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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

#781

Post by joe_the_user »

Upvoter33 wrote: post #568

Not all colleges are the same. For example, at the UW-Madison, over half the students leave with do debt at all. There is a Bucky tuition promise so that any low-income person will have college paid for in entirety. All of the negative comments on here treat "college" as if it is one unified thing, when in fact the experiences across institutions (both educationally, as well as financially) are quite different. All o…

Even if there are multiple ways to avoid crazy student debt, the existence of crazy student on a society-wide basis produces social and financial distortions that everyone should be worried about.

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

#782

Post by vkou »

asdfadsfgfdda wrote: post #694
vkou wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Debt is good. It's what enables people who don't have the money up front to start businesses or buy houses. The reason people go into debt to buy houses is because everyone is using debt to buy houses, thus driving the prices up. If mortgages were capped at 5-year terms, the price of houses would be a lot lower, which would be great for society - for the same reason that having cheaper electricity is great for soci…

Prices wouldn't significantly change. You still have people/pension funds/governments with lots of money to invest (the people who currently buy mortgage debt). How would you prohibit this money from just buying houses and renting them out? And even if you could lower prices, how would you compensate the current homeowners for destroying the value of their largest asset?

> Prices wouldn't significantly change. You still have people/pension funds/governments with lots of money to invest (the people who currently buy mortgage debt). How would you prohibit this money from just buying houses and renting them out?

This won't happen - because:

1. Up until the 80s, houses used to cost closer to three years of wages, as opposed to ten. Yet, there was no shortage of people and pension funds in the 80s.

2. Individuals borrowing mountains of money for their first home get tax advantages, compared to institutional investors. It's individuals pulling the price of houses up, not institutions.

> And even if you could lower prices, how would you compensate the current homeowners for destroying the value of their largest asset?

The same way we compensate people who bought pets.com stock in 1999, the same way that we compensate 22 year olds who amassed $200,000 of debt, and an English Literary History degree, and the same way that we compensate someone who invested into a coal plant, when utility solar starts selling electricity for 2 cents/KWH.

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

#783

Post by Mirioron »

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…

Why do so many people need to go to college? Especially before they even know what life is really like. Couldn't they work a year or two and then decide to go to college?

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

#784

Post by nojvek »

2 things that I feel hurt US and probably be why we lose to China.

1) Predatory college loans (which lead to overpriced education)

2) healthcare tied to employers where providers can charge after they provide service months later. Very little transparency and insane markup.

Both are very specific to US, and absurd compared to every other wealthy nation.

Fixing education and healthcare to be reasonable for lower and middle class would do wonders for this country. Currently millions are in perpetual debt due to medical bills and college loans. They won’t start companies and build great things.

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

#785

Post by austincheney »

RandallBrown wrote: post #662
austincheney wrote: post #645

Software 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 ea…

If you go 100k in debt to get a job that pays the same as one you could have only gone 10k in debt for, it's probably because you like doing that better. Some people would way rather be an elementary school teacher than an electrician and that's fine.

The same argument can be made for gambling and using cocaine. That’s fine, maybe, but if financial slavery is the known output then don’t cry about how expensive it is.

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

#786

Post by traek »

tony0x02 wrote: post #742
drevil-v2 wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Do you have a source for this history of income sharing? Just trying to learn more.

S/he is referring to tenant farming and sharecropping, if you search those terms you can read more about it.

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

#787

Post by mitchdoogle »

jkhaui wrote: post #730
mywittyname wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when MIT first started publishing their lectures online. I would watch them for my chemistry and physics classes and was astounded by the fact that the lectures were basically identical. Ivy league schools had this mystique around them and I always wondered what it would be like to be there instead of a community college. Turns out, the difference is absolutely not in the lectures or tests. At least, for f…

"Online education used to be like online dating: only something losers would do. But now it seems to moving towards the default way of doing business." As a self-taught developer and proud of it, I like this quote. A lot. It's easy to let yourself fall into a toxic mindset where you (and many employers) unjustifiably feel inferior because you didn't take the traditional 4-year college route. But in less than a decade…

Only fools with zero foresight ever said anything like that. These days I would think less of a person paying $20,000 tuition per year over the person who did all the same work online for free.

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

#788

Post by Erem »

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…

Nimbius, the way that you write is remarkably effective. Makes me want to crack open my old Steinbeck novels. Please keep writing.

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

#790

Post by Glyptodon »

kenjackson wrote: post #176
Glyptodon wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course actual faculty wages are balanced against boatloads of adjuncts and grad students working for a pittance.
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