Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plus 3700 in fees
My apologies for not quoting it originally, but it literally says "Tuition & Fees".
Except it also lists $3700 of other fees.
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
#642Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard to pick an economically viable major. There are lots of difficult fields to study that just don't pay well due to competition. People tend to think Science = STEM = Guaranteed Job, but that is not the case. Lots of sciences don't make much money, especially the ones driven by passion. Others are highly geographically dependent, so mining engineers might have a median salary of $80k after five years, but 80%…
Colleges should not even offer loans for non-viable majors. Picking a major should not be like Indiana Jones picking which grail to drink from.
> Colleges should not even offer loans for non-viable majors.
Oddly enough, a couple of the best programmers I have ever work with are now CTOs at their respective companies. One of them had an english degree and the other a music degree.
Just yesterday there was an article here on HN about the importance of writing.
So, which majors would you consider non-viable?
Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education
#643Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
even graduating with no debt and a good job, I doubt most people are looking to buy a house within seven years anyway.
Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education
#644Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most STEM PhDs (and especially in the hard sciences) are funded from mostly government sources. It’s seen as the country making an investment in top talent. Nobody (who is any good) in the USA pays money for a STEM PhD. You get paid to do these degrees, albeit not a lot but a lot better than paying yourself!
However, the opportunity costs for a PhD are very, very high, especially if the degree takes longer than planned.
True. I had planed to finish my CS PhD in 2016, but now I am still not finished
Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education
#645Software should be either a trade school or a masters program depending on a student’s level of commitment to the academics involved just like law, medicine, or engineering.
The primary problem with education financing is unrealistic expectations. Do some basic math before paying for any education. If an education loan costs you a certain amount plus interests you need to make a certain amount minus what you would earn without the education to qualify that expenditure. If people currently working in your field aren’t making $150k then why would a $100k loan make any sense? Why waste that kind of money? When you could attend a trade school for $10k that allows you to earn $60k. Blaming the system does not excuse bad personal financial decisions.
When I was picking schools out of high school I found the third cheapest 4 year university in Texas. It was the only school I applied to more than 20 years ago. A 12 hour semester cost $1800 including dorm, tuition, and meal plan. Books and supplies were extra. To me that price made perfect sense because it would take becoming a CEO to justify the expense.
Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education
#646Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The offered loan amount would be much lower, too.
Which is fine, because tuition, textbooks, and housing would be, too.
This is a crystal-clear example of what happens when government subsidies distort a market.
Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education
#647Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 that they help universities raise tuition as long as the projected lifetime income increase from going to college exceeds the cost of tuition. Which will just allow our unsustainable "tuition rises faster than inflation" trend to last a few more years before it falls apart. Note that "projected lifetime income increase" is generally overestimated. What we do is compare average income of a college graduate wit…
Its also backwards looking, obviously. In the boomer working years, colleges were very selective and a degree was a stealth IQ test along with socioeconomic group membership.
At this point the average IQ of a college grad is very close to 100. I guarantee that within the next 30 to 40 years someone will make the shocking discovery that the presence or absence of a degree has no influence on income, success, or happiness.
At that point the ponzi scheme of higher ed can collapse.
There's nothing wrong with designing and implementing an education system for the top 5% of society and the jobs that top 5% will likely have. There is a big problem with a marketing scam along the lines of every American is a temporarily inconvenienced millionaire.
Surely, my favorite waitress at Dennys is making more money as a waitress than she would as a K12 educator, if she could get hired, which she cannot. The degree does not make her a better person nor a better waitress. It does signal that she's in maybe the top 50% of humanity WRT the skills required to get a degree. She's a somewhat better than average person because of who she is, not a meaningless piece of paper for training she will never use. The point of discussing my favorite waitress is we need "something" to signal in the job market who is in the upper half of potential employees, and $100K of debt and four years of labor seem a huge waste on a civilizational level.
Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education
#648Earlier quoted context omitted.
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:/…
> For a just-graduated person with minimal assets it's not that bad It is in fact bad. You can’t just declare bankruptcy and get a high paying job a year later and have no student debt.... When I looked into personal bankruptcy I was told by my lawyer that it would only make financial sense if there was no way I could pay back the amount owed in the next 7-10 years.
Having a bankruptcy on your record may make it difficult to get that high-paying job, as employers may not look favorably upon it.
Re: Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education
#649Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Out of the fire and into the frying pan..
What makes you think that "profit motive" or "regulatory capture" will be kinder and more gentle with this approach?
For hundreds and thousands of years Indian farmers had a version of "income sharing". You should research how it went. And please don't respond with "Sure they fucked up but WE will build a better system this time around"