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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

#351
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…

Woah there... govt subsidizes what? This isn't about subsidies (except for loan guarantees), it's about unsecured credit and debt that can't be discharged in bankruptcy. That (like credit card spending, 8 year car loans, and payday lending) is a recipe for rising prices and high eventual bankruptcy rstes, but it's not govt subsidy. It is regulatory capture.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That's because there are far more people jockeying for teaching positions than there are positions available.

Imagine what they could be doing if more people were going to college.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think not being able to default on your student loans is the main factor in rising costs. There is no reason not to give out a student loan of any amount if it is guaranteed money. And there are many people who struggled to graduate highschool, or people who have no idea what they want to do in life in any way, that are getting crazy large loans to go to very expensive and demanding schools and and are very likely…

In short, the free market has found a very lucrative cash cow for all involved. A select group of people are getting fabulously rich off this broken system, and since they control it there is no incentive to stop. Of course, someone is getting shafted. The students, in this case.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As I understand it, salaries are only one of the many ways that doctors make money. Many "providers" are doctor-owned. No, nowadays, private practices are a dying breed. Most physicians are, in fact, salaried. And that salary isn't actually all earnings, because a large chunk of their business and professional expenses (insurance, continuing education, various licenses, etc.) all have to be paid out-of-pocket. Thes…

But the earnings aren't all salaries either. As I understand it, doctors earn salaries from employers, but as I understand it, they are also leading investors in provider systems and in the malpractice insurance system. They're not getting poor. The only thing I'm suggesting is that reducing the cost of care will make them poorer, but that could be offset by attracting people to be doctors who don't come from the mos…

> But the earnings aren't all salaries either. As I understand it, doctors earn salaries from employers, but as I understand it, they are also leading investors in provider systems and in the malpractice insurance system.

Your understanding is very, very gravely mistaken. Most doctors do not have any of the kids of investment stakes you describe.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#355
post #322
post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that a politician who stares at a problem head on and refuses to deal with it, because we didn't deal with it in the past, is the insane one. Student loans have become incredibly predatory and the banks were the ones who had the information to realise these were bad loans, but they lobbied the government to make it so they had to do no due diligence. Now they've fucked up and unless something is done about th…

> It's already a house of cards and we should just deal with it instead of tying large portions of the population to these bad deals I guess the taxpayer is kind of screwed when it comes to Federal loans. I still think it is a bad idea to retroactively change laws even if the idea seems popular. As far as I understand, an individual's loan obligations don't automatically transfer to their surviving family members so…

Ah I thought you were treating private and federal loans as the same. I'm with you on private loans being treated as regular loans, let them go away in bankruptcy.

For federal loans, the position the US is in with them needs to be unwound. It's not even a choice at this point, it's worse than how inflated the housing crisis happened and if we don't deal with it on our own, it's going to just show up as a surprise.

That's not to say we need to wipe the slate clean at once. We could just do a 10% or 5% haircut on all loans every year and treat it the same way as an entitlement. We will need to fund it of course, and it will not be painless, but that's the position the countries gotten itself into.

Not doing something to cut down the massive amount of debt that is already dealing with large amounts of defaults is just be willfully ignorant of the risks.

>Yeah, no. If you have a guaranteed loan (which apparently you can't get anymore), I say you are on the hook for it for life especially if you start making money later.

The only things we saddle people with life for are prison sentences for murder and rape. Student loan debt shouldn't be at that level of seriousness. Think about it. If you had a debt from the government that followed you _forever_, why even be part of the system anymore? You are incentivized to either not work, or work and hide every bit of income. If you don't give people a path out of an issue, they aren't going to play by the rules anymore

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think not being able to default on your student loans is the main factor in rising costs. There is no reason not to give out a student loan of any amount if it is guaranteed money. And there are many people who struggled to graduate highschool, or people who have no idea what they want to do in life in any way, that are getting crazy large loans to go to very expensive and demanding schools and and are very likely…

In short, the free market has found a very lucrative cash cow for all involved. A select group of people are getting fabulously rich off this broken system, and since they control it there is no incentive to stop. Of course, someone is getting shafted. The students, in this case.

Definitely not a free market. If the government didn't guarantee student loans, the banks would have been a lot more conservative in giving out loans. In fact, this is easily the biggest factor in the rapid rise in tuition.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think not being able to default on your student loans is the main factor in rising costs. There is no reason not to give out a student loan of any amount if it is guaranteed money. And there are many people who struggled to graduate highschool, or people who have no idea what they want to do in life in any way, that are getting crazy large loans to go to very expensive and demanding schools and and are very likely…

In short, the free market has found a very lucrative cash cow for all involved. A select group of people are getting fabulously rich off this broken system, and since they control it there is no incentive to stop. Of course, someone is getting shafted. The students, in this case.

The parent posts detail the ways the government has distorted the free market, and your takeaway was that this is the free market's fault...? So was the '06 housing bubble was the free market's fault as well?

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In short, the free market has found a very lucrative cash cow for all involved. A select group of people are getting fabulously rich off this broken system, and since they control it there is no incentive to stop. Of course, someone is getting shafted. The students, in this case.

The parent posts detail the ways the government has distorted the free market, and your takeaway was that this is the free market's fault...? So was the '06 housing bubble was the free market's fault as well?

Quite so. It was the "free market" that gave out those loans, it was the "free market" that repackaged the CDOs knowing full well the repercussions in case of defaults, it was the "free market" that stacked rating agencies, regulators, courts, even academia, to prevent their cash cow from going away, or from suffering any kind of personal responsibility for their crimes.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#359
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with a lot of your points, but the way to increasing the base level of education isn’t through making all colleges free — it’s through investing in and making community colleges free. Why? If we’re trying educate the entire populace instead of a few high achieving high schoolers, we should recognize that a majority of people can’t afford to up-end their lives, move far away, and spend 4 years getting a degree…

Can you elaborate on the Californian bias with regard to community colleges? Is the California community college system better/worse than other states? I’m a native Californian that went straight to a 4 year, but I sometimes think about how much cheaper college would have been if I had gone to community first.

Went to CC in California. Paid ridiculously little. All classes transferred, started with killer foundations at a fraction of the cost. Transferred to UC. Been employed 8 years. Nobody's ever asked where the first 2 years of college were from. Not even for my first job.

I don't know why more people don't go that route. It's like $26 dollars a unit, the books cost more than the classes do. The professors were dope as hell - especially in the hard sciences. Plus you didn't have a lecture hall with 150, 200 kids in it - you had 30, 50 for a "big" class. The instructors always showed up to office hours, they all spoke great English, and actually cared if you understood the material - they weren't ditching class to prepare for a conference, or having a TA do the actual teaching. They genuinely liked their subjects.

Going to CC is practically a secret weapon. I'd hire a CC graduate over a "bootcamp" graduate any day of the week.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#360
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…

That would presuppose that admission at schools like Stanford is more skewed towards wealthy students than the "lesser" schools. Which I doubt. But even if, then that would be the problem to address, rather than cutting the assistance programs.
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