NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students • Hacker News Board

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#491

Post by arstin » Fri, Aug 17, 2018, 4:27 PM UTC

h4b4n3r0 wrote: post #410

GeneralMayhem wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very heartily disagree with letting the market decide education priorities, for two reasons. First, education is chock full of positive externalities, which will never be realized correctly. While "the economy" doesn't need underwater basket weaving - or art history, or literature - society still does. Even if people don't work in their field, the world is better for the increase in knowledge. Man does not live on…

>> society still does That's just, like, your opinion, man. Society certainly does not need so many graduates in English Literature: there are only so many open positions at McDonalds, and they as a rule do not require a degree. If there's market demand, society can pay real cash money for it. It used to be that most writers, painters, historians, etc, etc, had to also have an useful day job. _Albert Einstein_ had a…

English major here! I never got the McDonald's gig, but I am now helping the economy and keeping the world turning by making money as a useful software engineer. :)

I wouldn't use the stern-faced "useful" language, but I agree with you about it being perfectly fine to have a day job and pursue literary/artistic interests on the side. TS Eliot insisted on keeping his job as a bank clerk. Gladstone wrote serious history at night after discharging his duties as the English PM. Etc, etc.

Regarding choice of degree, the value of a liberal arts degree is difficult to argue for---and against. It's not like, say, math where you can do the proof or you can't. You can model the system such that transformations actually map onto transformations in the target domain or you can't. But I can often tell when someone has a (successful!) liberal arts degree by, to give one example, how careful they are with imprecise language. And, to give another, how light of a hold imprecise concepts have on them, how flexible and playful they are in such thinking (this has nothing to do with being unable to be "rigorous").

But also the fact is the system did not work for most people. Partly because most students just aren't suited for it...and that's fine. And especially with how broken college is now (for one, non-STEM subjects tend to allow the student to choose from a smorgasbord of unrelated courses instead of systematic growth over years). IMO far fewer people need to go to college, we should increase the funding and prestige of vocational school, and non-STEM subjects need to more regularly be taught again in a demanding way.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#492

Post by iak8god » Fri, Aug 17, 2018, 4:28 PM UTC

neap24 wrote: post #483

talltimtom wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is like saying you only want to pay taxes towards the roads you drive on yourself. Would you be better off if all publicly funded roads where instead private and required you to pay tolls per usage? You would defiantly get an bill more matching your usage, and people who don’t drive would pay less. But it at least feels like we are better off with public roads because they all add value to society as a whole. Th…

Indeed, many do advocate that paying for the roads you drive on through tolls would be a much better system. I don't think it's unreasonable to not want to subsidize certain fields of study with public money. In the past, when a smaller percentage of people were "educated" the marginal value of educating an extra member of society was very high. It seems much lower to me now that information is cheap and freely avail…

Education is not about memorizing information. It is about learning how to think. If anything, this is of much more value now that we're drowning in so much information -- and so much misinformation.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#493

Post by krschultz » Fri, Aug 17, 2018, 4:29 PM UTC

wyattpeak wrote: post #378

duxup wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right, at the same time if allowed to walk from student loans... wouldn't we see a similar incentive on the student side? I would find it pretty tempting when graduating to ... default. You've got plenty of time to fish your way out of bankruptcy as you're young, you don't have much for assets or anything...

That seems fine to me. Banks are in the business of calculating risk on loans, they can work out under what conditions they're willing to loan money to students who have little to lose by declaring bankruptcy. If they basically shut down all student funding, that doesn't seem like a huge problem either - it's a fairly bad model and I think society would benefit for from the pressure to find a better way to educate pe…

The clear result of this would be parents that can afford to send their kids to college will send their kids to college by just paying for tuition. Interest rates will go up significantly, which makes the math on taking out a loan worse for anyone that doesn't need one. It would be a death spiral for loans.

I'm not convinced the politics of subsidizing education get better after that. There's a very high risk that a large and powerful swath of the country reacts to it with "I worked my ass off to pay for my kids to go to college, why should I subsidize yours?" The resulting increase in inequality is bad for society as a whole, but honestly it's a feature for most upper income parents.

It would probably put some pricing pressure on college, but the predictable knock-on effects are really really bad.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#494

Post by iak8god » Fri, Aug 17, 2018, 4:30 PM UTC

namdnay wrote: post #415

avip wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always replace "free" with "I'm paying for you". I don't know what's "obvious" about me paying your tuition fees. For once, I may be happy to fund your auto-mechanic studies as I know I'll need you to fix my car. But if you're studying ancient Akkadian I'm less inclined to pay your bills.

Are you really that petty in real life? Or is this just an absolutist argument?

"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#495

Post by Marazan » Fri, Aug 17, 2018, 4:54 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #434

wyattpeak wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems fine to me. Banks are in the business of calculating risk on loans, they can work out under what conditions they're willing to loan money to students who have little to lose by declaring bankruptcy. If they basically shut down all student funding, that doesn't seem like a huge problem either - it's a fairly bad model and I think society would benefit for from the pressure to find a better way to educate pe…

Banks [...] can work out under what conditions they're willing to loan money to students [...] If they basically shut down all student funding, that doesn't seem like a huge problem either The problem arises if they decide "We'll only loan money with a wealthy co-signer" and that locks out working class kids from college and the class mobility opportunities education provides.

Whilst absolutely a concern the cost of a college education is hugely inflated by the guaranteed loan money.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#496

Post by ralmidani » Fri, Aug 17, 2018, 5:02 PM UTC

aquamongoose wrote: post #462

ralmidani wrote: post #419

Why medical school and not, say, engineering or economics or math? I value having good physicians (my father is one), but medicine is not the only worthwhile human endeavor. Edit: Also, at least in my state (Michigan) there seems to be no shortage of medical students (we went from 4 med schools to 7 earlier in the decade). The real bottleneck is residency programs.

Maybe because PhD programs in those fields already are free at every university (in fact, they pay you a stipend).

In exchange for that stipend, you work insane hours as an RA and/or TA.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#497

Post by wyattpeak » Fri, Aug 17, 2018, 6:03 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #434

wyattpeak wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems fine to me. Banks are in the business of calculating risk on loans, they can work out under what conditions they're willing to loan money to students who have little to lose by declaring bankruptcy. If they basically shut down all student funding, that doesn't seem like a huge problem either - it's a fairly bad model and I think society would benefit for from the pressure to find a better way to educate pe…

Banks [...] can work out under what conditions they're willing to loan money to students [...] If they basically shut down all student funding, that doesn't seem like a huge problem either The problem arises if they decide "We'll only loan money with a wealthy co-signer" and that locks out working class kids from college and the class mobility opportunities education provides.

I considered that briefly, but honestly I disagree. Class mobility is a pleasant fiction we tell ourselves about, but the data suggest that it is nothing more. Since 1980, the prime time of our current every-goes-to-college education paradigm, social mobility has fallen off a cliff.[1] And frankly, it was never a major feature of society.

For deeper socioeconomic reasons, pretty much everyone in the truly lucrative fields like law and medicine is already quite well-off, and people who graduate from other degrees generally either end up in poorly-paying fields like academia, or else in careers that half a century ago didn't require tertiary education at all.

[1] http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/43/1/139.refs

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#498

Post by DoofusOfDeath » Fri, Aug 17, 2018, 6:09 PM UTC

alasdair_ wrote: post #293

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a wealthy Stanford alumni Grammar tip: In English, the word "alumnus" is typically declined as it would be in Latin. Especially amongst academics, I'd say. So if you're writing for that audience, the appropriate forms of "alumnus" are, I think, as follows [0]: "alumnus" - One male, or one person of unspecified sex. "alumna" - One female. "alumnae" - Multiple females. "alumni" - Multiple persons whose sex is all mal…

If you insist on being pedantic, at least be correct. "alumnum" is the correct Latin term for a singular person of undetermined sex.

My understanding of the issue comes from long-ago high-school Latin classes, and a few websites ([0], [1]).

If you have a more authoritative source of information I'd be grateful for a link.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alumnus

[1] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/alumna-alumnae-alumni-alumnus...

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#499

Post by felipemnoa » Fri, Aug 17, 2018, 6:10 PM UTC

jsoc815 wrote: post #488

felipemnoa wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>You can get into NYU from a poor socio-economic background, if you work hard and attain academic excellence. Very true. Unfortunately many times the schools where a kid from a lower socio-economic background will attend will not prepare them for a school like NYU. In fact, sometimes it will probably be a net negative. Not necessarily the school itself, but the whole environment. Other students will be so disruptive…

I've never had the displeasure of being around so many drugs as when I went to prep school-- not some random private school, but a legitimately prestigious one to which future U.S. presidents and or their spawn are sent. Kids there were smuggling large quantities of narcotics in and out of the country, sometimes at the risk of death.(No, I am not exaggerating.) They were also robbing each other of said drugs. The dif…

>>Ps. A pier is something one might take a walk on. A peer is a member of a cohort, class, etc., ostensibly.

Thanks for pointing it out. Didn't notice the error until you mentioned it. Too late to change it now.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#500

Post by perfmode » Fri, Aug 17, 2018, 6:15 PM UTC

bootloop wrote: post #414

perfmode wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am the first person in my family to attend university. Stanford gave me a full ride to study CS and it has made a world of difference in my ability to access opportunities. I am an anecdote obviously. However, I want it to be known that at Stanford, people at the bottom of the economic ladder receive aid, but people in the middle still get squeezed. Making tuition free for all would actually be a net positive. Sure…

Yea but historically Stanford was tuition free for everyone. (Like the founders wished it to be.) So that's why they have such an extensive student aid program, properly not the same anywhere else. Edit: Actually more of a comment for the post before.

it’s definitely falling short of that ideal. i know too many people getting squeezed.