We need to immediately stop Government-back student loans that can't be discharged in a bankruptcy. Then tuition will drop like a rock.
I would never support student loan forgiveness until the Government stopped the loans!
Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993
311–320 of 588 posts
Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are Universities in Europe really that high quality? Certainly some are, but as a parent researching schools I have been really surprised by how many European colleges are a bit mediocre by the criteria I was evaluating. For example, Spain and Italy have some of the oldest colleges in the world. But in many ways there are four or five colleges in California that are better, four or five colleges in Texas, and across…
My issue with the rankings is how they emphasise research. Why would it matter to an undergraduate how highly decorated his prof is? We used to joke that the more titles a guy had, the worse he was at teaching. I think this is true because the guys with the titles have moved on to managing research and finding funding, rather than having daily tasks to do with the research. I went to a very well known university that…
I went to a public university with a good engineering program. After freshman year I took most of the Edx circuits course from MIT to see what the ivy league education advantage would be. It was pretty much the exact same topics and lectures. I thought the MIT lecturer did a slightly better job and I'm sure all the students were smarter than me, but I feel like I learned the same things for a fraction of the cost.
Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993
#313> 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…
> but not evaluate them based on whether they went to school or where. This is akin to how you can fire someone for ANY REASON, except a few forbidden reason. Guess which reason Timmy is fired for? Certainly not for trying to start a union.
That does happen some, but it would be much harder for large companies to have an off-the-books policy of requiring a college degree if they couldn't talk about it with each other or put anything in writing for fear it would come out in a suit.
Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993
#314"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…
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
How universal are they?
Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're cherrypicking by focusing on UC in isolation. Higher education funding in California has gone up from ~5.5 billion to ~16 billion nominal from 1990 to now. Overall funding has gone up - it was just focused on community colleges at the expense of UC, as it should be to avoid exacerbating economic inequality.
That's true! This thread I thought was about whether tuition at places like UCs has gone up because of cost increases or state funding decreases though. As far as I can tell from the budgets, it's primarily due to per-student state funding decreases, which match almost dollar-for-dollar with tuition hikes. I.e. the UC is hiking tuition to make up for declining per-student state support, not because the UC is spending…
> (Cal State is kind of halfway in between, still much more state-funded than the UCs, but not anywhere near the per-student levels of 1990, which is why in-state tuition there is creeping towards $10k.)
This is an interesting observation, as the Cal States are more focused on instruction than UC, which I think helps justify their (and the CCs) better state funding. UC looks like its flush from all the federal research dollars it pulls in, and from running the hospitals, so the Assembly feels it's easier to cut there, than at CalState/CCs, where they don't have the research or hospital money.
Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993
#316Earlier 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
How universal are they?
How uni are these unis?
Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 relatio…
IQ tests aren’t blanket-banned; they just have additional hurdles. For instance, the Wonderlic test is routinely used in hiring contexts and is even part of the NFL scouting combine.
Even the SATs and ACTs (and most definitely the ASVAB) have significant overlap with IQ tests.
Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993
#318I don’t understand this argument here: > Up until 1993, the federal government merely guaranteed/backed student loans that private lenders gave. This meant that only in the case of someone defaulting on their loan would the government be on the hook, stepping in and paying the college what’s owed. > This amendment completely overhauled that system, making it so that for the vast majority of student loans, the federal…
I had the same thought. My hunch is that the difference is friction. In both cases, there's money going from the Feds to the University (100% probability) and money going from the student to the Feds (>1993: no bank in the middle. University gets paid right away. Zero risk for them
Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993
#319Yeah, as many others have pointed out this analysis is facile verging on just wrong. Do universities not compete for students? Why have costs gone up so much faster than inflation? It's not just a question of there being a huge pool of money, you can buy a car with loans and car prices haven't skyrocketed. The answer is that education is a weird "good" that's probably a Veblen good, among a lot of other reasons.
>It's not just a question of there being a huge pool of money, you can buy a car with loans and car prices haven't skyrocketed.
The obvious difference is that car loans are not Federally issued and defaults are possible. Hence creditors have to issue loans in a prudent manner or else they will incur a loss. Not everyone is able to acquire a car loan, and interest rates can be very high.
These incentives do not exist in the student loan market and thereby subsidizing demand. Students become price inelastic.
Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993
#320"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…
A lot of the cost of American college doesn't go towards education but things like sports stadiums and teams, various non-academic events, administrators, various other non-academic staff, uniquely-expensive American legal costs and insurance, on-campus police (a big wtf for Europeans), and then there are also those people who decide which Halloween costumes are appropriate for students, investigate various misconduc…
The schools don't have shareholders to whom dividends might be paid. The extra programs and the employees to support them will expand to use up all extra income.