321–330 of 447 posts
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Education doesn't always need to have an ROI, sometimes it's just worth what you spend on it.
The vast majority of folks can't afford something that expensive without an ROI. What's being discussed here is how our current system encourages getting into debt for it and how that's negative for our society.
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The problem with subsidizing college in any way, including the current student loan system is that it encourages people to go to college whether it makes sense or not, and as several people have mentioned in this discussion, in a lot of cases, it doesn't make sense. Anyone who is properly motivated should be able to go to college, but when I hear cries for a free college education, I can imagine that that would stimu…
Many countries provide free (you don't even have to buy overpriced books or any other scam) education on all levels (including PhD). Even the middling ones like Poland. You simply estimate your rough requirements for different specialties and fund that many students. Admissions can become somewhat cutthroat (50 applicants per slot are not unheard of), but that only works for the better.
This is what I've heard about a lot of places that provide good higher education. I would be concerned in the US that college readiness correlates a little bit too closely to familial wealth.
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Yeah, but isn't that also the "problem" with subsidizing K-12 public school? One doesn't need a high school education to wait tables or stock shelves, and most apprenticeships and trade schools could probably be started several years earlier without issue. We used to have this Enlightenment ideal of a Liberal Arts Education. It served as job training, sure, but it also tried to make its recipients better citizens and…
Was just talking with my boss about how they do it in Germany. Essentially they do heavy tracking, if you can't cut it in the college track, you get put into blue collar training and apprentice programs. This is why they are such an industrial powerhouse still - they have a well prepared white collar and blue collar work force.
In Germany it's easy to be put on one of the two lower tracks which lead to apprenticeships [1], because you didn't do well in primary school. At that point is harder (but still possible) to go to college. It also leads to segregation because immigrants who don't speak German at home are unlikely to do well in primary school.
[1] Calling it blue collar is a bit of misnomer here because you can also do apprenticeships in white collar jobs, even software engineering.
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"A similar number of people" developing a brand of hero worship for scientists? Maybe I'm hugely biased but that doesn't really mirror what I see online and elsewhere. Are you telling me that for every climate change denier, for every anti-vaxxer, for every creationist, for every chemtrail/tap water/moon landing/flat earth conspiracy theorist there's a rabid scientist who elevates the current scientific consensus to…
The "March for Science" that happened earlier this year had estimated attendance of 1.07 million. Now go to Google Images and search for "March for Science". Nearly every sign I see is either political in nature, elevating science to a level of religion/infallibility, or casting science as a fashion/meme ("Scientific is the new chic", "Science isn't wrong", "In science we trust").
It feels like an act of willful ignorance to interpret the few words or catchy phrase on a protest sign and ascribe them as that person's core beliefs.
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>Another solution is to let you go to school for free and then pay a percent of all your future earnings back to your college, or at least in to a pool that pays for the next generation's college. We basically already have that system. If you get federal loans (which most people who take out loans do--90% of all loan disbursements) you can sign up for an income based repayment plan. You pay back 10% of your disposabl…
Absent public service loan forgiveness (which we may very well soon be, if Republicans in Congress get their way), the number is actually 30 years and the forgiven amount is taxable income. Additionally, income-based plans often result in payments that don't even cover interest, so the debt continues to pile up quickly. Meaningfully different from the original suggestion.
No. It's 20 years. https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/repay-loans/understand/plans/in...
>the forgiven amount is taxable income.
It's only taxable up to the point of solvency. If you have a sizeable loan forgiven and you haven't made enough money to pay it over 20 years, you likely won't have enough assets to end up owing very much.
Also it's very likely congress will intervene in 10-15 years or so when a huge percentage of voters have this problem.
>income-based plans often result in payments that don't even cover interest, so the debt continues to pile up quickly.
If that's the case, you will never pay it off and we're back to debt cancellation after 20 years.
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where did this concept of college as a 4 year vacation come from? You have to show up to class, study, be diligent, and apply effective time management skills. Otherwise, you'll be put on academic probation and then kicked out. Even for those people who seem to have a knack for finding lax professors and classes, coasting is not necessarily a college student thing.
I coasted through five years of college, graduating with a CS and Math joint-major, three internships, and 20 more credit-hours then I needed. I did the bare minimum of studying, and applied little to no time management skills (Unless you count the occasional half-assed assignment finished on Sunday night.) I spent more time worrying about World of Warcraft, then I did about the possibility of ending up on academic p…
If you went to college voluntarily and did not care about neither the monetary constraints nor the opportunity costs, then sure that's a vacation. I suspect pretty much anything can be framed as such under those circumstances. For most people, this is not actually a realistic option.
What feels so deceptive about the panic around student debt is the devil is the details. I think if you drill in median student loan debt for an UNDERGRADUATE is like $12k. That's less than a car loan and we don't have a panic about that. Most of the debt is for graduate, PHDs, law and MDs or undergrads who attend expensive private universities. These people should make more money from that investment. My point is ov…
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The problem with subsidizing college in any way, including the current student loan system is that it encourages people to go to college whether it makes sense or not, and as several people have mentioned in this discussion, in a lot of cases, it doesn't make sense. Anyone who is properly motivated should be able to go to college, but when I hear cries for a free college education, I can imagine that that would stimu…
what's wrong with a 4-year vacation where you enrich your mind? That sounds perfectly healthy on an individual level, and tolerable on a societal level. Perhaps even necessary if you consider the deterioration of discourse in this country. Also, It's not like food and housing becomes free when tuition is removed.
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> I'd say "bite the bullet, and that's what banks get for giving out risky loans" but we know that's not going to play out that way, especially since the gov owns a fair portion. > Making tuition free is nice... I think it's funny that you have these two ideas so close together... The government owning most of the loans provides a very easy path to enabling free college retroactively: extinguish all the loans. The go…
That punishes everyone who took out private loans or worked to put themselves through college. Not to mention it hurts those who worked to pay down their loans earlier. There are a lot of ways of socializing the cost of education, doing it retroactively opens up a whole can of worms.