261–270 of 848 posts
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in states with good public universities, the best value is 2 years at a good community college, then 2 years at the state school. even 2 years at a good state university is getting ridiculously expensive ($60K+).
What state schools are $60k+ for 2 years for in-state residents? Berkeley was my guess for an expensive in-state tuition rate and they're $38k for 2 years. Unless you're including housing/food/etc.
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Because many (most?) states have been cutting state funding for public universities for years, IIRC. (See, for example, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/most-americans-dont-r... ). It wouldn't have been sensible to impose price caps while cutting funding at the same time.
If I’m a Republican legislator and I’m seeing my kids enroll at a state college where gender and queer studies classes are a requirement to get a computer science degree, I’m going to want to defund too. I remember my Republican high school peers arguing with our liberal debate coach, and he’d just laugh and say “wait until you go to college, then you’ll get it”. Sure enough, she went to Harvard Law and became a Demo…
I have cried myself hoarse on HN trying to make this simple point - but except for Cornell, every Ivy League is ordinary in engineering and the hard sciences.
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> 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…
> All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, just like any other loan. The reason they aren't dischargeable is because what bank in their right mind would give a loan to an 18 year old with no collateral? They only guarantee they get that it will be paid back is the fact that it can't be discharged. Student loans would dry up overnight if they could be disc…
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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…
Specifically, having a population lacking in critical reading skills makes everyone more susceptible to propaganda, and less able to critique and assess flawed arguments in writing.
If you want to know why, for example, our political “debates” are shallow circuses of misdirection and name calling, look at the state of the humanities.
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> All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, just like any other loan. The reason they aren't dischargeable is because what bank in their right mind would give a loan to an 18 year old with no collateral? They only guarantee they get that it will be paid back is the fact that it can't be discharged. Student loans would dry up overnight if they could be disc…
> But barring shifting to a European model of college funding, I don't see the US allowing dischargeable loans, nor do I think they should, because the reality of it is that colleges won't reduce their rates nor increase their scholarships, they would just be completely out of reach of poor and middle class students. The reality is that the they should be out of reach to poor or middle class students TODAY. They are…
I think a lot of smaller college would fail, and the big colleges would keep their high prices, and only cater to the wealthy.
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Student loans should absolutely be dischargeable. It will force tuition to drop to something affordable. It's advertised as a ticket to a good job and that's just false.
I addressed this in my comment. You'd end up with schools not lowering their prices, they would just be available only to the upper class.
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> 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.
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Also a generation of potential parents who won't be having kids because they can't afford to, largely because of student loan and housing costs. That's already hitting - the incoming class of 2023 (matriculating 2019) is the first cohort born since 9/11, and is tiny. A number of colleges are facing bankruptcy because there just aren't enough students to go around. And it'll only get worse. Birth rates were depressed…
Can I read more about these statistics somewhere?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2019/10/21/downfall-...
Fertility rates by year in U.S:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
Births per year:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/195908/number-of-births-...
I was wrong about the start date, BTW. I'd thought that fertility started dropping after 9/11 (which also roughly coincides with the children of the 70s having kids instead of baby boomers, a smaller cohort), but it really didn't peak until 2007-2008. Then there's a double-whammy: there are fewer women of childbearing age (coinciding with Gen-Xers born in the 70s and early Millenials), and the fertility rate among women who are of childbearing age has fallen off a cliff. Births are down about 15% since 2007; when you think about what that means for a typical classroom (where you might've had 24 kids, now you might have 20), that's pretty huge.
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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 this true? It seems some tech companies disagree: CA Technologies [1], Y Combinator [2], Google [3]. Is it possible that you are not well versed in what philosophy majors actually study and how well that might translate to a working environment?
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/16/tech-talent-gap-looks-to-phi... [2] https://www.fastcompany.com/40440952/why-this-tech-ceo-keeps... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/08/26...
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I disagree with you, however one aspect of the continental European model that I admire is the close integration between post-secondary education and industry. One of my cousins - who studied and now lives in Germany - did his Masters and PhD on the topic of work he was doing while working at , where he still works today. On the other hand, from my understanding such close integration between advanced degrees and ind…
This is not as common as you might think. Some universities do closely collaborate with their regional industry, but the vast majority of master thesis have zero practical application, just like in the US.