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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

#501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even remotely controversial that students at top schools are overwhelmingly more well off than average. At Stanford theres roughly the same number of students whose families are in the top 1% of income as those in the bottom 60%. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/upshot/some-c...

But isn't that a tremendous endorsement of Stanford? That they have recruited so well and changed their cost structure so effectively that even the poor can attend? How do other top-level schools compare?

Not really? Yes there are other schools that are worse than Stanford, sometimes significantly more but take a top public school like University of Texas which has 5x as many students from the bottom 60% as from the top 1% (5.4% and 27.7%)

Stanford is at 17.5% and 18.6%.

For comparison Harvard is better, MIT is significantly better, on par with Texas, Yale and Princeton are slightly worse.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#502
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

== 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 man…

Remember when college used to be cheap enough for people to afford working summers? I don't remember because that was before my time, but that was also before the subsidies and loans were made available by the feds. Turns out, if you dump money into an industry while increasing demand and not changing supply, prices will increase.

I'm not following your comment, Federal student loans started in 1958 [1] but costs didn't start to skyrocket until the late-80s/90s. Since the late-80s costs have more than tripled at public universities after adjusting for inflation from about $3,000 to almost $10,000 [2].

==dump money into an industry while increasing demand==

Did the money create the demand or are you saying they dumped the money while also creating demand?

==not changing supply==

Do public universities have the same number of available seats as they did in 1958? 1980? 2000?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loans_in_the_United_St...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/how-much-college-tuition-has...

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#503

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…

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…

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Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#504
post #391

What a surreal discussion about something obvious: University and college should be free for everyone. First, this is a great equalizer in the positive way: it does not depend on how wealthy your parents are, so you get an equal opportunity. Second: the society as a whole benefits from well educated people. Accounts need well trained doctors, doctors need well trained accountants, both need an engineer to craft them…

This is because Americans have a collective mental illness when it comes to publicly funding societal goods.

Trolling will get your account banned here.

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

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with zoology / ornithology today?

You can study whatever you want, wherever you want, without criticism or question if you are willing to pay your own way.

Very well, but what is your objection to zoology? Normally, people pick an arts subject when arguing about poor-value degrees.

Zoology is a biology course, so there's a general scientific background (research, hypotheses, statistics, modelling etc), and zoology in particular is necessary for understanding the spread of animal pests (e.g. insects eating pests), invasive species, human and animal disease (bird flu?), understanding/recording what is in a particular place (perhaps before construction work, or to guide the planning of that).

The report on the lowest- and highest-paying majors ranks zoology fairly highly -- above chemistry and physics: https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/valueofcollegemajors/

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#506
post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first sentence almost led you to a realization that you're wrong, but you just barely missed the boat judging from your last sentence.

Not at all. You have misread me. That language evolves is a common used argument (and there is a place for it) but often used as a catch-all argument to justify errors.

But in this case alumni is in common use in that way and has been for some time. You yourself acknowledged that by starting your comment with "Unfortunately, common or not".

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#507
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.

"Investing" people who graduate from university earn more than people who don’t. Skills and thinking patterns developed in studying any advanced degree generalize to other pursuits. It doesn’t matter that the critical thinking skills etc were built in a subject you personally do not value. The person is improved through the process and their earning potential is increased. Your return on investment comes later when t…

> did you know that philosophy degrees are disproportionately represented among CEO’s?

I did know this, but I wonder which way the causality goes. perhaps CEO's are disproportionately likely to have come from wealthy families who could afford to send them to elite liberal arts colleges and/or afford to pursue a degree without direct applications.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> let students discharge student loans via bankruptcy This is a fine idea, but you have to recognize that this just means approximately no one gets student loans (and those who do get them don't need them). Think about it: if you come out of college with, say, $20k of debt (granting that this might bring down prices) and no assets, bankruptcy is a very tempting option. Student loans are just inherently problematic -…

> Think about it: if you come out of college with, say, $20k of debt (granting that this might bring down prices) and no assets, bankruptcy is a very tempting option. You actually have to convince a judge that's appropriate. And the court has a wide variety of tools at it's disposal to reach an equitable decision. From telling the petitioner to get stuffed all the way to telling the creditors to get stuffed.

Can you cite a case of this happening? As far as I can tell, chapter 7 cases are only ever denied for failing to file properly (missing deadlines, failure to disclose, etc), or kicked over to chapter 13 (which would be pretty remarkable in a case involving the little to no income of most students).

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> let students discharge student loans via bankruptcy This is a fine idea, but you have to recognize that this just means approximately no one gets student loans (and those who do get them don't need them). Think about it: if you come out of college with, say, $20k of debt (granting that this might bring down prices) and no assets, bankruptcy is a very tempting option. Student loans are just inherently problematic -…

> This is a fine idea, but you have to recognize that this just means approximately no one gets student loans (and those who do get them don't need them). The vast majority of student loan loans are issued by the federal government since private lenders are cut out of the federally-guaranteed Stafford loan program, so changing rules on discharge won't meaningfully effect loan issuance without some other federal polic…

> The vast majority of student loan loans are issued by the federal government since private lenders are cut out of the federally-guaranteed Stafford loan program, so changing rules on discharge won't meaningfully effect loan issuance without some other federal policy change.

This is a good point - I think of Stafford loans as inextricably tied to the no-discharge terms, but that's probably not the case. Perhaps cutting out the no-discharge terms would just be a backdoor to government-provided university-level education.

Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students

#510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Think about it: if you come out of college with, say, $20k of debt (granting that this might bring down prices) and no assets, bankruptcy is a very tempting option. You actually have to convince a judge that's appropriate. And the court has a wide variety of tools at it's disposal to reach an equitable decision. From telling the petitioner to get stuffed all the way to telling the creditors to get stuffed.

Can you cite a case of this happening? As far as I can tell, chapter 7 cases are only ever denied for failing to file properly (missing deadlines, failure to disclose, etc), or kicked over to chapter 13 (which would be pretty remarkable in a case involving the little to no income of most students).

If we were being reasonable about student loan debt Chapter 13 or 11 would be more appropriate than Chapter 7. Both of those allow for debt service to be renegotiated.

Student loan debt is a particularly odious bit of neoliberal policy, forcing students to take on debt for something other societies provide for free, non dischargable and guaranteed by the state.

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