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Comment by WhompingWindows | Hacker News Reader

Supply and demand - the supply of college degree holders has gone up dramatically, therefore the cost of those degree-holders' labor to employers can be much lower. Combine this with rampant anti-labor practices, poor wage growth since the recession, and the huge increases in tuition/fees due to federal loans. These loans allow universities to jack up the costs, and then at 6% interest on federal loans, the govt is robbing our graduates.

Can we take a step back and consider this: Germany and other modern nations provide free education, while poor and middle class graduates are paying 6% or more interest on their loans. Absolutely disgraceful!

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Germany is also at the bottom end of tertiary education attainment in the OECD. The real lesson to learn from Germany is not free education, but that tertiary education simply isn't needed by the vast majority of the population. As the price of post secondary schooling is also a function of supply and demand, when the rest of the population back away from those services, it will become more cost effective for those who have a good reason to be there.

Because Germany doesn't let anyone go to tertiary education, it's extremely selective.

The new problem the US will have if they actually try to implement any kind of free or heavily-subsidized tertiary education system is that this high selectivity will not be acceptable to a significant portion of the US population. Part of the reason we are in this student debt crisis in the first place is the constant drumbeat that everyone is supposed to go to college. You can't suddenly tell a large portion of them "sorry, you aren't good enough for college".

America already has exclusive scholarships.

Unless your mother is Felicity Huffman. That type of nonsense has been going on since jump street and another reason to despise the racket that is the typical modern day college education.

And like whatshisface said in another comment, the US already provides scholarships for those who have good reason to attend a college. It is free already.

The difference is that the US also allows those who wouldn't be accepted in Germany to fork over their own money to attend as well. Which, I imagine no American would want to take away. The freedom to be able to purchase desired services is something most Americans hold dearly.

In other words, in America you have the opportunity, the freedom if you will, to be an idiot.

Jonathan Franzen explores this in _Freedom_.

I wouldn't say paying for something voluntarily is "robbing". Just bad marketing. And yeah, government subsidies inflating costs is a classic outcome.

Demand has also dropped since the quality of post-secondary students has regressed to the mean of society. Schools used to be more selective, and you'd only get in if you were in the upper percentiles of society in terms of aptitude, ability, and work ethic. In the 60s, only 10% of people had college degrees. Now almost any high school graduate can find a university program.

Unfortunately the selective outcome was marketed as achievable to anyone who goes to university, leading to swathes of people forking over money expecting the best result.

I don't think schools used to be more selective... It seems more like the selectivity shifted from being self-selective (only highly apt/able people would apply) to selectivity on the part of the universities themselves.

My father says when he went to Columbia University in the 80's the acceptance rate was >60%. Nowadays Columbia is 7%. It's a similar story with most other colleges. My university used to accept pretty much anyone and now it's <%20. Not sure how that can be spun to say universities are less selective now. Maybe there are more universities, so some of them are less selective than others were in the past. But if you track the same universities over time, they have vastly decreased acceptance rates over time.

The state school I went to was automatic admission when I applied in 1998 (meet the SAT/GPA requirements, you're in). Now even they have an acceptance rate that is somewhere on the 50s.

But how many students really applied in those days. If application rates were low, which I think is very likely, then selection rates can simply be higher.

I remember reading somewhere that just a generation ago, Ivy League schools where about as selective as flagship state schools are today. So many people want to get a brand name education (domestic and international) that it pushes the acceptance rate toward 0. The median standardized test school for successful applications is near perfect.

The robbery is the interest rate. Why should students, young people in their 20s who need to save for homes and families, why should they pay 6% interest when big banks and rich folks get low interest loans from the same federal govt? It's absolutely ass backwards and shows the govt cares for the rich, not students.

Tuition has also skyrocketed relative to inflation. New graduates are being squeezed from every side, to no clear benefit for the rest of us.

13th Grade. — Still waiting for someone to change my mind.

When I was graduating there was no option but to apply to colleges. We carved our time in classes to fill out applications. We were sent to guidance counselor to help select schools. I remember the worst kids in class who hated school talking about what college they were going to next year.

At least now Trade School isn’t a bad word, and coding boot camps are a step in the right direction (sort of).

I shake my head when I see calls for free college. There IS GOING TO BE a barrier of entry SOMEWHERE. We moved it from BA/BS degrees on to Masters, now those are becoming worth less and less as the prices go up. Now people act surprised, but this seems obvious.

It’s fine to have some barrier, but the income level of your parents is probably the most unreasonable one.

So let’s have free college and figure out some other barrier, please.

If that is the concern, why “free college” rather than “free college for people whose parents make less than 200% of the poverty line?”

Free college for everyone wont have a leveling effect. Indeed, it will make degree inflation even worse. For lower income people, living expenses, opportunity costs, and lack of college predatory K-12 still serve as huge barriers. Middle and upper income people will still account for most college attendance, so in the end it’ll be a big handout to the middle and upper middle class.

> Indeed, it will make degree inflation even worse.

I grew up and went to university in a country where you only paid a nominal tuition (~$500, and when it got raised to $550 students went on the streets to protest the injustice.)

If you wanted to go to college, you could. People studied what they were passionate about. And companies didn't mind hiring a language major, because a university degree was seen as sufficient proof that somebody was smart enough to learn complex material quickly.

And there was no grade inflation.

Because there's the thing: when students don't have to pay an insane amount of tuition, the professors don't have any pressure to not fail a bad student because so much money is at stake. Failing grades for bad students were the norm. This was true from elementary school all the way to university.

When I see my daughter graduating with an average score of 92% while hardly breaking a sweat, I'm obviously proud of her, but I also can't shake the feeling that she was never tested. But it has to be like this because GPA is so important for college admission.

> Middle and upper income people will still account for most college attendance, so in the end it’ll be a big handout to the middle and upper middle class.

Oh, there's a very easy solution to that: a tax system that's even more progressive.

I mean degree inflation, not grade inflation. More people having degrees hurts those who can’t get a degree even with free college because of other factors. (The US already has some of the highest college attendance rates in the world.)

As to the tax system—ours is already more progressive than those of countries that have friee college: https://www.vox.com/2014/10/8/6946565/progressive-taxes-are-.... The problem is that we’re unwilling to tax the middle and upper middle class, which is actually the biggest tax base. AOC’s millionaire’s tax would raise $17 billion a year, even assuming no change in behavior: http://www.aei.org/publication/how-much-revenue-would-the-70.... A European style VAT could raise a trillion.

There is a fundamental political problem in the US, in that nobody will agree to raise taxes on the middle class. The left demands not only a welfare state, but that the rich and corporations pay for it. It’s a package deal. The right won’t agree to raise taxes on the rich and corporations—and they’ve kind of got a point. Our tax burden on capital is already roughly comparable to say Germany, if a bit lower: https://www.chicagofed.org/publications/chicago-fed-letter/2.... Where our tax burden is really low is in middle class taxes: social insurance and consumption. (There is a reason folks like AOC point to how great the welfare state is in say Sweden, but point to US taxes in the 1940s and 1950s, when war-torn Europe was no competition for the US. Or mention Sweden’s top marginal rate, without mentioning that it kicks in at an income level a mid career teacher or police officer might make in the US.)

So to raise taxes without making ourselves uncompetitive with Europe from the perspective of capital, the only avenue to raise real revenue is higher taxes in the middle class. Since that’s a political non-starter, we have the status quo that we have.

I don't agree that you should restrict the number of people who are capable of attending college just because it overwhelms the market, but for the sake of argument, let's assume that this is the right thing to do.

Even then, the way to implement that restriction should not be done the way it is done now: a system that either requires rich parents or saddles new graduates with a lot of debt. I don't see how anyone can make the case that money should determine which kid can go to college or not.

As for progressive taxes: the article makes the case that higher progressive taxes result in the rich finding loopholes to avoid them, and that the whole society should contribute to the welfare state. That's fine: I'm not an expert on the subject and I'm very much willing to consider whatever option works best. The low level details are not nearly as important as the end result: one that gives young people to chance to study start their professional life without a debt millstone around their neck.

But I have no illusions that this will happen in my lifetime.

You missed the core point of the AEI article. $17 billion is the most AOC’s tax could possibly raise, assuming no changes in behavior (including tax avoidance). That’s nothing in America—we spend $7 trillion in government spending each year. If we wanted to be able to afford a similar welfare state to Germany or France, we’d have to raise taxes by $2 trillion. That’s the total income of the top 1% (and $600 billion more than the income they have left after the taxes they already pay).

I think you're missing my point that I don't particularly care how it's done. I just care that graduating students can start their life with zero debt, just like they can in many other countries.

Germany has (almost) free colleges and it works put well. They make a lot of changes to get there (no campus experience, big classes, little handholding, two exams and no graded homework), and they have trade schools as well (well, apprenticeships). Those are completely orthogonal to college (you can do better financially in the latter).

Having a well educated workforce isn’t a bad idea, as long as we don’t think of it as a pissing contest.

> There IS GOING TO BE a barrier of entry SOMEWHERE.

This is correct. When everyone has a degree, then no one does.

There is a limit to how many productive professional jobs can exist. All the necessities for society and life can be produced and distributed by really about 10% of the workforce, working with economies of scale. Everything else is nonessential service jobs or entertainment.

Around the 1960s, the 10% that had college degrees happened to match that 10% of skilled jobs. We fooled ourselves into thinking that was causation. It's not. Awarding four times as many college degrees does not mean four times as many productive jobs will somehow exist or the consumptive power to sustain them. Companies don't want to hire a degree, they want to hire from the most able 10% of their applicant field. A degree used to be a proxy with significant signal towards that, but now has little.

"When everyone has a degree, then no one does."

Wait, what? "When everyone can read, no one does"?

Your assumption for that statement to be correct is that degrees have no real underlying value except as a discriminatory tool.

10% is probably to low. I'll guess somewhere around 30-40% (of non senior adults).

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