751–760 of 848 posts
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Holy shit it's that expensive now?? Graduated from there about 15 years ago and it was maybe 8-10k a year..
The state cut all funding under the last governor so they had some major issues.
Rauner cut 400 million for education during a year he could make a budget with legislators.
Pat Quinn cut education spending by 340 million during a year when he got to write the budget himself because the legislature couldn't pass one.
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I do think there's an argument to made that college should be cheaper (at least excluding housing and other secondary costs) than K-12 given that K-12 has a bunch of mandatory cost centers like special education (which is to say dealing with kids who destroy classrooms, abusive parents, etc.), that class size can be larger in college, that students in college (at least excluding community college) should be above the…
But the salary of the faculty is more expensive, at least on a per instructor basis. Although maybe you need fewer instructors. And facilities will cost more. You're not likely to have a nano-technology lab at your K-12 school. I think university could be cheaper than it is today, but probably not much cheaper than K-12.
The idealized form of studying is education with mentoring, see Blooms 2 sigma results.
But that is too expensive, who wants to have that number of teachers ! It would cost a fortune!
So instead people try to cut costs, and or keep making it a discussion on price, since this is America, instead of just making colleges public and free.
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> 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…
> All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, just like any other loan. 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. Student loans would dry up overnight if they could be disc…
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…
I agree, as a Tier-1 dev. I went to a Tier-1 university and wouldn’t discount universities in Tiers 1-2 for the research, lectures, and resources they provide, in addition to the serendipitous environment where you will bump into other top-talent people. Below Tier 2 I would support online learning to an extent, but having regular lectures and group work is important to keep an 18 year old on track. Universities need…
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> 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…
> All of us should be regularly lobbying our lawmakers to make student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy, just like any other loan. 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. Student loans would dry up overnight if they could be disc…
No, more likely they would be priced - both in amount lent and interest rate - according to the value of the "asset" they're purchasing. There's a reason why home mortgage and car loan rates are 3-4% while random credit card rate is 16-25%.
One is used to purchase something that has long term value and may be used to create value or enable you to make money while the other one is used for Netflix and Big Macs.
I'm waiting to see how things shake out in the next couple weeks. Many colleges require freshman deposits on May 1st. We don't know a) how many are coming back into physical session in the fall and b) how many parents will tolerate paying for an online degree. The next 12 months could crash the system.
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> try telling that to a person in the middle of the state, who has never been to Madison, has never had a kid go to Madison, and who has to pay their tax dollars to support the University. It is a hard sell. Everyone wins some and loses some with government spending. But overall as a collective group, the idea is that the group is better off (e.g. a more educated population produces greater amounts of valuable work w…
Rural regions get their fair share of wins. E.g., the massive amount of money that is redirected from productive cities into relatively unproductive rural counties, many of which subsist on jobs that would not exist without superfluous military bases, over-incarceration, massive farm subsidies, or, yes, branch campuses of state university systems. This happens at the state level too. Many of our state’s rural school…
Essential workers are not the people running Facebook to sell likes, it's the people picking and moving food to you.
Up to you if you'd like to consider that food a win for them and not you.
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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 revenue expenses 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 u…
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For the average college graduate, college is still a pretty good investment. I could write lots of comments about people without a college degree that live crappy lives and have trouble finding good paying jobs, and people with college degrees that live well and make a lot of money. My prediction is that we'll see changes in the US system. The problem you're pointing out is the risk. Universities are the ones that IM…
No college is going to advocate for taking future income from students over government backed loans or a traditional loan. The former translates to less immediate income. Colleges had little reason to raise tuition since 2000 except for money, I don't see them suddenly moving to forward-thinking strategies.
Unless they sell bonds secured on the income streams.
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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…
Do you think colleges wouldn't change if they were going to receive far far fewer applicants at their current sticker prices? I don't mean that to come across as snarky. I'm genuinely curious because your comment seems to be based on an assumption that colleges would not make changes to their operations or tuition if they suddenly had a hard time filling their freshman class.
Regardless if job requirements change (they only will for a subset that no one cares about and no one is trying to get), you're going to screw people over. The lag time between no-loans and job-requirements dropping is going to be too long. There will be a lot of people who fall into the cracks and will be stuck with the lowest tier jobs because they couldn't afford a cash-only education until it was much less expensive.
Regardless of this - I feel like this is the wrong approach to debate lower costs vs no loans vs whatever-where-a-student-pays-in-the-end. I think 4 year college should be free (no tuition, books paid, stipend or special housing, etc.) given how the world works. I went to college for free due to CH 35 of the VA and it was really the only reason I was able to do it and fully commit to it. I have no problem with having a more educated populace - regardless of what they study. I did study something that came with very gainful employment but that wasn't obvious in the beginning of my studies. I think 4 year college would be less necessary if we had better education from the start - but we're never going to get there in this country.
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Philosophy is great, but it's not something you need to go into debt for. Did you learn anything in those classes that you couldn't have learned on your own via books and free lectures on YouTube, etc?
I think you're missing the point of college. Anything you learn in college can be learned from a book or YouTube. The value of college is the curation the professor provides and the people you are doing it with.
That which can be learned by one-way communication from a book or video are not all that can be learned. Through dialogue and practice one may learn techniques of proofs in math classes, lab techniques in science classes, how to write and edit papers in humanities classes. All the practice that drama, art, or music majors do amplifies what they learn from their books. And so on.
The NFL wouldn't hire college football players who got all their learning from books or YouTube.