711–720 of 848 posts
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Ironically, every governmental attempt to make college more affordable has caused tuition to rise.
Except the original attempt: public schools.
https://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-educ...
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Having a bankruptcy on your record may make it difficult to get that high-paying job, as employers may not look favorably upon it.
Do Americans really check prospective employees' credit scores? Wow.
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Philsophy majors are a common target for ridicule, but the fact of the matter is that corporations go out of their way to hire Philosophy majors to be problem-solvers of various types because they essentially have a degree in critical thinking.
They'd be better off hiring people with engineering degrees (non-software). That's applied critical thinking and creative problem solving all in one. I really don't know why there's this insistence that humanities has a monopoly on teaching critical thinking.
Someone that's good at critically analyzing software doesn't make them good at being able to understand why users might be drawn to a product. Nor does it make them able to design UI that won't frustrate the average user.
Humanities doesn't have a monopoly on critical thinking, but you'd be a fool to believe that it doesn't aid critical thinking. The best software engineers I've worked with were those that came from other professions whom could apply other ways of approaching a problem compared to others.
To put it bluntly, if you hire a bunch of engineers they will design a lightbulb that no one can figure out how to screw in.
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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…
People should be able to get an education no matter their social standing. It shouldn't be tied to this idea of job prospects because commodification of education is a sham.
A couple of points: not all colleges are created the same. Many state schools, particularly top-tier ones offer fantastic educations at an excellent price-point. They are a good value, and will remain so. Along with need-based aid and scholarships, they are amazing vehicles to reduce generational inequality (look at UCLA for example). I can only speak to the engineering (not software) side of things, but from lab wor…
> the social networks that universities provide students and alumni are valuable Colleges say this, but does anybody ever really find it to be the case? I suppose if you went to Harvard or Princeton this might be true, but as a representative of the other 90%, I've never interacted with anybody I went to school with (including a year abroad, a four-year degree, and a master's degree) in any way.
I'm a Dutch person who went to both universities in Amsterdam.
I know people who now work at:
- McKinsey
- Adyen (not anymore)
- The Dutch television
- The biggest Dutch bank
Don't get me wrong. It's hard to get a job that I want, because apparently I can't get a job at those great companies (prepping hardcore for Google at the moment, so who knows). And I'm not utilizing my network in the right way. But I do get to get a glimpse inside some of them.
Besides that, I have met a person who helped me a shit ton financially, spiritually and intellectually. I've done the same for him (though less financially, unfortunately, but if the roles were reversed, I'd have done what he did). While he never went to a big name company, it definitely helped (more than anything else really).
Did I count on it? No. Did I meet him during the first day of uni? Actually, seven days prior to the first day of uni (1 week non-stop partying first).
So there's that.
===== THE UNIVERSITY EXPERIENCE =====
Also, I've experienced more or less everything a university has to offer, doing 2 bachelors and 2 masters + extracurriculars + student societies help with that.
In a big way it did mature me a lot. I was different than most though, in the sense that I always did multiple studies and things at once. I wasn't beholdened to one "student identity". I was never a psychology or CS student, I was always both or more.
In all fairness, high school was simply a prison. University felt more like a city, anything was possible. And more or less everything did come true.
Here's a small selection:
- Horrible education
- The best spiritual lessons that any other person could ever teach me. The course was called: meditation and psychology, and it was a 75:25 mix of theology (Buddhism during the centuries, emphasizing meditation) and psychology/cognitive science of meditation. Before this course I had issues with meditation. After this course, I knew how to deal with all of them despite that they were never directly addressed.
- The most epic parties,
- And some pretty boring ones
- Easy yet super interesting lessons, one was about the supply chain of a video game
- Hard lessons that weren't useful and simply wasted time
- Education that made me believe I was too stupid, only to persevere and realize that, to my surprise, there is no such thing. There is only perserverance, for my situation anyway. That was really empowering. What's currently less empowering is that potential employees don't seem to understand this.
- Fickle friendships
- Deep friendships
- Shallow loves
- 3+ year relationships
- Lots of wasted opportunity costs
- Amazing synergies that proppeled my education and job prospects (currently definitely not though)
Don't get me started on my 5 theses. To close, it was everything: epic, painful, mundane, joyful, sad, enriching, numbing, stimulating. I can keep on going, I'll stop.
-----------------
For anyone who's interested, here's how they went:
- One master thesis was written in a weekend, published nominated for best paper award.
- Another master thesis took 6 months and completely failed (I'm not the best at qualitative research)
- My computer science thesis was the culmination of all my theses and it showed. It took a bit longer than normal and I had an attitude with academic references across the whole spectrum of science and philosophy (not that I know that much, I'm simply more T-shaped than most academics)
- One bachelor thesis that was absolute horrible to do, we were basically unpaid labor. I wrote the thesis itself in 5 days, and was done with it.
- My first bachelor thesis, that was an absolute blessing. In hindsight: a perfect thesis experience. It took 3 months (as it should) and I got an amazing result (I analyzed 12 million tweets and hypothesized that 70% to 95% must be positive, I was right with 84.5%). The algorithm was simple but benchmarked very well against sophisticated ones. It was awesome.
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> Outlawing things to a group of people isn't going to serve them better. It will mean that the entire middle class will be unable to educate into jobs. Educating them about the effort college requires to be successful once you leave would be better. Making it harder to get a student loan is hardly "outlawing" anyone from going to college. Schools would still give scholarships. Plus, tuition would almost certainly go…
If you're saying that someone who is below a certain income cannot get a loan - how are they going to go to college? Pull-up them bootstraps and find some more money under the couch cushions? You do know that scholarships are not like a dime-a-dozen, right? It's not like every university waives tuition at middle class incomes. If you want to limit the cost of college then doing it by putting caps on how much a univer…
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They may if they face competition form Lambda School style ISAs (not necessarily just ISAs generally, but ones that are actually good for the student). As a bonus this would make universities better at education since the incentives would be aligned with the students. It would be helped though if the easily available government loans were not available, though with the generally bad politics from both sides on this,…
You're assuming a lot of faith in market forces. In reality, the incentives should already be aligned with student interest: All of the information for it is already available. Retention & graduation rates are public knowledge, and you can easily find out if a school has job placement (and their rates) or merely a "career services" area that will help you write a resume and point you at some other resources. The fact…
College worked out well for me, but I definitely didn't know you could evaluate a school this way when I was 17 & filing applications. I just applied to public schools with a strong reputation.
It's easy to take for granted as an adult that all this information exists. But for a teenager, the whole thing is all new.
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…
It is still true, based on statistics of college graduate vs non-college graduates, that going to college brings much better odds in your favor to get a "good life". As usual, it's about odds, nothing is guaranteed in life.
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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 go…
>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%. A four-fold increase in funding as a percentage of GDP isn't relevant to the more important metric, real funding per student. https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/state-hig... > But the long-term trend is that spending by stat…
Second, your argument is absurd on the absolute size of the numbers involved. For example from page 2 of https://www.mhec.org/sites/default/files/resources/mhec_affo... we see that per FTE enrollment from 1992 to 2017 that inflation adjusted state spending went from $8,301 to $7,642 and net tuition per FTE (tuition - financial aid etc) went from $3,361 to $6,572. The in real dollars decrease of $659 per FTE in state spending is only 20% of the real increase for students. Where is the other 80% coming from?
Even in the difficult 2008-2017 period, changes in state spending explains less than 50% of the change.
Furthermore the explanation that you are focused on explains changes in public university tuition only. It does not address why private universities have likewise seen skyrocketing tuition. Given that the trends in private and public tuition have been similar, it is more likely that they have a common explanation rather than unrelated ones.
Next, you're dismissing the source that I gave that looked at a variety of possible explanations and tried to quantify the relative impact at each. And yet you've failed to give sources that examine the possibility of any explanation other than your preferred one. (Which still only explains a small fraction of the rise in cost to students.)
And finally it is obvious that a university is more than just teaching staff. But when the fraction of revenues spent on what is supposed to be a core educational mission is so absurdly small, there is a problem. (In the meantime there are more bureaucrats per student, nicer dorms, and much nicer athletic facilities.)