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Comment by superninja234 | Hacker News Reader

There should be a clause that only helps individuals with useful majors (Engineers, Education, Math) and not some dingus that went to a $60,000 a year private school for art therapy.

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In a case of "Be careful what you wish for", this would likely result in colleges abandoning the pretense that all their majors are equally valuable and charging engineers more. They already act to capture any increase in public or private subsidy [+]; this just makes it easy to justify for people who would find it socially awkward to say "Degrees in CS better prepare you for the labor force than degrees in communications; we should charge accordingly."

"The government is practically forcing our hand; what can we do. Those philistines, there is just no reasoning with them. Ever since Reagan all they do is cut, cut, cut -- why does no one appreciate the value of an education anymore?"

[+] I have been occasionally called paranoid regarding this claim, so I will clarify that this is directly observable. Get a price quote which contains any portion of grant aid. Then inform the university that you've received a $2k scholarship. The university will increase the price retroactively, by "applying" the scholarship 50% to your loan and 50% to your grant aid.

This was straight-up policy at my alma mater. Luckily, my regular-old mater embarrassed the heck out of me by arguing the point with them for each of my external scholarships, causing a net decrease in the cost of attendance of about $10k versus the university's post-subsidy-recapture amended quote.

So what? This form of "price discrimination" already exists at universities, e.g., with certain graduate, MBA, and continuing education programs that function largely as profit centers. There's no reason for different schools like engineering or liberal arts to charge the same rate.

Students aren't forced to pay tuition. It's a voluntary exchange if they feel they're getting their money's worth.

Individuals with useful majors can pay their own debt precisely because their major is useful. It's the people with degrees in terrible fields that need and deserve forgiveness, because they were scammed.

They shouldn't have been allowed into college in the first place, but the college was just too happy to take their money and give them nothing.

So they can learn nothing and future generations can look at look at what happened and think I too should follow my heart and major in Stamp History because its a government subsidized major.

But then the colleges will also learn their lesson and stop admitting such people. Also the institutions that finance them will learn to stop lending money for useless majors.

I'm all for personal responsibility, but isn't it too much to ask for teenagers to be able to resist propaganda from all sides that insists they must go to college and follow their dreams?

Students are not the problem, they are just doing what they are told. We just need colleges and banks and governments to stop telling them to be financial idiots.

> for art therapy.

Art therapy is a respected form of psychotherapy. It's available to people on the English NHS (which focuses on evidence based treatment), and "art therapist" is a protected title in the UK.

Does "art therapy" mean something else in the US?

It's a respected field here, (obviously not universally well respected) although not as highly paid as anything requiring med school.

It's just a way for people with well paying STEM degrees and jobs to look down on people who make different life choices.

A title being protected doesn't mean it's scientific. C.f. naturopathic "doctors."

I don't know enough about art therapy to say that it is or isn't scientific, though.

Art therapists are licensed therapists who focus on treating patients in the way the title implies. I don't think I'd call it science, although the one graduate program I'm familiar with has their students treat children and report on the efficacy of the results.

It's often an MA degree, so there's no pretense of it being a scientific endeavor.

In what way is therapy not science?

I don't think most therapists publish much, is the short answer. For a more meaningful answer you'd want to ask a practitioner, I would think.

I'm assuming that art therapy is grounded in a scientific understanding of psychotherapy. You don't need to be a professional scientific researcher to practice science.

I realize that my wording was ambiguous so I'm sorry for that.

What is a "protected title" in the UK?

You can't call yourself a protected title unless you have the qualification and professional registration.

Here's a list for health care: https://www.hpc-uk.org/aboutregistration/protectedtitles/

Thank you for the clarification.

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