81–90 of 146 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We could just forgive the debts. We don't need a compensating tax when inflation is this low.
This would be a slap in the face of some people who went to school and worked odd jobs to pay for tuition.
It's a hard choice but macro is more important than micro in these decisions.
This did not happen by chance. The answer isn't hard to arrive at--simply ask why college is so expensive compared to the 1990s, and why states cannot afford to offset these costs anymore. America is selling out its future by convincing young people that they should go into debt to pay for "the college experience". But why does "the college experience" need to include superfluous staff and wasteful resources? Follow…
Paint, for those of us with no familiarity with the US system, a picture.
I'm a high school math teacher. As part of their high school math education, I encourage all of my students to do one of their projects on analyzing loans. I ask them to pick an item they might take a loan out for, such as a car, a boat (we live in a small fishing town in Alaska), a house, or a student loan. They pick a realistic loan amount, APR, and term length. Then they run the numbers on the loan. I demonstrate…
Care to share your instructions? I’m an adult and I just use the web calculators haha.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lAG9o3f106qwLBODURsglUChsBs...
Before the internet, centralized places of knowledge were needed, and you'd need to attend that place to find said knowledge. Think about how access to music caused the price of albums to drop. Education had not seen a similar dip in cost even though the supply is 100 percent saturated. There's a dying class of professors who got in while tenure was still a thing that paid probably 1/10 of the cost for education kids…
This did not happen by chance. The answer isn't hard to arrive at--simply ask why college is so expensive compared to the 1990s, and why states cannot afford to offset these costs anymore. America is selling out its future by convincing young people that they should go into debt to pay for "the college experience". But why does "the college experience" need to include superfluous staff and wasteful resources? Follow…
> Follow the money Paint, for those of us with no familiarity with the US system, a picture.
The position did not pay, what their brochure was promising their computer science majors could expect to be paid, while at the same time, asking these computer science majors to accumulate 5 salary-years' worth of debt, for the honor and distinction of earning this degree. But they don't even pay their own staff that much.
Although by inclination what I want to do is rant about the iniquity of this kind of robo-debt in education, instead what I am thinking right now, is this: how does this compare overall to the rate of default in debt for other purposes? how does it compare to car loan debt? mortgage debt? I ask, because debt is the same, except in as much as student debt is in principle seeking a path to be able to repay it. The asse…
"The modern theory of the perpetuation of debt has drenched the earth with blood, and crushed its inhabitants under burdens ever accumulating." -Thomas Jefferson I know I mention this book a lot on here, but _Debt: The First 5,000 Years_ is the most amazing book I've ever read on the history of debt, money and slavery. Debt relief has to come. Every great civilization throughout history has had to forgive debts. Curr…
This is a rather ungenerous view of the great burdens faced by previous generations. When I grew up there was a draft. When you got out of high school, you faced the real live possibility of being forcibly inducted into the military and sent to an active combat zone--where many US soldiers died, including high-school friends of mine who were killed before they turned 20.
They would happily have swapped going to war for four years of college and the long-term debt attached to it if they had had that option.
You might not like the terms today, but please don't ever say you have it worse than any generation before you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Follow the money Paint, for those of us with no familiarity with the US system, a picture.
Insane administrative salaries, ridiculous sports budgets, new buildings and amenities that no student needs ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/one-schools-f... )
For the specific case you linked above, $25m for athletic upgrades is really not that expensive for a school the size of UCF with over 64,000 students and an annual budget of $1.5b. [2] If you abandoned building the facilities and distributed the money evenly among all students you could cut costs for a single year by 2% for in state students and 1% for out of state students. [3] That isn't nothing and you can certainly debate whether athletic facilities are a smart use of $25m, but it is a drop in the bucket compared with the actual rise in costs.
[1] - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-m...
This is ruining America's future. That's 5M people who can't even qualify for a car loan now. The penalties for default are punishing. Even bankruptcy isn't a realistic option. This is ruinous for these people. They'll be in their mid-30s or early 40s before they can pay off. Starting that late to build a nest egg, they'll never recover. There's going to be an entire generation that has no secure retirement plans. It…
The age curve in the United States is actually doing pretty good thanks to the massive amounts of immigrants we attract. Japan and Germany wish they had our population growth rates.
I'm a high school math teacher. As part of their high school math education, I encourage all of my students to do one of their projects on analyzing loans. I ask them to pick an item they might take a loan out for, such as a car, a boat (we live in a small fishing town in Alaska), a house, or a student loan. They pick a realistic loan amount, APR, and term length. Then they run the numbers on the loan. I demonstrate…
You could also say that many students wouldn't be in higher education without the loan. That is especially true here in the UK. That might not be a bad thing except that we've gone through an arms race so that every junior post needs five bachelor degrees and a decade of experience. Experience alone used to be enough.
It'd be nice to get back there. Our focus on getting everybody into higher education —and underwriting indefinite liens on lifetime income— has also meant that universities care more about the number of students than the quality of teaching. That alone probably isn't news, what has been recently in the UK is the remuneration of higher management staff.
They can apparently justify the 10-20× bump over senior lecturers (plus benefits like housing, cars, lunches) to their boards by saying they're the only people who can attract all the money from the students. It's disgusting and vicious cycle.