Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education • Hacker News Board

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#431

Post by dabbledash » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 7:48 PM UTC

slg wrote: post #416

gwd wrote: post #113

Earlier 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…

>All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, just like any other loan. Why would anyone lend money to someone with zero credit history, zero income, zero collateral, zero prospects of repaying the loan for at least 4+ years, and has the ability to immediately declare bankruptcy as soon as it comes time to start paying you back? What would the free market int…

The interest rate would be very very high, as it should be. You can’t on the one hand encourage people to loan money to those who aren’t credit worthy and on the other hand bemoan the fact that people end up with loans they can’t pay back. The former policy is guaranteed to produce the latter outcome. It also artificially inflates the price colleges can (and will) charge. Allowing people to discharge education debts in bankruptcy is one part of making college cheaper.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#432

Post by cloudier » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 7:48 PM UTC

c9fc42ad wrote: post #332

mywittyname wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when MIT first started publishing their lectures online. I would watch them for my chemistry and physics classes and was astounded by the fact that the lectures were basically identical. Ivy league schools had this mystique around them and I always wondered what it would be like to be there instead of a community college. Turns out, the difference is absolutely not in the lectures or tests. At least, for f…

I had a similar experience about 8 years ago in Intro to Linear Algebra. I had been attending lectures at my school but I ended up missing a day so I decided to find the corresponding lecture from MIT. It turns out, I was able to watch a lecture from the author of the textbook we were using. Even crazier, the lecture I watched online ended with him working through an example problem but he did not finish. When I went…

Agreed, I also found this to be the case for my CS degree. When I realised that some courses were essentially facsimiles of courses I could take on a MOOC, I changed the way I chose my courses. Why take a copy-pasted course, when I could just take it online for free from the original source? I ended up doing a lot more project-based courses after that.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#433

Post by btilly » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 7:49 PM UTC

teh_infallible wrote: post #264

0xffff2 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As someone who majored in English, I assert that the emphasis on STEM and shift away from the humanities is causing serious problems in our society. 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 mis…

Your argument assumes that taking humanities is required to develop critical reading skills.

However attempts to measure critical reading skills, for example in standardized tests such as the GREs, consistently find that STEM majors are better at critical reading than humanities majors!

Secondly, critical reading is not the only required skill for critiquing and assessing potentially flawed arguments. Quantitative reasoning is also needed. For example you can't assess public policy questions about COVID-19 without quantitative reasoning. However STEM courses are far more likely to teach quantitative reasoning than humanities courses.

This critique of your argument is brought to you by someone with a STEM degree.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#434

Post by outoftheabyss » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 7:50 PM UTC

devit wrote: post #322

jedberg wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Maybe it could be a percentage of all taxable income, kind of like giving out equity in the student themselves as a person? Although of course there is no reason for college in general to be particularly expensive.

That's what it is here in the UK. It's around 8% of everything over £20k with loan forgiveness after 30 years.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#435

Post by Yhippa » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 7:50 PM UTC

basch wrote: post #66

xhkkffbf wrote: post #2

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…

>The job can be done better for much less. First and foremost, the lecture part of education is extremely inefficient. I know "watch the video" just doesn't work for some people, but charging for a live rendition of a repeated script, and then not valuing the person who watched the same recording equally, is absurd. Education needs to acknowledge a couple things. 1) Theres probably a "best" lecture or lecturer out th…

> Theres probably a "best" lecture or lecturer out there for each topic.

This is something I've been thinking about for a while. Let's assume that there is one "best" lecture for a given topic. I think then effort could be spent with smaller study groups where students can have direct access to people who can help them understand the concepts. There is little reason to have so many other different takes unless they add to the universal body of knowledge.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#436

Post by thomashobohm » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 7:50 PM UTC

JadeNB wrote: post #339

N1H1L wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically Harvard, and maybe Columbia and that's it. UIUC, Wisconsin-Madison, Berkeley, Michigan-Ann Arbor are orders better schools in the sciences than Dartmouth or Brown.

In math, Princeton tops all the non-Ivy's you list, and UPenn has at least a fighting chance, maybe depending on speciality.

Once you're at that level, the differences are marginal. It matters if you want to go to graduate school, I suppose, but we're talking about people who just want to get a degree and go into the workforce here. For them, Princeton vs. Michigan won't matter a bit if they're studying to become an engineer.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#437

Post by ttymck » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 7:51 PM UTC

secabeen wrote: post #410

clairity wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe the dept of education should stipulate that 80% of college operating budgets be direct teaching/research costs, lest their fed loan largess be taken away. and progressively tax endowments, particularly targeting above a threshold of $100K/student or something like that. currently, the incentives are such that greedy people can just milk all the unrestrained cash flow coming into what should be a non-profit-orie…

Which of these expenses do you think they should eliminate? https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_334.10.a...

Ideally you'd start with Instruction right? A breakdown of the "constituent categories" therein would be useful.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#438

Post by Spooky23 » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 7:53 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #179

gwd wrote: post #113

Earlier 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…

> 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…

It's a sure thing for the bank. Most of the loans are guaranteed by the federal government.

Student loans only changed to be non-dischargable in the 70s and 80s, driven by certain professions (especially medical) and costs associated with them.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#439

Post by dyadic » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 7:53 PM UTC

pmorici wrote: post #390

HarryHirsch wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this downvoted? In the European nations (with the notable exception of Britain), university is free or nearly so.

It's not 'free' it's paid for through taxes.

It is free to the person that receives it.

Imagine I bake and give you a cake, it's still a "free cake" even though I've put the work into baking it and other people have put the work into harvesting the ingredients and bringing them to me.

Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

#440

Post by jefftk » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 7:53 PM UTC

gwd wrote: post #318

jedberg wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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? 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 t…

> If it's a bad bet for the bank, it must be far worse of a bet for young adults.

That doesn't follow: you could graduate, get your degree, and declare bankruptcy. You're fine, your loan is gone, and the bank regrets their investment.