121–130 of 264 posts
Make the college free and provide students with a living stipend. Return higher education subsidies (and tax brackets) to their 1950s levels. Join the rest of the developed world.
Let's scale this up huge, let everyone take part, and have all of society invest in education and reap the rewards. We can call it "public education" and even capture the public externalities of having a well-educated population!
We can't just indiscriminately invest in everyone - we're going to end up throwing a huge amount of money away on kids that don't have the capacity to benefit from such education, and wasting the kids' time too. Not to mention the credential inflation, and the kids' own debt burden if they're tricked into investing their own scarce funds into education that won't pay off.
I guess I'd support this if there was some strict mechanism to avoid such malinvestments - but I'm not sure how feasible that is politically given the equality dogma prevalent in our culture.
At the end of the day, having the government control this creates the same Soviet-style problems as having the government control investment in cars, bread, or other consumer goods. Government just doesn't have anywhere near the accuracy in allocation or price discovery as free market does.
Let's scale this up huge, let everyone take part, and have all of society invest in education and reap the rewards. We can call it "public education" and even capture the public externalities of having a well-educated population!
That way those that prefer more expensive forms of education, can be free to do that and pay for it, and those who don't, don't have to do so.
Make the college free and provide students with a living stipend. Return higher education subsidies (and tax brackets) to their 1950s levels. Join the rest of the developed world.
Absolutely not, at least not without making college much more difficult. Otherwise it is just subsidizing adult daycare. Many people do not belong in college and learn next to nothing, but go because they're shoo'ed along into it and the universities are in on the joke, and in on the money-making, and undergoing a drastic reduction of standards as a result. Some data on just how bad higher ed is getting, from 2017: h…
If you are allowed to re-enroll, you have 1 strike left. Another sub-2.0 GPA and you're gone.
If the US brought such a generation-transforming policy like this to the table, the easiest part of it would be to set that minimum standard across all participating schools. Most likely already have something close to this in place now.
The obvious point to make is that American student loans already suck so this may be an alternative. However, this makes me feel really uncomfortable. The first is the same reason as student loans: At the age you're agreeing this you are very unlikely to correctly judge your own value. It's the same reason why students take on ridiculously onerous student loans. The solution to that problem in my mind though is to re…
I think that's the point, isn't it? Even if the student overestimates his potential, investors with more neutral incentives and more broad experience in predicting such outcomes won't.
Lots of startup founders overestimate themselves too; the social purpose of VCs is to make judgments on who can use capital the best. What we have now is like a government agency that gives capital to literally anyone who wants to start a company, promises them riches, and makes them pay half the tab anyway so they end up hugely in debt in addition to wasting the taxpayers' share.
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Absolutely not, at least not without making college much more difficult. Otherwise it is just subsidizing adult daycare. Many people do not belong in college and learn next to nothing, but go because they're shoo'ed along into it and the universities are in on the joke, and in on the money-making, and undergoing a drastic reduction of standards as a result. Some data on just how bad higher ed is getting, from 2017: h…
Are there statistics that compare open admissions and selective schools? (If performance at an identifiable subset of schools is better, then it's more that spending resources on the other schools is questionable than it is that higher education is in a crisis)
Median salaries pool are much higher at the top yet tuition is really similar across all schools.
This is true with undergraduate programs as well. Median starting salary after graduation at University of Florida is 52k. FIU and UCF, both a few hours away with similar programs? 46k.
University of Houston? 53k. Rice University a few miles away? 64k.
I've named schools that are all pretty good...the story gets much worse with private universities that are not selective. There are always people who do fantastic regardless of which school they go to but in aggregate schools matter a lot.
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I agree with you. ISA proponents make two arguments that sort of resonate with me, though. First, incentive alignment is closer with a private structure. This is weak to me because there’s no reason why incentives can’t be aligned in a similar way with, say, an additional tax on students that looks similar to an ISA (big standard deduction, time limited, with a total cap on return). Second, and more reasonable to me,…
> and ban charters. Why? What's the difference between publicly funded versus publicly funded and operated?
Federalizing K-12 in the US is a pretty radical proposal but I think it's necessary if we ever want to get out of the inequality quagmire we're in now. Leveling the playing field would mean that no matter where you happen live your kids have access to well funded high quality primary education.
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Well, one problem solved, but likely creating (or restoring) others. Their non-dischargable status helps keep rates low(er) and allow folks who'd never qualify for a $100k loan otherwise get a degree. If we're gonna require a bachelors degree to work at McDonalds, it's probably time to treat undergraduate education like K-12; as an entirely publicly funded endeavour.
The problem is, it also allows folks who would never qualify for a 100k loan otherwise get 100K into debt. I read an article about how artists are struggling in the high cost San Francisco Bay Area (sorry no link, because it was really an eye-opening article). The article did mention student loans, but focused mainly on gentrification brought about by high tech. However, they did profiles of various struggling artist…
> the power of government sponsored men with guns to pursue foolish borrowers
please correct me if I'm wrong, but I belive tax evasion is the only debt-related (but still requiring a criminal intent to avoid paying) situation that will result in arrest. If you don't pay your student loans, even gov't backed ones, it will be a thorn in your side forever and result in civil actions, but I don't believe you can be arrested or criminally charged for not paying.