point it transitioned to the former.
I'd say a bigger problem isn't that undergraduate psych is easy, but rather just that _so many_ students that don't really know what they want to do take it, causing like a permanent glut of psych undergrads.
My major was also very popular, but about 1/3 students in computer engineering drop or switch majors, most after the first year. Fair or not weedouts and things to reduce the glut of undergrads. At least at my school the graduation rate for the psych school was way higher.
Reading your comment really affected me just now. I work in the video games industry, and since entry-level positions are quite competitive (video games are quite popular with younger folks), people make a lot of decisions to take a focused, employer-attractive, career path to be hired. Firms will often hire aspiring designers that have worked doing QA for a few years as well as programmers that have spent a lot of time intentionally studying C++ and rendering.
I appreciate the effort and enthusiasm my coworkers have, but sometimes I feel like the expertise in the industry is too overspecialized. Perhaps it's a product of larger-budget games being more conservative by financial/organizational necessity, but I'd appreciate if the people working there were more well-rounded. I would love more game designers to have a liberal-arts background to inject into their ideas.
>The deeper problem is that people are seen one-dimensionally, as equal to some degree, rather than their experiences, like college is some glorified vocational certification program.
This wasn't a problem when college was an exclusive program with standards that maintained prestige. Those standards have been gradually eroding as we faced collective political and corporate pressure to "open college up to everybody."
Intelligence and ability are heavily skewed distributions. The purpose of college was once to develop and certify those near the top. Now we're in some weird PC transition zone where standards have been lowered (this is evidenced by the fact that the distribution of intelligence has not changed, but nearly 50% of people have a degree).
Imagine if we decided that everyone needed to learn and play basketball and started letting everyone into the NBA. Imagine what would happen to the sport if we decided there were too many straight black men playing and we needed better representation of women and other groups. Sure, if you institute society-wide training, people on average might get a little at basketball, but nothing will change the fact that a tiny percentage of the population is able to play at a professional competitive later.
The only difference here is that intelligence is far less visible. There's far more room for decades of excuses and second chances when we have drilled into two generations now that anyone is capable of being a rocket scientist and all we need to do is go to school and try. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I don't fully agree with your post, but you do make some good points. In The Netherlands I have seen some majors go downhill (hello psychology!), while others became a bit tougher actually (hello computer science!).
In the Netherlands though, what I've noticed is that high school was tough (if you did STEM high school that is). IMO, high school was way tougher than university, considering the skills you had at the time and effort you needed to put in.
Even computer science is a cake walk compared to that, because at university people tend to be more motivated than in high school.
So students remain undecided as long as possible to enroll in as many undergrad classes as possible? your proposition makes no sense to me. I believe as an 18 year old, you need to begin seriously taking responsibility for your decisions, and if you choose to go to school, you absolutely should pay for it. the cost argument is totally separate, colleges should be much more affordable IMO, but there shouldn't be free rides for remaining "undeclared", that would have perverse incentives.
I'm not sure I agree with that. I was undecided for 2 years (of the typical 4 at a US institution). It wasn't a problem and didn't cost me anything. Expecting an 18 year old to commit to a program seems a bit excessive (yes, we do it for professional programs like nursing and engineering - but not all students are the same, both of those programs have high wash-out rates, and at least with engineering, if you get a job doing other things).
College, and the push to send everyone to it, makes much more sense when you view College as both an economic proposition, and a part of social class.
The economic aspect has been well covered here, but the social class has not. Social classes are a set of shared values, habits, and beliefs that help cluster people together into a sense of shared social membership. It is completely distinct from economic class, with some of the “lower” classes regularly having more income and net worth than the “upper” social classes.
In America, a large portion of the push to send everyone to college has been a push for the supremacy of middle class norms and values over working class norms and values via college. College is literally an indoctrination process into the middle social class, it’s where you learn the norms and values of that class and socialize exclusively with other members of said class.
As you’ve discovered, social class and economic class are not one and the same, and you yourself as a member of the working class actually make significantly more money than members of the middle class who went to college but did not reap any economic benefits from the process.
That's de-risking, de-skilling and outsourcing. Back then, in the last century, the US and Europe had a functioning chemical industry. Unfortunately, information technology took off, and investment banking discovered that returns are better with Facebook than in Pharma, consequently that's where the jobs are now. Also, mergers & acquisitions took off in the same time. Why invest in research when you can buy up someone else's research? Industry research does not exist any longer in the sciences. The sciences are not a good proposition any longer if you want to make a living.
You don't have to create and improve in a world you have little to no competition with high barrier to entry established. You can keep repackaging the same things without risk and work on perceptive value of people.
Why innovate and create when I can live like a king just playing our economic, governmental, and social systems like a fiddle? We're not quite that bad yet but we're already headed down the path in that direction.
In economics this is what is called rent-seeking behavior, and I think it probably is an exceptionally interesting area of research to study how financialization of industries modifies rent-seeking behavior in those industries. My own hunch is that it probably increases significantly.
Yep, financialisation black hole. Cratering living standards, partially hidden by printing ever bigger numbers next to people's house prices and ignoring that they have no retirement savings.
Many of the "industries" beloved by this site are showing they are only viable on top of a backbone of "real" jobs like industry and manufacturing.
No N95 mask manufacturers, but we can write how sad we are about this on facebook. And the media won't tell us the root cause, so nothing is learned.
N95 is the US standard, so it makes sense the US makes more of these than other countries.
Compare production capacity of N95s in the US with FFP2/3 in the EU, or KN95 in China. Then we'll really see how US production capacity stacks up.
To be clear, I have no idea how these production capacities stack up. But if we want to evaluate medical mask production, this is the comparison that needs to be made.
I work in AV development, and the number of refugees from the hard sciences is astonishing. I guess I don't blame them, but it's weird to have a physics PhD report to you and be able to use only a fraction of the skills she spent a decade and hundreds of thousands of dollars gaining.
This isn't quite a complaint: adopting math and physics PhDs (first as a mentor and now as a TLM) that are seemingly unproductive has been a consistent secret weapon of mine: they're often written off as unproductive, but it's not difficult to turn someone that smart into a solid engineer with a few months of guidance, as long as they're willing to learn. In specific domains, a subset of their actual skills are a good fit (they tend to be great at math), but it just signifies an unfortunate and fairly significant misallocation of resources.
Physics PhD student here. Yeah, we're all playing the lottery for the dream of a life studying the universe.
It's the exact analogue of how serious student athletes throw away their whole undergrad education for a shot at a pro career, usually to end up injured and useless a couple years later.
I don't know about that. If you fall short of your aspirations at the PhD or postgrad level, there's always quantitative finance or any number of other lucrative careers where your background will at least get you in the door for an interview.
Except, for so many of us who have studied hard science, the idea of a career in quantitative finance is the exact analog of the purebred racehorse who breaks his leg on the track and gets taken out back for an acute brain-scrambling.
As the example originating this subthread shows, quantitative finance isn't even close to the only option for a lucrative career available to those educated in the hard sciences.
Most STEM PhDs (and especially in the hard sciences) are funded from mostly government sources. It’s seen as the country making an investment in top talent.
Nobody (who is any good) in the USA pays money for a STEM PhD. You get paid to do these degrees, albeit not a lot but a lot better than paying yourself!
You do get paid but quite little. I still took on debt during my physics PhD for lifestyle reasons (my significant other was 2k miles away, so flights were prioritized over savings).
I went to graduate school early 2000s. 6 years, average stipend < $15k and still had to pay student fees. Then a couple post docs for 5 more years at $40k.
There was significant opportunity cost, but now I've had 3 jobs that were all reasonably well paid that I only got because of the fanciness of my degree. I'm _not_ saying that's the right sorting for hiring managers to do, but it is what happened to me.
Net-net, I don't know if I'm even, behind, or ahead financially. I do know that graduate school was one of the best experiences of my life, my deepest friendships were formed in those years, and I miss pursuing my passion at that level constantly. So, I guess I'm in the position of not really caring if it lost me money.
Right I know, but I was making the assumption that they had a related undergrad, and more importantly, accounting for opportunity cost. Five years of working time for someone smart and quantitative enough to do a physics PhD is easily over six figures.
Sorry, autonomous vehicles. We use the term so much internally and in industry-adjacent conversations that I have a blind spot around the fact that it's not an obvious acronym at all.
I didn't mention a loan, and was thinking primarily of opportunity cost (and to a lesser extent, undergrad, though the skills gained in undergrad tend to be the ones directly useful for their current work).
I tend to treat opportunity cost like inflation adjustment: in most cases, failing to include it is an error, so I do it by default.
I guess Javon never learned about second order effects in college.
> the work he would get would pay about as well as a fry cook anyway
You start in the same situation, but with the room for advancement in a skilled field, you have the opportunity to either pursue growth in your role, or leverage those skills into a related but more lucrative career. Avoiding dead ends is much more important than your velocity, assuming you have enough time to let things play out.
I used to tell my friend this and she was positive she'd never earn more than $50K CAD/year, and always said I was overpaid as a developer making ~$70K/year at the time. These days she has advanced far more than I have, and she'll continue to. Even as a developer with no education or particularly special skills, your ceiling in Canada isn't all that high. I'm the epitome of a 1xer though, so I can't speak for everyone. I can earn around $90k, but she's earning $120k now – that only took about 7 years for a 240% increase. Having an education can be a huge asset to your career, and she couldn't have her career without hers.
In addition to just frightening people away from attending college, we could do some real things to make the skilled trades attractive to more people:
1. Real workplace safety laws with real enforcement
2. Better health care
3. Better safety net, including retirement
4. Stronger unions
5. Free continuous retraining
From time to time, I hire tradespeople to work around my house -- roofing, tree service, installing a sliding door, new Internet service, a new furnace, etc. One thing I've noticed is that the guys who are my age -- mid 50's -- are hobbling and broken. Many of them work for smaller businesses, as independent contractors, or in situations where they are conveniently "exempt" from things like health care, unemployment, etc.
At the smaller businesses where they work, regulatory enforcement is probably minimal to nonexistent. I would guess that abuse of wage and overtime laws is probably rampant.
Much of the work is seasonal.
Much of it is at the mercy of the construction cycle.
Many of the trades are in businesses that are largely family owned, which puts non family members at a severe disadvantage at finding jobs and advancing beyond the entry level.
So, don't just cite some anecdotes, or throw starting wages around, but take a deep look into what the working class deals with in the US, and start making changes.
I think this idea that white collar jobs require college is generally wrong.
The core of the issue is that colleges produce degrees instead of people capable of doing specific jobs. If you want education for education's sake this is fine and great. But most of us don't have the money for that and need college to give us the specific skills needed for an in demand job. That's what needs to change, colleges need to prepare people for real jobs. Or be replaced by trade schools for white collar jobs or apprenticeships.
The main problem with apprenticeships is that you have to pay them and they don't produce enough work for their cost in most industries.
The state that I live in, Wisconsin, has a multi tiered system of higher education. The University of Wisconsin in Madison is a world class research university with all of the trimmings.
Then there is a system of public universities around the state that offer fewer programs but similar admission and academic standards -- they are also less expensive and have slightly lower prestige, but produce a lot of trained people such as engineers, nurses, programmers, and so forth.
And then there is an even larger network of trade schools (aka "community colleges" in some states) that tend to be smaller but are accessible to students who live at home or commute to school part time while also working. Those schools all offer computer programming and other tech related trades.
Many of those schools also offer programs that provide the first 2 years of a conventional bachelors degree, with guaranteed transfer to one of the universities for the rest of the degree. These schools are designed for students who are working, raising families, etc. A lot of people think those programs are a rollicking good deal.
All of that stuff is available. The high schools immerse kids in information about these options.
In my view, any plan that successfully addresses the college cost situation will do so through the regional colleges and trade schools, which are already excellent. I have colleagues who went to those schools, and you can send me a dozen more. There's huge peer pressure on kids to attend the gilded private colleges, but I'm not sure that I see the value.
A problem is that the private schools are funded by private wealth through their endowments, whereas public schools are funded by workers through our taxes.
I thought getting a degree in computer science was my ticket out of poverty and the lower class blue-collar work that has perpetuated my family for generations.
Boy was I wrong.
Opportunity and pure luck have to be at your back for the kind of generational change I sought. End up on the wrong side of either one of those and you too might not end up where you expect.
Nowadays, I wish I had learned a trade. Sure the work is hard, but those skills are always in demand. Houses will always need electrical or plumbing, but not everybody needs someone who can design an emulator or make an interpreter.
Can confirm: earn more than my university educated age group; no education debt; have home and mortgage that I don’t struggle to pay; still have plenty of work during the down turn.
Have often thought about living on rice n lentils n going to university to get a degree, but this whole pandemic mess has made me realise: well and truly fuck that for a joke.
It's all a betting game. Go to trade school and get a decent job making good money but have little upwards mobility other than opening your own business. Or go to university and hope you pick a worthwhile major and get a great job out of school where you have a lot of upward mobility. University is risky but if you can pick something like electrical engineering and end up at a top firm, you are probably set for life. I've got friends with university degrees that have done very well for themselves and those that just couldn't find a job in that field so now they work in retail. Some of them did everything right but just couldn't find high-paying work (computer science), others choose majors that fit their passions but don't have any immediate real world use (english).
I think some people have huge expectations for what their degree will get them that just aren't reasonable. I picked a engineering major that would pay big but also fit my passion, got the job I wanted, and have constant work lined up for me for the next 5 years. I got very lucky at the university betting game. If I hadn't gotten into college or decided to drop out when I had to take an semester off due to grades, I probably would have decided to try trade school.
2bb. Problem? Fix it with your carpenter skills or trade school buddies (plasterer, electrician, you name it, they know them).
3. Work a few years more
4. Buy second house
5. Get a few more houses.
This is what my carpenter buddies are doing. And I was the smart kid in my class. I guess they have the last laugh, they are all on their second houses now.
People aka the New Oil must have skills, not knowledge. This narrative has been coming out of the woodwork recently. Like, lumberjacks over dendrologists all the way.
If we translate this motto from the newspeak, it would be this: the New Oil must flow smoothly without asking uncomfortable questions about the piping.
The other replies are interesting and insightful, so I wanted to add a little anecdata here.
> some massive college bills
In the late 1980s I started a Computer Science program at Cal Poly Pomona https://www.cpp.edu/ If memory serves, my tuition for a quarterly full load was less than $300. That's not per credit, that was for as many classes as I wanted. Books added up to a bit less.
Working at Jack in the Box and later McDonalds, I was making minimum wage which was I believe $4.25/hour. Assuming I kept 70% of that after taxes it took me about 185 hours to pay my combined tuition and books, which comes out to about 19 hours a week over the 10 week quarter.
And I did, in fact, work about 20 hours a week.
This doesn't include housing, but it was also fairly affordable. I believe another 10 hours a week could have covered some basic shared rent. I had a place to live for free, fortunately.
EDIT: I haven't done any math for how this would look today, but I'm pretty sure it's not quite so friendly.
At CSU Long Beach, tuition is about 7k per year. We hire our student assistants at 13/hr, so they can make around 8 or 9k year in salary. Not nearly as cheap when I went, we paid around 2k a year for tuition. So if you are willing to go to a state school, you can come out with relatively small amounts of debt. Now if you go to a really nice private University and live on campus, all bets are off.
In California, at least, it used to be that(still may be, but my data is a couple years old) you could get about 2 years of your prerequisites done at a community college and then use that to funnel into the Cal-State schools.
That was a significantly cheaper option for most students. And the classes tended to be smaller and, often, much better quality.
My state does something like that. You do an associates at the state community college system in a field geared towards your planned university major and as long as you get good grades, you get guaranteed admission to a state 4 year school. It helps the student by reducing cost and helps the 4 year schools by reducing the number of incoming freshmen.
I saw something similar a couple of decades ago when I was living in Austin and working at a well-known game development house. There was a Chinese restaurant close to the office, a really good one. We ate there all the time, enough to get to know a couple of the waiters pretty well. One of them, a guy by the name of Bruce, was especially friendly and professional. He always remembered us, spoke perfect English, never let our drinks run dry. We'd ask to be seated in Bruce's section when we saw he was working. He always got big tips.
One day he mentioned that he had an MSEE degree from a university back home in China. Cue record scratch.
That was a deeply unsettling revelation, since a couple of us were EE dropouts ourselves. How'd I drop out of school and end up with my dream job, while Bruce finished his master's program and ended up serving Szechuan shrimp? WTF was up with that? What if, in my next life, I'm the one who gets hosed like this?
I didn't wake up the next day with a hangover or anxiety -- not with the ego that it took to run in that crowd -- but I certainly had a new perspective on things. If people think that even a STEM degree is going to be an automatic ticket to ride through the good life, there's some massive disillusionment coming.
And I don't think it's going to matter whether you're from China or the US or anywhere else. Not in the long run.
Thanks for your story. I had a similar moment after college myself. I graduated into the recession of the early 90s, in San Diego, which had been hit very hard by defense cutbacks. Almost everyone I knew worked service jobs, and even those were hard to get at times. The only people getting decent jobs - by which, I mean jobs that build careers, I'm not talking about pay - were engineers and a few finance/accounting related majors. Humanities majors who moved (to Washington DC, New York, to a lesser extent San Francisco or Los Angeles) fared better.
I agree that "STEM" alone won't get you a good job, and some of the bio majors were not doing a whole lot better than the humanities majors. But overall, STEM was a vastly better place to be, especially the more "numeric" fields - by that, I mean the various majors that require the common two year sequence of math from calculus through linear algebra and differential equations as a prerequisite to whatever upper division specialization happens. Even there, some are better than others in terms of jobs, but they all fared vastly better.
Humanities majors from very elite schools tend to weather a recession ok, but otherwise, I think that one advantage to being a STEM major (with the caveat I described above) is that you're less likely to be permanently knocked out of the game by a bad stretch, especially in the beginning. There's a real risk to getting sidelined, and I worry about the young people graduating right now. For instance, my employer has done a hiring moratorium for a year, and there may be layoffs. This, especially if it goes on for a few years, is unusually devastating to the long term career prospects of people just starting out.
My suspicion is that there is a huge difference between graduating as a humanities major in a recession vs boom. If you graduate in better times, you lock in a few good career building years. You may stagnate, you may even be unemployed for long enough that it knocks you off the path for a bit, but you have something to build on. If you graduate when nobody is hiring, and you float around for a few years, by the time things pick up, employers are either hiring the people who have some experience, or going back to recent grads for entry level hiring. That definitely happened to a lot of people I know who graduated in the early 90s in SoCal.
I suspect that humanities majors from very elite colleges, as well as STEM majors in very in demand fields from a broader range of colleges, are less likely to be locked out in a bad market, and more likely to be recruited back in when things improve. This is a bit of a guess, though I think it is supported by some research.
> My suspicion is that there is a huge difference between graduating as a humanities major in a recession vs boom.
Drop the "humanities major"--it's true even for STEM majors as well. There's a pretty consistent career track from college to junior to senior positions, and if you fall off that track, it is quite hard to get back in again. There are very few majors for which demand is high enough to let you get back on the track, certainly not all of STEM.
CS major graduating in June from a top 3 institution, here. Last fall, my application-to-callback rate was like 80-90+%. I had to stop applying to jobs to make my workload and interviewing manageable.
My current rate is like 15-20% after I lost my full-time job. About 10% in software and engineering vs. 30% in finance.
Most of STEM degrees are not similar to CS regarding career prospects. Masters in chemistry or mathematics don't have that many entry level jobs with attractive salaries eagerly waiting for fresh grads.
Sorry, I should clarify. My point is that even a candidate who would typically be a viable hire or interviewee is now struggling in the job market. The implication being that other STEM students, including CS students, are severely struggling to find jobs, right now.
My friends in earth sciences are essentially at 0% callback. Friends with identical experience to me from different schools are getting a <5-10% callback rate unless they have referrals.
I'm in 100% agreement with you and the other poster. There's no real silver bullet for quickly finding employment right now except the small niche of math/CS majors with good GPAs from T10 institutions applying to work in finance.
It's no joke in STEM either, I'll give you that. I should have said it's hard for humanities majors relative to STEM, because I definitely wouldn't try to claim it isn't a big difference for everyone, graduating in a recession vs a boom.
I read an article a while back about how it doesn't matter where you go to college provided you major in STEM. Here's a link, along with a counter point:
I wasn't super caught up in the debate, mainly because I think that as an absolute statement, the claim that it doesn't matter at all is nearly impossible to defend. It's really a relative argument. Read that way, though, I do find it compelling.
Another couple of problems here is that 1) there's always a bit of hand waving around "STEM", with a temptation to turn it into a no true scotsman argument. I defined STEM for this purpose as majors that require you to take specialized upper division coursework with a prerequisite 2 year undergraduate calculus through linear algebra and differential equations sequence. Even that's loose though, and may include some finance or highly quantitative Econ majors (I suspect they do just fine, though).
The other is that I think this may hide some differences between elite STEM majors in the nature of the work done. There's a big difference between "senior data scientist at uber cool prestige media company with tons of autonomy" and "senior CRUD bug fixer."
I felt pretty much the same, during my last post-doc. I had a friend who rebuilt power plant equipment. He got to work on very cool stuff, and he made very good money.
I did a straight chemistry BS and basically a biochemistry PhD, so I remain largely ignorant of the humanities. But I did learn to write clearly (if not artfully) and I learned very well how to learn. In my experience, that's what's most important. Facts get dated quickly, and now they're findable online. But how to learn, that's essential.
But then, this was some decades ago. My BS cost about $20K, and the PhD was "free". Indeed, "worked" as a research assistant during grad school. The salary was very low (albeit tax-free) but it was enough for rent and food.
The topics people learn in US colleges are about identity politics, affirmative action and safe spaces. Since those skills are hard to monetize outside of politics and academic beaurocracy, the same people have a hard time earning their living.
it goes further up. Luckily I was an only child to a single-worker-family midlevel government employee that rode the interest cliff and was willing to spend gobs of money for my (quite good) college, and I went for a technical grad program that pays you sub-minimum-wage (but no educational debt!) to do 100 hours a week in a lab for seven years, so I had no debt -- but I quit my postdoc to drive for lyft for a year and a half, and I made more money and had less stress driving for lyft (yes, after expenses) than I did in my postdoc. Everyone thought I was crazy. Well, maybe I was, but I wasn't the only postdoc that had quit and was driving for lyft full-time.
the reason those people can't get jobs isn't because they're not smart. It's because there simply aren't enough jobs that require that, and waaaayyy too many people running around with that education and those degrees.
While I do not want to be rude, statistically speaking, those with tertiary education still do better on average than those without. It's true that there's outliers and that underemployment is a persistent problem (especially in our over-educated society), but getting tertiary education might still be a better choice than a trade school, depending on your situation.
Nothing is without risk and you should inform yourself about your job prospects beforehand though. Not every major will pay and some will only pay to a select few. One should put much thought into major choice (or whether they should go to university at all) - it's one of the more impactful choices in people's lives.
I wish I could be more sympathetic to the college industrial complex, but they've been treat us poorly for years. Yes, I know it's our fault for demanding gold plated educational experiences and then going into crazy debt to finance it. But who wants to blame himself/herself?
The job can be done better for much less. Indeed, it used to be much cheaper in the past when the dorms weren't so fancy and there were a bazillion deans waltzing around trying to look essential. The adjunct professors get paid next to nothing. Let's give them a slight raise, fire 90% of the deans and we'll get back to something sustainable and affordable.
First and foremost, the lecture part of education is extremely inefficient. I know "watch the video" just doesn't work for some people, but charging for a live rendition of a repeated script, and then not valuing the person who watched the same recording equally, is absurd.
Education needs to acknowledge a couple things. 1) Theres probably a "best" lecture or lecturer out there for each topic. That's an overstatement, and a more documentary style edit of the best lectures is more realistic. The point is, there should be a collaborative way for lecturers around the country to contribute to a shared curriculum, and a group of people editing out redundancy. The amount of people in the country delivering roughly the same speeches is astounding. An open and shared processes for editing would allow for competing edits to exist simultaneously, a la forks and branches. 2) School needs to flip a bit and focus on the parts that need more individual attention. Discussions, Labs etc. Using physical space limitations in lecturers to create scarcity benefits only the schools. Anybody who has been in a 300 person lecture knows how little question and answer interaction there is with most professors, during the lecture. 3) a large portion of the value of school is networking. who you meet, who your environment is and who you absorb. is that the actual thing being sold, elitism? how do you fix that, when the product being sold is club membership under the guise of education? it's a way to manufacture class/caste divides there otherwise wouldnt be, or that would be even more nepotistic. its very much a "i had to do it to get in the club, so the next generation should too."
tldr: "school" is an artificially scarce elite caste membership. just because you pay the membership fee, doesnt mean you actually make the club, but getting in the lobby is a prereq to full membership. make school about education.
I remember when MIT first started publishing their lectures online. I would watch them for my chemistry and physics classes and was astounded by the fact that the lectures were basically identical. Ivy league schools had this mystique around them and I always wondered what it would be like to be there instead of a community college. Turns out, the difference is absolutely not in the lectures or tests. At least, for freshman-level courses.
I think we are slowly getting here though. The number of credible online degree programs has exploded in recent years. Online education used to be like online dating: only something losers would do. But now it seems to moving towards the default way of doing business.
I had a similar experience about 8 years ago in Intro to Linear Algebra. I had been attending lectures at my school but I ended up missing a day so I decided to find the corresponding lecture from MIT. It turns out, I was able to watch a lecture from the author of the textbook we were using. Even crazier, the lecture I watched online ended with him working through an example problem but he did not finish.
When I went to the next class in person, our professor was finishing up the exact same example problem from the lecture video. It could have just been coincidence that that exact lecture lined up the way it did, but it kind of opened my eyes to how silly it was to have professors repeating the same thing year after year.
Agreed, I also found this to be the case for my CS degree. When I realised that some courses were essentially facsimiles of courses I could take on a MOOC, I changed the way I chose my courses. Why take a copy-pasted course, when I could just take it online for free from the original source? I ended up doing a lot more project-based courses after that.
The difference is the other students. For most, your peer group is what motivates you. A peer group which values excellence in X will motivate you to become excellent in X.
The peer group in the ivy leagues have been strongly pre-selected to value achievement in academic related pursuits.
Not really. There is an online MS in Computers Science from Georgia Tech, that's really well regarded and will cost you approximately $8,000 for the whole degree.
A lot of materials science is highly experimental, so it's not super easy to teach advanced skills. I went to a top 10 materials science school for my PhD, and the absolute vast majority of what I learnt was self-taught. However there is a caveat - I self-learnt by doing, and failing multiple times. The advantage of a high ranked school is that the research facilities are top notch and professors bring in external grants, so the research facilities are always maintained at a high standard through overhead costs.
There is also a lot of value in the conversations you have with other students and faculty something that is really hard to reproduce remotely. It's also something where quality matters, I suspect.
"Online education used to be like online dating: only something losers would do. But now it seems to moving towards the default way of doing business."
As a self-taught developer and proud of it, I like this quote. A lot. It's easy to let yourself fall into a toxic mindset where you (and many employers) unjustifiably feel inferior because you didn't take the traditional 4-year college route.
But in less than a decade, hearing of couples who met on Tinder has gone from a novelty to the norm, reminding us of how quickly societal paradigm shifts can happen (for the better, imo).
Only fools with zero foresight ever said anything like that. These days I would think less of a person paying $20,000 tuition per year over the person who did all the same work online for free.
> Charging for a live rendition of a repeated script, and then not valuing the person who watched the same recording equally, is absurd.
I went to a small college where most lectures had fewer than ~20 students (if that), so I realize this doesn't scale as well to 100-person lecture halls.
But, I got a lot out of the interaction in my college lectures. I almost always sat in the front† where it was easy to ask and answer questions, which I did a lot. Less obviously, professors could and did react to my facial expressions of confusion/understanding/curiosity as they went. Well, I don't know that it was specifically my facial expressions, but there was definitely an interaction going on between us even when only the professor was speaking.
I can't say if that's worth the inefficiency of small-ish, in-person classes, but it certainly helped me.
---
† College: the one place where the best seats are also the easiest to get. Fine by me—I took advantage.
I was just about to post something similar. I attended a large state U and I got the most out of smaller lectures/discussions than the large classes with 300 students. FWIW, only the most introductory classes had large head counts. Everything 200 level and above was somewhere between 20-50 students (and most had an associated discussion with 10-15 students, usually led by a grad student, but sometimes the professor).
That's where the value in live classes lies - the interaction with peers and professors. Not the listening to pre-scripted lectures.
OTOH, being able to hit rewind is invaluable. Or hitting rewind, googling a bit, and then continuing. My first online course was Andrew Ngs when he at Stanford, and being able to rewind and google whatever he just said was fantastic. It also meant I could play it at 1.5x speed for the bits I had no trouble with.
If we wanted to make it better to support interactive questions, one could imagine an online system with videos plus "Push now for live help". Or facetime your peers.
I've spent a fair amount of time and energy working and researching in this area. I'd agree with most of what you are saying. To point #1 I worked on a project that had almost the exact same design you mention (collaborate, git versioned edits of learning modules, etc.) - the biggest problem is the mounds and mounds of red tape and regulation that stifle any truly innovative solution. There are some movements for high school materials that are tackling parts of the problem (see: https://www.ck12.org/student/, https://www.khanacademy.org/), but it definitely needs to be on a much larger and national scale and extended to universities. I think, most all undergraduate courses could be done this way. If someone with enough leverage could ever push it through it would virtually completely remove textbook, materials, and lecture costs from the system and if done right, provide a treasure store of knowledge.
To #3, I'm sure there are organizational structures you could implement that would augment every students network - there's a lot of stuff from management science you could try out.
Overall though I found it extremely frustrating trying to innovate in education because you really need to be able to implement radical changes but there are so many regulations at every level that you have to creep forward, hoping for minor incremental improvements when what you need is complete system overhauls. This was extremely frustrating for me.
Could you describe some of the regulations you found burdensome? I work in regulatory compliance (in an unrelated field) and I’m wholly unfamiliar with the requirements for education.
A few months ago I saw a Lambda School tweet with a giant stack of regulatory filings and I’ve been wondering ever since why I don’t hear much about higher ed compliance. It isn’t one of the areas that immediately comes to mind when I think of “highly regulated industries” (banking, insurance, healthcare, etc) but perhaps it should be.
with regard to 2, thats why i used the word flip. i dont think my 1 or 2 are that unique, a lot of it is dreaming of a khan+git+wikipedia.
with regard to 3, i think the larger question is, is that what is best for society? to create elite clubs based on who you know vs merit, capability, output volume etc.
> is that what is best for society? to create elite clubs based on who you know vs merit, capability, output volume etc.
I don't know if finding ways to expand someone's network and connections necessarily means we have to create elite clubs - having networks is vital to success in any way, especially in a system based on merit.
So maybe I was one step ahead of what you were saying. I read it as more along the lines of given the entire set of X people in our education systems, how do we ensure a system that is fair and allows for the maximal human flourishing of each individual member while taking into account our psychology and the negative externalities / side-effects of emergent system dynamics. (Of course this last point, is something we sorely need in many fields - not just education).
Collage is not expensive due to lectures because they don’t actually cost that much.
Let’s say your average class size is 20 people at a good school and a professor costs the school 200k including benefits per year. Assuming a student takes 18 credit hours and a teacher teaches 12 credit hours that balances out to ~15k per year. But, more than 2/3 of what a teacher spends their time on is outside the lecture such as grading assignments etc. So, removing lectures only saves ~5k per year.
Sure the physical room adds a little, but the average teacher is also far less expensive at most schools.
I am not saying the lecture itself is expensive. I am saying the artificial scarcity of everything around higher education keeps people from receiving a certified education that is recognized by the employment marketplace, when at least for undergrad classes, the lecture and the textbook is largely what you need to receive a functioning education.
I think the number of people graduating with a collage degree significantly outstrips the demand for collage degrees. Otherwise you would not see people with collage degrees working retail etc.
Nearly every EE I graduated with, including me, had to give up on our dream of being a hardware engineer because nearly zero hardware companies will hire an EE grad from a mid-level school. They either refuse to hire new grads or only recruit at CMU/Purdue job fairs.
Then you take a software job that's available but not interesting, and you get pidgeonholed into that field. It's not retail but it doesn't seem great for EEs who didn't go to a top-10 school. I'd be very interested to hear any other EE grad's perspective though.
I'm an EE that went to a mid-level state school and got a hardware engineering job out of school; I got lucky that there was a hardware company in town that did a lot of hiring from my school. I had a similar experience applying to other companies before I graduated though, the company I eventually started working for was the only one to ever give me a call back and I think that was only because I was already working there as a software engineering intern ;)
How'd you like it/would you recommend it? I've heard really good things about that program specifically, other than it can be hard to graduate from it.
It is as hard as you want to make it. You have near absolute freedom in the classes you choose to take. I would say it was definitely a worthwhile experience.
It’s a fair point, but colleges also adjust program sizes based on what students chose to study. Just compare CS graduates in 1990 and how fast that grew and shrunk over time.
That's what I meant by my line "just because you pay the membership fee, doesnt mean you actually make the club."
College is selling you the promise of an opportunity to join the club. You pay an application fee, and then you may or may not get into the club. If you don't get in, they keep your application fee, and you have student loans and a degree but no viable networking.
> Theres probably a "best" lecture or lecturer out there for each topic.
This is something I've been thinking about for a while. Let's assume that there is one "best" lecture for a given topic. I think then effort could be spent with smaller study groups where students can have direct access to people who can help them understand the concepts. There is little reason to have so many other different takes unless they add to the universal body of knowledge.
And part of the problem with asking "what's the best lecture on x" is that the replies often come from people who have seen one prestigious lecture, and recommend the one they are familiar with. Popularity breeds popularity. There's a much smaller sample of people who sat through 20-30 of the same lecture series, for the same course, from different professors, and know which parts are the best from which person.
>> The adjunct professors get paid next to nothing. Let's give them a slight raise, fire 90% of the deans
This is where the education industry can learn from the law schools. They are certainly ivory towers, but part of that tradition is that law school deans still ussually teach. My first year contracts prof was also the school dean. Law school deans remain largely 'first among many' rather than a separate profession, the 'professional administrators'.
Law schools are the worst offenders in the education industry. Only a small percentage of law students end up at big law where the salaries can support the debt load, but almost everyone leaves law school with a mountain of debt.
> Law schools are the worst offenders in the education industry.
They also are some of the best too. My wife went to a top-tier school and I remember the controversy when it was discovered that almost 50% of the tuition was actually given to the medical school. The justification was that they were a top school, they would charge what the other top schools charged, and they had a moral imperative to make the medical school as cheap as they could make it. They also guaranteed (in writing) that if any graduate had difficulty paying off student loans, the alumni network would step in and make the payments.
Top-tier law schools get the majority of big law slots and are usually a pretty good balance. Anything outside the top 8-10 law schools and the % of graduates who go on to big law is VERY, VERY, VERY small.
> part of that tradition is that law school deans still ussually teach
At my Uni, the administrators taught bullshit courses on personal development et cetera.
Law schools have a unique culture. Teaching requirements are a product of their "first among equals" attitude, not a cause. Porting the mechanism without the culture is unlikely to solve the problem.
Agreed, sadly the demand is still there. It's so easy to get huge loans and as a result, there is no downward pressure on price. My tiny college had 5 full-time staff for "residence life", plus a dean of that department. Totally unnecessary.
The problem is the loans. I have a funny feeling if loans were capped at say, 10k/year, colleges might all the sudden charge 11k/year to attend instead of 30k...
One of the oddities in the college process is how public universities followed the price increases of their private counterparts. Why weren't state governments able to dictate effective cost controls to keep costs down for residents?
Note that I'm aware of in-state tuition. The main campus of my state university charges 30k/year instate, and 40k/year out of state. Neither number is appropriate in a state with a median household income of 75k, and a median home price of 450k.
Because many (most?) states have been cutting state funding for public universities for years, IIRC. (See, for example, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/most-americans-dont-r...). It wouldn't have been sensible to impose price caps while cutting funding at the same time.
If I’m a Republican legislator and I’m seeing my kids enroll at a state college where gender and queer studies classes are a requirement to get a computer science degree, I’m going to want to defund too. I remember my Republican high school peers arguing with our liberal debate coach, and he’d just laugh and say “wait until you go to college, then you’ll get it”. Sure enough, she went to Harvard Law and became a Democrat. The indoctrination is there and if monetary compensation isn’t the reason professors get into teaching, what is? If you have a mission to “educate young minds” to reject their “problematic” notions, that can be a strong motivator.
There’s a strong culture war aspect to defund colleges, because you’re essentially funding the opposition if you’re a conservative and you’re paying the salaries of the extremely liberal college professors. Then people say obnoxious, arrogant things like “well reality has a liberal bent” and other platitudes to explain away why conservatives voices have been systematically excluded from college campuses over decades.
Perhaps if the conservative voices would stop saying stupid stuff like this, they wouldn't be systematically excluded from the conversation. In my particular subfield of CS, there's a "self-identified conservative" who's been more or less utterly rejected from the community because, in addition to their bonkers political opinions, it turns out they also have bonkers scientific opinions. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that they reject the scientific process. It's hard to find that compatible with doing science. Perhaps I have many secret conservative colleagues in my field, but the only one I've seen is not someone who I would ever wish to collaborate with.
State schools in US are often the best STEM schools.
I have cried myself hoarse on HN trying to make this simple point - but except for Cornell, every Ivy League is ordinary in engineering and the hard sciences.
Harvard is a biomedical behemoth, especially once you include the affiliated hospitals (MGH, Brigham and Women's, Dana Farber, Beth Israel Deaconess, etc) and research institutes (Broad, Roland). Harvard proper and MGH each receive about a half billion dollars a year in NIH funding. These are usually listed separately in those "league tables", but the whole system must bring in nearly $2B/year (out of a total NIH extramural budget of ~$28B).
The other Ivies aren't as big (though not much else is), but all of them have well-regarded medical schools (except for Princeton) and biomedical research programs. Yale, Havard, and Princeton have pretty credible chemistry programs too. Princeton also has the Institute for Advanced Study, which has hosted a crazy number of Nobel/Fields/Wolf/Cole prize winners; it's formally independent but...right there.
It may be debatable how much this matters for undergrad teaching--is it better to have a world-renowned expert or someone invested in teaching?--but for anything involving research (including undergrads), they are definitely way up there.
(No argument that JHU, Stanford, and other places (CMU, UMich, NYU, etc, depending on field) also have intensive research too).
Basically Harvard, and maybe Columbia and that's it. UIUC, Wisconsin-Madison, Berkeley, Michigan-Ann Arbor are orders better schools in the sciences than Dartmouth or Brown.
Once you're at that level, the differences are marginal. It matters if you want to go to graduate school, I suppose, but we're talking about people who just want to get a degree and go into the workforce here. For them, Princeton vs. Michigan won't matter a bit if they're studying to become an engineer.
If you want to study applied math and go into the workforce, then my point still stands, going to Princeton vs. Michigan simply doesn't matter. If you want to go to graduate school, it's unclear if it matters all that much. Princeton tends to draw the most talented young mathematicians in the world, and has for decades. Presumably if a student of that caliber went to Michigan, they would do just as well, because Michigan also has talented mathematicians who do good research and can write good letters of recommendation for graduate school.
Specialty fields yes. But Princeton engineering is ordinary, and the state schools often have exceptional faculty across multiple departments - leading to way more collaborative, cutting-edge work.
The undergraduate students at Dartmouth and Brown are generally much better than the ones at those large publics. The rankings are largely due to the department size and what the professors and their PhD students are publishing.
FWIW, I was a lifelong conservative Republican but in recent years have slowly become a liberal independent (leaning very much Democratic) because of A) the gradual takeover of the GOP by fact-scorning white nationalists who used to be banished to the fringes of the party; and B) what I've experienced and seen in life over the decades, which has made me much more sympathetic to others who didn't get the breaks that I and my ancestors did.
As just one, powerful example: Go visit the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis sometime, at the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. They have life-changing exhibits about the Jim Crow system; about the civil rights era — which I remember from childhood; and especially about slavery. I was fighting back not just tears but sobs. Twenty years ago I scoffed at the idea of reparations for African Americans; now I'm very much open to the idea because of the corrosive compound-interest effect of what was done to their ancestors. To be sure, neither I nor my forebears kept people enslaved, AFAIK — in fact, one of my ancestors was crippled in the Union Army, according to family lore — but all we whites are still benefiting from what was done to the A-As. (Yeah, yeah, I know, other minorities were treated badly too, including some of my recent ancestors; none, none, were treated as badly as enslaved Africans and their descendants.)
Universities are also the place that turn out STEM graduates and Ph.Ds: engineers (the non-software kind, where you actually need and use the education), physicians, scientists and researchers of all flavors (like the kind trying to find a cure for COVID-19), and so forth. These people are the pillars of progress and innovation necessary for a country to be great. Ironically, by defunding universities, culture warrior conservatives are effectively slitting their own country's throat.
(Personally, I had no use for the ideologues either but managed to avoid them by simply not taking any of their classes; foreign language courses are a great way of filling humanities requirements with something actually useful.)
What I read was that the reason for in-state college tuition increasing so much was because of the reduction in property taxes.
Typically property taxes go towards education at the local level, and as property taxes were reduced there would be a shortfall in the budget somewhere. This typically fell on education, which then forced colleges to start raising tuition as there is still a non-zero cost to education.
There was a "print" article about this in the 70's or 80's in a local newspaper in California urging residents to vote NO on lowering property taxes citing the increase in future college education as the main reason. But the vote went through, property taxes were slashed, and then of course ten years later and so forth, tuition had sky rocketed.
Decreasing taxes is like debt. Once you are hooked on it it's hard to go back. Hard to imagine any real states or large communities raising property taxes significantly to actually reinvest in the local community.
In my state, FL, derives most of it's income from sales taxes and fees. Property taxes are really local, down to the county and city.
> Decreasing taxes is like debt. Once you are hooked on it it's hard to go back.
Well some voters see the taxes as an investment in their city and community. My city passed a referendum to back a bond to pay for climate change projects and education programs. The state passed a constitutional change that has made it virtually impossible to raise taxes.
When I look at the midwest and the hollowing out of their cities I have to imagine the tax cuts partially contributed. But at the time they passed the politicians believed they would be a net positive.
It's a delicate balance. Taxes too high will drive businesses away. Taxes too low will reduce communal investment and drive people away.
So, to be clear, price controls never work. Prices are determined (mostly and usually) by supply and demand. More demand -> higher price. More supply -> lower price.
The price of an education (regardless of cost structures, public funding, or whatever) is going to dominated by demand, since supply is relatively fixed. It takes years or decades to increase the supply of qualified instruction following typical university models.
In this case Federal dollars guarantee a massive surplus of demand, while Federal accreditation limits supply (rightly or wrongly).
"Public" schools are paid by students, just like private, as a fee-for-service product. For most educations at most universities, this service is largely indistinguishable. Some of the University income comes from tax offsets, but the product they provide is the same service and on the same market as private universities - fee-based educational services.
The price is therefor entirely determined by the amount of supply (relatively fixed) and the amount of demand for fee-based education. Demand has risen dramatically since WW2 due to a bevvy of Federal programs designed to underwrite and promote post-secondary education.
No amount of legal wrangling or tax-offsetting will defeat that. In fact, by increasing tax-offsets for public universities, the apparent price of the service supplied by public universities drops (relative to the market price), which is a signal to buyers that they should buy MORE of that service. This signal would naturally increase demand until the price of a public education on the market matches the price of the same education at private institutions.
The actual oddity is not that public education pricing keeps rising to private institutional pricing, but that it is not already at the same price.
Prices drive expense-side efficiency. An operation (such as a University) will not be mechanically driven to keep costs significantly lower than income - most are non-profit. There is no reason to "increase margin". Most Universities are already teaching at capacity. Since the price is set by the market, there is no reason to keep prices significantly below the market rate. Instead, the costs associated with an education simply rise to meet whatever revenue can be generated from a fixed pool of buyers. These buyers have virtually no spending limit, since their purchasing is de facto underwritten by enormous Federal programs. The result year-over-year dramatic price increases.
For extra credit, this is largely the same process that drives healthcare pricing in the US. A relatively fixed supply of a specialized service and a price-insensitive buyer pool largely underwritten by massive Federal programs.
> No amount of legal wrangling or tax-offsetting will defeat that. In fact, by increasing tax-offsets for public universities, the apparent price of the service supplied by public universities drops (relative to the market price), which is a signal to buyers that they should buy MORE of that service. This signal would naturally increase demand until the price of a public education on the market matches the price of the same education at private institutions.
This is an interesting claim, because tax-offsets of tuition have been going down over the last 30 years, not up. Look at the percentage of educational costs covered by state general funds in the late 60s compared to today. It's night and day different.
> Prices drive expense-side efficiency. An operation (such as a University) will not be mechanically driven to keep costs significantly lower than income - most are non-profit. There is no reason to "increase margin". Most Universities are already teaching at capacity. Since the price is set by the market, there is no reason to keep prices significantly below the market rate. Instead, the costs associated with an education simply rise to meet whatever revenue can be generated from a fixed pool of buyers. These buyers have virtually no spending limit, since their purchasing is de facto underwritten by enormous Federal programs. The result year-over-year dramatic price increases.
This is a interesting point, but the data doesn't back it up. We have data from the Department of Education on expenditures by universities. It doesn't show dramatic expenditure increases. The prices went up because state legislatures cut higher ed funding, and universities had to raise tuition to balance the books. Here's that data:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_334.10.a...
If you have data showing that universities are spending dramatically more in expenditures on a per-student constant-dollar basis, I'd love to see it.
This is true for free-market goods, however there is no fundamental reason a state run institution should be beholden to such rules. In the case of public transport the state dictates the price and to some extent capacity, and the local authorities find the right set of tradeoffs to make it work ( with mixed results ).
In the case of a state university, it's odd that we don't see at least one example of this approach. Why isn't there an example of a state university with fixed admissions capacity, poor dorm/ student life quality, low cost, but with good academics?
We generally see the same set of tradeoffs across the entire industry with no student cost considerations in university planning to speak of.
If you can figure out the reasons for university price increases, good luck. It's a combination of a variety of things.
One is that increased demand for employers for "certification" of ability pushes demand for degrees among students. Every recession there's articles showing that those with a college degree fare better than those without. We can argue about why that is, but that's what the average 17 yo sees, along with their parents, and they don't want to be left behind, regardless of the details.
Another is that loans basically prop that up and facilitate it. So schools don't lose money on people who say "I can't afford it" because they find a way.
Another is the increasing administrative bloat at universities, which are now largely run like for-profit institutions even when they are not on paper. I think this is similar to a lot of fields, but my sense is that (based on personal experience) things are much more hierarchical now, with more of a focus on exploiting the university for personal gain than anything else. So administrative salary costs, and administrative costs in general, drive up the need for costs.
The public colleges have to compete for private colleges for faculty, administrators, etc. which then increases their costs, which then drives them to bigger need for more tuition.
At the same time, states have been cutting their funding. If they cut funding and unis have all these fixed costs, where else are they supposed to get money from?
A major dynamic between public universities in the US and political circles in the last couple of decades has been an increasing pressure for them to operate as revenue generating, profit-making institutions in every aspect. At the state level, the idea is that their role is to bring in money, at less cost (an alternative is to see them as providing a service to the state and country -- can you imagine wanting K-12 schools to be treated as profit-making ??? ). As a result, what we've ended up with are institutions with a lot of profit-seeking administrators, pyramid schemes, taking advantage of federal funding loopholes at every chance to bring in money, etc.
Public universities should be able to offer a good value to students, but they're being run as profit centers. If you think of it that way, it's no surprise tuition isn't competitive.
Also have you seen how much reporting requirements have increased for faculty? How much paperwork is needed for grants?
Just today there was a story I read about a Georgia Tech professor who is under federal investigation for misrepresentation on her continuing NSF grant. And the money involved was $40,000. And one of her defenses is that Georgia Tech provided very little secretarial services to her. Which may very well be true.
Everyone cribs about increased administrative bloat at universities, but given how massively paperwork requirements have ballooned, nobody is willing to point the figure also at that. Universities are hiring more admin because professors are often overwhelmed with paperwork nowadays.
This is all true. The cost of research is high. And although there are some additional costs involved in educating a more broad student body, it's nothing compared to the disinvestment in higher ed by state governments. Here's the ed department's data on expenditures. It doesn't show huge increases:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_334.10.a...
I don’t think secretarial services would help with misrepresentation.
And how much more help would she need?
Georgia Tech has really high admin costs with fees per semester above $1000. That’s just the explicit fees and doesn’t include the admin costs that are included in tuition.
And how much "advice" to they give? When I went, the only time you had to talk to your advisor, was once a semester for them to rubber stamp your approval for major-only classes (which the official advisors would defer to in-major professors). Beyond that, you were free to talk to advisors on an as needed basis. There role was essentially to be a primary point of contact for students. Why shouldn't a student have multiple advisors. If she has a problem/question with her honors program, ask the honors advisor. If she has a general administrative question, go to the general advisor.
Our entire math department was served by two advisors who likely also had non advising administrative duties.
My honors advisors were just the main faculty of my honors program.
I don't think I ever spoke to my official CS advisor.
As a professor who is also a major advisor, I cost nothing, because I'm not paid separately to advise. On the other hand, given the corresponding emphasis on training and evaluation of advising (not much, although our department and college are working to get better at it), my advising is probably worth about what I'm paid for it.
> I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me how 15K+ in tuition a year is acceptable.
I believe people who support such things think as follows:
1. $15k a year tuition for 4 years is a great deal if it turns you into a banker or programmer with a $150,000 a year salary and a 40-year career. Indeed, it would be unjust for a garbage man's taxes to be paying for a stockbroker's education.
2. Majoring in poetry might not be such a clearly great decision, but if you're on the left politically, banning poetry is anti-intellectual; and if you're on the right market demand is its own justification.
It's not unjust if that garbageman went to university too, or at least had the same opportunity. Society is better off with better educated citizens. It's why we have free public schooling up through the age of 18; many other countries simply carry that farther.
On the poetry point specifically, I really think writing degrees in general would be more successful if they were granted by trade schools (i.e. a focus on doing the thing, not a focus on academic scholarship about the thing).
> It's why we have free public schooling up through the age of 18; many other countries simply carry that farther.
To be fair, we also have compulsory schooling for that period as well, and it makes complete sense to use tax revenue to pay for something the same government is making you do.
Note that I don't oppose the use of tax revenue to fund voluntary education, and I personally benefited heavily from it. Its just that using the example of the government paying for something it made mandatory is not much of an argument in itself for having it pay for something that is voluntary.
There are scores of government services that aren't compulsory/universal though. I don't think that's a key differentiator. And there's plenty of things the government makes you do that they don't pay for, either.
> Indeed, it would be unjust for a garbage man's taxes to be paying for a stockbroker's education.
Education and improving society floats all boats, just as the garbage man is dependent on people generating trash. Stocks fund companies that employ people who generate trash. That was a very narrow, short-sighted analysis of tax policy.
Said 150k a year for 40 years generates more in taxes than the up front cost of the education, so said investment makes sense in terms of the public good.
With loans, the govt both makes a return on the interest AND a lifetime increase in net tax revenues.
Value of a college education goes beyond salary, and ideally creates a better informed citizenry.
Garbage men in major cities make more than $100,000/year, not including benefits and pension (if they're part of a unionized workforce). Don't be concerned about the garbage man's taxes paying for the stockbroker's education.
> I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me how 15K+ in tuition a year is acceptable.
My town currently spends about $12,635 per pupil for public schools. Other towns in the state spend over $20k. Compared to that, $15k tuition seems right in line.
I do think there's an argument to made that college should be cheaper (at least excluding housing and other secondary costs) than K-12 given that K-12 has a bunch of mandatory cost centers like special education (which is to say dealing with kids who destroy classrooms, abusive parents, etc.), that class size can be larger in college, that students in college (at least excluding community college) should be above the average in K-12, time in classroom per student/semester is lower, etc.
But the salary of the faculty is more expensive, at least on a per instructor basis. Although maybe you need fewer instructors. And facilities will cost more. You're not likely to have a nano-technology lab at your K-12 school.
I think university could be cheaper than it is today, but probably not much cheaper than K-12.
Frankly education is too cheap, which is why people are getting crappy outcomes and then debating on it.
The idealized form of studying is education with mentoring, see Blooms 2 sigma results.
But that is too expensive, who wants to have that number of teachers ! It would cost a fortune!
So instead people try to cut costs, and or keep making it a discussion on price, since this is America, instead of just making colleges public and free.
There’s a bit of a rat race in colleges posturing to get ahead of each other always, and that takes capital investment and the recourse to raise funds ends up being tuition.
These things and reputations take years and tons of willpower and planning, so the risk of falling behind is immense.
If only we were somehow able to remove the ability to peacock and ensure everyone going through the system got a good education.... then rich people and employers would have much less to work with in terms of picking candidates based on school "reputation".
> If only we were somehow able to remove the ability to peacock and ensure everyone going through the system got a good education
Good professors are rare. Good classmates are rare. Distributed education lets benefits from the former scale, albeit with degradation. There is no known way to scale access to the network of a good college experience.
Education quality varies with respect to both of the above. As a result, there is a scaling limit. As a result, there will be scarcity until the preconditions are solved or the scaling limits released.
One solution I heard is changing the loan requirement to be a fixed price sole payment accepted with zero required additional bundling. They can have scholarships but none of this "must stay in our dorms the first year and meal plan, books must be bought from here now suddenly several thousand each" mark up smuggling opportunity bullshit. So there would be a driven for efficiency. You want federal money for education? It is accept $35K/yr per student or get bent.
There would be fine tuning in the numbers and parameters but that would kill price as a signal as a good thing as it forces either public rates or exorbitant private school which thinks they can actually make more without the massive prime consumer pool.
Your source says "athletic departments", not football or basketball programs, which is an important distinction. Football and basketball are the only money-makers (I think hockey or baseball make money at a few schools), and all of the other sports drag down the athletic departments budget.
That's also ignoring that FBS is basically advertising. There's been a steady increase in applications (and subsequently an increase in average GPA and similar numbers) at University of Alabama under Nick Saban, and I know I would have been less likely to go to Virginia Tech if it wasn't for their football program drawing me in when I was in middle/high school.
Jim Calhoun and Geno Auriemma did more to take the University of Connecticut to national prominence than 100 deans. And Auriemma did it by excellence in a non-revenue sport.
While Mark Few at Gonzaga made the NCAA tournament 20 years in a row, this small Jesuit school in Spokane doubled the number of applicants, increased the proportion of students from outside Washington, increased incoming student test scores and dramatically grew the endowment.
It depends on the school which means maybe some schools should not have sports teams? How crazy is it to think that a school should be focused on education and not go into debt to finance extracurriculars.
Big brand name schools that are regularly competing at top level in sports are usually seeing huge financial surplus due to sports.
15k in just tuition does not seem outrageous.
Suppose a year is 30 weeks, and you spend 10 hours a week in classes (not even counting the other benefits that college/a college campus may offer), thats about 50 dollars/hr you're spending for lecture. For some classes/fields it's clearly a much better deal. But 40k+ in tuition? Yea agreed, that's pretty outrageous.
maybe the dept of education should stipulate that 80% of college operating budgets be direct teaching/research costs, lest their fed loan largess be taken away. and progressively tax endowments, particularly targeting above a threshold of $100K/student or something like that.
currently, the incentives are such that greedy people can just milk all the unrestrained cash flow coming into what should be a non-profit-oriented institution.
Honestly, those endowments are part of why some schools like my alma mater are able to offer a no-loan commitment for need-based aid. Now, those calculations are still awfully rough on many middle class families, they tend to overestimate family contributions, but they're still really helpful for a lot of students.
that's a tried-and-true sales trick--inflate the price and then offer a discount. calibrate your discount to extract maximum economic value from each customer individually.
it's best if schools have to compete on price vs. value, and for students to leave school with a little debt to know the value of what they bought. it's when both price and debt are unconstrained that you need such tricks in the first place.
Relatively few people can go to a school with endowment subsidized tuition. The ivys only started doing it because it looked bad for them to be sitting on piles of money and only allowing wealthy elites to attend.
Not sure, but of the 44,965 being spent per student, only 7,219 is going to salaries and wages of the instructors (2016-17). Seems like an awful lot of overhead in there somewhere.
Funding is created for college places. Enough to "educate" 30% of people. People start to go.
Employers for very basic jobs notice that 50% of applicants have degrees. They stipulate on their next job advertisement "degree required".
The bar has been raised. You now cannot get an interview without a degree in many jobs.
You have to get a degree. The financiers start to loan more and more for this now essential ticket.
Universities start charging more. Student's entire working lives are financialised, as the debt will take a lifetime to repay.
University is not set by the cost to deliver, it's set by the available credit.
Same for housing.
But hey keep on focusing on your "right to free speech" that every single other nation has but without a brutal police force that Europeans look upon with horror.
A couple of points: not all colleges are created the same. Many state schools, particularly top-tier ones offer fantastic educations at an excellent price-point. They are a good value, and will remain so. Along with need-based aid and scholarships, they are amazing vehicles to reduce generational inequality (look at UCLA for example). I can only speak to the engineering (not software) side of things, but from lab work to project-based design classes, I gained skills, knowledge and experience from well-trained instructors in a way that I think would be very difficult to begin to replicate in a remote experience.
Many, if not most students, can't learn effectively by themselves through online videos alone. Structure, assessments and regular interaction with teaching staff have real, measurable value.
Finally, the social networks that universities provide students and alumni are valuable. We're social beings. These networks open students to possibilities and careers they may not have considered. Of course, there are negatives to this as well.
Universities remain economic engines, particularly across wide swaths of semi-rural parts of the country. They create dynamic flows of people, ideas and capital that are undeniably important.
I would personally consider the education I received in UC Berkeley when I was there studying CS, excellent. It was very challenging (in a way, it's impossible to exaggerate this), I found tons of help from TAs, my peers, professors were experts in their fields, labs were very useful to make me experience "real life" stuff and discussions were very useful to learn "theory" side of things, both of these occurring in the same class. I had a lot of research opportunities, and "hand-on" engineering opportunities.
The only problem I can think of right now, it was occasionally hard to get the class you want; but with a few strategies it was manageable to get all the classes you want.
I hear a lot of people who criticize college being "4 years of fun". I don't doubt this is the case for most people, but this cannot be further than my own experience (and my friends in Berkeley who studied some STEM field). When you have endless stream of homeworks, projects, midterms and often-times you need to make decisions so that you minimize the penalty you can get by spending too little time on a HW (as opposed to maximizing your grade), there was simply not enough time to socialize. Obviously there were many people who socialized and partied but their GPAs were low. Also obviously, there were people who socialized and partied also had high grades, but they were very brilliant and were probably 0.1% of the class. Most of us mere mortal souls spent weeks in library studying and perfecting ourselves.
We can have endless discussions about importance (or lack thereof) universities, but given the correct setting, and correct motivation, they can be incredibly good tools.
When I came to Berkeley my family was piss poor and I was a 1st generation college student. Fast-forward 3 years (I graduated in 3 years as opposed to 4) I found a 6 figure job doing what I love every day, programming. I think that's a very good deal.
Controversial claim ahead: I think this discussion about universities' importance is uniquely American. I think we're simply discussing the wrong thing. Instead of questioning whether college is important for X, Y, we should be discussing how we can make every single American go to college. Yes this would mean having public universities where Americans can go without any cost, European style.
I just don't agree we should be discussing how every American can go to college.
I am a drop out. I really had no business ever going to college in the first place.
I love what I do now but I had to figure things out on my own.
Free college would have just been more free party time for me. You can run it a 1000 times and every time I am partying.
What we need to do is make sure people like you don't put off college because it becomes too pricey.
I also think I would have figured things out sooner if I would not have been pushed so hard by all these signals as a young man that college was a given.
> I think we're simply discussing the wrong thing. Instead of questioning whether college is important for X, Y, we should be discussing how we can make every single American go to college.
Or we could help most people learn valuable skills in their first 13 years of schooling, so the only people who need/want to go to college are those who will actually benefit.
"Like pretty much every everything about schooling in the US ever, it assumes that what schools do – and all that schools do – is educate. [...] The fact of the matter is our primary school system is state-subsidized childcare for the vast majority of parents who cannot afford to raise their own children in our ghastly economy. That's been the case for the last 40-plus years. This isn't new, and if it's news to you, o reader, it's only because nobody much in the US has wanted to admit this evidence of the US economy being terrifyingly more broken than we Americans are prepared to confront."
While I appreciate that public schools are supposed to serve the interests of the public, the standard factory school model isn't doing anyone any favors.
The United States' College/University system is a much more valuable institution than the K-12 as commonly exists today.
The only reform really needed for K-12 is to transform it into an institution that exists to help children figure out what they're good at, and provide the resources to help them learn what they want to learn.
That sounds like masochism. I went to a decent public school, worked hard sometimes, partied whenever, and yet I work for the same kind of company as you. A good 25% of my class ended up the same way.
If your goal is to make money, then I don't think hard work matters nearly as much as figuring out the social aspect of how to fit in with working professionals.
That's true. My point was college isn't necessarily 4 years of chilling and partying for everyone, which is weirdly how everyone I talk about seems to frame this debate. Some of my elders don't even believe college wasn't 7/24 frat parties, ideological indoctrination and protesting.
EDIT: Also, to be clear, masochism was part of the problem. In college I thought I wanted to be a professor so I was working hard for grad school so I can get into a good PhD program. I was also doing a lot of research. Then I realized I liked being an engineer, and I don't have money to go to PhD. I DEFINITELY didn't need a near 4.0 GPA and taking ALL the hardest CS/engineering/math classes to get a six figures job.
I agree, as a Tier-1 dev. I went to a Tier-1 university and wouldn’t discount universities in Tiers 1-2 for the research, lectures, and resources they provide, in addition to the serendipitous environment where you will bump into other top-talent people.
Below Tier 2 I would support online learning to an extent, but having regular lectures and group work is important to keep an 18 year old on track. Universities need to instead cut superfluous spending on sports programs, new buildings, and layers of administration.
> the social networks that universities provide students and alumni are valuable
Colleges say this, but does anybody ever really find it to be the case? I suppose if you went to Harvard or Princeton this might be true, but as a representative of the other 90%, I've never interacted with anybody I went to school with (including a year abroad, a four-year degree, and a master's degree) in any way.
===== UNIVERSITY AND ITS SOCIAL BENEFIT: my experience ======
I'm a Dutch person who went to both universities in Amsterdam.
I know people who now work at:
- McKinsey
- Google
- Adyen (not anymore)
- The Dutch television
- The biggest Dutch bank
Don't get me wrong. It's hard to get a job that I want, because apparently I can't get a job at those great companies (prepping hardcore for Google at the moment, so who knows). And I'm not utilizing my network in the right way. But I do get to get a glimpse inside some of them.
Besides that, I have met a person who helped me a shit ton financially, spiritually and intellectually. I've done the same for him (though less financially, unfortunately, but if the roles were reversed, I'd have done what he did). While he never went to a big name company, it definitely helped (more than anything else really).
Did I count on it? No. Did I meet him during the first day of uni? Actually, seven days prior to the first day of uni (1 week non-stop partying first).
So there's that.
===== THE UNIVERSITY EXPERIENCE =====
Also, I've experienced more or less everything a university has to offer, doing 2 bachelors and 2 masters + extracurriculars + student societies help with that.
In a big way it did mature me a lot. I was different than most though, in the sense that I always did multiple studies and things at once. I wasn't beholdened to one "student identity". I was never a psychology or CS student, I was always both or more.
In all fairness, high school was simply a prison. University felt more like a city, anything was possible. And more or less everything did come true.
Here's a small selection:
- Horrible education
- The best spiritual lessons that any other person could ever teach me. The course was called: meditation and psychology, and it was a 75:25 mix of theology (Buddhism during the centuries, emphasizing meditation) and psychology/cognitive science of meditation. Before this course I had issues with meditation. After this course, I knew how to deal with all of them despite that they were never directly addressed.
- The most epic parties,
- And some pretty boring ones
- Easy yet super interesting lessons, one was about the supply chain of a video game
- Hard lessons that weren't useful and simply wasted time
- Education that made me believe I was too stupid, only to persevere and realize that, to my surprise, there is no such thing. There is only perserverance, for my situation anyway. That was really empowering. What's currently less empowering is that potential employees don't seem to understand this.
- Fickle friendships
- Deep friendships
- Shallow loves
- 3+ year relationships
- Lots of wasted opportunity costs
- Amazing synergies that proppeled my education and job prospects (currently definitely not though)
Don't get me started on my 5 theses. To close, it was everything: epic, painful, mundane, joyful, sad, enriching, numbing, stimulating. I can keep on going, I'll stop.
-----------------
For anyone who's interested, here's how they went:
- One master thesis was written in a weekend, published nominated for best paper award.
- Another master thesis took 6 months and completely failed (I'm not the best at qualitative research)
- My computer science thesis was the culmination of all my theses and it showed. It took a bit longer than normal and I had an attitude with academic references across the whole spectrum of science and philosophy (not that I know that much, I'm simply more T-shaped than most academics)
- One bachelor thesis that was absolute horrible to do, we were basically unpaid labor. I wrote the thesis itself in 5 days, and was done with it.
- My first bachelor thesis, that was an absolute blessing. In hindsight: a perfect thesis experience. It took 3 months (as it should) and I got an amazing result (I analyzed 12 million tweets and hypothesized that 70% to 95% must be positive, I was right with 84.5%). The algorithm was simple but benchmarked very well against sophisticated ones. It was awesome.
I think it's time to decouple education from all of the other things tied to colleges. When I studied abroad in Australia, things like the gym or meal plans were available, but not "bundled in" to your tuition. The idea of tying competitive sports teams to a university would be laughable.
We need to remove all of the "excess" stuff from higher education and get back to the core of education and research. Sure, things like football might be net profitable (for some schools), but lacrosse, baseball, swimming, gymnastics and all of that are not and students shouldn't be paying for that.
This is essential. The state university my partner attended and worked at became, over the years, more similar to a theme park or all-inclusive resort than an educational institution. They were involved in everything from student banking, fast-food franchises, high-end gyms, suites instead of dorms, and on it went. Not saying these things have no place, just that it shouldn't be part of the university.
And that's the problem. Malcolm Gladwell has a great podcast about this focusing on Bowdoin college. Bowdoin (apparently) spends a lot of money on luxuries like great food for the dorms, etc.
As a result, the rich kids who can afford it naturally prefer to go to Bowdoin. Now, the school becomes more prestigious because of the rich kids... it's a place to go to meet other rich kids, which builds valuable connections that ultimately help your career. Meanwhile, schools that prioritize financial aid over things like gyms and food go down in the rankings and become less desirable.
Now, this is all fair game in my opinion. The schools are basically turning into country clubs of a sort and I think country clubs have a right to exist in America. BUT... I don't want to see them subsidized by the rest of us. If you are a school and you want to receive state/federal money directly or via student loans and you want to maintain your non-profit status... scale down the amenities.
At the very least, I don't want tax breaks going to subsidize (mostly) rich kids' gyms.
No, especially not football. At my college the football team is essentially a separate corporation. The college gets nothing from the arrangement. In fact they have to rent parking from the football folk.
Fat deal were made to coaches over the years, until its all pork-barrel dealing and nothing left for the school. The students can't even go to games, the ticket prices are a semester's tuition.
Pre-1990 I read this quote from a college president: "College administration boils down to sex for the students, football for the alumni, and parking for the faculty."
Given the similarity of your description to my own alma mater, I can virtually guarantee that that football program is self-sufficient, and probably raises your university's profile. They couldn't charge that much for tickets otherwise. So I don't really see the harm.
I've volunteered at a summer youth leadership camp held at a local state university since 1998. In the last 10 years the host university has undertaken massive construction of more "luxury appointed" dorms, recreational complexes, a huge basketball arena, and upscale dining halls. The justification was that it was necessary to do these things to compete with other colleges. I can't say that I've followed the cost of their tuition and fees, but given the amount of money spent on construction I can't imagine the curve is flat.
I won't dispute that students will pay. I think it is predatory, though, on the part of the colleges.
I'd argue students, by and large, don't have the maturity to make such consequential financial decisions (taking on loans representing multiple years of their future gross income that can't be discharged in bankruptcy). The average young person just hasn't had the duration of life experience to think on a 10+ year horizon. (Arguably a shortcoming of humanity in general.)
I went to Purdue. At Purdue, athletics and student housing/dining are entirely separate divisions from the academic side of the university. Each of those divisions is required to be self supporting without needing aid from tuition dollars.
That being said, a mandatory part of tuition is funding for the student gym. I think it came out to be something like $100/student/semester which I'd consider reasonable.
Any individual cost looks justifiable. But they add up. And ultimately, students pay for many of them. With a gym, especially, you can make it optional and charge students who want it. That's the model in many other countries. Similarly, the school newspaper, political clubs, other student activities all get funded from somewhere.
I always found the US model of colleges so outlandishly short-sighted. Problems of non-bankruptcy and wage slavery are just the very apparent outcomes that you would have a system like this.
"Free" education is the only thing that separates us from a dystopian society of social immobility. And hence people in US defend it.
I came from poor background and the fact that Uni education is free allowed me to, first of all, receive it, and also take risks that I wouldn't be able to do if I had to repay a 100k+ loan. These kinds of risks are what in essence allow social class movement, otherwise, we are talking about more comfortable wage-slavery.
On the other hand, belief in higher education wanes, people question if degrees like philosophy are "useful" (whatever that means) and then question why voters have no critical thinking to decide their own future.
I would love to see if there is historical data supporting my intuitive belief that free access to higher education made significant differences in the advancement of otherwise similar nations. USA is throwing its education down the drain and the decay is already visible.
I grew up in the States and live in the Netherlands now. I can see this truth, but the Americans don't understand.
I want to take citizenship in a couple years... my family doesn't understand. The cultural rot is obvious to me. I hope simply that the country survives without violent conflict. It seems like it would have had to be saved ten years ago.
I don't think anyone has to take a 100k loan to pay for college in the US. There are many many many colleges that are cheaper than that and there's a HUGE variety in financial aid that can make college free.
The 100k is over 4 years and tends to be mostly from "room and board" costs rather than the actual cost of credits. So the courses might be 10k a year and housing is 15k, for example.
College isn't as appealing as it once was. In order to participate in the economy, we need a well-paying job. We're told to get a well-paying job, we need a good degree. To get a good degree, many of us have to go into debt. We finish college with a good degree but are saddled with thousands of dollars of debt (sometimes tens of thousands). And this college debt doesn't go away if we go bankrupt. It will always follow us. So, while we're trying to pay back our debt for a good degree for a dream to live well in this life, we also have to pay for our housing, to live, to eat, etc. It makes it so hard to save up for a house or anything permanent. Everything always seems precarious because it is. We're precarious. What's the point of a college degree if we're going to be in debt while working after getting the degree? Might as well skip the whole college part.
> What's the point of a college degree if we're going to be in debt while working after getting the degree? Might as well skip the whole college part.
A bachelor's degree serves as a barrier of entry for many roles outside of IT. Historically the pay gap between the jobs you can get without, and what you make after clearing this barrier, made up for the initial investment rather quick. Now that there are diminishing returns on that investment, you need to optimize on a case by case basis. Does your chosen profession allow other paths to high paying jobs? Can you get the degree with less investment using less costly credit hours (community college first, then state university)? Is the peer group and the resulting network formed after attending college valuable enough to boost your career 5 years later? There are not that many well paying jobs accessible without a degree, I think cost optimization is worth it in the long run instead of not going to college at all.
I think the level of economic anxiety (precariousness) people have is one of the biggest mental health risks in the US. It lowers people's ability to perform cognitive tasks and results in more bad decisions.
in states with good public universities, the best value is 2 years at a good community college, then 2 years at the state school. even 2 years at a good state university is getting ridiculously expensive ($60K+).
From others experience it's 2 years at good community college and 2.5-3 years at the good state university. I've yet to see state college take all the credits from a transfer.
admittedly i don't have first-hand experience in this, but my understanding from friends & family here in CA is that limiting time at a state university to 2 years (and sometimes less) is entirely possible, with some planning.
the confounding factor for young adults, i suppose, is that it's hard to be certain enough about future interests amid all the possibilities not yet forgone to stay the course without (understandable) alteration (i changed course a few times in college myself).
UIUC is 25k a year just tuition and fees. Expensive college town room & board plus opportunity cost of education instead of working easily gets you to 30k a year.
The legislature passed a budget every year under Rauner, he refused to sign it because he wanted anti-union runners. Agreed it's been a long time coming though, definitely not just Rauner's fault.
Certainly not an option for everyone, but a ton of people in my state school class still lived at home. A good percentage could have lived at home but chose not to.
It's also hard for me to include housing because you'd need housing no matter what path in life you choose.
It’s too bad college has become so transactional. Not judging — there’s a lot of wealth inequality in the world, and the vast majority of people don’t have the luxury.
But there’s another aspect to college — the friendships, the discovery, finding interests, finding yourself.
These aspects have gone to the wayside, because for the majority of people there’s just not enough money to justify this. It feels similar to the cuts to art and music in lower schools - “what good are those programs for getting a job?”
The fairly recent law that you cannot bankruptcy out of a college load caused all this.
- Lenders are willing to lend to anyone knowing they will HAVE to pay.
- Colleges over-inflated costs, way beyond inflation
- It balanced out to this shit.
In the past, colleges had to be careful, and so did lenders, because lots of people just didn't go to college due to cost. So they had to sell their worth.
Well.. the problem is how can lenders "be careful" when loaning to an 18 year old, which we can call an adult all we want but an 18 year old on their way to college is basically a grown child with no money.
So how can a lender protect themselves? Make a parent with enough money co-sign? Then you are essentially systematically not giving loans to poor people.. and only giving "loans" to kids with parents who have money.
Anyway I do think it's a complicated problem.. we want to be able to give loans to basically anyone so they can go to school; but if they are loaning to people who by definition have no assets how can a lender protect itself without essentially discriminating against the poor?
I think it is not that complicated. In any case, there should be risk management involved. If you have a parent with enough money, make them co-sign.
If you come from a not so wealthy background, then you only get a loan for a program that has a higher earnings potential than what you put in. I mean come on, Williams College, the supposedly best liberal arts school in the country has a "median" graduating salary of 58k, and this number does not include the possibility that you could graduate with a major no one wants to hire. 1 year of cost of just tuition and room and boarding is 74k. This does not include other costs like health insurance, books, and other equipment, extra living costs. You add this up, you can easily run up the bill to 400k. You seriously think a person should be able to get this loan to graduate in "Arabic Studies"? I mean I am sorry that people come from a poor background (me included), but taking out that 400k loan without any checks and balances seems irresponsible.
Well, I think part of the solution is to require schools to provide an option for payments to be a fixed percentage of wages after graduation for a set number of years. Everyone's interests are then aligned, and the school now has to bear some of the risks, and also gains some potential upside if their students regularly command high wages. It's obviously not that simple, but schools like Purdue (Back a Boiler) have working systems in place.
Right, it's a weird situation, where lenders don't want someone going into bankruptcy right out of college when they have nothing to lose. But preventing loans from being discharged in bankruptchy has created the perverse dynamic where it's made the cost of college very inelastic and almost predatory.
Also, the best thing (for banks) is that since the borrower can't discharge the loans in bankruptcy, the banks have the borrower's entire working life to garnish wages and levy penalties.
It's amazing how few people recognize this. Unintended consequences of government policy in both cases. "Everyone deserves a home" said GW back in the early 2000s. We've now seen the exact same thing play out in the education system. Of course as soon as the government gets in the business of providing/guaranteeing loans, the cost of tuition skyrockets. Why wouldn't they raise prices?
Not all colleges are the same. For example, at the UW-Madison, over half the students leave with do debt at all. There is a Bucky tuition promise so that any low-income person will have college paid for in entirety.
All of the negative comments on here treat "college" as if it is one unified thing, when in fact the experiences across institutions (both educationally, as well as financially) are quite different.
All of that said, to those who say "free college": try telling that to a person in the middle of the state, who has never been to Madison, has never had a kid go to Madison, and who has to pay their tax dollars to support the University. It is a hard sell. Sure, it'd be great if people were willing to support colleges so that they were free. But the taxpayers, by and large, aren't.
> try telling that to a person in the middle of the state, who has never been to Madison, has never had a kid go to Madison, and who has to pay their tax dollars to support the University. It is a hard sell.
Everyone wins some and loses some with government spending. But overall as a collective group, the idea is that the group is better off (e.g. a more educated population produces greater amounts of valuable work which raises the standard of living for everyone, etc.).
E.g., the massive amount of money that is redirected from productive cities into relatively unproductive rural counties, many of which subsist on jobs that would not exist without superfluous military bases, over-incarceration, massive farm subsidies, or, yes, branch campuses of state university systems. This happens at the state level too. Many of our state’s rural school districts are almost entirely funded by redistributed taxes. Because their local populations won’t even pass no-tax-increase no-debt-load-increase bond issues to fix roofs.
Hopefully work from home will take off and rural communities/states will find a way to become more productive.
Even if there are multiple ways to avoid crazy student debt, the existence of crazy student on a society-wide basis produces social and financial distortions that everyone should be worried about.
This is where the continental european model of the university is so much better than the anglo-american one.
Universities should be about coursework and research, that's it. Dorms, dining halls, gyms, social clubs, sports etc. are not part of the university's mission
I went to university in Germany (ME, Stuttgart) my kids are attending public universities in Oregon. I get exactly what you're saying, when I walk across the OSU campus I'm amazed at how beautiful everything is made for the students life. THe flipside is that many labs are underequipped. We have to face the fact that colleges in the US are providing lifestyle at least as much as education. However, when kids and parents pick colleges they decide it's worth it, otherwise everyone would be going to community colleges.
Many, many students choose those schools specifically because of the 'lifestyle' they offer. You are solidly correct.
What everyone seems to be missing in this thread is that those things only exist because people want them. I work for a bare-bones community college. We're less than 1/8th the cost of the closest large state school. And people choose to go there, and pay 8x more than they would at our institution because of dorm life, student life, and club opportunities.
Like it or don't, schools are only responding to what students want. There is obviously bloat in administration at schools - anywhere with a bureaucracy will (in my opinion) have that. But all of the other 'fun' things are because some students made a stink about wanting them.
I've never understood why students would even want the college to be so involved in their student life. Allocate some buildings to the student body, get them to organise themselves and throw a bit of a cash at them. I think that's a good balance. I studied at a university with quite a focus on "college life" and it was nice to feel part of something but we didn't need to organise our social lives.
> I've never understood why students would even want the college to be so involved in their student life.
If I understand the American system, there is pressure from parents as well. The students might not want the college to be so involved in their student life, but many parents would be unwilling to allow their children to attend an institution that is not highly focused on keeping them safe, to the point of treating adults as children. Rules requiring you to live on campus for the first 1–2 years, college-organized sober social activities, mental-health personnel on university staff, etc. is all meant to say “See, parents, your kid is safe with us.”
This is not the point of the parent post. Extravagant expenditures on dining halls do little for safety. Competitive sports are a net negative for safety.
A large number of european (as well as japanese) cities are very safe. Also, university students are adults.
> Extravagant expenditures on dining halls do little for safety.
Parents are worried that their children might struggle to nourish themselves without the college or university seeing to their meals. Once all institutions have come to offer some form of meals on campus, individual institutions can then stand out from the crowd and attract students’ interest and parents’ approval by boasting more elaborating dining halls than other places.
> A large number of european (as well as japanese) cities are very safe.
Of course. But the issue here is that fretful American parents assume that anywhere their little darlings go off to will be unsafe, and their children shouldn't be left all on their own.
Does this have anything to do with 21 being a significant age? I understood that from 18 in the U.S. you were legally an adult but there seemed to be a bit of a blurry period up to 21. That seems less of a thing in the UK.
21 is the legal age to drink alcohol in the United States. Yes, really. The management of 18-21 year olds as if they were children is primarily to keep them from having a beer or two.
I think it's often the parents who are buying into these things. Meal plans and dining halls are so popular because parents think their kids can't possibly cook for themselves or walk 10 minutes to eat out (at least that's my perception in a college city with lots of options to eat out, most of them cheaper & better than meal plan).
This adds up to $16.15. That hamburger isn't very filling (between Whopper and Whopper Jr.), especially if you still operate on a teenaged metabolism. Add a fries to it, or do what I did and get a $2 salad from the salad bar. At 39¢ to the ounce, it's a cheaper option to maximize nutrition. Sometimes they have leftover salmon, flaked.
Okay, that's the expensive meal plan. You get five days of those, not seven. This is on the maximum dining dollar plan of $3800. You do not get a discount. One dollar in is one dollar spend.
But you can't afford the full plan. The other option – and you have to pick one, they're mandatory for on campus residents – is "worth" two meals a day, five days. You need to stretch it out.
It's not enough. If you don't do the accounting and budget beforehand, you will run out. If you don't supplement with ramen, you will run out. If you want a snack every now and then, you will run out.
Also, you don't have a kitchen in the residential halls. I hope you have a friend in an apartment or with access to the rare communal kitchens [1], since you otherwise can't cook, and must eat.
Oh, and as of winter quarter 2019, they started using scales to measure everything, down to the last noodle.
Panda Express doesn't do that, by the way. You get filling meals at only a slight premium, though I can't remember the price off the top of my head. The real value option is Subway, which costs $6.99 for the footlong of the day, including tax, and each is good for 1.5-2 meals with more or less balanced nutrition. If you somehow have a stove, a pre-packaged two-pack of Tikka Masala from Costco runs at around $3.50/meal, plus rice, and takes less time than the cross-campus dining hall roundtrip.
Fortunately, for 2019-2020, they increased the maximum package to 5100, which helps those who have financial aid. This doesn't reduce the daily cost, however.
People universally get the lowest dining plan allowed by HDH. It's just cheaper to go to the vendors, even with the invisible on-campus price hike.
[1]: The price of access to a communal res hall kitchen is fire alarms at 3 AM during finals week.
I'm from a european uni and in first year fire alarms where frequent. I don't understand why this is the case, since these fires are never serious, and the repeated false alarms result in them being ignored. This was even an issue in a real fire at Manchester Uni, since a number of students simply ignored the alarm.
Yep at MIT it's also pretty pathetic - most dorms have dining halls instead of kitchens, and living in a dining hall dorm requires you to be on a meal plan. These meals somehow cost around ~$14 per meal. And apparently MIT dining is still millions of dollars in debt... I truly don't understand.
Where I went there was a very strong fear that the students might socialize with people in the town and get influenced by them. The university had a bunch of rules in place to prevent this, they knew who they were selling to.
I disagree with you, however one aspect of the continental European model that I admire is the close integration between post-secondary education and industry. One of my cousins - who studied and now lives in Germany - did his Masters and PhD on the topic of work he was doing while working at <large car manufacturer>, where he still works today.
On the other hand, from my understanding such close integration between advanced degrees and industry is less common in North America - to my disappointment.
I feel like engineering and graduate education are linked in the US too. I've worked for many large companies where staff were also Ph.D students using their work as their thesis. Granted, every one of these companies were European, and I worked in R&D labs. But I suspect this is reasonably common in engineering.
I did graduate work at Fraunhofer in Germany, which straddles academia and industry. It's a model that could be employed more in the US, I think. I work at hp in the US now and we fund a lot of very small projects, effectively paying for some graduate students we like, but nothing at a large scale.
This is not as common as you might think. Some universities do closely collaborate with their regional industry, but the vast majority of master thesis have zero practical application, just like in the US.
It generally depends on where the funding comes from, at least from what I've seen. Chairs or individual projects that are funded by industry generally hand walk graduate students through partner-sponsored topics.
I would like to see a reckoning for the modern college and university model. They have extremely bloated administrative costs due to the moral hazards of public funding, they have accumulated ideologically biased fields that should never have been legitimized (https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...), they are increasingly becoming political monocultures that are hostile to any diversity of thought, and they seem archaic when their primary function these days is not to teach (especially at large, well endowed, research universities) but to certify. That is, people mostly attend college to leverage their names as a proxy for economic value on a resume. Could they largely be replaced with testing centers and more focused vocational schools?
All that said, maybe what we need is simply increased competition. Rather than a few, large colleges that absorb lots of students and funding, we need a web of smaller universities that are given greater consideration (and support?) than they are today. However, the current conditions might starve out the smallest colleges or trade schools, and only amplify the hegemony of large colleges.
My kid will be making his college choice in the coming year. As such, he's getting mail from colleges pretty much every day. The mailer from Vanderbilt really struck me as to the wrongheaded thinking of university leaders. On one side was this amazing blurb:
"Vanderbilt financial aid packages DO NOT INCLUDE LOANS.
IT'S FREE MONEY....65% of Vanderbilt students received some type of FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE"
Tell me why college pricing makes shopping for a car look simple, even by pre-internet standards.
Revenue maximization by way of price discrimination. Charging $x as the list price but giving 65% of students a big need-based financial aid package is a lot more palatable than saying the price is $x unless you're rich or foreign, in which case it's $x * 3, even if they're functionally equivalent.
We just went through this. The finalist schools -- a big midwest Catholic school and a large NE state university -- offered scholarships or grants between $16k and $21k per year with some caveats such as min 2.0 GPA at one and FAFSA qualifications staying roughly the same over the four year period.
These scholarships/grants brought the per-year cost close to the University of Ottawa international rates, about $41k/year all in. If my senior had been accepted to UMass Amherst, our in-state university, the all-in cost would start at $33k/year (without FAFSA consideration).
The brand-name private colleges around the Northeast US now have all-in sticker prices of $75k-80k. Financial aid in the form of grants or scholarships (not loans) would have to be $35k-40k to make these schools competitive on a cost basis with the examples given above.
> The brand-name private colleges around the Northeast US now have all-in sticker prices of $75k-80k. Financial aid in the form of grants or scholarships (not loans) would have to be $35k-40k to make these schools competitive on a cost basis with the examples given above.
Harvard's financial aid is such that if your income is under $150,000, the max you pay is 15K a year.
"free money" just screams inflated valuation. it's like credit card companies giving "cash back" so they can take larger fees for themselves. the fees more than cover their costs, so they funnel some of the largess back to the consumer to make sure the gravy train keeps going.
i'd be for having every student leave college with some debt, maybe on a scale of $1K for open-to-all colleges and $10K for the most competitive ones. enough to feel the value proposition, but not enough to laden the futures of those recent graduates.
Over a decade ago when I was applying to schools, Vanderbilt also stood out as the worst experience. Parents were placed in a separate room a told that there only purpose is to pay the bill and the campus tour felt like a ghost town on a sunny Spring Friday
I went to Vanderbilt and graduated in 2013. Their financial aid covered everything up to what FAFSA said my parents could afford- the EFC (expected family contribution) value. Tuition+room/board at the time was $56k, and EFC was $8k, so Vanderbilt covered the full 48k difference with no loans.
Vanderbilt has a very large endowment, and there is a lot of money earmarked for financial aid. I received $30k+ in scholarships that I never personally applied for, and I was able to graduate without loans.
On the flip side, if the EFC is very high and your family cannot afford it, you will have to get loans from another source.
There’s this fairly well known idea in organizations that expenses will tend to rise to fill the available budget. It’s not nefarious, just the natural result of a competitive market - both the market inside the organization, where people want to spend any money that is allocated to them (because why not?), and the market outside the organization, where spending (on fancy dorms, maternity wards, or rock climbing inside the office) is an arms race to attract “the best” students, patients, or tech workers (just to name a few examples).
Again there’s nothing inherently wrong with this. In tech, especially in the Bay Area, it means a lot of us get to live pretty nice lives as our employers have to invest a lot more of their budgets in attracting and retaining a skilled work force.
The problem is when this sort of thing is fueled by subsidies and/or opaque mechanisms. Google can afford to lavish it’s workforce from its own profits, but the average startup these days is burning heaps of investor money on “perks” to compete for talent that aren’t truly necessary.
But that’s private money, and if/when those companies fail, society at large isn’t threatened.
When this same phenomenon happens in public institutions like Universities and Hospitals, where the money is coming from individuals who need these services to thrive, the damage is much greater. In the long run, public subsidy for student loans doesn’t make college available to the masses, so much as it balloons the cost and saddles students with debts. In the long run, the US’ Byzantine “insurance” system for health payments doesn’t spread the cost around so much as it inflates and distorts the costs and changes insurance from a “nice to have” to an increasingly expensive barrier to entry.
The global pandemic didn’t create the problems these institutions have, it’s just exposing them and accelerating the inevitable failure of the unsustainable. It’s going to leave a lot of damage in its wake.
Pessimistically, I expect these institutions to go beg for money from the printer and try to sustain the unsustainable. But my optimistic side sees this as an opportunity for all of us to question the systems around us, and try to fix some of the underlying root causes that made these systems so fragile in the first place.
Once the role of professional college administrator became a thing, then they took over. They're paid more than the faculty now. And they run it like a body shop. To pay for their hyperinflated salaries and padded staff.
Speaking as a college professor, this is true. I started noticing really quickly that there was an implicit expectation that faculty be evaluated on their suitability and/or desire to move into administrative positions. This is fine, but it got mingled with professional administrators brought in from other institutions trained in business administration etc. Our president actually had no experience in higher ed prior to their appointment, it all being in large corporate business, and it was seen as a good thing somehow.
Everything has become very hierarchical, run as a corporation, focused on profit maximization, with those profits going progressively more and more to those higher and higher up the administrative chain.
Two accredited online ones that have interestingly sustainable models, and possible interaction with others, I think:
BYU Pathway Worldwide and associated programs. It requires a Church affiliation but not necessarily membership (I think). I think tuition is much lower, bachelors programs (like IT, business, others) are available, programs excellent, and is also suitable for those who need to first become qualified for entering a university (edit: i.e., learning English which is used in curriculum, and other basic skill), then provides that university. More info is in Wikipedia and I have gathered a bit of info including linking to a news article that explains it well I think, here: http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854578440.html .
And: https://www.wgu.edu/ (also mentioned in wikipedia): state aid available from multiple states it seems (per wkp).
I know that standard BYU has the lowest tuition in Utah, lower than any state school, provided you are a tithe-paying member of the Mormon Church [1]. Otherwise they have a higher tuition, similar to the in-state/out-of-state changes for most state schools. Does BYU pathway tuition work the same way?
I don't have a ton of experience with Western Governor's, but the fact that unlike many online universities they are nonprofit is a good sign. Of course, whether they have access to quality instructors is an unknown to me.
Good question: if you ask BYU Pathway Worldwide people or browse their site to learn about it, would be a good follow-up post here, to say. :) I am pretty sure I link to them indirectly above (i.e., to a page that has a convenient link to them).
(Edit: from what I have read, I don't think there are different tiers for tuition, but it is all the same. Corrections welcome. I think it is quite low, for any student, so the opportunity including for international students in lower-income countries is significant.)
And for WGU, there were praises of it on this page from former students (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22719797 and Ctrl+F for "wgu"), and a relative of mine is planning to attend soon, but I can't say from personal experience. I would certainly hope they do a good job. At the very least, they are accredited and one can use that credential to earn money while continuing to learn well from many available sources (like MIT online courses, unix system documentation, etc :).
Any time you make money easily available for a certain good, whether through debt or direct subsidy, the cost of that good is going to increase proportional to the amount of money made available. This is what happened in the housing market and with college tuition.
I'd be willing to bet that if you outlawed student loans (assuming that was possible), you'd see colleges finding all sorts of ways to cut costs without negatively impacting the students.
> I'd be willing to bet that if you outlawed student loans (assuming that was possible), you'd see colleges finding all sorts of ways to cut costs without negatively impacting the students.
Big optimist you. They'd find all sorts of ways to cut costs without negatively impacting the enrollment, which is the statistic colleges care about (at least indirectly, to the extent that it correlates with tuition).
Education wasn't on a sustainable course anyway (no pun intended). They couldn't keep increasing costs, increasing numbers of students, living off of the work of non-tenure-track instructors who got paid a pittance, and growing the size and cost of the administration. I think that was getting close to the breaking point, even without Covid.
>living off of the work of non-tenure-track instructors who got paid a pittance
This is, in my opinion, the number one problem in higher education right now. Adjunct/associate/part-time faculty are good, many of them are great. But the experience with those people is just not the same as with full-time tenured faculty. When a faculty member is worried about whether or not they'll have a course load next semester, their incentives are vastly different.
This is a system that needs to die.
Source: I have worked in higher education for a couple of decades now. Adjunt/associate/part-time has exploded since 2009-10 or so. It's ridiculous.
I started looking st going back to school starting around mid last year. I picked up my research again in the past month.
All I've done is manage to make myself so much more cynical. Everything I read and learned made it seem like college is nothing more than a pay to play game. I'm not andti-education or anti-intellectual, but I sure as hell do not support whatever the hell is going on in US higher education. I've been tempted to write aboutit, but my particular circumstances are rather unique and it would just come off as an angry rant.
Tech companies should take the lead on this. Say loud and clear: we no longer ask about education, and no longer take education into account when hiring, starting today. Devalue the sheepskin.
I get where you're coming from, but honestly I would actually prefer the opposite.
Sometimes, when I'm looking and interviewing for a new job, I really wish we had some sort of standardized, recognized certification that companies could see on my resume and think "OK, this guy knows how to code, we don't need to put him through the BS of a take home, or whiteboarding exercise or whatever". After 15 years in the industry, I'm less and less patient with having to prove myself by explaining how I would find duplicates in 2 arrays or how I would process "very large files" or whatever.
That being said, now we kind of get the worst of both worlds where you need the degree for HR to forward your resume, and you need to dance the "coding interview" anyway.
How else do you propose companies should assess new hires, especially young ones? And while the cost of tuition these days (IMO) outstrips the value of a college education, that’s not to say that value is zero.
The question is rather, how do you think degrees help assess new hires?
1) Programming skills? These are easy to assess with programming exercises. If someone has a degree but can't solve a programming exercise, I won't hire them.
2) Interpersonal skills? But a tech degree doesn't certify those, you need to assess them the hard way anyway.
3) Culture fit? But if you use degrees for that, it's simple discrimination, "let's hire this guy because he's from MIT like us". Not sure why this should be defended.
So in the end, degrees don't seem to help tech hiring in any way. I think tech companies could stop looking at degrees with very little loss.
I think this is a very limited view of what college, and being a great employee, is all about. Yes, I agree that education should not a priori be a dealbreaker. However you're shortchanging here the value of a) accomplishing something over a number of years, which a decent number of people with all 3 of the dimensions you specified, couldn't necessarily do; and b) the Gen Ed side of technical degrees. Strong communication skills and a general intellectual background are both valuable assets in an employee, and aren't captured by programming skills|interpersonal skills|culture fit, but are hinted at by, e.g., the ability to write a 10 page research paper which is a degree requirement for the top-line university certifications.
Yes, all of these skills can be gained and evinced without the traditional 4-yr college route, but I understand why generic Big Corp middle management uses it as a proxy for establishing a baseline in what I, and you've, mentioned.
I'd say the value of the average four year bachelors degree today is less than the value of the average two year trade school, so the value might not be zero but it might as well be.
That being said, I think the assessment problem is real. I'm the founder of a small startup that very few people want to work for (relative to say, Google) and that means I can assess each candidate in careful/unorthodox (time-consuming) ways. Companies at Google scale have to assess thousands of candidates per month (week?) and they have to do it in a way that ensures they're beyond reproach with regard to discrimination.
Having a college degree means you're statistically more likely to know your stuff, period. Correlation or causation isn't material in this case. There would have to be a very good reason for any big company to start ignoring that reality.
Tricky problem. I'd imagine the only solution involves an actual replacement credential. Like a bar exam, but for "private" disciplines. Maybe Neuralink will sort out how to see if you actually have the necessary understandings in your brain.
> the value of the average four year bachelors degree today is less than the value of the average two year trade school
but why do you think this? I see this assertion more commonly than I'd expect here and it always to me seems wrapped up in an implicit glamorization of blue collar work & tradesmen without referring back to, say, quality of life, long-term earning potential, flexibility in occupation, etc.
Because I think the average four year bachelors degree has regressed to soft sciences taught by lackluster instructors with very little rigor. So no glamorization of blue collar work, it's just that a two year trade school is more transactional - if you graduate, you'll have learned a hard skill that you can earn money with. That used to be true for most four year degrees, now I'd guess it's only true for a minority.
I did a lot of interviewing of new grads when I worked at a FAANG. I had the luxury of not needing a prior, and I looked at the resume only after conducting the interview and submitting my recommendation. I rarely looked even then.
The degree might have helped or hindered your getting through the early part of the funnel, but was irrelevant once you got to me.
Shuttered colleges should be turned into hubs for remote knowledge workers. The worst part of remote work is that it's hard to build a community without an office; college campuses are designed around community-building, with great shared spaces, gyms, etc. They also tend to be in beautiful places that are reasonably affordable, at least compared to the expensive coastal cities where many knowledge workers live.
The current financial precarity of colleges and the massive increase in full-time remote workers have created a very interesting set of pre-conditions. If these conditions persist a while past the distancing phase of the virus, the environment could be uniquely perfect for this shift to take place.
My big prediction for education is that a lot of research universities are going to move large lecture halls online (think chem 101, etc) with labs, seminars, and discussions with lower number of slots to abide with moderate social distancing requirements. It provides the primary educational content of lecture, and provides in person opportunities that students desire.
Once we see students and professors like this format compared to either all in person or all online, I think it will stick around. There's clearly a need for both improved efficiencies as well as the desire to have real human interaction, and I suspect this Fall we'll have the golden opportunity to really experiment with it.
We would like this if they made us pay a lot less. Currently we are still paying the same amount in tuition, and some classes just provide a video a week and maybe a trivial assignment. It just feels awful and I dont learn anything from that type of experience.
I worked at a private college called Expression right at the end of the first dot com bust.The founder wanted to turn the school into the "Julliard of the digital arts" - and keep the tuition as low as possible. For the first few years it was a really interesting and unique place. To make a long story short, the board of directors weeded the main founder out and moved the school through the accreditation hoops so that students could get massive loans. As a result, the school raised the tuition. The place exploded with students for x number of years. When Obama came to office new laws killed off the loans (and the school). Most of the original staff left and the whole thing was sold to a company named SAE. I always wondered what would have happened if they were never able to get accredited and were forced to stay a small trade school. The aftermath is documented in the eastbay express article below (2015). From reading current reviews, the place never recovered.
Software should be either a trade school or a masters program depending on a student’s level of commitment to the academics involved just like law, medicine, or engineering.
The primary problem with education financing is unrealistic expectations. Do some basic math before paying for any education. If an education loan costs you a certain amount plus interests you need to make a certain amount minus what you would earn without the education to qualify that expenditure. If people currently working in your field aren’t making $150k then why would a $100k loan make any sense? Why waste that kind of money? When you could attend a trade school for $10k that allows you to earn $60k. Blaming the system does not excuse bad personal financial decisions.
When I was picking schools out of high school I found the third cheapest 4 year university in Texas. It was the only school I applied to more than 20 years ago. A 12 hour semester cost $1800 including dorm, tuition, and meal plan. Books and supplies were extra. To me that price made perfect sense because it would take becoming a CEO to justify the expense.
If you go 100k in debt to get a job that pays the same as one you could have only gone 10k in debt for, it's probably because you like doing that better.
Some people would way rather be an elementary school teacher than an electrician and that's fine.
The same argument can be made for gambling and using cocaine. That’s fine, maybe, but if financial slavery is the known output then don’t cry about how expensive it is.
Colleges, like Intellectual Property, impose artificial scarcity on the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge in an age where the Internet has allowed us all to publish and discuss like never before. They come from a time when we couldn’t record audio and video and disseminate it so easily. Never mind multimedia, they use heavy textbooks!
There is a concept called “flipping the classroom”, where people can watch the classroom lectures at home at their own pace, and do the homework together in class. And these lockdowns just go to show that people can carry on learning online. They just need a good coach or course.
Lectures are the commodity. Individual attention from tutors and labs is the scarcity.
When even rich Hollywood celebs feel they need to bribe colleges for their kids to get in, we know we have artificial scarcity and an old boys network.
One of the things I was curious about was how many people are in school now compared to the 60s and 70s. I had trouble finding a graph or statistics on how many people are in school but https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attai... shows that 14.6% of men and 10.1% of women in 1971 had completed 4 years of college.
For 2019, that was 35.4% of women and about 34% of men.
So there are 3 times as many women and 2 times as many men as there were 50 years ago.
And that's for students who have completed 4 years. I would be surprised if the number of students who started and didn't make it to 4 years wasn't also 2-3 times higher than it was back then.
This situation is exposing colleges as the scam that they are. Families are getting indebted up to their eyeballs, thinking are paying for education. In reality the education can be had for free. What they are really paying for is a sorting function, something that could also be had for free with national exams.
It wouldn't be 250K USD due to lower incomes, but the average South Korean family spent 20% of their income on test prep and private tutoring back in 2011. Anecdotally, a friend in China is talking about his future with his girlfriend and they are looking at around that figure as well if they have kids.
Good! These aren't hard choices - this is the type of prudent spending that happens when you're not guaranteed infinite sums of money from the federal government. Scale back on the insanely bloated administrative staff, lavish facilities, sports stadiums, etc.
State schools are still a relative bargain. I attended around 30 years ago and it was about 5000/year + 4000 room and board. Tuition now is about 16Kyear and room and board is about 13K/year. If tuition is doubling every 20 years, that is about 3.6% growth in cost
The average public university is about 10K for tuition today. I think that is attainable for a middle class family.
Where things are really out of whack is all the loans to attend private schools. A student has no business going to any private school if they have to take out 50-100K in loans per year.
There should be no govt backed loans to private schools and no student loans should be discharged in bankruptcy.
I understand that colleges charge the same tuition for online students and in person students, but what's preventing the schools from lowering the cost of online, part-time degrees as a way to increase enrollment? They may have hosting costs, or costs associated with platforms like Coursera, but there's no cost for facilities which should make them able to cut the tuition. The cost of healthcare and education is far too high in the US. IMO Universal means Affordable, Accessible and Abundant (In addition hopefully high quality as well). Education and Healthcare should meet all of those points.
My sense is it's a good idea to separate college as a place where you take classes and can get a degree from college as a lifestyle choice. While living at home and later with a friend, I went to a community college after high school, that my family paid a nominal amount for, and transferred to a UC from there that was entirely covered by Pell/Cal grants until graduation. No debt required.
Had I gone straight to a 4-year from high school, lived at the school, and made it a lifestyle as opposed to someplace I go to take classes, then I likely would have graduated with a significant amount of debt.
The higher education bubble has been building for a long time. It follows a similar trend to the housing bubble: high prices fueled by loans that are too easy to get and too hard to repay.
The current situation is likely going to force a hard reset for the industry. Administrative bloat and other expenses will need to be addressed as colleges get back to basics and focus on delivering education under a more sustainable economic model.
A 10% decline in enrollment (much higher is realistic for many colleges) would devastate the finances of most institutions. These will be an interesting next few years.
2 things that I feel hurt US and probably be why we lose to China.
1) Predatory college loans (which lead to overpriced education)
2) healthcare tied to employers where providers can charge after they provide service months later. Very little transparency and insane markup.
Both are very specific to US, and absurd compared to every other wealthy nation.
Fixing education and healthcare to be reasonable for lower and middle class would do wonders for this country. Currently millions are in perpetual debt due to medical bills and college loans. They won’t start companies and build great things.
Burn it all to the ground. This model that saddles unknowing students with debt, while locking in old and crusty professors to their cushy jobs for life, is antiquated and needs to go.
Colleges have been peddling shoddy goods to unsophisticated buyers for years with little or no regulation or oversight.
In fact, the government has propped them up with federal money, loan guarantees, and a feeder school system that conditions their potential customers and funnels them in the doors.
The shoddy goods are degrees that are highly unlikely to be worth what was paid for.
You can't get more unsophisticated than an 18 year old who's been fed a dream about how their life will be awesome if they get into the school of their choice.
I'm currently adjunct faculty in a software engineering program. I have no expectation of future work beyond the end of this semester as my school has announced massive cutbacks across the board. I'm "lucky" in that I don't rely on this for income but it still sucks. The only good thing is, as far as I know, none of my senior students have lost a job offer as a result of the pandemic.
I once interviewed for a CD role at a private, vocational certificate college. They do have some IRL locations but primarily online. The director shared that their revenue was about $500m. I didn't take the role, and I was left scarred knowing their revenue is someone elses debt and based on hope.
makes sense: colleges are are entering another recession, and there is already a forecasted drop in enrollment of the wealthiest students, who should have been born during the last recession, that will hit in 2026 and could be as bad as a 15% to 20% drop in enrollment.
All in all, this might not be too bad, if you look at the growth in college expenses over the last few decades, the rise in tuition isn't going to instruction, it's going to administration, and hopefully this downturn will lead to the emergence of mass market cheap credential that are feasible solutions for everyone.
They won't be missed. I hope they use this as an opportunity to re-evaluate what exactly they're offering to students for the currently astronomical prices inflated by reckless borrowing.
Like many institutions that are failing during this crisis; this is merely accelerating a reckoning that was probably going to happen one way or another.
Maybe this is a controversial opinion, but why are parent's expected to foot the bill of their children's education? When did this become the expectation?
One of the "hard choices" some colleges are making is removing the requirement for SAT or ACT tests for admission. While a case can be made against certain types of standardized tests, will their admission criteria be made more rigorous in other areas to compensate? Lowering the bar for incoming students could end up reducing both the educational experience at the college and eventually its reputation, making them even more desperate for unqualified students in the future, ad infinitum until it gets bailed out or goes bankrupt.
I was often told stories from the Boomer generation of people "working their way through college", holding part time jobs through college to pay for both living expenses and tuition. That is, quite literally, impossible today.
Can you provide some sources for this? Let's assume minimum wage, calculate average living expenses, hours spent in class and doing HW vs hours working. I know I spent at least 70hrs a week doing school.
I'm GenX, went to college in the late 80's, in state tuition in TX was $2000 per semester as I recall. I knew people who worked a part time 20 hours/week job that paid $8 an hour. (graveyard shift sorting boxes at a local shipping company). I knew many others who did some program where they worked at the college and made $5 an hour IIRC). I was a grader/TA/proctor for the first year engineering course and made the princely sum of about $10/hr but there was a lower cap on weekly hours which I don't recall exactly. I want to say it worked out to 10 hours/week on average so about $100 a week. For two semesters of about 18 weeks of work (10 hours a week) I could make $3600. But you had to be a junior or senior so this job could only be done for 2 years.
Not sure what sources you want to see. The fact is tuition now is mind bogglingly more than when I went. Or, tuition is outrageously jacked up now compared to the past.
Here's a link from the Houston Chronicle showing tuition over the years for TX:
For 1990 it shows average tuition, room, board was about $6500 for a YEAR, for TX state schools.
Maybe you couldn't earn every penny you needed while also attending as a student, but it sure was a hell of a lot easier to get 50% of the way there than it is now. If you needed financial aid to bridge the gap you weren't facing painful debt for decades. If you only had to borrow half of what you needed, you could leave college with a loan of $13000 to pay off. That's a cheap car.
Ah my brain did a flip flop, mixed up genX with millennials. Yes, that was a very different landscape than we have now. I recently went back to school for an EE degree, and the costs were insane, even for someone with a good job and middle class wealth. An interesting thing I noticed was the the time cost for classes. I would spend a HUGE amount of time doing homework, maybe double the time it took during my CS degree. A lot of that time was fighting against the online homework system; what I could do on paper in 10 minutes would take 20 minutes to do, and the sheer load of homework was much higher. I can't imagine trying to hold a decent job and still keep my grades up. College seems a pretty poor option modern day.
It is in a city. I'm working to pay for my living expenses and full-time university currently ongoing -- not really struggling, either. The last few weeks of each semester requires sacrificing some sleep, though.
It's still possible if you go the computer science route and get a few good intern gigs, but the margins are quite tight. It's a far cry from paying for college by selling firewood, like my baby-boomer father did.
The culture of higher education isn't what it used to be. The advancement of knowledge is now secondary to economic growth in a university. Students begin as customers and turn into products by graduation. Universities used to be gatekeepers to better economic opportunities but those opportunities have disappeared. This is a relatively recent phenomenon in that Baby Boomers don't have the student loan obligations that generations following them do. Boomers changed the policies to suit their own financial interests, destroying the opportunities that they benefited by for future generations. Massive student loan debt constrains major life decisions and limits access to credit. It's a lot easier to navigate life when you don't carry inescapable debt burdens. Government refused to limit access to credit and that allowed universities to constantly charge more every year. You can't escape student loan debt as you can business loans by declaring bankruptcy because of a fundamentally flawed logic about what the student loan enabled. Higher education is an economic investment. Yet, when the investment fails, the lenders aren't exposed to the losses -- the borrowers are. This has been a great deal for lenders as they aren't exposed to risk.
Unfortunately, neither a Trump nor Biden administration is going to change anything. It's up to the free market and entrepreneurs to disrupt this exploitative system.
> The advancement of knowledge is now secondary to economic growth in a university.
I will second this just taking from my own experiences.
> Students begin as customers and turn into products by graduation.
To add to this the students' parents have also wedged themselves into the customer category. They are often footing the bill or at least the loan payments and some of the more helicopter-like parents feel entitled to demand universities do more and have more for their precious children.
Online learning isn't a very big threat to colleges because colleges hold a sort of "social monopoly" on credentialling for majority of fields. No one will care about you coursera certificates they want a bachelors degree.
There are too many short-sighted idiots who don't realize that having your neighbors child is the 2nd most important thing to having your own child educated.
"But I didn't have childen! Why should I pay taxes for schools?" is not uncommon. The answer, of course, is that we all benefit from their education, and so it isn't unreasonable for tax money to be spent to help heavily subsidize education.
I'm lucky; I went to college in the early 80s, at a good state school, and it cost about $5000/year ($13K/year in today's dollars). I'm doubly lucky: my parents paid for it, so I left college penniless but without debt. It sickens me to read how much colleges are charging these days, and how even state schools are modeling themselves after for profit schools. When I went to school, most classes were taught by full time professors, many tenured, aided by TAs. Now there are so many "associate professors", i.e., getting paid minimal amounts per course hour taught without benefits. The system is rotten.
Back in the 70s, Texas was awash taxes from oil money. I knew someone who attended UT Austin back then and it was a few hundred dollars per semester, as the state picked up the rest. Conservatives were conservative back then too, but they saw the value in an educated public. Now they feel like schools should be self funding.
I was also lucky. Undergrad funded by my parents. Grad school funded by assistantships with most tuition waved. I got a PhD with zero debt.
My father could pay for college himself back in the 50's and 60's a summer job and with a part time job during the year. His parents were poor and uneducated, yet He got a PhD with no debt.
Now my kids are facing college. The landscape has changed and it is not good. I am very well paid but I make too much money for financial help, but not really enough to pay for 4 years of college for all my kids. I have saved money and have paid off my house, but I don't have another $600K set aside for college. I don't want them getting out of school with debt, so I will make sure they don't do anything stupid with large student loans. But I imagine they will all have to take on some debt.
The sad thing, college is not better (actually worse in the liberal arts -- that is a different discussion) and the inflated costs are insane. The money is not going towards better professors -- I was a professor for 18 years and I didn't see a proportional growth in teaching and research. Almost all of the extra money went into the bureaucracy.
As I understand Blendle, they only offer some stories from their list of publishers. NYT, WSJ, WaPo, LA Times, etc. will pick & choose what they allow Blendle to offer. Top-tier stories will not be shared through Blendle, and will be reserved for direct subscribers.
It's the liberal arts vs. the servile arts. "Liberal" because they are liberating, essential to freepersons. It's the undercurrent of virtually all education reform.
Today, higher education is virtiually entirely a credentialing, branding, and gatekeeping mechanism. And like all gatekeepers, the higher-education-industrial complex collects rents.
And this goes back a ways. Hardly the first, but: "On the role of Universities and Primary Education as Social Indoctrination: John Stuart Mill via Hans Jensen", from the 1860s:
Mind, a college or university experience can be a hugely transformational thing, most especially if the student transgresses the curriculum. In the mid-1980s I shared a campus with some incredibly capable students (several have appeared in HN stories), granted with many who weren't. There were on-campus events, issues, and politics. There were faculty, emeriti, and visiting lecturers who were notable in their fields, including more than a few recognisable names. At least some of whom were patient enough to talk to a clueless undergrad for an hour or so. The arts & lecture series gave access to principle minds and creators. I discovered the on-campus library with a collection in the millions of volumes, part of a multi-campus system numbering in the tens of millions, indexed (though not directly accessible then) via an at-the-time groundbreaking computerised catalogue system -- a preview of DuckDuckGo-like search engines of today. And through the campus computing centre, free use of a shared Unix system, also with multi-campus connectivity, and access not only to such stunning tools as csh, vi, sed, awk, and troff, but email, ftp, and tin.
All of this (and more) has shaped who I am, how I think, and what I value today.
None of this appears in my (mediocre) grades, transcrpts, or degrees. It was a level of access (gatekeepers, remember) largely otherwise impossible at the time. Today's Internet ... makes a significant part of this experience far more generally possible, though there is still a tremendous element of being in the same space with someone, or a group, or access to physical infrastructure, equipment, and environment that online experience can still not match.
And the system in which I'd participated evolved out of a long train of policy decisions, backlashes, many quite political: Thatcher-Reagan conservativism, 1970s eco-awareness and peace movements, 1960s Sputnik-fuelled space-race and nuclear techno-FOMO and -optimism, civil rights, and university expansion, RAND-UCLA Arpanet, 1950s anticommunism, 1940s Vannevar Bush endless frontier government-funded research, early 20th century industrial and energy monopoly funded endowments, late-19th century majors systems, mid-19th century engineering polytechnical schools and land-grant/agricultural policies, the Prussian university model, Enlightenment, the Encyclopaedists, the classical university system, liberal & mechanical arts,the Renaissance and emergence of the university, scholasticism, mediaeval and earlier philosp[hical traditions .... Very little of which I had any knowledge, understanding, or appreciation of at the time.
Universities have to do all this proxying for a good education because they are unable to demonstrate the primary value: making you valuable to society.
If they did, they could simply publish "Median income distribution for graduating students by degree achieved". They currently sell a common lie: that there is a roundedness or completeness to education. This is common wisdom and false.
The only degree that doesn't force a "well rounded" education is aerospace engineering. They start on their major course work right away. How many of those guys are out of work?
"Well rounded course work" is just a money sink and wastes two years. Most of the major course work that matter you don't get to until junior and senior years. All you really need are those last two. First two are a waste.
that's why a strategy I've heard that helps to reduce cost of higher education is to take as many of the courses that you can at a community college where those credits can transfer over to the university of your choice.
FWIW, my university does do this. The college of engineering here publishes a yearly report that breaks down statistics about the graduating class (post-graduation plans, salary statistics, etc.) for each major.
go blue baby, when i was a student in the CoE and having the standard "I'll never make it!" anxiety I'd take a peak at that report every now & then and feel just fine, lol
Colleges really only started scaring the heck out of me when I started enjoying my career. After spending a day wrenching in a garage, we'd hit miller time and head down to the Soapbox Bar and Grill. Over the span of a month or two ordering buckets and shooting pool I learned our bartender Javon had a masters in biology and his fiancee Cortisha who bussed the tables had a bachelors in mining science. The both of them came in well below what I earned, had no healthcare and no retirement. I remember having a few too many boilermakers one night and I asked why he was serving grease monkey clowns like us instead of working on flowers. Javon just said theres no work, and the work he would get would pay about as well as a fry cook anyway. He had some massive college bills too and i didnt understand how those worked, but you cant get rid of them like you can a car loan.
That scared the hell out of me. You could waste a hundred grand on something I always thought made people into millionaires and still wind up serving suds to a drunk in a blue jumper covered in soot from a runaway 2 stroke who thinks you "invent flowers." I woke up the next morning with a hangover and anxiety.