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Comment by diogenescynic | Hacker News Reader

>went to school in the mid 90s

>but it was well understood that majoring in Underwater Basket Weaving

The way you make such a condescending argument and blame the victim takes away any credibility in your comment. The issue is that tuition has ballooned since the 90s. Tuition is outpacing income/inflation and most else, so regardless of what school or major, the ROI is going down for most. Also, even if you went to a top-tier school and had student loans in the 1990s, you could discharge them in bankruptcy--until Bush changed that in 2005. Things really have gotten harder, it's not as you falsely claim that people are picking useless majors.

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Student loans are one of the biggest and most self-destructively predatory idiocies the "financial industry" has ever invented.

Ballooning tuition was an inevitable outcome, as was the speculative financialisation of educational institutions, and the relative loss of value of student teaching and post-grad research.

It's really just a form of compulsory loan sharking, and it's politically and economically cancerous.

Not only does it have immensely toxic second order effects, it's almost guaranteed to kill, or at least seriously damage, its host economy.

As for "useless majors" - one of the foundations of any civilised society is personal freedom, and that includes the freedom for cultural and intellectual exploration.

Forcing all activities to compete economically and sweat a profit is not freedom - it's the opposite.

I agree with you entirely. Basing everyone's college major on ROI is why public universities should be free, so that people can pursue knowledge regardless of cost or ROI. Otherwise we wouldn't have artists, musicians, journalists, authors, and dozens of other essential careers that help make life worth living.

Liberal arts grad here. Humanities education has almost completely absolved itself of any responsibility for helping its students build careers.

I did not have a single lecture or discussion with any of my professors about how I could use my degree to get a job, what kind of careers I could pursue, and how to use my degree for anything outside of academia.

Humanities education has become "education for education's sake".

That's fine and all if the cost of tuition is low. But when you're spending $30k/year on tuition, your professors believing that "everyone should just go into academia" is just a bad investment.

> I did not have a single lecture or discussion with any of my professors about how I could use my degree to get a job, what kind of careers I could pursue, and how to use my degree for anything outside of academia.

I agree, this should be something more emphasized.

I also blame (to a degree) my K-12 career for not putting an emphasis on any courses related to budgeting or Home Economics.

I also agree, but I'm also a liberal arts grad and it gave me the skills to get to where I am now, so I really can't complain. I agree there needs to be more time spent helping students find career paths. That is truly severely lacking.

Sorry, bud. I also went back to school for another go after 2005, still focusing primarily on ROI. So I think I can say I'm well aware of and lived through both current and past student loan / tuition regimes. But please feel free to continue to attack the tone of my argument rather than the content.

Your "argument" was nothing but tone, unless you're literally trying to say that people are majoring in underwater basket weaving, in which case my counter argument is "no they aren't".

Yes, but these are kids lacking your additional 20 years of experience. Congrats on your ROI, Other people are just looking to get out of dead ends, thinking the better (or any) school will provide that. Unfortunately we'll see the for-profit schools negatively affect the overall. Even so, a 11% default rate across the board is nothing to sneeze at. [1] https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/national-student-loan...

Your argument is a straw man and it was a pathetic attempt to blame the victim AND it ignored the vast increases in college tuition. It was a poorly reasoned argument and it was incorrect.

Check your facts, most student loan debt hasn't been dischargeable since the 1970s. The 2005 change allowed for-profit banks to get in on the game.

Student loan debt now is also far more common and larger as a percentage of expected income than it was back in the 70s. The University of California didn't start charging residents tuition at all until the mid-1970s and didn't really ramp up until Governor Reagan slashed the budget:

http://www.dailycal.org/2014/12/22/history-uc-tuition-since-...

If random internet sites are to be believed, the $630 combined tuition plus fees in 1976 is roughly $2k today. An awful lot of students could manage that without aid.

Useless majors are only ones where the recipient fails to utilize it.

I set myself with a well-known localized (to the industry) degree (Music Performance), but still couldn't implement it; even in a sense where I could turn it into something a bit more "useful" (Music Education).

Plenty of my classmates have gone on to utilize it effectively.

My major wasn't useless; I was.

He didn't claim that people are picking useless majors. He stated that the earlier post's claim that students are encouraged to pick useless majors is incorrect (at least for his generation).

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