21–30 of 79 posts
Interesting that there is no mention here of the drastically inflated number of administrators in colleges as compared to say 30 years ago. “literally nobody knows who these people are or what they are doing” https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the crazy thing about discussions like cost of education or health care. Where does the f....ing money go? Nobody seems to know or care.
Yup. And in healthcare most of the focus is on Pharma (which is certainly profitable and gouging Americans but is a small piece of the pie) and insurance companies (which don’t even make much profits), but not on hospitals which constitute around 70% of healthcare costs.
You don’t have to make profit to waste a lot of money.
> After years of projecting big profits from student lending, the federal government now acknowledges that taxpayers stand to lose $31.5 billion on the program over the next decade, and the losses are growing rapidly. Most civilized countries offer free or close to free education for their young population instead of trying to profit off of this segment of the population that barely knows what it wants out of life. I…
In US any graduate from HS can go do 4 year degree in “something”. Try that in Germany or Netherlands.
I think a lot of the student debt crisis is self-inflicted. No one is forcing you to attend a 4 year straight from high-school, go to a community college and then transfer to a state school/4 year. (I spent 3 years at a CC, but I graduated from a UC and paid off my student loans within a year) Yes, college is expensive, but there is an existing alternative that everyone seems to forget about and it boggles my mind.
Severe student loans can be incurred starting at age 18 and aren't dischargeable. That's why they're uniquely pernicious. It's typically not possible to fuck up your financial life for decades via most debts, but it is with student loans. We don't know ourselves and the future is unpredictable, and that's why bankruptcy exists. Taking it out of the equation empowers predatory lenders and institutions.
Interesting that there is no mention here of the drastically inflated number of administrators in colleges as compared to say 30 years ago. “literally nobody knows who these people are or what they are doing” https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...
Teacher salaries are the biggest factor in price increases. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/bl...
Interesting that there is no mention here of the drastically inflated number of administrators in colleges as compared to say 30 years ago. “literally nobody knows who these people are or what they are doing” https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...
Teacher salaries are the biggest factor in price increases. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/bl...
>It is fake jobs for women who didn't study anything useful and this phenomena is spilling into the rest of the economy. We hoped that the influx of women to higher education will help the economy but it is only a burden, the return on the money we spend on their education is abysmal, it hurts the whole economy and is part of the reason this debt crisis was created in the first place. Women almost don't start new businesses and they don't create jobs. Most innovations, technical jobs, dangerous jobs, physical jobs and creative jobs are done by men. Women fill up mostly secretarial roles with fancy names in the private sector. Those roles don't really need any education and it is a total waste of 3 or 4 years just to signal secretarial capabilities to employers. Armies around the world can figure this out with half a day test and can teach those jobs in 3 months max. The rest of the women work in care taking type of jobs in the public sector, funded mainly by our taxes. We wouldn't need those jobs had those women stayed at home and took care of their kids, their elders, their house and gardens. The education system is a good example of industry overrun by over educated women that is deteriorating and stagnating because there are not enough men to push it forward. So I think the first step we need to take is limit higher studies only for women who are exceptional and are willing to actually study and work in something productive. That's in itself will reduce the amount of people in the system and will solve a lot of the financial issues. There are also many men who don't have to be there, but the numbers are much lower.
I think even though your point appears very inflammatory at first glance, I think your point raises a deeper problem. The issue of why are we subsidizing poor value majors. So in an ideal world any major that doesn't have much value would automatically get culled as its graduates won't find jobs but with guaranteed federal loan money that's not happening.
So tomorrow, I could go and setup a "department of crystal healing and contemporary perspectives on it" and I'll start getting the federal loan dollars from my students. The only way I see to fix this, is to make loans dischargeable via bankruptcy to bring this negative feedback pathway back into the pricing of courses ecosystem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Short answer: Because they can. Longer answer, according to the universities: Because modern students demand more than just classes, they also want social services (on-site counseling, bias incident response teams, etc). Longer answer, according to a cynic: Because universities are more or less guaranteed the money from the federal government, they've grown to spend the money on inflated administration. As costs go u…
A project will grow to fill the timeline, and departments will grow to fill the budget
The statistics in this article aren't especially useful, and could easily have been made more so by breaking debt down by attainment. Students that leave postsecondary without a 4-year bachelor's degree on average apparently owe less than $10k; with a bachelor's, less than $25k; with a graduate degree, $45k. Roughly 1/3 of all borrowers drop out, implying (I think?) that the majority of debt is held by people who com…
The last point is key. There are so many options that provide relief for those who need it most that don’t bail out New York Times journalists who paid $150,000 for a Columbia English degree or big firm lawyers who paid $250,000 for a Columbia law degree. And given how much of the debt is subject to income-based repayment, there is also a set of options for bringing relief to those who don’t qualify to cap their loan…
The statistics in this article aren't especially useful, and could easily have been made more so by breaking debt down by attainment. Students that leave postsecondary without a 4-year bachelor's degree on average apparently owe less than $10k; with a bachelor's, less than $25k; with a graduate degree, $45k. Roughly 1/3 of all borrowers drop out, implying (I think?) that the majority of debt is held by people who com…
The last point is key. There are so many options that provide relief for those who need it most that don’t bail out New York Times journalists who paid $150,000 for a Columbia English degree or big firm lawyers who paid $250,000 for a Columbia law degree. And given how much of the debt is subject to income-based repayment, there is also a set of options for bringing relief to those who don’t qualify to cap their loan…
Don't let history repeat itself