I once interviewed for a CD role at a private, vocational certificate college. They do have some IRL locations but primarily online. The director shared that their revenue was about $500m. I didn't take the role, and I was left scarred knowing their revenue is someone elses debt and based on hope.
Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education
231–240 of 848 posts
Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He had some massive college bills too and i didnt understand how those worked, but you cant get rid of them like you can a car loan. This is the thing that is really the most shameful and outrageous thing about the US system. Our entire K-12 educational system and our culture is set up to paint a college degree as a ticket to "the good life". Then an 18-year-old, potentially with parents who aren't great at math bu…
> Then an 18-year-old, potentially with parents who aren't great at math but have great aspirations for their child, is sat down and asked to sign a load of papers, not realizing that this will lock them into decades of unforgiveable debt and wage slavery. Well yeah, because us "adults" don't wanna pay the state and local taxes necessary to keep public universities affordable.
Attitudes such as this are the problem. Civilization has a cost, that cost is paid with taxes.
Edit: I didn’t pickup in the sarcasm. Mea culpa.
Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He had some massive college bills too and i didnt understand how those worked, but you cant get rid of them like you can a car loan. This is the thing that is really the most shameful and outrageous thing about the US system. Our entire K-12 educational system and our culture is set up to paint a college degree as a ticket to "the good life". Then an 18-year-old, potentially with parents who aren't great at math bu…
Colleges should be shaking in their boots for the next generation, because there's going to be a whole generation of parents that suffered terrible college debt they couldn't pay off and will likely be telling their children it's just not worth it (as opposed to the previous generation that had cheap college and a great economy and pressured all their children to go for that 'guaranteed better life'). I made it throu…
Wow those are really good points I hadn't heard yet about future outlook for colleges.
There's a lot of parents whom children are in high school now that already went through the student loan debt cycle so we should start seeing the effects of that soon.
Perhaps we'll see a rise in trade/vocational school as a result.
I think the stigma of not going to college is changing a lot (for the better) or at least in the programming world it seems that way.
Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work in AV development, and the number of refugees from the hard sciences is astonishing. I guess I don't blame them, but it's weird to have a physics PhD report to you and be able to use only a fraction of the skills she spent a decade and hundreds of thousands of dollars gaining. This isn't quite a complaint: adopting math and physics PhDs (first as a mentor and now as a TLM) that are seemingly unproductive has b…
PhDs though are never self-funded, so almost entirely the loan is from undergrad.
*STEM PhDs are almost always funded.
Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education
#235Disclosure: i never went to college, I went to a trade school. Colleges really only started scaring the heck out of me when I started enjoying my career. After spending a day wrenching in a garage, we'd hit miller time and head down to the Soapbox Bar and Grill. Over the span of a month or two ordering buckets and shooting pool I learned our bartender Javon had a masters in biology and his fiancee Cortisha who bussed…
I work in AV development, and the number of refugees from the hard sciences is astonishing. I guess I don't blame them, but it's weird to have a physics PhD report to you and be able to use only a fraction of the skills she spent a decade and hundreds of thousands of dollars gaining. This isn't quite a complaint: adopting math and physics PhDs (first as a mentor and now as a TLM) that are seemingly unproductive has b…
"AV" being audio/visual, anti-virus, else?
Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education
#236I think it's time to decouple education from all of the other things tied to colleges. When I studied abroad in Australia, things like the gym or meal plans were available, but not "bundled in" to your tuition. The idea of tying competitive sports teams to a university would be laughable. We need to remove all of the "excess" stuff from higher education and get back to the core of education and research. Sure, things…
No, especially not football. At my college the football team is essentially a separate corporation. The college gets nothing from the arrangement. In fact they have to rent parking from the football folk. Fat deal were made to coaches over the years, until its all pork-barrel dealing and nothing left for the school. The students can't even go to games, the ticket prices are a semester's tuition.
Given the similarity of your description to my own alma mater, I can virtually guarantee that that football program is self-sufficient, and probably raises your university's profile. They couldn't charge that much for tickets otherwise. So I don't really see the harm.
Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Student loans would dry up overnight if they could be discharged at bankruptcy. There were student loans before 1976, when they became non-dischargeable.
Yeah but college could be paid for with a minimum wage summer job. That change in 1976 was actually the cause of the steep rise in tuition. Can't really put the genie back in the bottle now.
Well ... You can. A lot of things will change and there'd be much disruption and churn in academic institutions, but it is possible.
Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
our bartender Javon had a masters in biology That's de-risking, de-skilling and outsourcing. Back then, in the last century, the US and Europe had a functioning chemical industry. Unfortunately, information technology took off, and investment banking discovered that returns are better with Facebook than in Pharma, consequently that's where the jobs are now. Also, mergers & acquisitions took off in the same time. Why…
You don't have to create and improve in a world you have little to no competition with high barrier to entry established. You can keep repackaging the same things without risk and work on perceptive value of people. Why innovate and create when I can live like a king just playing our economic, governmental, and social systems like a fiddle? We're not quite that bad yet but we're already headed down the path in that d…
In economics this is what is called rent-seeking behavior, and I think it probably is an exceptionally interesting area of research to study how financialization of industries modifies rent-seeking behavior in those industries. My own hunch is that it probably increases significantly.
Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
A funny idea, but also a great way to make sure that schools only offer majors with a high average post-grad salary.
Is that bad? Humanities departments are already shrinking without any changes because there's just no demand. It doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to me that if you are determined to get a degree in philosophy, which has virtually no job prospects outside of teaching the next generation of philosophy students, you have to go do that at one of a handful of schools that carve out a niche for themselves with a philosop…
> Is that bad?
It depends on your point of view. Should college be a trade school or should it stick to it's roots of broadening one's horizons?
I found my philosophy classes quite enlightening. They were required for my degree in CogSci.
If my school didn't have a philosophy major, it wouldn't have a philosophy department, and I would never have had those classes.
Also, there are some majors that lead to professional school. English/Rhetoric are often majors of people going into law school for example.
Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He had some massive college bills too and i didnt understand how those worked, but you cant get rid of them like you can a car loan. This is the thing that is really the most shameful and outrageous thing about the US system. Our entire K-12 educational system and our culture is set up to paint a college degree as a ticket to "the good life". Then an 18-year-old, potentially with parents who aren't great at math bu…
> There's a reason many ancient religions forbid loaning money at interest entirely; It's sad that most cultures understood the danger and fragility that debt brings, and yet we've all somehow how forgotten it. We even have terms like "good debt".
Debt is good. It's what enables people who don't have the money up front to start businesses or buy houses. It becomes bad when people are relying on it to finance small purchases or when loans have predatory terms (like credit card payments, payday loans, etc.)