311–320 of 848 posts
I started looking st going back to school starting around mid last year. I picked up my research again in the past month. All I've done is manage to make myself so much more cynical. Everything I read and learned made it seem like college is nothing more than a pay to play game. I'm not andti-education or anti-intellectual, but I sure as hell do not support whatever the hell is going on in US higher education. I've b…
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Can I read more about these statistics somewhere?
Big WaPo feature story on Hampshire's bankruptcy and the impending demographic apocalypse for colleges: 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 d…
Although that chart doesn't capture the ratio of women of fertile age in each year, so there may be an unforeseen cliff.
I wish I could be more sympathetic to the college industrial complex, but they've been treat us poorly for years. Yes, I know it's our fault for demanding gold plated educational experiences and then going into crazy debt to finance it. But who wants to blame himself/herself? The job can be done better for much less. Indeed, it used to be much cheaper in the past when the dorms weren't so fancy and there were a bazil…
I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me how 15K+ in tuition a year is acceptable. No sympathy here for the college industry.
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For some degrees . I don't see many CS degrees working retail. I don't see many EE degrees doing so.
It’s a fair point, but colleges also adjust program sizes based on what students chose to study. Just compare CS graduates in 1990 and how fast that grew and shrunk over time.
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How else do you propose companies should assess new hires, especially young ones? And while the cost of tuition these days (IMO) outstrips the value of a college education, that’s not to say that value is zero.
I'd say the value of the average four year bachelors degree today is less than the value of the average two year trade school, so the value might not be zero but it might as well be. That being said, I think the assessment problem is real. I'm the founder of a small startup that very few people want to work for (relative to say, Google) and that means I can assess each candidate in careful/unorthodox (time-consuming)…
but why do you think this? I see this assertion more commonly than I'd expect here and it always to me seems wrapped up in an implicit glamorization of blue collar work & tradesmen without referring back to, say, quality of life, long-term earning potential, flexibility in occupation, etc.
Disclosure: 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…
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> 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.)
The reason people go into debt to buy houses is because everyone is using debt to buy houses, thus driving the prices up.
If mortgages were capped at 5-year terms, the price of houses would be a lot lower, which would be great for society - for the same reason that having cheaper electricity is great for society.
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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…
If it's a bad bet for the bank, it must be far worse of a bet for young adults. That's the point -- right now we're essentially suckering millions of naive young adults into a life of wage slavery by giving them a "bet" which they are completely unequipped to evaluate; and many of them are making a bet when they shouldn't.
What you're essentially arguing is, "We have to enslave these people or society wouldn't function". On the contrary: we must not enslave these people; if stop doing it, society will figure out some other way to get things done.
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UIUC is 25k a year just tuition and fees. Expensive college town room & board plus opportunity cost of education instead of working easily gets you to 30k a year.
Holy shit it's that expensive now?? Graduated from there about 15 years ago and it was maybe 8-10k a year..
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There are not enough upper class to go to all of the schools currently operating- colleges would have to lower prices or disappear.
Yes exactly. The small schools would just disappear, and the big names would keep going.