Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993 • Hacker News Board

Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993

#51

Post by shkkmo » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 6:43 PM UTC

Ericson2314 wrote: post #32

koolba wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fix for both is the same. Get the government out of the demand side and, if anything, only work on the supply side. Want lower doctor and hospital prices? Try competing against a “free but you have to wait” government option. Budget $X million dollars per year to put some primary care doctors on retainer. Want lower private school tuition? Try competing against a free (or at least low cost) government / public op…

I would not make "Get the government out of the demand side" a rallying cry because UBI is the huge counter-example of something governments should be doing. Better to say governments should do, not fund, on the institutional level (run the school, run the hospital, like you say), and fund, not do, in the individual level (UBI not SNAP).

UBI doesn't manipulate the demand for specific markets, it is more of a monetary policy that has only an indirect impact on demand.

Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993

#52

Post by rayiner » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 6:43 PM UTC

PeterStuer wrote: post #31

typedef_struct wrote: post #26

So, Universal Basic Income....

Why? Keeping afloat a system that siphons all the fruits of progress to the 0,01% by throwing just enough trickles to the bottom so they don't revolt?

The top 0.01% earns 5% of all income. The top 1% (which includes many Facebook engineers, doctors, etc.) earns 20%. The vast majority of the "fruits" of the system go to normal people.

Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993

#53

Post by stevefan1999 » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 6:44 PM UTC

noetic_techy wrote: post #34

"The question then becomes a matter of how we fix this without diminishing access to a college education." This is the crux of it that everyone needs to get over. Universality, High Quality, Low Cost. Pick two. By letting the government meddle you have guaranteed no one can afford college and will be long in debt to a loan they cannot discharge in bankruptcy. I'd rather have cheap college then universal access for ev…

You can generalize things well, you've concluded your point just by using a trilemma

Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993

#54

Post by stevefan1999 » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 6:45 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #42

noetic_techy wrote: post #34

"The question then becomes a matter of how we fix this without diminishing access to a college education." This is the crux of it that everyone needs to get over. Universality, High Quality, Low Cost. Pick two. By letting the government meddle you have guaranteed no one can afford college and will be long in debt to a loan they cannot discharge in bankruptcy. I'd rather have cheap college then universal access for ev…

What does the choice of "High Quality, Low Cost" look like in practice? (Because I'm not seeing how to make that happen, other than "burying the actually high cost someplace where it's spread out and hard to see, so it looks like low cost".)

elitism

Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993

#55

Post by jefftk » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 6:47 PM UTC

btilly wrote: post #49

jefftk wrote: post #10

> the feds should handle student loans the same way they handle medicaid/medicare reimbursement. I'm not sure how anyone looks at our health care reimbursement system and the decides that's the approach to apply to fix anything else? Personally, I'd like to see: * Employers are allowed to test students to see what they can do, but not evaluate them based on whether they went to school or where. * Make student loan de…

Employers are allowed to test students to see what they can do, but not evaluate them based on whether they went to school or where. For those who are unaware, these tests are considered a violation of the Civil Rights Act because they result in hiring blacks at a much lower rate than whites. A big underlying cause of that is that schools with lots of blacks are underfunded relative to schools with lots of whites. Ma…

> For those who are unaware, these tests are considered a violation of the Civil Rights Act because they result in hiring blacks at a much lower rate than whites.

Work sample tests are legal; otherwise we wouldn't see tech companies giving whiteboard interviews.

More general tests are not legal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.) unless you can demonstrate that they "bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used". On the other hand, they held that "neither the high school completion requirement nor the general intelligence test is shown to bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used" so I think there's a decent chance that the widespread use of college degrees as a filter is also already illegal. (Not a lawyer)

Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993

#56

Post by pnw_hazor » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 6:51 PM UTC

spaetzleesser wrote: post #14

pnw_hazor wrote: post #9

For undergrad I used Army money and was poor enough for Pell grants after that ran out. I got out with $12K in loans. Much later in law school I was shocked how my first financial aid award letter (I can't remember if it was for one semester or one year) offered $80,000 in loans even though I had an $18000 tuition grant/waiver. I met younger students who had close to $200,000 debt before starting law school. It is to…

At least lawyers and doctors are smart enough to keep their rates high enough so they can repay their loans. A while ago I was looking for a lawyer and it was surprising that there were no freelance lawyers that changed maybe 80 dollars per hour. They all wanted 250 and more.

Maybe true for MDs. But many lawyers, especially solo firms struggle to get by.

I did some low-fee legal for awhile part-time because I was still programming after I got my JD. I think I charged $250/hr or flat fees but I did a lot of free/contingency cases too. As a solo you rarely bill 8-hours a day. Between running around to meet clients or driving to different courts in the area some days you are lucky to bill a few hours.

One guy got angry at me because I wanted $250 (or something like that) "just to read" his DIY complaint before he filed it. "Just to make sure everything looked okay..." He didn't realize that he would be establishing an attorney client relationship with me that would obligate me to give competent legal advice that put my license on the line. That is way beyond just reading his complaint. The same goes for reviewing contracts, non-competes, etc. I eventually read the complaint he had prepared since he sent it to me earlier, boy I dodged a bullet on that one. It would have taken a ton of work to get it even close to ready for filing.

I did some low-fee family law stuff too -- one client thought I was taking the side of her ex, because I didn't raise her legally irrelevant complaints in court. I still got her more money than any other family lawyer would have done for the small fee she paid. I think I charged her a flat $1100.

In a low stakes employment discrimination case, my client had been rejected by multiple attorneys before she ran into dumb me. I took the case and got the client a six figure settlement. Client promptly took me to arbitration because she thought my share to was too high even though it was well below industry standard.

Eventually I got tired of this crap and sold out and went corporate.

Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993

#57

Post by silvestrov » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 6:53 PM UTC

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #45

Dannymetconan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universities in Europe are generally high quality and low cost. It does have it's problems but it is not one or the other. You do not need a degree 30 years ago to do lots of jobs that now require one. Higher education for a lot of organizations is just an easy way to cut the application stack down

>Universities in Europe are generally high quality and low cost. The cost is low for the student but it's pretty high for the taxpayers. Not US high but still, it's not free, there's lots of bloat in the system that thrives on volume of students not on quality so they try to push forward legislation and programs to increase the number of students, especially from abroad and build more faculties/universities with more…

No, the cost to tax payers in Europe is less than what people in USA have to pay the college.

This is because my University (in Europe) had no sport facilities whatsoever, not even a soccer field. It also had no dormitories, canteens, no fancy library, sport teams etc.

It did teaching + research, and nothing else.

Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993

#58

Post by mcguire » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 6:53 PM UTC

fatnoah wrote: post #2

Is this surprising to anyone? Colleges battle each other to provide amenities, loans are easy to come by, and the colleges have nothing to lose when the students default. I remember my first day of college (in 1993!) and remember part of registering was signing all of these forms where my options were a) take out loans and go to school or b) don't take out loans and don't go to school. I had no idea what it meant to…

That's kind of surprising. Bachelors, Masters or Phony-Doctor?

"Among borrowers of all ages [1/3 of adults under 30] with outstanding student loan debt, the median self-reported amount owed among those with less than a bachelor’s degree was $10,000 in 2016. Bachelor’s degree holders owed a median of $25,000, while those with a postgraduate degree owed a median of $45,000."

And that's in 2016

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/13/facts-about...

Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993

#59

Post by noetic_techy » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 6:56 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #42

noetic_techy wrote: post #34

"The question then becomes a matter of how we fix this without diminishing access to a college education." This is the crux of it that everyone needs to get over. Universality, High Quality, Low Cost. Pick two. By letting the government meddle you have guaranteed no one can afford college and will be long in debt to a loan they cannot discharge in bankruptcy. I'd rather have cheap college then universal access for ev…

What does the choice of "High Quality, Low Cost" look like in practice? (Because I'm not seeing how to make that happen, other than "burying the actually high cost someplace where it's spread out and hard to see, so it looks like low cost".)

Without government backed student loans for literally anyone who wants it, you suddenly dry up the money for colleges. They are forced to compete on degree cost and quality alone, and degree ROI will likely start to get factored into the price. College used to be relatively low cost long ago and easily accessible to the middle class, even lower middle class. Yes, the colleges will be hurting and screaming if they took that money away but they did this to themselves. Their entire business model is based on never ending government subsidy, essentially free money. At this point it will require a reckoning but this is always the case when you set up systems like this with good intentions and bad outcomes.

You see almost the same phenomena with Uber vs traditional taxi's. The government forced taxi's to buy medallions to operate a certain number of drivers because they didnt want the streets overrun with taxi's, with each medallion costing hundreds of thousands and even up to a million dollars in places like NYC. A taxi driver essentially had to have a second mortgage to operate. Along comes Uber and that whole government backed system gets crushed and starts to look ridiculous and artificially inflated in price. Yes, the taxi drivers got screwed, but it was the "good intentions" of the medallion system to keep the number of taxi's low that screwed over the consumer with higher cost rides compared to a market driven approach with companies like Lyft and Uber competing to the bottom. Let the market do the same for colleges. They have fancy campuses now.

There have been other ideas where student loan ROI is factored in and the college themselves must cover the cost of the loan if your degree turns into a lower paying job and the percentage of your loan payment exceeds some percentage of your income. Either way they have skin in the game that's EXACTLY whats needed.

Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993

#60

Post by dnautics » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

veilrap wrote: post #24

dnautics wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t know that there’s any groups deciding on something Credentialism is exactly that. If in the pre-covid era you went to Washington, DC, you will see huge illuminated ads in the metro stations for companies, for example "graduate school" (literally the name of one company I saw) which offer super sketchy master's degrees. This is because if you have a master's degree, you get a mandated pay bump in your salary…

That sounds like bad regulations and bureaucracy more than credential-ism, but I agree that is horrifying. A blanket pay bump for "Master's" degrees written into the code? Clearly that's going to be gamed. If any auditing actually went into the source and value of the credentials then they could be appropriately valued or ignored, depending on the case.

> "If any auditing actually went into the source and value of the credentials"

Pray tell how would one prevent gaming of the auditing.

As an aside, my dad worked at the VA. There was a person who was supposed to be promoted to CIO and then they did an audit and found her undergraduate credentials were not correct (don't remember what the exact circumstances were). As a result she got canned instead of promoted.

There are positions in the federal government system where you are required to have a college degree or else you are not eligible, no matter how competent you are.