441–450 of 848 posts
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which is just weird because well, at around the age of 18, most people should be able to handle themselves and they are not children anymore.
Should and can are two different things in the real world. We can idealize what people should do, or we can work with what they can do. Not both.
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One of the oddities in the college process is how public universities followed the price increases of their private counterparts. Why weren't state governments able to dictate effective cost controls to keep costs down for residents? Note that I'm aware of in-state tuition. The main campus of my state university charges 30k/year instate, and 40k/year out of state. Neither number is appropriate in a state with a media…
So, to be clear, price controls never work. Prices are determined (mostly and usually) by supply and demand. More demand -> higher price. More supply -> lower price. The price of an education (regardless of cost structures, public funding, or whatever) is going to dominated by demand, since supply is relatively fixed. It takes years or decades to increase the supply of qualified instruction following typical universi…
In the case of a state university, it's odd that we don't see at least one example of this approach. Why isn't there an example of a state university with fixed admissions capacity, poor dorm/ student life quality, low cost, but with good academics?
We generally see the same set of tradeoffs across the entire industry with no student cost considerations in university planning to speak of.
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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.
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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…
Considering that humanities majors tend to believe in socialism does not burnish their critical reading skills and resistance to propaganda. The reality of the history of socialism is one of failure. And yes, I do understand that everyone thinks that those who disagree with them are ill-informed and susceptible to propaganda, and those who prefer socialism will think that of me :-)
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To be clear, I don't think college should be paid for with loans. I agree with you that we shouldn't be enslaving people. But I also don't think allowing these loans to be discharged in bankruptcy will solve anything (and will arguably make things worse) without systemic changes in the way college is paid for.
It will force "the system" to come up with some other way to pay for tuition. What do you think about Income Share Agreements? https://www.thesimpledollar.com/loans/student/income-share-a...
I think the (optics) problem is that it's a "more obvious voluntary fractional slavery program". So it's easy to criticize. Of course, because it's a less obvious voluntary fractional slavery program, non-dischargeable loans are simultaneously harder to criticize and harder for people to see the trap they're walking in to.
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>There are lots of difficult fields to study that just don't pay well due to competition That may be the case, but speaking as a recent young person, the vast majority of college students I met did no actual research regarding the employability of their majors. It's also a disservice to group soft and hard sciences together under STEM - because you end up with millions of children who can't hack it in math, but they…
I truly believe that it should be illegal for state-funded universities to collect tuition from students that are "undecided" in their major.
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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…
Here’s a lifehack: Attend college in Europe then move to USA for that high paying job. Works really well. Cheap to free education, better skills because you’re not just living the college life and professors have little incentive to make it easy. It’s great. Hell you don’t even have to fully graduate to get most of the benefit.
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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…
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. And yet somehow banks were happy to do so until 2005. Student loans would dry up overnight if they could be discharged at bankruptcy. That being said, I actually think that's a good thing, b…
Before 2005 most loans were already protected from bankruptcy, and for the others you generally needed your parents to co-sign.
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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…
> 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…
People are incentivized to act one way or the other. Less-wealthy people cannot afford college tuition, and the government cannot mandate that banks give away money to extremely risky but ambitious people.
This same problem exists with extending loans in general to risky, low-income individuals. Yes their rates are insanely high, bordering on predatory, but they also have sky high default rates so the alternative is they simply cannot get a loan at all.
This is essential economics.
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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. 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…