Why I’m Giving $1.8B for College Financial Aid

There is more to the problem then just available capital. In fact during the Bush administration, the government vastly increased the amount of capital available under pell grants and financial aid. These loans had horrible conditions, which people didn't read, and worse were increased the supply of cash, while not changing the amount of supply of education. Basic economics worked out - college tuition rose to meet the additional availability of capital.

Rising tuition costs + more generous financial aid packages are a shell game for donor money.

Money usually comes in from various donors with strings attached, so that it must get spent on the donors' pet projects.

College administrators then go "oh no! tuition is so high, look at all these qualified students who won't get to attend," to convince these donors that financial aid is a worthwhile pet project.

Administrators then raise the tuition to compensate for the new financial aid pool they just cooked up. Money earmarked for financial aid then gets "spent" by going right back to the college with the earmark removed. That money can now be spent on the administrators' pet projects, including higher salaries for themselves.

The US does have numerous vocational schools and training programs, and they result in placement in positions which do pay reasonably livable wages. They are pretty effective, the problem here is a class issue. Getting into the middle class in the US still means you are at the mercy of a variety of problems.

Higher education is still the ticket to an upper middle class life, partly due to ingrained structures like larger cities lacking affordable housing, a tax system that favors capital classes, and high healthcare costs for the poor and middle classes.

Containing/reducing medical costs, reducing housing costs and a fairer tax system might be the real answer here. The core issue is that, for example, the poor and middle classes can easily be bankrupted by a medical bill, whereas white collar software engineers are likely to have very good and cheap health insurance that covers much more.

" ... The Credit Suisse report has an entire chapter devoted to “the unlucky Millennials” who have been hit by rising debt and poorer job prospects.

And it’s true. Recent reports from the Treasury Department show that the US government owns nearly $1.5 trillion in student loans.

That’s pretty sad when you think about it: the US government’s #1 financial asset is debt owed by tens of millions of its young people for university education that didn’t even necessarily qualify them for a real career..."

-- Simon Black

Is it not the case that at a fundamental level certification is a funneling mechanism to filter people and set expectations at an early stage in life?

It's quite arbitrary and probably not "fair" by any reasonable definition, but it seems to achieve that goal fairly well.

I feel this is essentially why the UK idea of 'chuck 50% of the population in to University' failed.

It created an expectation, in huge numbers of people, that they were going to have the good life.

But our society is structured at a fundamental level around the class system. Our jobs, our homes, our cities, everything.

There will still be millions of unskilled jobs with no respect afforded towards the workers. There will still be millions and millions of crappy prefab houses out there, far away from where the decent jobs are. There will still be sink estates. There will still be dead end towns.

You could evacuate the streets of London and walk around and see, quite easily, that the entire city is built around our class system - even with the intentional mixing we've done geographically.

I think it would take centuries to achieve a sensible level of equality even if such a thing were possible or desirable.

It's something I think about often; social mobility is just shuffling the cards around; ultimately someone has to lose, not everyone gets the drawing room in Knightsbridge and lunches out on the town as they please.