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NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

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Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#281

Post by ithilglin909 »

justonepost wrote: post #236
pitaj wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

College is expensive because so much money is available in the forms of subsidies and loans. If the federal government stopped guaranteeing loans, and cut back on other subsidies, the cost of college would be much much lower.

No, College is expensive because it's horribly inefficient. Professors are paid terribly.

Professors aren't paid terribly -- adjuncts, lecturers, and teaching assistants typically are. That's because there are far more people jockeying for teaching positions than there are positions available.

But saying college is expensive because it's inefficient begs the question: why is it inefficient? I'm inclined to think that the amount of federal money available is, at least, a factor...

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#282

Post by robotrout »

trylist wrote: post #272
pitaj wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

College is expensive because so much money is available in the forms of subsidies and loans. If the federal government stopped guaranteeing loans, and cut back on other subsidies, the cost of college would be much much lower.

That's backwards. College is expensive because demand is extremely high. Subsidies increase that demand by making college affordable for most, but the suggestion that the subsidies themselves are the problem is plain wrong. We wanted an educated workforce, we've got one. We can say we don't want one, but to blame our efforts to educate people as the problem with education is not productive. We either educate people o…

As the supply of available money increases, there is no incentive not to increase tuition. Any system that is flooded with money experiences price inflation.

Because students are not able to discharge their debt in bankruptcy, they constitute a riskless loan opportunity to the lenders, who throw money at them.

A sad side-effect of this as that the price inflation that this causes is forcing more and more students who might have otherwise been able to finance their tuition without loans, into needing loans also, thus dooming more and more of the next generation into huge debts that will effect their ability to buy houses, start families, and save for retirement.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#283

Post by ams6110 »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #211
ConfSibi wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making college free is a huge waste of resources. College is largely an exercise in social credentialing and signaling. If we make college free, the people who want to get ahead in society will just go to expensive graduate programs in order to distinguish themselves. Then the discussion will shift to fully funding those programs... Our current system is very fair. Take out a loan if you need to, but make sure your p…

I have some bad news for you: graduate programs are usually fully funded and some PhD students even get a stipend for attending.

PhD students getting stipends are essentially contract employees. They are doing work, either as associate instructors or research assistants, for that money.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#284

Post by rohanshah »

nappy-doo wrote: post #173
aantix wrote: post #150

This is probably the other piece of the puzzle regarding the implementation of single payer healthcare. Because who in their right mind wants to sacrifice 16 years of earning potential, take on 500K of debt only to become an MD with long work days and now prices that are fixed with no other form of negotiation leverage in sight.

Does anyone know if the single payer models we use in the US keep Dr. salaries on par? I've only heard of savings from negotiated drug prices, and insurance overhead; but, if Dr. salaries are also decreased, OP's got an interesting point.

From my understanding of Bernie's "Medicare For All" bill (S. 1804) [1] payment to providers would be fixed at the, well, Medicare rate. Medicare rates are about 40% lower than private insurance (about 56% of national healthcare spending is private), but it's also higher than Medicaid and obviously higher than what the uninsured pay. All-in-all, from the figures I've seen [2], this specific single-payer plan would lead to about a 10.6% [3] overall reduction in payment to providers (some of which will be ameliorated by a reduction in costs that maintain complicated insurance administration work at hospitals) but I imagine providers will generally take some percent hit to payments which would in turn affect physician salaries (albeit not drastically)

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/180... [2] https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/blahous-costs-medicare... [3] https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2018/08/15/provider-pay...

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#285

Post by NTDF9 »

megamindbrian2 wrote: post #262
NTDF9 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People call for X to be more affordable > government subsidizes X > X absorbs all subsidies and becomes even more expensive > people call for X to be socialized. The problem is that government subsidizes loans. It doesn't do something like capped match. The government should just say, "We will cover your need-based education burden up to $20,000". Something like this would make most state schools accessible to most…

This sounds like government should pay people subsidiaries directly. Like an HSA but for more than just health. If you use the account for school it's tax free otherwise there are fee or the transaction is declined. How much more amazing would service from utilities be if they had to go through customer to get the same subsidiaries they get now.

I have taken an education loan from a bank in another country. They literally only approved me for a maximum of $30,000 loan. Let me explain how that worked.

I had to pay first 15% from my account, they would pay the remaining 85%. Every semester, once I showed a receipt that I paid 15% to the university, that bank would wire the remaining 85% directly to that University.

What did this do to my decision making? I literally only chose universities for which I could afford the upfront 15% and the max of $30k. I chose this university even though I had admit from other universities which had higher tuition.

What impact does it have on universities? Universities with higher tuition start seeing a decline in enrollments. I got out with a max $30k debt, of which I paid 15% out of pocket already, per semester.

I could've dropped out of school and joined again a few years later but that loan would still be available to me for 7 years.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#286

Post by nine_k »

eugeniub wrote: post #258
pitaj wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

College is expensive because so much money is available in the forms of subsidies and loans. If the federal government stopped guaranteeing loans, and cut back on other subsidies, the cost of college would be much much lower.

Considering the millions of people struggling to pay for college and desperate for lower tuition, this is totally untrue. This is like saying, "if we didn't have food stamps, food would be half the cost."

Food stamps have a limited value.

If we provided people with unlimited special accounts only good to buy food (with money, not food stamps), this would definitely affect prices in groceries.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#287

Post by beat »

chimeracoder wrote: post #141
beat wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm convinced that it's the cost structure, implemented by many-to-many negotiation between providers and insurers, that drives the uniquely high cost of the US health care system. (Unique as in twice as much per capita as the rest of the industrialized world.) Japan's system is structurally very similar to ours - employer-provided private insurance - with one key difference. In Japan, pricing for all medical goods/s…

> I'm convinced that it's the cost structure, implemented by many-to-many negotiation between providers and insurers, that drives the uniquely high cost of the US health care system. (Unique as in twice as much per capita as the rest of the industrialized world.) Japan's system is structurally very similar to ours - employer-provided private insurance - with one key difference. In Japan, pricing for all medical goods…

So is Medicare paying more than similar systems in other countries, or less, or about the same? And if Medicare is paying more than, say, Japan, but it's still not enough to cover the costs in America, what is going on structurally with the other 60% of the medical system? Because there's something structurally broken here. It's not mere profiteering - it's more like a feedback loop. For-profit medicine works effectively and affordably in at least one other country with a cost of living otherwise on par with ours.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#288

Post by moorhosj »

nostromo wrote: post #220
pitaj wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

College is expensive because so much money is available in the forms of subsidies and loans. If the federal government stopped guaranteeing loans, and cut back on other subsidies, the cost of college would be much much lower.

This seems to be a pattern in America. People call for X to be more affordable > government subsidizes X > X absorbs all subsidies and becomes even more expensive > people call for X to be socialized. Maybe instead we should start to unwind student financing. For example: let students discharge student loans via bankruptcy. That would give financiers pause and would put an upper bound on what many universities could…

== That would give financiers pause and would put an upper bound on what many universities could charge.==

It would also limit the pool of people who could get a loan for college in the first place. Maybe we can take a page from other developed countries who don't seem to have the same problem.

It seems to be a pattern in America where we act like a problem has no answers, meanwhile the rest of the world contains many potential solutions to the problem.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#289

Post by alasdair_ »

monocasa wrote: post #120
sf_rob wrote: post #32

I'll probably be downvoted on a forum like this, but I worry about the most successful universities using their funds to subsidize those who would be fine without it. I was actually made aware of this by a wealthy Stanford alumni which has a fairly broad program for undergraduate tuition assistance. Graduates of mid/low tier universities seem more and more likely to have to compete with better credentialed people wit…

IDK. The same thought process led me to not being able to complete college due to financial reasons. Despite being emancipated, FAFSA still considers you a dependent until you're 24. I was told that only with documentation of leaving an abusive household would a dependency exception grant be applied. So according to FAFSA I was supposed to use all this money that I didn't have to pay for college. By 24 I had dropped…

>Despite being emancipated, FAFSA still considers you a dependent until you're 24.

It's ridiculous.

Parents divorced and one parent is an asshole? All they need to do is refuse to hand over their tax returns.

Parent remarried? FAFSA wants to see the tax returns of the step-parent and takes THEIR income into account, even if the marriage only occurred the previous year.

Needing parental tax returns is a ridiculous thing for an adult.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#290

Post by brtknr »

I do not live in the US and therefore I am not sure why medicine has been singled out as a worthy profession to receive subsidy over many others? Don’t those in the medical profession get paid reasonably well over there? Aren’t there other professions equally necessary for a functional society that don’t get compensated as well as they should like teachers, social workers and those in the voluntary sectors who would be better off with this money? I personally think this is a misjudged priority in the grand scheme of things.
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