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A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

theatlantic.com

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Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#281

Post by codekansas »

simplify wrote: post #264
bhupy wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making education debts dischargeable in bankruptcy sounds good in theory, but against what collateral do you take out a college loan? Most bankruptcy includes collateral liquidation. What's to stop someone from obtaining a useless degree that doesn't contribute to the nation's economy, and then discharges the debt in bankruptcy? I think a big part of the problem is that debt is so readily issued for degrees that over…

> What's to stop someone from obtaining a useless degree that doesn't contribute to the nation's economy, and then discharges the debt in bankruptcy? Nothing, and that's exactly why education debts need to be dischargeable like anything else. Dischargeable loans makes loan companies have actual responsibility and consequences in deciding who to give loans to. Otherwise, they blindly give out loans (why not, there's n…

This is spot on. Currently there is very little accountability for predatory student lending. For my mortgage I had to talk to multiple people on the phone, show proof of income, and have a background check. For my student loan I just had to give my parents' socials and prove I was attending college. I know nothing about the laws around this, but I suspect it was set up this way with good intentions. Unfortunately changing this will probably require a nation-wide acceptance that not all degrees are created equal.

It would be interesting to see insurance companies have more skin in the game - we would probably start getting much more accurate breakdowns of ROI by major, degree, and school.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#282

Post by codekansas »

Auracle wrote: post #278
simplify wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's to stop someone from obtaining a useless degree that doesn't contribute to the nation's economy, and then discharges the debt in bankruptcy? Nothing, and that's exactly why education debts need to be dischargeable like anything else. Dischargeable loans makes loan companies have actual responsibility and consequences in deciding who to give loans to. Otherwise, they blindly give out loans (why not, there's n…

But it could lead to plenty of people making the smart decision to file for bankruptcy even when they have a good degree. Bankruptcy at 22 isn’t that big of a deal, generally. I’m not sure what the answer is, though I think an economic approach is key.

If the lender can garnish future wages, I think the incentives are still pointing in the right direction. The only way the lender loses money is by lending too much to someone who will never be able to pay it back - which is what you want, presumably.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#283

Post by francisofascii »

geodel wrote: post #275
francisofascii wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the huge increases in productivity since the 1950's, people should be working less hours than in 1950. I don't have a good reason why this should be an anomaly in history.

Sure, if one is willing to stay at 50's living standard. Trouble is what used to be luxury then is now basic necessity and "everyone" must have it.

Exactly. We come back to our original problem. Our society turned "luxuries" like college, into basic necessities that one must do or have. Two cars, big homes, two parents able to work, phones, etc. are all great, but they cease to be luxuries when they become required.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#284

Post by MrFantastic »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #94
omginternets wrote: post #30

I barely skimmed the article, but I don't find this surprising for a few reasons (some of which have been mentioned elsewhere in the comments): - "University degree" is a heterogeneous thing. While there is such thing as non-economic value, the strictly economic value of a college education tends to cluster around a small subset of degrees. - Many countries have enacted policies to increase proportion of people who g…

> Far from fixing inequality Was this the purpose? I thought it was to raise living standards by improving productivity. By and large, broader education has been successful at that. (It went off the deep end, in recent years, with the proliferation of bullshit degrees.)

Productivity has increased but I'd argue that because of technological leverage and not more college grads.

A large portion of those creating the tech are self educated.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#285

Post by jbgud »

chrisseaton wrote: post #253
pigscantfly wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an American perspective, it seems extremely easy to get into a 'top' UK university. Oxford and Cambridge admit around 20% of applicants. Compared to Princeton (6%), Stanford (4%), MIT (7%), etc. it seems like a cakewalk. Is there something I'm missing?

> Is there something I'm missing? Yes you're missing something. My friends in the US all apply to a very large number of elite universities. In the UK I don't believe you're even allowed to apply to more than one elite university in the same year, and only a very small number of universities overall. One person I know in the US applied to 23 universities. And then on top of that, in the UK all admissions for elite un…

>> require an in-person interview, which the US (bafflingly) doesn't do.

Not all, but at least premium ones do alumni-driven interviews.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#286

Post by opo »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #171
Kinrany wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're explicitly saying that good jobs are zero-sum. Why do you think that? It seems like a non-prediction that having more people with good education will enable new businesses.

At any given moment there are a fixed number of jobs, and so a fixed number of "good jobs". I can grant that the number of good jobs isn't fixed on the scale of years. But people that want/need good jobs usually can't wait years for them to materialize. On the timescales that matter to individuals, the number of good jobs is fixed and so the competition for them is effectively zero-sum. There also seems to be a scale…

>At any given moment there are a fixed number of jobs, ...

I think most economists would say that is called the lump of labour fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#287

Post by uzakov »

chrisseaton wrote: post #253
pigscantfly wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an American perspective, it seems extremely easy to get into a 'top' UK university. Oxford and Cambridge admit around 20% of applicants. Compared to Princeton (6%), Stanford (4%), MIT (7%), etc. it seems like a cakewalk. Is there something I'm missing?

> Is there something I'm missing? Yes you're missing something. My friends in the US all apply to a very large number of elite universities. In the UK I don't believe you're even allowed to apply to more than one elite university in the same year, and only a very small number of universities overall. One person I know in the US applied to 23 universities. And then on top of that, in the UK all admissions for elite un…

> In the UK I don't believe you're even allowed to apply to more than one elite university in the same year, and only a very small number of universities overall.

When I applied to university a while ago the rule was that you can apply to 5 universities only, ie make 5 applications in total. Only exception was "clearing" but thats a different story

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#288

Post by DoreenMichele »

I passed up a National Merit Scholarship that would have let me go away to school and attend one of the big two colleges in my home state. Instead, I attended a local college for two years, living at my parents, taking whatever federal grant money was available and my parents covered the rest, in part because going to the local college kept tuition and other expenses reasonable.

(I'm 55. Tuition has changed in the decades since and this approach might no longer work. It did at the time.)

I then dropped out without a degree and did the military wife thing for a lot of years. I returned to school when I knew what I wanted to do, career-wise.

I made that decision in part because I was personally acquainted with two people who each had a bachelor's degree (and more schooling beyond that -- one was two quarters short of a master's and the other was working on his second bachelor's) and were financially dependent on someone else while they delivered newspapers (one also spent some time selling shoes and he eventually killed himself).

One was in his thirties and living with his mother. The other was mooching off a wife at the time who eventually left him.

So I was never fooled into believing that a college degree guarantees you a successful professional career. I felt I could deliver newspapers for a living without a college degree and I would be better off if I had such a job without being saddled with college debts like at least one of these two men was.

I don't regret my decision. Given the details of my life, I think I made the right choice.

We need to do a better job of educating young people about when it makes sense to go to school. Far too many people seem to think a degree is a magic wand and don't understand what else needs to happen to establish a career, especially one that pays well enough to justify taking on student debt.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#289

Post by mindvirus »

There's so much potential in a better university/college.

Imagine that in society we pooled our resources to make the best video/online courses for a variety of subjects. The best CS courses. The best history courses. The best biology courses. We could focus on making the courses accessible and translated. We could make the best assignments and projects, iterated and experimented on with a population of millions. Heck, we could even hire professional actors that would both help with engagement and with representation problems in various fields.

Then in addition to being places of research, universities become the places we go to facilitate taking those courses and applying the knowledge. Watch the interactive videos, and expert tutors help you understand challenging topics, guide you where to look next, and facilitate labs. At least for undergraduate, this seems much better than what we have now.

And then, why not open it up to everyone? We could all take various courses throughout our lives. I'd love to be continuously taking classes in new fields, but the world isn't set up that way.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#290

Post by simplify »

Auracle wrote: post #278
simplify wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's to stop someone from obtaining a useless degree that doesn't contribute to the nation's economy, and then discharges the debt in bankruptcy? Nothing, and that's exactly why education debts need to be dischargeable like anything else. Dischargeable loans makes loan companies have actual responsibility and consequences in deciding who to give loans to. Otherwise, they blindly give out loans (why not, there's n…

But it could lead to plenty of people making the smart decision to file for bankruptcy even when they have a good degree. Bankruptcy at 22 isn’t that big of a deal, generally. I’m not sure what the answer is, though I think an economic approach is key.

Bankruptcy negatively affects your credit score by a large amount, so it's not exactly an easy decision.
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