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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

#571

Post by slg »

jackcosgrove wrote: post #523
lostcolony wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll go one further. Education is not an asset you can take away. Houses and cars can be foreclosed on; you can't take and resell education as a good. It either needs to be kept as a pure luxury commodity, or it needs to be valued societally and not require an individual to pay for. Even if college is 'cheaper', if it prices some people out, it can't be viewed as a necessity to be able to get a good job (not saying i…

Lots of credit card debt is unsecured because the purchased goods are consumed, but that is dischargeable.

Which is why credit card interest rates are so high and why you can't get a credit card with $100,000+ limit as an 18 year old with zero income or credit history.

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

#572

Post by staticautomatic »

bluGill wrote: post #463
jedberg wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want real change, I just don't believe this is the change that makes sense. Changing the way colleges are paid for would make sense. Capping tuition would make sense. Making you pay a portion of your income back to the college for the rest of your life (or maybe just 20 years) would make sense. But allowing student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy would do more harm than good without other systemic changes.

If you are getting a degree that doesn't have good job prospects then you should pay for it out of pocket, only the rich should try for it (rich can mean middle class with a good job taking a second degree for fun). If you take a loan that means you expect the value of the degree is worth more than the loan amount over time. If you can't find such a job paying enough to make it worth it, then you should declare bankr…

I got a liberal arts degree that by all accounts should have left me with terrible job prospects but I ended up going straight into a lucrative career path with just my BA. I know music majors who went into consulting and English majors who went to work for Goldman Sachs. Yes, they were exceptional people. None of us were rich.

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

#573

Post by zachm0 »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #350
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some degrees . I don't see many CS degrees working retail. I don't see many EE degrees doing so.

Nearly every EE I graduated with, including me, had to give up on our dream of being a hardware engineer because nearly zero hardware companies will hire an EE grad from a mid-level school. They either refuse to hire new grads or only recruit at CMU/Purdue job fairs. Then you take a software job that's available but not interesting, and you get pidgeonholed into that field. It's not retail but it doesn't seem great f…

I'm an EE that went to a mid-level state school and got a hardware engineering job out of school; I got lucky that there was a hardware company in town that did a lot of hiring from my school. I had a similar experience applying to other companies before I graduated though, the company I eventually started working for was the only one to ever give me a call back and I think that was only because I was already working there as a software engineering intern ;)

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

#574

Post by mattkrause »

N1H1L wrote: post #262
wincy wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

State schools in US are often the best STEM schools. 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.

I'm not sure that's true for science.

Harvard is a biomedical behemoth, especially once you include the affiliated hospitals (MGH, Brigham and Women's, Dana Farber, Beth Israel Deaconess, etc) and research institutes (Broad, Roland). Harvard proper and MGH each receive about a half billion dollars a year in NIH funding. These are usually listed separately in those "league tables", but the whole system must bring in nearly $2B/year (out of a total NIH extramural budget of ~$28B).

The other Ivies aren't as big (though not much else is), but all of them have well-regarded medical schools (except for Princeton) and biomedical research programs. Yale, Havard, and Princeton have pretty credible chemistry programs too. Princeton also has the Institute for Advanced Study, which has hosted a crazy number of Nobel/Fields/Wolf/Cole prize winners; it's formally independent but...right there.

It may be debatable how much this matters for undergrad teaching--is it better to have a world-renowned expert or someone invested in teaching?--but for anything involving research (including undergrads), they are definitely way up there.

(No argument that JHU, Stanford, and other places (CMU, UMich, NYU, etc, depending on field) also have intensive research too).

NIH funding data from here: https://report.nih.gov/award/index.cfm

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

#575

Post by ZoomerCretin »

jedberg wrote: post #352
iguy wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly both would happen, right? Harvard doesn't set their prices based on loans, they wouldn't care. Some mid-rank colleges would disappear, and some would adapt to serve the new market.

> Harvard doesn't set their prices based on loans, They most definitely do: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2006/10/25/tuition-increa...

This source does not have any information related to loans availability correlating with tuition prices. Are you making the assumption that tuition hikes can only be caused by loan availability?

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

#576

Post by omgwtfbyobbq »

My sense is it's a good idea to separate college as a place where you take classes and can get a degree from college as a lifestyle choice. While living at home and later with a friend, I went to a community college after high school, that my family paid a nominal amount for, and transferred to a UC from there that was entirely covered by Pell/Cal grants until graduation. No debt required.

Had I gone straight to a 4-year from high school, lived at the school, and made it a lifestyle as opposed to someplace I go to take classes, then I likely would have graduated with a significant amount of debt.

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

#577

Post by ZoomerCretin »

panzagl wrote: post #266
jedberg wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are not enough upper class to go to all of the schools currently operating- colleges would have to lower prices or disappear.

Universities don't hike prices for the sake of extracting more money from students. They do so because it's the only way to make up for the enormous cuts in funding from states, which have historically provided the bulk of revenue that universities see.

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

#578

Post by labcomputer »

btilly wrote: post #486
jefftk wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> somehow banks were happy to do so until 2005 Before 2005 most loans were already protected from bankruptcy, and for the others you generally needed your parents to co-sign.

The loans that were protected from bankruptcy from 1978 to 2005 were student loans to the federal government. They weren't private loans to banks. Therefore before 2005, banks that lent money for student loans did so without that particular extraordinary protection.

> Therefore before 2005, banks that lent money for student loans did so without that particular extraordinary protection.

Most of the pre-2005 loans required a parental co-signer. And I know that I wasn't able to take out non-federal loans all by myself.

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

#579

Post by mhb »

cujo wrote: post #522
SkyBelow wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when the loans could be discharged this was not at all common, so why would it be so now?

Because college was infinitely more affordable.

The argument is that you are reversing the cause and effect.

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

#580

Post by gji »

wutbrodo wrote: post #187
nimbius wrote: post #64

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…

I work in AV development, and the number of refugees from the hard sciences is astonishing. I guess I don't blame them, but it's weird to have a physics PhD report to you and be able to use only a fraction of the skills she spent a decade and hundreds of thousands of dollars gaining. This isn't quite a complaint: adopting math and physics PhDs (first as a mentor and now as a TLM) that are seemingly unproductive has b…

I'm a physics grad student finishing up a PhD, would you have some time/be willing to chat about industry jobs? Email is in bio.
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