Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education
wsj.com
wsj.com
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.
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.
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.
> Why innovate and create when I can live like a king just playing our economic, governmental, and social systems like a fiddle?
Because the entire country is going to implode.
2008: financial crisis
2016: political crisis
2016: political crisis
2020: deadly pandemic, inducing a financial crisis, while also collapsing the real economy, on top of four years of political crisis
Lots of chemical industry here, etc.
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.
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.
https://www.wired.com/story/decades-offshoring-led-mask-shor...
Considering how many drugs are basically miracles of statistics rather than science: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/7950612/Five-out-of-...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/mobile/home.htm
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.
Computer and Information Technology Occupations:
Computer Programmers: $86,550
Software Developers: $107,510
Web Developers: $73,760
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.
Picking a major should not be like Indiana Jones picking which grail to drink from.
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.
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.
So, which majors would you consider non-viable?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I would like someone to point out why a tuition cap would be a bad idea, since regulation often carries unintended consequences.
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.
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"...
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.
Depends on the degree, school, and student. Still true for STEM and medicine.
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".
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.
And even if you could lower prices, how would you compensate the current homeowners for destroying the value of their largest asset?
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.
Unfortunately our culture and multiple industries strongly push people towards bad debt.
Well yeah, because us "adults" don't wanna pay the state and local taxes necessary to keep public universities affordable.
Edit: I didn’t pickup in the sarcasm. Mea culpa.
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.
Our government spends more money on education in both a relative and an absolute sense than the European average.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As far as I've heard, US colleges are on the order of $10000+ per semester.
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.
> you will have to guarantee that you can support your life in Germany What's so special about that?
https://www.slu.se/en/education/application-and-admission/tu...
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.
It depends on your point of view. Should college be a trade school or should it stick to it's roots of broadening one's horizons?
I found my philosophy classes quite enlightening. They were required for my degree in CogSci.
If my school didn't have a philosophy major, it wouldn't have a philosophy department, and I would never have had those classes.
Also, there are some majors that lead to professional school. English/Rhetoric are often majors of people going into law school for example.
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.
Everyone else had to work.
Those are the roots of the liberal arts.
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.
I really don't know why there's this insistence that humanities has a monopoly on teaching critical thinking.
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.
-- Bruce Lee
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.
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.
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.
What a sad state of affairs we find ourselves in that this attitude is common.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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. """
https://genius.com/Good-will-hunting-good-will-hunting-bar-s...
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...
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.
Again I ask, given that textbooks exist, can you make the argument that STEM is any different?
I assumed this was true for most people in STEM majors in college, no?
That's a skill that the liberal arts pick up as well.
> I do remember spending quite a lot of time in either a computer lab or in the library fighting my way through problems.
Will did that all on his own, without the need for a college. You're also describing a technical institute.
I don't see any skills there that really require a university either.
You didn't offer any support for your claim, though, which triggers an alert from my critical reading skills.
Did I pass the test? I did major in STEM.
> 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"
Was that the point you were hoping to make?
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 :-)
And yes these countries do use the market in a regulated fashion where it does a good job.
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.
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.
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.
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?
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/16/tech-talent-gap-looks-to-phi... [2] https://www.fastcompany.com/40440952/why-this-tech-ceo-keeps... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/08/26...
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.
They most definitely do:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2006/10/25/tuition-increa...
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].
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".
There were student loans before 1976, when they became non-dischargeable.
That change in 1976 was actually the cause of the steep rise in tuition. Can't really put the genie back in the bottle now.
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).
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.
Why?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
The REPAYE Plan already allows you to pay 10 percent of your discretionary income for 20 years and then the rest of your loans are forgiven [0].
[0]: https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/repayment/plans/income-d...
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.
Banks generally don't give loans, the federal government does.
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.
I think a lot of smaller college would fail, and the big colleges would keep their high prices, and only cater to the wealthy.
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
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.
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 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)
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.
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.
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.
What do you think about Income Share Agreements?
https://www.thesimpledollar.com/loans/student/income-share-a...
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!
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.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education
P.S. Signaling is very profitable for the individual benefitting from the signaling, it just isn't good for society.
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 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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
Studying law isn't a finite resource either.
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 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
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.
https://nypost.com/2012/05/13/what-class-columbia-university...
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.
Wait, what? Since when?
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.
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).
Maybe... but we could definitely alter the nature of risk involved.
Why not reduce cost of tuition (e.g. <$1K/semester), while raising the bar on academic rigor as a means of controlling demand?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Long ago demolished and turned into a Mall during Urban Renewal.
Things people need to know to function in our society.
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.
Be careful, this is very dangerous informstion
And it gets worse
You forgot that these loans are subsidized, so when they Go sour (and they will) its the taxpayer holding the bag, not the banks
In other words, its 2008 all over
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.
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.
Since the bank is absolved from making that bet, it is now the young adult making the same bet that no sane bank would take.
A lot of people are now living with having lost that bet.
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.
Why? I rather consider this as a sign that the person will be rather loyal as employee because he needs the money ...
Trust is like glass - easy to break, very hard to put back together.
This of course will be to the spiral and collapse of the college loan system.
If bankruptcy laws were abusable by students in the present day, EVERYONE would know how to do it
It's a positive feedback loop
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)
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.
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 is essential economics.
https://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-educ...
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.
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.
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.
Contrary to popular perception, there's no robust private investor market for student loans. US Treasury is the predominant buyer.
https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/commentaries/2020...
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.
Although of course there is no reason for college in general to be particularly expensive.
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.
So yes, the US is pretty unique in this respect.
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)
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.
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.
Before 2005 most loans were already protected from bankruptcy, and for the others you generally needed your parents to co-sign.
Therefore before 2005, banks that lent money for student loans did so without that particular extraordinary protection.
Most of the pre-2005 loans required a parental co-signer. And I know that I wasn't able to take out non-federal loans all by myself.
In fact the fact that banks insisted on mitigating their risks with a co-signer is actually supporting evidence FOR what I said.
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.
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).
Exactly as I said.
A four-fold increase in funding as a percentage of GDP isn't relevant to the more important metric, real funding per student.
https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/state-hig...
> But the long-term trend is that spending by states has gone up relative to both enrollment and inflation.
Real funding per university student has not increased, and this claim is not backed by your source. See my source above for rebuttal.
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/texas/2012/09/23/texas-colle...
"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.
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.)
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.
Student loans only changed to be non-dischargable in the 70s and 80s, driven by certain professions (especially medical) and costs associated with them.
Owned and issued, not guaranteed.
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.
So? That's the marketing evaluating what the loan is actually worth.
Bankruptcy isn't a magic "Get Out Of Jail Free" card.
Your credit is trashed at a point when you might want to get married, buy a house, start a family, etc.
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").
Except private student loans exist
Over 90% of loans are owned by and issued by the federal government. It's not banks Congress was protecting.
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.
Now, get the hell off my lawn!
Just like the whole american privatized healthcare; the sky is the limit... to what they'll charge you.
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.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2019/01/09/student...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2019/10/21/downfall-...
Fertility rates by year in U.S:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
Births per year:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/195908/number-of-births-...
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.
Although that chart doesn't capture the ratio of women of fertile age in each year, so there may be an unforeseen cliff.
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.
The only continent that still has fertility rates above replacement is Africa:
https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publicatio...
The debt load on young people is greater than the cost of raising a child to adulthood. By the time it is paid off, the urge to procreate has gone.
And those who turned baby-raisin' into a soulless, for-profit industry can choke on their sins, too.
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.
I suppose going the private route would just result in different contacts. I also benefit from colleagues from previous employment.
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.
That'll just make loans even more expensive for everyone else.
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.
The only bearing family income has is whether you get the lower subsidized rate or not. Anybody can get unsubsidized loans.
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.
Good job, guys.
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.
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).
Yes. We should invest in public universities to have very low cost or free tuition, and stop pouring public money into private education institutions.
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.
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.
Which is fine, because tuition, textbooks, and housing would be, too.
This is a crystal-clear example of what happens when government subsidies distort a market.
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]
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.
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.
Sounds like a great deal for those who were alive then. I don't think it's as simple as you suggest.
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.
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/22/797330613/myth-busted-turns-o...
But as it turns out, an infinitesimal number of students even try to have these loans discharged.
Because if that was the case no one would lend them money, and there wouldn't be any student loans.
Also there is a repayment system where you only are required to pay a percentage of your income above the poverty line..
That's called "marketing".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My current rate is like 15-20% after I lost my full-time job. About 10% in software and engineering vs. 30% in finance.
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.
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:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/do-elite-colleges-lead-to-highe...
https://money.com/college-matters-stem-majors/
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."
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
For the athlete, it's literally all or nothing.
From the perspective of understanding the universe, that is nothing. Decent consolation prize though.
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.
Disclosure: Professor for many years
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.
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)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unless they sell bonds secured on the income streams.
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.
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[...]"
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/12/is...
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.
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.
[0] https://siderea.livejournal.com/1260265.html?format=light
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.
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.
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.
1. Work
2. Buy house
2b. Rent house out
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.
> 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.
That was a significantly cheaper option for most students. And the classes tended to be smaller and, often, much better quality.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Most of my education was in government school and later I cleared IIT and studied there for nearly free.
After completion education, I got offer from foreign countries and traveled whole world just by bouncing from one company to another.
Yea, I'd have loved to stay near my family and become a machinist but my family couldn't even afford a "drill press".
Meanwhile, at i had access to do many equipments that I didn't even know about for free at my institute.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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).
NIH funding data from here: https://report.nih.gov/award/index.cfm
[0] Specifically, please. Two semesters of English, which is pretty standard, doesn't count unless few other options.
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.)
That's just one example. I could go on ....
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.
> 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.
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.
Also, real estate
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So, just because you didn't get value out of it doesn't mean that's true for all students.
Did you instead mean loans that the parent takes on, perhaps as cosigner?
I'm seeing nothing beyond $5500 that can be obtained by a student.
No sympathy here for the college industry.
http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athlet...
Big brand name schools that are regularly competing at top level in sports are usually seeing huge financial surplus due to sports.
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.
These things and reputations take years and tons of willpower and planning, so the risk of falling behind is immense.
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.
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.
There is more value in a Princeton diploma than a Princeton education.
Are you forgetting the entirely free K-12 option here that most people grow up with?
>$15k/yr is not expensive
Ok....
My kids' school spends $21k/pupil/year.
We distributed the cost, but 15k a year is absolutely unaffordable for most Americans.
https://www.edweek.org/ew/collections/quality-counts-2019-st...
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 think university could be cheaper than it is today, but probably not much cheaper than K-12.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_334.10.a...
(until you get to ~80/20)
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'.
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.
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.
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.
To #2 This is already a technique in education research its called flipped classrooms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom).
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Could you supply some examples? I know of Western Governors University, but it only has limited majors.
In particular, do you know of any online degree programs in materials science?
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.
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.
The peer group in the ivy leagues have been strongly pre-selected to value achievement in academic related pursuits.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's where the value in live classes lies - the interaction with peers and professors. Not the listening to pre-scripted lectures.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I saw a submission in /newest last night about how one of the actual purposes of American K-12 education is 'childcare': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23027408
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm a Dutch person who went to both universities in Amsterdam.
I know people who now work at:
- McKinsey
- 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.
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.
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.
My alma mater is concerned about having to run online classes next semester as they usually pay for many of the costs with the residence money...
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.)
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.
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.
"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 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.
In ancient India, Education is considered as sacred and given utmost important.
Basic Ideology is that student who have dedicated his life to studies shouldn't suffer to learn. So education is free.
Basically university's are publicly funded and students also do other small works as compensation.
For food, students used to go and beg (One needs to stand with a bowl infront of someone's house, people will come and feed them).
Even though whole culture is destroyed due to colonization. Sadhus/Rishis continue to do it even now.
I'd almost venture to say "tens of thousands of dollars of debt (sometimes hundreds of thousands)"
On the other hand, if you want to be an engineer then it's pretty important to go to a reputable institution - at least in the field I work in.
Berkeley was my guess for an expensive in-state tuition rate and they're $38k for 2 years.
Unless you're including housing/food/etc.
It's also hard for me to include housing because you'd need housing no matter what path in life you choose.
Rauner cut 400 million for education during a year he could make a budget with legislators.
Pat Quinn cut education spending by 340 million during a year when he got to write the budget himself because the legislature couldn't pass one.
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).
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.
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?”
- 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Essential workers are not the people running Facebook to sell likes, it's the people picking and moving food to you.
Up to you if you'd like to consider that food a win for them and not you.
In ancient India, Education is considered as sacred and given utmost important.
Basic Ideology is that student who have dedicated his life to studies shouldn't suffer to learn. So education is free.
Basically university's are publicly funded and students also do other small works as compensation.
For food, students used to go and beg (One needs to stand with a bowl infront of someone's house, people will come and feed them).
Even though whole culture is destroyed due to colonization. Sadhus/Rishis continue to do it even now.
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
On the other hand, from my understanding such close integration between advanced degrees and industry is less common in North America - to my disappointment.
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.”
We can idealize what people should do, or we can work with what they can do. Not both.
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.
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.
This has also to do with worker safety. University clinics also act as worker clinics for their own workers.
UCSD has a food bank on campus. Here's the math as to why:
Recommended daily dining dollar spend: $19
Breakfast: $3.95, "Bobcat Sandwich" Lunch: $5.25, Hamburger Dinner: $6.95, "Wok Entree"
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Harvard's financial aid is such that if your income is under $150,000, the max you pay is 15K a year.
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.
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.
I wish I were being pessimistic about this.
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.
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 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.
[1]: https://finserve.byu.edu/students-parents/tuition-fees-deadl...
(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 :).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 can't agree with this, you need to work well with the people you see every day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/sound-arts-fading-out...
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.
Some people would way rather be an elementary school teacher than an electrician and that's fine.
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.
Flipping the classroom is not enough. Here is what we can do to fix the educational situation: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158
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.
That just causes the money to be poured into national exam test prep like in South Korea or China.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/s-korea-tries-to-wrest-...
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2094427...
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2176377/chin...
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.
YouTube and the algorithm have really forced content creators to improve the quality of the content.
It's going to be tougher for schools to charge 30-50K a year when there are credible alternatives.
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 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.
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.
In ancient India, Education is considered as sacred and given utmost important.
Basic Ideology is that student who have dedicated his life to studies shouldn't suffer to learn. So education is free.
Basically university's are publicly funded and students also do other small works as compensation.
For food, students used to go and beg (One needs to stand with a bowl infront of someone's house, people will come and feed them).
Even though whole culture is destroyed due to colonization. Sadhus/Rishis continue to do it even now.
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.
- Better develop processes for remote education
- Bring to light the idea that MOOCs are legitimate
- Reduce the shocking amount of waste, privilege to the wealthy, and academic cruft and butt-kissery
Wouldn't it be nice to emerge from all of this with a more level, more accessible, and lower priced collegiate environment?
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.
To require a BS or BA for a sales job is insane and just creates servitude dynamics for no reason.
This doesn’t make it good or bad; it just is.
In ancient India, Education is considered as sacred and given utmost important.
Basic Ideology is that student who have dedicated his life to studies shouldn't suffer to learn. So education is free.
Basically university's are publicly funded and students also do other small works as compensation.
For food, students used to go and beg (One needs to stand with a bowl infront of someone's house, people will come and feed them).
Even though whole culture is destroyed due to colonization. Sadhus/Rishis continue to do it even now.
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:
https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/texas/article/The-c...
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
It makes Blendle less attractive to me.
TL;DR: skills vs. reasoning.
For oligarchs, especially of public education, it is a skills-manufacturing pipeline for producing an efficient but docile wage-slave workforce.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
For themselves, they reserve critical thinking, un-bowdlerized. Yes, an eponym.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bowdler
As Brother Mouzone said in _The Wire_: "You know what the most dangerous thing in America is, right? N-----r with a _library card_."
https://invidio.us/watch?v=bRCyZydgqdc
(Yes, bowdlerized.)
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artes_mechanicae
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6x7u6a/on_the_...
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.
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.