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Comment by blahedo | Hacker News Reader

This article, and many (not all) of the comments here, are really missing an important point: that if you don't view a bachelor's degree as vocational training, but rather as the education proper to any free person---i.e. the liberal arts ideal---then you would expect a lot of people with at least bachelor's degrees working in fields that don't, on surface, "require" them.

The idea of college (=university) students having a specialisation (a "major" area of study) is not by any means a new one, but the idea that this tightly corresponds to one's career and serves as a sort of vocational training program, that's pretty new. Schooling of that nature used to be found primarily in apprenticeships and vocational schools.

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The problem many people have here is that college is heavily subsidized, and those subsidies pretty much require us to get something for our money. I would be very surprised if the government's policy was "we will lend up to $200K to people with no assets and no prospects, which they can use to purchase art." And yet when those people borrow similar sums of money to purchase, say, a BA and MA in art history, it's fine.

That's a bad policy. If the university system didn't exist, and you tried to pitch the current version to Congress, you'd be ridiculed.

Can you clarify the 'heavily subsidized' part? I don't know a whole lot about this area, but I was under the impression that relatively speaking, the US higher education system was significantly less subsidized than in many comparably developed countries. And anecdotally, I'm sure we all know students and families that struggle with tuition costs. Are the subsidies you're talking about Pell grants? or tax breaks for funding education? People in this conversation make is sound like getting a full ride from public funds is the norm, but that seems really off.

Public Universities (which usually have names like "University of Florida" or "Idaho State University" are heavily subsidized by direct money from (primarily) state governments. Many "private" universities also get significant direct money from government. In addition, there are federally (and state) funded scholarship programs that give money for school directly to students, and student loans have their interest paid while the student is in school by the federal government.

I don't know how it compares to other countries, but there is a lot of government subsidization.

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