241–250 of 669 posts
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> So, ... what the f@@@ did you do at college that you are calling it a "waste"? I think your mistake is in assuming that your experience is typical.
Out of the 100 or so people I know my experience is very typical.
Not typical.
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Doesn't that argument extend to mean that the public shouldn't fund any education? I mean what's the difference between the first ~12 years of school vs the last 2-5? Is the difference that the people are adults and no longer children (and so can be said to be responsible for themselves)?
First, there must be a dividing line between when we are no longer going to pay for a persons education. 18 years old is a pretty good dividing line because that when society deems people responsible for themselves. Second, college is a good cut of because it's highly specialized education. Third, almost all the benefits are captured by the precipitant of the education. Finally, most of the country would either be un…
Scientific and technical knowledge drives innovation. Economic growth on a per-capita basis is entirely driven by innovation. Thus scientific and technical education directly impacts your quality of life.
With regards to liberal arts education, I'm inclined to agree that government subsidies may not be the best use of tax money.
As a culture, we really need to stop telling 17 year olds to not worry about money, go to college, and figure something out. There is always someone ready with a romantic appeal to a classical education, and it is so frustrating for me. Wasting four years is a huge cost. Years, decades of debt is a huge cost. Going to college with no plan about money? The costs are assured. Plus, the degrees people are actually getti…
How about as a society we need to lower college tuition?
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I don't regret time spent getting higher ed, but I 1) worked while studying 2) didn't end up with debt 3) didn't do it in the US. I honestly have no idea what I would do in US with 100k+ debt load projected at the end of college. I wasn't that financially educated at 17-18... I don't think any common school even cares to give such tools to people. I guess I am lucky I hadn't have to face this problem, but I am kind o…
Average student debt in the US is only $37,172 [1] which is not insurmountable to pay off. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_debt#United_States
[0]: https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/average-credit-card-debt-hou...
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The amount of money that goes towards marketing, administration, and buildings that are far fancier than they need to be is the issue. The professors are a fraction of the costs. Universities spend far more money than they need to on useless extraneous offices and bloat. Get back to focusing on education and the costs will drop.
It's not that simple at all. Regarding buildings and marketing: you have to work hard to attract the absolute top students, especially in a huge education market like the US. Now you may argue that students shouldn't be so superficial, but they are, so universities have to deal with that when competing at the national stage. As for administration, you probably have no idea how complicated it is to keep a university r…
Yes but that isn't actually making education better overall, it just means you're taking in better students. It's a zero sum game. Every college could deck out their dorms like the 4 Seasons Hotels, but it's not actually improving the quality of the education provided. It's still the same set of students, rotated around a bit more between which ones ended up in which schools.
That's the key part - is separating out what costs actually provide a better overall education vs. which costs just are "marketing in disguise" to take the top students from School A and convince them to go to School B.
I think a lot of people are looking at this as "maybe this article is offering advice" instead, the way I'm looking at it is this is giving us a rough quantification of what we all know intuitively: that college is so expensive it's reaching a natural ceiling. The way this manifests in reality isn't millions of people all doing a cost/benefit calculus like this and coming to the rational conclusion they can skip coll…
Don't have all the answers, but less emphasis on loans, competition from better-supported state and other non-profit schools, and having multiple forms of post-high-school education and credentialing available could all potentially help to bring some competition and sanity back to all this.
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> We should not aim to make college free by means of government sponsorship, but rather education free or inexpensive by means of lowering the actual costs. I think that you're vastly underestimating how much money is needed to provide quality higher education. Trust me, the last thing we need is a race to the bottom when it comes to higher education.
The amount of money that goes towards marketing, administration, and buildings that are far fancier than they need to be is the issue. The professors are a fraction of the costs. Universities spend far more money than they need to on useless extraneous offices and bloat. Get back to focusing on education and the costs will drop.
How do you skip college and invest the tuition in the S&P 500? Ah, you can't: Of course, lenders won't give out large loans for an individual to skip college and dump tuition into the stock market, this is just a hypothetical scenario. So this article is unrealistic.
This is the kicker. Similarly, the stock market outperforms property on the regular, but banks won't lend you hundreds of thousands of beans to get involved in the stock market, when they'll fall over themselves to give you a mortgage.
Tuition at a California State University is only $5,472 a year. That is pretty darn close to free. Many other state schools have low tuition. Nearly 500,000 students in California attend a CSU. Almost twice as many students as attend a UC school. Yet, in these kind of analyses, these low cost state schools always seem to get the shaft when in fact they educate a tremendous number of students at very low cost. https:/…
There's still opportunity costs to consider. For example, in the Netherlands tuition is about 2k a year (the rest is subsidised). Education is top-notch (pretty much all of our universities are top 5% worldwide), although we don't have any of the top 0.1% institutions that educate a relative handful of students. (e.g. Harvard with 2k students per year) But despite cheap tuition fees, the average person would spend 5…
How is that top 5% computed? Do you have a source?
I think a lot of people are looking at this as "maybe this article is offering advice" instead, the way I'm looking at it is this is giving us a rough quantification of what we all know intuitively: that college is so expensive it's reaching a natural ceiling. The way this manifests in reality isn't millions of people all doing a cost/benefit calculus like this and coming to the rational conclusion they can skip coll…
And college got expensive partly through policy choices. Offering easy loans tends to make people price insensitive, so tuitions go up and a lot of that money goes to things like increasingly fancy buildings and making textbook publishers' shareholders rich. Meanwhile often less is going to state schools that, with low in-state tuitions, were historically a way up for a lot of people. (An older friend went to Berkele…