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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

#601

Post by lordnacho »

abnry wrote: post #595
lordnacho wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't that then a gigantic failure of high school then? If there is one thing we need to prepare students for, isn't it how to start making career decisions?

If that's a goal of high school, then yes, it's a huge failing. There's also a bunch of other useful stuff they don't teach you, like cooking and how to wash your clothes. There's no coherent idea of what school is supposed to be, though. Is it a place to learn a bunch of practical skills? Or a place to read about some interesting ideas? All those things take time and money, and we end up with a school that does a bunch of different stuff with no real plan.

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

#602

Post by eldavido »

freeone3000 wrote: post #570
eldavido wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

College at $60k a semester while an adjunct earns $28k a year and somehow this doesn't result in a 1:1 student:teacher ratio means someone's skimming off a ton of money.

Skimming or cross-subsidizing?

Part of the problem with universities IMO is the accounting for revenueexpenses isn't at all straightforward. Athletics generate a ton more money than they cost, most people seem fine with that. Research generates no revenue but costs a ton, for some hard-to-quantify but (hopefully?) real benefit to society at large. Tuition is nominally for teaching, which is a big cost center for a university. And, at least in the US, all the costs are split between the national government, the state government (who has the pleasure of educating people who may not live in that state long-term?) and tuition, and various donors and grants.

A system ripe for disruption, if ever there was one.

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

#603

Post by cmurf »

gwd wrote: post #113
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…

> 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…

One party stood vehemently, unmoving, in 2005 to change the law in order to make it more difficult for student loans to be subject to bankruptcy, based on false pretences. And quite literally no one cared. There's no political will to make student loans more easily dischargeable, even merely repealing the 2005 law. Just like there's no political will to consider education a right, let alone higher education. In the U.S. education is a product you buy, rich people get more and better versions of it.

But as it turns out, an infinitesimal number of students even try to have these loans discharged.

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

#604

Post by labcomputer »

dabbledash wrote: post #431
slg wrote: post #416

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. 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…

> The interest rate would be very very high, as it should be.

The offered loan amount would be much lower, too.

There would be nothing to distinguish a student loan from any other unsecured personal loan (like a credit card), so the credit line would be similar. For an 18 year-old, that means the total amount over 4 years would certainly be less than $10k at an APR in the 20's to 30's.

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

#605

Post by wolco »

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…

It may pay the same but building experience today would net him a better job in the future.

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

#606

Post by brianwawok »

jefftk wrote: post #554
markdown wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let's say I've just graduated from college with a degree. I have minimal assets (clothes, computer) and lots of debt (100k in student loan debt). How does bankruptcy work out poorly for me?

7ish year delay in buying a house. Which may be better than 20 years of payments to debt.

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

#607

Post by btilly »

ZoomerCretin wrote: post #558
btilly wrote: post #405

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? 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…

> The bulk of their customers are able to pay thanks to loan guarantees backed by special government rules. Universities are not businesses. Students are not customers. Student tuition was much more heavily subsidized by states, but funding from states to universities has declined in the past few decades. This is the reason for tuition hikes. In the past, there was an agreement between states and universities: The st…

Yours is a narrative that universities themselves like to put forth. However it doesn't make sense.

Tuition rises are a long-term trend. As https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/education_spending points out, from the 1950s to the present, the share of GDP spent by government on universities went from 0.4% to 1.7%. With sometimes progress, and sometimes a loss. But the long-term trend is that spending by states has gone up relative to both enrollment and inflation.

Yes, there are recession years where universities blame tuition hikes on cutbacks in state spending. But tuition has outpaced inflation in good years as well. Which suggests that the long-term trend has other causes.

How bad is it? At present average college tuition at a private school is $45k/year. Salaries for the people teaching vary from $40k for a postdoc to an average of $95k for a full professor. Which means that in an average classroom, a handful of students could hire the teacher as a private tutor, give the teacher a pay raise, and themselves save money! This basic fact suggests that it should be possible to teach students for a lot less than we consider normal today.

Now why have caused risen? It turns out that a lot of causes have been proposed, from the cost of buildings going up to an increase in bureaucracy to deal with government regulation. But attempts to quantify all the different factors, such as https://www.nber.org/papers/w21967, find that the biggest single factor is the combination of restricted supply and artificially increased demand (thanks to the availability of loans and financial aid).

Exactly as I said.

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

#608

Post by JoeAltmaier »

lordnacho wrote: post #601
abnry wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that then a gigantic failure of high school then? If there is one thing we need to prepare students for, isn't it how to start making career decisions?

If that's a goal of high school, then yes, it's a huge failing. There's also a bunch of other useful stuff they don't teach you, like cooking and how to wash your clothes. There's no coherent idea of what school is supposed to be, though. Is it a place to learn a bunch of practical skills? Or a place to read about some interesting ideas? All those things take time and money, and we end up with a school that does a bu…

Our town used to have the Mechanics' Academy. A 12-week study program to learn enough math to balance, books, amortize a loan, calculate weights and measures, figure load limits. Graduates were very employable. My Mom's Grandfather was one.

Long ago demolished and turned into a Mall during Urban Renewal.

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

#609

Post by toast0 »

jedberg wrote: post #239
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…

> Is that bad? It depends on your point of view. Should college be a trade school or should it stick to it's roots of broadening one's horizons? I found my philosophy classes quite enlightening. They were required for my degree in CogSci. If my school didn't have a philosophy major, it wouldn't have a philosophy department, and I would never have had those classes. Also, there are some majors that lead to professiona…

> If my school didn't have a philosophy major, it wouldn't have a philosophy department, and I would never have had those classes.

I went to an engineering school, the only majors were X Engineering, Business, and Nursing. Somehow, we had professors for the humanities classes, so I don't think a major is a requirement.

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