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Student Loan Debt Is Now as Big as the U.S. Junk Bond Market

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Re: Student Loan Debt Is Now as Big as the U.S. Junk Bond Market

#441

Post by throwawayjava »

sigstoat wrote: post #126
grasshopperpurp wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No offense, but that's ridiculous. There's money owed here. The schools already got it, the banks are owed it. Someone needs to make that right, you can't just "forgive" debt without some party taking a huge hit. Which one? No offense, but the banks should take on risk if they're charging interest. Right now, they can have their cake and eat it, too, which is stupid - no offense.

> No offense, but the banks should take on risk if they're charging interest. Right now, they can have their cake and eat it, too, which is stupid - no offense. i'll skip the faux politeness of "no offense" and just point out that this is foolish. even if payback is literally guaranteed, interest is still required, because money now is worth more than money later, due to opportunity costs. the US federal government,…

> interest is still required, because money now is worth more than money later, due to opportunity costs

But where can I get the kinds of returns that banks get from student loans? Especially without doing any real work?

Re: Student Loan Debt Is Now as Big as the U.S. Junk Bond Market

#442

Post by greedo »

heywot wrote: post #294
jobu wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for a useless degree they'll never use Another part of the problem is that there's really no such thing as a useless degree. A person may never use what they learned from that degree, but the fact that they were able to earn a degree is still used by employers as a bar to judge potential employees.

Which is a really frustrating thing. I have family members who didn't go to college who could not pursue certain careers (or, struggled to advance their careers) because they don't have piece of paper - even if it had nothing to do with the career itself. In tech it has become less of an issue but I would love to see this go away for everyone. Being able to get a four year degree does not signal that a potential empl…

Not sure it's less of an issue in tech now. I got into the field when a degree wasn't needed (late 90's), just a pulse. Now it would be hard to get an entry level job without one, at least at my company.

Re: Student Loan Debt Is Now as Big as the U.S. Junk Bond Market

#443

Post by harrumph »

tzahola wrote: post #377
harrumph wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Value is the compensation others are willing to give you in exchange for your goods/services. Value includes far more than that. It includes all kinds of tangibles and intangibles, including compensation in exchange for absolutely nothing, such as in the case of nonworking shareholders being paid dividends, such dividends arising from the expropriation by owners of surplus value created by workers.

Nonworking shareholders are being paid for their investment risk. The company pays them for taking said risk instead of investing their capital somewhere else. Workers are paid wages for creating said surplus value using the company’s capital. If the shareholders’ capital were indeed not necessary for producing said surplus value, then why wouldn’t the workers create it by themselves, thus avoiding the expropriation?

>Workers are paid wages for creating said surplus value using the company’s capital.

Workers are paid wages to produce. Wages, stagnant for the last forty-plus years, have proven unlinked to productivity, which has risen very sharply over the same time. Wages are also unlinked from investment risk, which compels no rise in wages when it retires.

> then why wouldn’t the workers create it by themselves, thus avoiding the expropriation?

They do - you have described cooperative ownership of an enterprise. To tie back to value: given the fundamental conflict of interest under capitalism in the apportioning of value between creators and expropriators, I think we should expect cooperative ownership to grow in popularity.

It's important to allow that value reasonably includes the satisfaction of workers, customers, neighbors, and the taxpayers who subsidize the enterprise. It's understandable that these things would escape the category of "value" under a system that enshrines the satisfaction of shareholders as the prime motive of the enterprise.

Re: Student Loan Debt Is Now as Big as the U.S. Junk Bond Market

#444

Post by ma2rten »

tobltobs wrote: post #424
dvcrn wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. I ended up in my apprenticeship because during elementary school I wanted to go to the school where all my friends went even though my scores were better. Stupid I know but I was a kid that wasn't able to make reasonable decisions. Yet I ended up through a apprenticeship in Software Engineering and I could go back at any time and finish my 12 years then go to university. Part of me wants to go study and get a de…

Could'nt you go to a Fachhochschule with your apprenticeship in Software Engineering?

You have to do 1 or 2 years of school (Fachoberschule) first. My friend did this, but it's a path that not many people will choose, because it's hard to go back to school for such a long time after you started to earn money.

Re: Student Loan Debt Is Now as Big as the U.S. Junk Bond Market

#445

Post by elif »

geodel wrote: post #357
elif wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Considering the discourse in universities in this country with all the perceived victimhood and unending political correctness I am not sure they are producing enlightened minds.

That could have something to do with the character of people who can currently afford college. I've heard it called an echo chamber.

Re: Student Loan Debt Is Now as Big as the U.S. Junk Bond Market

#446

Post by chriskanan »

mywittyname wrote: post #140
chriskanan wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that one can gain a great deal of enrichment from studying non-lucrative majors, I think people should highly consider double majoring in this case. I majored in computer science AND philosophy as an undergraduate. Doing both took under 5 years. I think a lot of people don't realize how little they will earn with their degrees compared to how high their debt load will be. That's not including people who…

Isn't a philosophy/CS double major kind of like a math/CS double major? In that it expands your knowledge in the same domain, rather than a completely new one would (like, for example, studying German literature or biology would). I remember helping my sister with her philosophy home work, and being surprised by the amount of elementary logic and set theory being taught.

Other than a class on logic, all of my other courses involved enormous amount of written argumentation, e.g., reasoning, ancient philosophy, modern philosophy, Asian philosophy, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophy of film, metaphysics, etc. I would say that only logic had a direction connection to computer science, although as a computer scientist, I would choose to write essays about the Turing test, philosophy of AI, etc. This was 15+ years ago, but I assume things are still the same in many philosophy departments.

Re: Student Loan Debt Is Now as Big as the U.S. Junk Bond Market

#447

Post by czep »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #406
czep wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are more prone to trends, fads and more personal biases This is not necessarily true, and I would urge caution when making such generalizations. There is junk social science and there is also plenty of junk "hard" science. Examples of fake data, political and personal biases interfering with the scientific method, occur in all fields. Some "fads" eventually become accepted fact. It took 100 years before plate…

When you have prominent social scientists arguing that pointing out statistical errors in papers is "Methodological Terrorism" ( http://andrewgelman.com/2016/09/21/what-has-happened-down-he... ), I call that junk science. And if social scientists want to "help legitimize science as a process, critial thinking, and to debunk illogical arguments.", they should start with fixing their own reproducibility crisis and p-ha…

I completely side with Gelman on this issue, but you can't point to this one case to dismiss all of social science. One can find examples of p-hacking, irreproducible research, and fabricated data in any field, but the existence of such does not invalidate the entire discipline.

I am merely cautioning against over generalization that just because there are some high profile examples of bad social science, there is still a lot of very good social science happening and it would be a shame to ignore it.

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