I still don’t know why there aren’t mass scale class action lawsuits against higher education for certain degrees.
if the degree is for fun not a job that is fine - but as the taxpaper subsidising this all I only want to help those who will pay off my investment (or those who stasticaly would have had not whatever unexpected disaster happened)
A professional degree should give you an opportunity to increase your income in proportion to the cost of the degree. If that is not even close to being the case, as is what happens with a lot of degrees at elite schools, then I’d call that what it is — a scam.
Those averages include things like medical school for doctors and law school for lawyers. Tuition and expected salary are more aligned there.
Where tuition and salary are not aligned are fields like the humanities and social sciences. At top graduate schools for those fields you will have tuitions in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, with average salary expectations far below that.
The only way that it makes financial sense to get a degree like that is if you are independently wealthy to begin with, but these schools will not tell you that and will cheerfully direct you to take on a ruinous amount of debt.
School should be provided, IMO, and nobody should be left with ruinous debt. This country can afford it, and money invested in education comes back in multiples in economic output, and yet we choose to keep education out of reach from many poor people and make it extra hard for those who can only just afford it. I’m sorry if you got stuck with a load of debt that’s difficult to manage. That sucks and it’s not fair.
And my comment is not about people thinking they'd be getting rich -- it's about people making a (or what should be) reasonable assumption that they'd make enough money to pay off their tuition without lifelong financial struggle.
Yes, state schools are the smart choice here.
My point is it's not all on the student, they are victims to a large extent. We should also place blame on these elite institutions for suckering in young adults with their prestige and then not delivering a product that is worth what they charge. And on the government for providing a blank check for this nonsense.
Anyway, I do think we're mostly in agreement. And btw, I'm fine, I'm just speaking from the experiences of many of my peers, which have left me pretty teed-off at a prestigious university in my city that I will refrain from calling out by name.
I know the drug dealer is not issuing the loan, but the dealer accepts and facilitates it. I’ll make it clearer:
I’m a drug dealer that doesn’t care where you get your money. If you rob and kill someone and bring me the money, I will take it.
So how does the dealer facilitate this entire institution?
They take the money, simple as that. If a drug dealer was a legal entity, they’d be sued into oblivion. These schools may as well be selling kilos of coke.
I’ll go one further:
I’m a drug dealer, currently you have no drug addiction. I cannot make money if you don’t have an addiction. Let me convince you need to take this drug.
The dealer creates the market for the loan too. Higher education needs you to take the loan.
What the Ivy Leagues charge for certain graduate degrees in the social sciences is basically a huge scam. There is absolutely no viable pathway to pay back the $200,000+ cost of a graduate degree in social sciences from a school like Columbia or Harvard, other than public service loan forgiveness, if you actually want to work in the field that the degree ostensibly prepares you for.
I know people that got grad degrees like this and then ended up going to coding bootcamps so they could work in tech to pay them off.