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

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

#541

Post by lordnacho »

abnry wrote: post #379
gwd wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I agree with what you are saying, except that we shouldn't say students are unequipped to evaluate the "bet" merely for being young and inexperienced. If we wanted to, we could train students to be much better at evaluating such a bet.

The kind of knowledge you need to evaluate this is something that is normally taught in college. What high school teaches decision making under uncertainty, along with economic history and statistics?

I mean sure we could try to teach kids this stuff, and I certainly aim to tech my kids, but it's not what's been done in the past at secondary school.

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

#542

Post by markdown »

jefftk wrote: post #440
gwd wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Do you know what bankruptcy does? One does not simply declare bankruptcy unless they're willing to have their lives suddenly become much harder and stay that way for a while.

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

#543

Post by jimbokun »

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...

Not sure, but of the 44,965 being spent per student, only 7,219 is going to salaries and wages of the instructors (2016-17). Seems like an awful lot of overhead in there somewhere.

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

#544

Post by jefftk »

BurningFrog wrote: post #462
jefftk wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Let's make that point clearer: Since the bank is absolved from making that bet, it is now the young adult making the same bet that no sane bank would take. A lot of people are now living with having lost that bet.

The bank doesn't want the bet because "bankruptcy" means very different things to the bank and to the student. To the bank it means they lose all their money. For a just-graduated person with minimal assets it's not that bad -- sure you can't get a mortgage to buy a house for a while, but you probably couldn't have afforded that anyway with student loans. You still have the degree, they can't take that (well, https://www.jefftk.com/p/repossessing-degrees).

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

#545

Post by dctoedt »

wincy wrote: post #109
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FWIW, I was a lifelong conservative Republican but in recent years have slowly become a liberal independent (leaning very much Democratic) because of A) the gradual takeover of the GOP by fact-scorning white nationalists who used to be banished to the fringes of the party; and B) what I've experienced and seen in life over the decades, which has made me much more sympathetic to others who didn't get the breaks that I and my ancestors did.

As just one, powerful example: Go visit the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis sometime, at the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. They have life-changing exhibits about the Jim Crow system; about the civil rights era — which I remember from childhood; and especially about slavery. I was fighting back not just tears but sobs. Twenty years ago I scoffed at the idea of reparations for African Americans; now I'm very much open to the idea because of the corrosive compound-interest effect of what was done to their ancestors. To be sure, neither I nor my forebears kept people enslaved, AFAIK — in fact, one of my ancestors was crippled in the Union Army, according to family lore — but all we whites are still benefiting from what was done to the A-As. (Yeah, yeah, I know, other minorities were treated badly too, including some of my recent ancestors; none, none, were treated as badly as enslaved Africans and their descendants.)

That's just one example. I could go on ....

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

#546

Post by wallawe »

alexpetralia wrote: post #335
Justsignedup wrote: post #224

The fairly recent law that you cannot bankruptcy out of a college load caused all this. - Lenders are willing to lend to anyone knowing they will HAVE to pay. - Colleges over-inflated costs, way beyond inflation - It balanced out to this shit. In the past, colleges had to be careful, and so did lenders, because lots of people just didn't go to college due to cost. So they had to sell their worth.

This is remarkably similar to the subprime bubble (in part instigated by a federal policy to encourage homeownership).

It's amazing how few people recognize this. Unintended consequences of government policy in both cases. "Everyone deserves a home" said GW back in the early 2000s. We've now seen the exact same thing play out in the education system. Of course as soon as the government gets in the business of providing/guaranteeing loans, the cost of tuition skyrockets. Why wouldn't they raise prices?

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

#547

Post by eldavido »

rch wrote: post #422
abnry wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with what you are saying, except that we shouldn't say students are unequipped to evaluate the "bet" merely for being young and inexperienced. If we wanted to, we could train students to be much better at evaluating such a bet.

> we could train students to be much better at evaluating such a bet Maybe... but we could definitely alter the nature of risk involved. Why not reduce cost of tuition (e.g. <$1K/semester), while raising the bar on academic rigor as a means of controlling demand?

This is probably what's going to happen, but only if we take a LOT of human labor out of it. Either that, or accept that every class will be huge (200-500 students) with minimal attention given to students, no office hours, and low-paid labor doing all the grunt work (grading, answering questions)

I see a lot of parallels to medicine here. Both are highly regulated and seen as a "right" we ought to fund. Maybe, but until we achieve greater labor leverage (made even harder by professional credentialing in medicine), there just won't be a way to drive costs down much, so we're stuck with what we have.

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

#548

Post by irishcoffee »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #529
irishcoffee wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in order to understand something, you need to a.) and then b.) have someone tell you how to think about what you read? While paying them? You can't wrestle with deep and complex topics unless someone tells you how to think?

Not at all, but having someone who can provide context sure helps with a lot of works - often these works are building on centuries or millennia of thought that they may assume you're aware of and that help place the arguments. Again I ask, given that textbooks exist, can you make the argument that STEM is any different?

As a STEM major at a large public university, my classmates and I decided that at a meta-level, STEM majors learned how to learn new and complicated things quickly in order to get good grades in classes. Also, as a STEM major, I found attending class less than helpful most of the time. I do remember spending quite a lot of time in either a computer lab or in the library fighting my way through problems. Math, physics, chem, programming. Attending lectures was largely someone regurgitating either slides or a textbook.

I assumed this was true for most people in STEM majors in college, no?

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

#549

Post by areyousure »

colinmhayes wrote: post #534
areyousure wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://admissions.illinois.edu/invest/tuition "Following are our estimated expenses for 2020-2021. Illinois Resident Tuition & Fees: $16,862-$21,956"

Plus 3700 in fees

My apologies for not quoting it originally, but it literally says "Tuition & Fees".

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

#550

Post by filoleg »

lallysingh wrote: post #309
take_a_breath wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

==philosophy, which has virtually no job prospects outside of teaching the next generation of philosophy students== 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-loo…

I thought Philosophy was essentially pre-law.

Yeah, philosophy was a bad example of a "non-high-earnings" degree.

Sure, there are plenty of whack philosophy programs that lead nowhere. But if you go to a school with a rigorous philosophy program (which doesn't mean only Ivies/Stanford/etc.), you can easily go for a law degree or a finance job afterwards. Rigorous philosophy programs usually involve tons of discrete math and logic classes, and mastering that opens a lot of doors. I only took up reading philosophy material after graduating, but it is very obvious to me that knowing that in school would have helped me with my more theoretical/math-y CompSci classes tremendously.

Not even talking about some other good applications of that degree that I might not be aware of due to not being a philosophy major myself.

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